Wait until mailing lists that you want to subscribe to start charging you because they have to pay to send you a email!
I don't subscribe to any mailing lists which could generate a large number of customer complaints and contain images in the messages. Therefore none of the mailing lists I am on will be charged by AOL for access. Did you even read the article?
Mind you, I'm fairly well convinced that anyone who's paying $24.95 a month for dial up in this day and age is probably not the sharpest crayola in the box. Since you're obviously too stupid to find one of the $4.95 a month dial up services and save yourself $20, I guess you deserve to pay even more to get your email.
I'm not exactly sure what the point is there.. sure there differently priced ISPs, but they all must pay for the bandwidth used up by spam somehow. In case you somehow thought I personally was using AOL or on (shudder) dialup, I am not. I do not however blindly hate those who are or wish them any ill will.
Come to think of it, it might work out well since the AOL users won't be cluttering up the mailing lists with stupid questions and getting offended when they get an "RTFM" reply.
Email is not free. We all pay for it when we pay our ISPs. I for one do not want to keep sharing the cost of the spam that all the other poor saps using my isp get every day. I would rather that the people using and benefiting from my ISP's resources paid for them. The first step is to charge the people who actually use up the most of my ISPs resources, and one large consumer is the senders of UCE which contains images. Hmmm.. thats the same exact group that AOL has decided to start charging for access... coincidence? I think it's a great step in the right direction, and I hope more big email providers follow suit.
Also, I'd just like to say that most of the comments I've read seem to want to crap on this idea just because it comes from AOL, with no valid arguments, just some cute joke. If you ever deal with AOL on a professional level, you'll realize that they actually are a pretty smart group of folks. Sure, they do some annoying things and bring a lot of people onto the internet that maybe shouldn't be there, certainly people who wouldn't be there otherwise. But they aren't stupid, they do understand quite a bit about how the internet works, and I think it is possible for them to have a good idea every now and then.
I would like to annouce the Super Magic Fun Rate Your Bank Account Number game.
Please email me your complete checking account number and PIN, and I'll give you a really fun rating to compare how special your account was compared to all the other ones I've collected. Who knows, you could be the winner!!
bitlord is just bitcomet with adware and other crap stuffed into it, from what I have read. everyone seems to recommend avoiding it and using bitcomet if you like that interface. I personally don't use either one because many sites will block them.
/etc/init.d/ scripts: Debian doesn't have a nice way to turn these scripts on and off and monitor their status via a command-line tool. Red Hat's system here was very good.
> Make sure it's an aluminum case at least. And be prepared to try several different ones until you find one that works well.
I have 4, two are adaptec and 2 are two different compusa house brand cheapo things. Never had any problem, didn't know that it mattered or I might have skipped the cheap ones.
> No, other than the six thousand cords you've got hanging off the back of it to plug in these external drives.
Well.. its not 6,000... but it does take enough to be a little bit of a hassle. I have 4 hds connected, so of course there are 5 usb cables (one per HD and one from slug to hub). And then you have power cords for the slug, hub, and HDs.. thats 6 all together. 11 cords, and then you have the ethernet out fron the slug for 12 total I think. 6000>12, but still I guess if you dont like cords, 12 could really freak you out.
> Oh, and don't accidentally disconnect a cord. The NSLU2 doesn't support anything approaching to Plug and Play. You'll likely damage data on the drive, but the most annoying thing is you gotta shutdown and restart the whole thing.
Not on my slug. ReiserFS avoids any nasty problems with damaging data, and I have only restarted my slug once (new kernel) since I installed Debian over 6 months ago. Of course I haven't tried disconnecting the root drive, that would probably not work out well. But all the other drives are regularly turned off or disconnected. no problems at all. You need to use disk labels since the device numbers can move around a bit, otherwise its been perfect.
> The other problems with the NSLU2 besides the speed(might as well hook it up to a 10baseT hub, cause it can't fully utilize 100baseT), is that if you do try to transfer a large amount of data(say 15 gigs of MP3s) more likely than not the whole thing will lock up on you.
Man you must have gotten the crapmaster slug from hell. I literally filled the first 300GB drive I connected in a single ftp session, not one error or problem. I regularly dump large amounts of data to/from the device and never have seen any problems. Sure, its not exactly fast, but plenty fast for 2 users to watch divx off of at the same time. The only time I saw a performance problem was when I tried to do a native compile of a new kernel on the box itself.. took several hours due to excessive swapping and during this time video was choppy every once in a while. Still better than I thought it would be.
> it's not a good device for a SOHO server, that's for certain.
All I can say is "sorry about your luck". This thing rocks as a SOHO server!!
This might not be perfect for the original poster's needs, but it works great for mine which are somewhat similar. Basically the linksys NSLU2 is a little box with an ethernet port and two usb 2.0 ports. it runs a variety of linuxes, mine runs Debian. You can learn about the open source side of the device here: http://www.nslu2-linux.org/
You can hook up several hard drives (or other usb toys) via a usb hub. Performance is not great, but totally fine for storage of music and movies if you only have a few users on your network. It supports samba, ftp, nfs, http, probably any other way you'd like to access the files. You could do software raid or some other type of mirroring/backup if you'd like.
The main reasons I really like this thing for an at home server:
Silent operation, no fans in the nslu2 and you can get fanless enclosures for the HDs
Takes very little space away from your home office
Very small power draw
Easy to add/remove drives without any reboots
Can power off drives that aren't used frequently, then turn them on when needed
I was amazed at how quiet my office became after replacing my PC file server with this guy and PC firewall with a wrt54g. I could actually hear the gf talking again, which is the only downside so far.
In the "real" world, i.e. business computing, everyone already uses tape backups and has for many many years. If anything, people are looking for ways to switch away from tape, but there aren't any perfect alternatives yet. The offsite internet based backup services are getting interesting though.
Google's Paul Buchheit, with Microsoft's Kevin Doerr (no relation to the venture capitalist) and Yahoo's Ethan Diamond walk into a bar. The bartender looks up and says, "what is this, a joke?"
I work as a consultant for smaller companies. Although I use linux on my desktops and am quite happy with it, I wouldn't recommend any of my clients try to deploy it on the desktops for normal users unless there is some very compelling reason to do so. I've yet to come across such a situation, but I guess cost, performance and/or security might be reasons in some cases.
On the other hand I do have some clients where certain individuals have requested linux, and allowing them to run it has not caused any problems other than the obvious compatibilty issues that may apply. These individuals are linux savy and can generally deal with their own problems. Management does not want to spend extra money to support a second platform, and they understand this.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that if you are considering rolling out some linux or even apple desktops, I would be careful to only migrate people that really want them and understand the consequences (and are able to deal with their own problems for the most part). Otherwise you're going to be incurring extra costs that probably outweight any licensing money you save. That usually doesn't go over well and will generate a negative attitude from management towards linux.
As for workstation management tools, there are solutions from Redhat and Novell and probably others, and IBM has some tools too. I don't have much experience with any of them, but again it is probably an extra cost and what would the point be? What is the boss going to like about this whole idea? Sometimes I think linux fans push too hard or don't fully evaluate the situation and actually reduce the opportunities they might have to use linux where it would really be a great solution.
yeah, you can "remove" it by add/remove programs, windows components.. but i think it's still there really. most machines I've seen seem to fire it up if you run "iexplore" regardless of whether its technically installed. microsoft bastards. but i think maybe windows can't really run without it.
-Lod
could anyone point me to where I might pickup this gem of a virus? I'm a little bored and was hoping to "research" the auto-pr0n capabilities. Reinstalling IE now...
My god, WHAT THE HELL is going on here???? This is an advertisement and nothing more. This IS NOT NEWS. "news for nerds" implies that the articles will at least be news of some sort.
PS I have some products I would like to advertise on Slashdot as well, please contact me with pricing information.
very good point, ipv4 space is limited and is not divided up fairly at all. and then within a particular region, things are not shared fairly again.
i have always been suprised more effort hasn't been made to make use of the 65 thousand ports each precious IP has.. i mean, there isn't really a shortage of possible connection points for communication between hosts, just of the relatively tiny number of well known places to make those connections. sure, it would drive firewalls crazy and require some additional dns records or something but it seems easier than moving the whole net to ipv6.
or maybe i'm crazy
A very good point. Also, by reading through the common util's man pages, in addition to knowing there's a tool to do a certain task (which you might forget, or not even understand at the time), you start to get a "big picture" understanding of unix. You learn how to look at a new task and break it down in to categories: "this part is very general and there must be a tool to do it", "this part is specific to my task but could be done using general tools", and "ok, i'm going to have to write some code here". Being able to properly break down a task and use the available tools to your advantage is truely the difference between a hacker and a hack, in my humble opinion.
"Babhoota said the agency had already successfully bedded down open source on its back-end, running its Oracle 9i and 10g core databases and assorted other transactional applications over Citrix on Dell-based clusters and had guarantees of open source support from key enterprise applications vendors."
What is open source about Oracle and Citrix? Sure you can run Oracle on an open OS, but that's not really an open solution. And Citrix?? How does that involve open source at all?
Maybe I am ignorant, but this makes no sense based on what I know about the products they list.
> I remember just thinking that being able to boot into Partition Magic was a pretty neat trick,
Partition Magic has had this capability built in for many years now. Why boot Windows to run a utility that can boot by itself in the first place, out of the box? I'm lost.
yeah.. sure..
80,000,000 is significant. To open/. 80,000,000 times would mean almost 20,000 times a day every day for ten years.
i'm going to bet you haven't done that. if you have actually loaded slashdot 4 times per second every second of every day for the last ten years, then I bow to your complete insanity.
You have some good points, and I do have alot of clients who have a small IT staff and supplement it with our services when needed. In many cases this is someone who's "good with computers" and actually has some other primary responsibility in the firm. This is a good approach if your company does need someone around all the time for help desk type things that remote support cannot do or do as well.
I guess your experience with using consultants will vary drastically based on the firm you do business with. You're right, trusting a consultant with all of your IT decisions might not be a good idea, and might lead to wasting money if your consultanting firm is not honest with you.
That said, I have worked for 3 different consulting firms (all small, 20 people at the largest) in the past 10 years. It might just be my luck or that I seek out poeple to work with who think like I do, but I can honestly say that the advice I've given and seen given has almost always been an honest attempt to solve the problem at hand in the best way possible. Sure, I've given bad advice but it was out of ignorance, not greed, and I've done whatever I could to make things right when I have made a mistake. I think that if you find a good firm to work with, you'll come to think of them as an extension of your staff rather than as an outside force. I have clients where they keep an office for me, and trust me I am very familiar with their day to day routines.
Even better than being familiar with company XYZ's day to day, I know company ABC, MNO, etc.. and very often can give them insight into what other firms in their line of business have had good of bad experiences with. They benefit from knowledge that no internal employee could hope to come by first hand.
There are times in life or in business when you have to partner with experts and you won't have the knowledge to thoroughly analyze their performance. Many small businesses use an outside accounting firm. Most consult outside lawyers when they have legal needs, an electrician service when needed, etc. I'm not sure where the idea that a small business should try to do their own IT comes from, but I assure you that I have many clients who are very happy that they have us as a resource, and many clients who have benefited from having access to a much wider variety of services than any single person or small group can provide.
Like any other time you must rely on outside expertise, you might not be able to understand every piece of advise you're given, but in time the results of following it do demonstrate the overall effectiveness of the service (i'm thinking back to a lawyer that gave me some truely horrible advice several years ago..:/
I'm sure the guy asking this question won't like to hear it, but come on.. a full time IT guy at a company with 20 employees? I realize some businesses are more dependant on their computers than others, but I work for a consulting firm that has many clients with 20-100 employess that do not pay for a full time IT staff.. very few with less than 50 that have any IT staff at all.
It just doesn't make sense. For starters, you will save $50-$80k per year by firing your IT guy (depends quite a bit on where you're at). Second, you will have at your disposal a whole staff of experts in every area from security to database design to wan/connectivity. These aren't overwhelmed guys with their A+/MCSE/whatever struggling to make sure everyone's PC boots up in the morning, these are experts who each earn much more than your company will ever pay for an IT guy, yet because you only pay for the time you acutally need them, they cost very little. Of course you'll have break/fix guys as needed as well.
End result, you will have the benefits of a full IT department but will pay much less you would for one guy who just wings it most of the time. I don't care how great you are at this or that, no one person is an expert in all the areas that even a very small business can use IT expertise in.
Now on to the equipment side of your budget... well who better to make recommendations than someone who's job it is to analyze the market and help your company (and hundreds of others much liek yours) pick out the best solution in terms of performance and ROI. Not someone who does research on the web in between help desk calls, a real consultant who has relationships with vendors, attends trade shows and has been doing this for years. Again, outsourcing makes sense and saves you money.
I know I am biased, I'm a consultant:) But I think my points are pretty strong. Outsourcing is something every small and even some medium businesses should really consider.
Slashdot Mirror
1) Do something
2) ????????????
3) Profit!
I think I finally figured out step 2. It's advertise with a "story" on Slashdot.
I don't subscribe to any mailing lists which could generate a large number of customer complaints and contain images in the messages. Therefore none of the mailing lists I am on will be charged by AOL for access. Did you even read the article?
Mind you, I'm fairly well convinced that anyone who's paying $24.95 a month for dial up in this day and age is probably not the sharpest crayola in the box. Since you're obviously too stupid to find one of the $4.95 a month dial up services and save yourself $20, I guess you deserve to pay even more to get your email.
I'm not exactly sure what the point is there.. sure there differently priced ISPs, but they all must pay for the bandwidth used up by spam somehow. In case you somehow thought I personally was using AOL or on (shudder) dialup, I am not. I do not however blindly hate those who are or wish them any ill will.
Come to think of it, it might work out well since the AOL users won't be cluttering up the mailing lists with stupid questions and getting offended when they get an "RTFM" reply.
2 cents,
Wasn't worth it.
Also, I'd just like to say that most of the comments I've read seem to want to crap on this idea just because it comes from AOL, with no valid arguments, just some cute joke. If you ever deal with AOL on a professional level, you'll realize that they actually are a pretty smart group of folks. Sure, they do some annoying things and bring a lot of people onto the internet that maybe shouldn't be there, certainly people who wouldn't be there otherwise. But they aren't stupid, they do understand quite a bit about how the internet works, and I think it is possible for them to have a good idea every now and then.
Please email me your complete checking account number and PIN, and I'll give you a really fun rating to compare how special your account was compared to all the other ones I've collected. Who knows, you could be the winner!!
bitlord is just bitcomet with adware and other crap stuffed into it, from what I have read. everyone seems to recommend avoiding it and using bitcomet if you like that interface. I personally don't use either one because many sites will block them.
update-rc.d ?
I have 4, two are adaptec and 2 are two different compusa house brand cheapo things. Never had any problem, didn't know that it mattered or I might have skipped the cheap ones.
> No, other than the six thousand cords you've got hanging off the back of it to plug in these external drives.
Well.. its not 6,000... but it does take enough to be a little bit of a hassle. I have 4 hds connected, so of course there are 5 usb cables (one per HD and one from slug to hub). And then you have power cords for the slug, hub, and HDs.. thats 6 all together. 11 cords, and then you have the ethernet out fron the slug for 12 total I think. 6000>12, but still I guess if you dont like cords, 12 could really freak you out.
> Oh, and don't accidentally disconnect a cord. The NSLU2 doesn't support anything approaching to Plug and Play. You'll likely damage data on the drive, but the most annoying thing is you gotta shutdown and restart the whole thing.
Not on my slug. ReiserFS avoids any nasty problems with damaging data, and I have only restarted my slug once (new kernel) since I installed Debian over 6 months ago. Of course I haven't tried disconnecting the root drive, that would probably not work out well. But all the other drives are regularly turned off or disconnected. no problems at all. You need to use disk labels since the device numbers can move around a bit, otherwise its been perfect.
> The other problems with the NSLU2 besides the speed(might as well hook it up to a 10baseT hub, cause it can't fully utilize 100baseT), is that if you do try to transfer a large amount of data(say 15 gigs of MP3s) more likely than not the whole thing will lock up on you.
Man you must have gotten the crapmaster slug from hell. I literally filled the first 300GB drive I connected in a single ftp session, not one error or problem. I regularly dump large amounts of data to/from the device and never have seen any problems. Sure, its not exactly fast, but plenty fast for 2 users to watch divx off of at the same time. The only time I saw a performance problem was when I tried to do a native compile of a new kernel on the box itself.. took several hours due to excessive swapping and during this time video was choppy every once in a while. Still better than I thought it would be.
> it's not a good device for a SOHO server, that's for certain.
All I can say is "sorry about your luck". This thing rocks as a SOHO server!!
You can hook up several hard drives (or other usb toys) via a usb hub. Performance is not great, but totally fine for storage of music and movies if you only have a few users on your network. It supports samba, ftp, nfs, http, probably any other way you'd like to access the files. You could do software raid or some other type of mirroring/backup if you'd like.
The main reasons I really like this thing for an at home server:
I was amazed at how quiet my office became after replacing my PC file server with this guy and PC firewall with a wrt54g. I could actually hear the gf talking again, which is the only downside so far.
In the "real" world, i.e. business computing, everyone already uses tape backups and has for many many years. If anything, people are looking for ways to switch away from tape, but there aren't any perfect alternatives yet. The offsite internet based backup services are getting interesting though.
unfortunately you will still have to vote for either a republican, a democrat, or someone who will lose.
Would you like to:
Google's Paul Buchheit, with Microsoft's Kevin Doerr (no relation to the venture capitalist) and Yahoo's Ethan Diamond walk into a bar. The bartender looks up and says, "what is this, a joke?"
On the other hand I do have some clients where certain individuals have requested linux, and allowing them to run it has not caused any problems other than the obvious compatibilty issues that may apply. These individuals are linux savy and can generally deal with their own problems. Management does not want to spend extra money to support a second platform, and they understand this.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that if you are considering rolling out some linux or even apple desktops, I would be careful to only migrate people that really want them and understand the consequences (and are able to deal with their own problems for the most part). Otherwise you're going to be incurring extra costs that probably outweight any licensing money you save. That usually doesn't go over well and will generate a negative attitude from management towards linux.
As for workstation management tools, there are solutions from Redhat and Novell and probably others, and IBM has some tools too. I don't have much experience with any of them, but again it is probably an extra cost and what would the point be? What is the boss going to like about this whole idea? Sometimes I think linux fans push too hard or don't fully evaluate the situation and actually reduce the opportunities they might have to use linux where it would really be a great solution.
yeah, you can "remove" it by add/remove programs, windows components.. but i think it's still there really. most machines I've seen seem to fire it up if you run "iexplore" regardless of whether its technically installed. microsoft bastards. but i think maybe windows can't really run without it. -Lod
could anyone point me to where I might pickup this gem of a virus? I'm a little bored and was hoping to "research" the auto-pr0n capabilities. Reinstalling IE now...
PS I have some products I would like to advertise on Slashdot as well, please contact me with pricing information.
very good point, ipv4 space is limited and is not divided up fairly at all. and then within a particular region, things are not shared fairly again. i have always been suprised more effort hasn't been made to make use of the 65 thousand ports each precious IP has.. i mean, there isn't really a shortage of possible connection points for communication between hosts, just of the relatively tiny number of well known places to make those connections. sure, it would drive firewalls crazy and require some additional dns records or something but it seems easier than moving the whole net to ipv6. or maybe i'm crazy
A very good point. Also, by reading through the common util's man pages, in addition to knowing there's a tool to do a certain task (which you might forget, or not even understand at the time), you start to get a "big picture" understanding of unix. You learn how to look at a new task and break it down in to categories: "this part is very general and there must be a tool to do it", "this part is specific to my task but could be done using general tools", and "ok, i'm going to have to write some code here". Being able to properly break down a task and use the available tools to your advantage is truely the difference between a hacker and a hack, in my humble opinion.
"Babhoota said the agency had already successfully bedded down open source on its back-end, running its Oracle 9i and 10g core databases and assorted other transactional applications over Citrix on Dell-based clusters and had guarantees of open source support from key enterprise applications vendors."
What is open source about Oracle and Citrix? Sure you can run Oracle on an open OS, but that's not really an open solution. And Citrix?? How does that involve open source at all?
Maybe I am ignorant, but this makes no sense based on what I know about the products they list.
see subject
Partition Magic has had this capability built in for many years now. Why boot Windows to run a utility that can boot by itself in the first place, out of the box? I'm lost.
and yes, in my drunken rant i flopped a fraction and said 4 times per second when i should have said every 4 seconds. i'm not good with math.
80,000,000 is significant. To open
i'm going to bet you haven't done that. if you have actually loaded slashdot 4 times per second every second of every day for the last ten years, then I bow to your complete insanity.
I guess your experience with using consultants will vary drastically based on the firm you do business with. You're right, trusting a consultant with all of your IT decisions might not be a good idea, and might lead to wasting money if your consultanting firm is not honest with you.
That said, I have worked for 3 different consulting firms (all small, 20 people at the largest) in the past 10 years. It might just be my luck or that I seek out poeple to work with who think like I do, but I can honestly say that the advice I've given and seen given has almost always been an honest attempt to solve the problem at hand in the best way possible. Sure, I've given bad advice but it was out of ignorance, not greed, and I've done whatever I could to make things right when I have made a mistake. I think that if you find a good firm to work with, you'll come to think of them as an extension of your staff rather than as an outside force. I have clients where they keep an office for me, and trust me I am very familiar with their day to day routines.
Even better than being familiar with company XYZ's day to day, I know company ABC, MNO, etc.. and very often can give them insight into what other firms in their line of business have had good of bad experiences with. They benefit from knowledge that no internal employee could hope to come by first hand.
There are times in life or in business when you have to partner with experts and you won't have the knowledge to thoroughly analyze their performance. Many small businesses use an outside accounting firm. Most consult outside lawyers when they have legal needs, an electrician service when needed, etc. I'm not sure where the idea that a small business should try to do their own IT comes from, but I assure you that I have many clients who are very happy that they have us as a resource, and many clients who have benefited from having access to a much wider variety of services than any single person or small group can provide.
Like any other time you must rely on outside expertise, you might not be able to understand every piece of advise you're given, but in time the results of following it do demonstrate the overall effectiveness of the service (i'm thinking back to a lawyer that gave me some truely horrible advice several years ago.. :/
It just doesn't make sense. For starters, you will save $50-$80k per year by firing your IT guy (depends quite a bit on where you're at). Second, you will have at your disposal a whole staff of experts in every area from security to database design to wan/connectivity. These aren't overwhelmed guys with their A+/MCSE/whatever struggling to make sure everyone's PC boots up in the morning, these are experts who each earn much more than your company will ever pay for an IT guy, yet because you only pay for the time you acutally need them, they cost very little. Of course you'll have break/fix guys as needed as well.
End result, you will have the benefits of a full IT department but will pay much less you would for one guy who just wings it most of the time. I don't care how great you are at this or that, no one person is an expert in all the areas that even a very small business can use IT expertise in.
Now on to the equipment side of your budget... well who better to make recommendations than someone who's job it is to analyze the market and help your company (and hundreds of others much liek yours) pick out the best solution in terms of performance and ROI. Not someone who does research on the web in between help desk calls, a real consultant who has relationships with vendors, attends trade shows and has been doing this for years. Again, outsourcing makes sense and saves you money.
I know I am biased, I'm a consultant :) But I think my points are pretty strong. Outsourcing is something every small and even some medium businesses should really consider.