A linux box here with an ISDN card sends Windows popups with "who is calling whom" info to the Windows boxes on the net. It occasionally annoys the children when they are playing a game, but we find it useful.
In a company, the users seem to like the popup announcing them they have new mail. I intend to replace their Exchange server with a Linux box, so I guess I'll also have to script some gadget talking to messenger to keep them happy.
Yes, they have a technote or something on the Apple site which mentions the fix: change your tld to something else!!
In other words: "yeah, we took over your private tld because we liked it. And we don't give a shit about what you think. Anyway, it's good for you because our computers are easier to use"
So after loosing hours trying to understand this weird problem you have to go changing your internal domain name.
The weirdest part was that host would ask the dns server and resolve the name, but everything else would fail, including ping on the name.
If you want to find the article, search apple.com for "rendezvous" and maybe "mdns" (multicast DNS).
Other kludges to fix it floating in Mac forums seemed to imply a file in/etc/resolver/ or something.
But without a person in the cockpit, the venture won't get much media attention. And without media attention, the project won't attract much sponsorship...... SIGH!
Exactly.
And being the "person in the cockpit", and attracting sponsorship is what the latest Piccard seems to be good at.
And he is nicely grateful to his sponsors too. On the contacts page of the site, the link to his own site (www.bertrandpiccard.com) actually points to his sponsors (www.breitling.com)! Whether it is accidental, intentional, or a nice meaning-ladden lapsus is open to speculations:-)
In different times, the scientist could end up getting the media's attention, but now the work has been "Taylorized": one does the acting, and others do the real (ineteresting but not so media-flashy) work. In this case, it's the Lausanne university. In his previous achievement, it was mainly meteorologists sitting in front of boring computer screens.
I wonder what new bug is waiting in their "automatic setup" to bite us.
I was recently bit by their hijacking of the.local tld with their Rendezvous/mDNS crap.
(and when you call their support to ask why the Mac cannot see the local mail server called x.y.local, they have no idea and tell you to go around asking in web forums!)
So whatever they do and sell you as "making things easier", I would be very afraid to have it on my network.
My laptop doesn't have a floppy drive, watcha gonna do now smart guy?
Don't worry, I have the floppy drive. And the CD drive too. External USB.
Of course, if it's an old notebook without USB, the simplest is to put your hard drive into my desktop which does have a floppy to massage your admin password, and then back into your notebook:-)
The EPFL explains much more about the technological aspects. It's in French of course: here.
But for those who cannot read:-), they also have nice pictures
One technological aspect is that by flying very high, they can take advantage of the cold (-55C), which can improve efficiency of electro-magnetic motors.
There are other interesting bits. I guess the page will be translated in English in a few days. (Forget computer translations, unless you want a cheap laugh)
Bertrand is the son of Jacques and the grand-son of Auguste. See his biography.
"His grandfather, Auguste (1884-1962), [...invented] the principle of the pressurised cockpit and the stratospheric balloon. In making the first exploration of the stratosphere [...] in 1931, he [...] became the first man to see the curvature of the earth's surface with his own eyes."
"His father, Jacques, continued the work of Auguste [...] the world's deepest dive (-10916 metres in the Marianas Trench, the greatest known ocean depth)."
In all the cases I have seen this problem, it was enough to remove the CMOS battery for a few seconds. It may be a bit more difficult with notebooks. For one, the case takes a bit more time to open. Then the battery may be soldered? Never had the problem with a notebook.
And then again why would that thief be smart enough to get the passwords but not smart enough to avoid somebody elses AOL account?
Indeed. Good point.
But I wasn't thinking about that specific looser, just replying to a general comment from someone who seemed to believe passwords were efficient protection.
So it sounded usefull to remind that there can be no security when physical access is possible.
While I have nothing against your Fortune 1000 survey, and am grateful you posted a link to other very interesting surveys, I sincerely feel your "masking" "product" is a rip-off.
It serves absolutely no purpose other than getting clueless sysadmins to pay you money.
My logs are filled with attempts to exploit MS-specific vulnerabilities, even though the server (correctly) advertizes itself as Apache.
This link is really interesting because it has surveys by tld.
As was mentioned earlier, no survey is perfect but they all have their value if you can compare them and understand what exactly they count.
A first look at securityspace shows huge differences:
- Apache lovers will love the.de figures, where it has almost 90%.
- Italy surprised me with 46% MS
- China is a strong MS supporter it seems: 63% (33% for Apache). Does it mean that price does play a role in the choice after all? In China, I suppose nobody actually pays MS. Or does MS have much better support for Chinese localization?
(use the drop down [1-25, 26-50 etc] to get the full list)
You use the drop down, or script it or whatever, then give a link to all the collected HTML, and I will be glad to do the rest (extracting URLs and probing them).
Sorry, but I'm not ready to do it all, just for our amsement...:-)
Why doesn't someone do a survey on what Fortune 100 / 500
Because you have to buy the list, or at least be a subscriber.
Forbes has a few lists from which one could get data, after some scripting to get the full list instead of very little chunks, and then get the link of the page showing the URL.
Well, I should have better things to do, but I couldn't resist looking at the results.
So with "the nation's 500 fastest-growing private companies, from Inc magazine" data (see parent), the dominance of MS, to my great chagrin, is even worse:
If you're into this sort of thing (and have a little time to spare), here is some more data for you survey-chart-whatever nerds.
What are "the nation's 500 fastest-growing private companies, from Inc magazine" running?
Inc.com publishes the company list including website for free, so with the help of Perl, I got the HTTP headers for these 500 companies. 44 sites appeared to be down, and didn't respond. For the 456 others, get the data in various formats and enjoy.
Of course, if you do make fancy graphs with it, please give us the link.
There is not much point in bashing one or the other survey as being biased. Of course they are (whether intentionally or not), since a single survey will only ever show a single perspective.
- Netcraft shows servers by hostnames - Port80 shows servers for US Fortune 1000 companies
But both are meaningless by themselves if you want a serious view of server software usage.
Adding Netcraft's SSL survey (which isn't free) would help to get yet another perspective.
Then a breakdown by IP addresses instead of hostnames would be interesting, but Netcraft doesn't seem to publish that.
And what about non-US Fortune-N companies?
And web servers whose main business relies on the web (as this post suggests)?
And stuff you definitely cannot get like the sites with the most traffic? (maybe you could get "sites-with-a-lot-of-traffic-which-do-banner- advertizing-with-major-banner-advertizing- companies").
If you take the survey for what it is, it's interesting. Just don't expect it to tell you more than it can.
Port80 is not about market share, it's about market share in US-based Fortune 1000 companies this summer. A very limited, but nonetheless interesting survey (if you care for surveys, that is).
Who will do a survey of slashdotted sites? Shouldn't be too difficult. Anybody bored in some rainy region of the globe?
Well, I don'tknow. I can easily imagne the concept being old. But the first time I saw it, it was in Ami Pro (1 or 2?), and at the time, the current versions of Word, Wordperfect or other apps didn't have it.
Too bad these are preInternet days, almost like prehistory. No Google...
So instead of ANSI don't we need a INSI (I standing for international) standard?
That sounds like a very good idea. To make it shorter, we could call it ISO (International Standards Organization). Yeah, what a terrific idea. Let's get a domain name straight away. Maybe iso.org? Sounds cool? Well someone took that already: ISO.
Unfortunately, some coder was bored and decided to kill some time by writing a conversion routine that would transcode all posts by removing the accents. I hope (s)he enjoyed that rainy Sunday afternoon, spent on breaking stuff that works flawlessly on the rest of the web.
(you may have noticed I would favor accents on/. But for DNS, I'm still not sure if I like it.)
The undercurrent of most of the discussion here is that the current lack of unicode characters reflects a sort of digital American unilateralism.
It certainly does when Slashcode rejects accented characters (making this discussion difficult at times).
But as far as DNS is concerned, I'm also not sure this Ponycode ride is worth the trouble.
I for one am quite happy to approximate German letters with the closest equivalent.
That is not a very good example, because in German, it is very easy and "looks/feels" ok. They happen to use only one type of accent on a few vowels, always producing the same transformation which can be decently approximated with an "e".
It's not as simple with many other (even Western European) languages.
Look at your keyboard layouts. In Windows it's called "English (United States) - United States International" or something. Never looked for it in Linux, but it certainly exists.
Slashdot Mirror
the messenger service isn't used by anyone
A linux box here with an ISDN card sends Windows popups with "who is calling whom" info to the Windows boxes on the net. It occasionally annoys the children when they are playing a game, but we find it useful.
In a company, the users seem to like the popup announcing them they have new mail. I intend to replace their Exchange server with a Linux box, so I guess I'll also have to script some gadget talking to messenger to keep them happy.
So is there a workaround for this or what?
/etc/resolver/ or something.
Yes, they have a technote or something on the Apple site which mentions the fix: change your tld to something else!!
In other words: "yeah, we took over your private tld because we liked it. And we don't give a shit about what you think. Anyway, it's good for you because our computers are easier to use"
So after loosing hours trying to understand this weird problem you have to go changing your internal domain name.
The weirdest part was that host would ask the dns server and resolve the name, but everything else would fail, including ping on the name.
If you want to find the article, search apple.com for "rendezvous" and maybe "mdns" (multicast DNS).
Other kludges to fix it floating in Mac forums seemed to imply a file in
I would have more faith in this project if it was being done by somebody else.
Don't worry, it's not done by him at all. He's only the man in the cockpit
The real team doing it is on this picture.
But without a person in the cockpit, the venture won't get much media attention. And without media attention, the project won't attract much sponsorship. ..... SIGH!
:-)
Exactly.
And being the "person in the cockpit", and attracting sponsorship is what the latest Piccard seems to be good at.
And he is nicely grateful to his sponsors too. On the contacts page of the site, the link to his own site (www.bertrandpiccard.com) actually points to his sponsors (www.breitling.com)! Whether it is accidental, intentional, or a nice meaning-ladden lapsus is open to speculations
In different times, the scientist could end up getting the media's attention, but now the work has been "Taylorized": one does the acting, and others do the real (ineteresting but not so media-flashy) work. In this case, it's the Lausanne university. In his previous achievement, it was mainly meteorologists sitting in front of boring computer screens.
Nevertheless, the project sounds exciting.
I wonder what new bug is waiting in their "automatic setup" to bite us.
.local tld with their Rendezvous/mDNS crap.
I was recently bit by their hijacking of the
(and when you call their support to ask why the Mac cannot see the local mail server called x.y.local, they have no idea and tell you to go around asking in web forums!)
So whatever they do and sell you as "making things easier", I would be very afraid to have it on my network.
Fascinating! A lot to learn there.
... Insightful, I guess.
Did you know 1009 was a prime number? I now have that privilege.
The parent should be modded
My laptop doesn't have a floppy drive, watcha gonna do now smart guy?
:-)
Don't worry, I have the floppy drive. And the CD drive too. External USB.
Of course, if it's an old notebook without USB, the simplest is to put your hard drive into my desktop which does have a floppy to massage your admin password, and then back into your notebook
The EPFL explains much more about the technological aspects. It's in French of course: here.
:-), they also have nice pictures
But for those who cannot read
One technological aspect is that by flying very high, they can take advantage of the cold (-55C), which can improve efficiency of electro-magnetic motors.
There are other interesting bits. I guess the page will be translated in English in a few days. (Forget computer translations, unless you want a cheap laugh)
Who is Jean-Luc Piccard anyway?
Bertrand is the son of Jacques and the grand-son of Auguste. See his biography.
"His grandfather, Auguste (1884-1962), [...invented] the principle of the pressurised cockpit and the stratospheric balloon. In making the first exploration of the stratosphere [...] in 1931, he [...] became the first man to see the curvature of the earth's surface with his own eyes."
"His father, Jacques, continued the work of Auguste [...] the world's deepest dive (-10916 metres in the Marianas Trench, the greatest known ocean depth)."
true, but what about BIOS passwords?
In all the cases I have seen this problem, it was enough to remove the CMOS battery for a few seconds. It may be a bit more difficult with notebooks. For one, the case takes a bit more time to open. Then the battery may be soldered? Never had the problem with a notebook.
And then again why would that thief be smart enough to get the passwords but not smart enough to avoid somebody elses AOL account?
Indeed. Good point.
But I wasn't thinking about that specific looser, just replying to a general comment from someone who seemed to believe passwords were efficient protection.
So it sounded usefull to remind that there can be no security when physical access is possible.
Were they not running a password protected operating system, at least Windows 2000 or Windows XP?
You must be kidding, but I'm not sure.
It takes only a few minutes to change the administrator password on a Windows box with a Linux boot floppy.
Done it a couple of times (on Windows 2000), for users who didn't know the admin password.
While I have nothing against your Fortune 1000 survey, and am grateful you posted a link to other very interesting surveys, I sincerely feel your "masking" "product" is a rip-off.
It serves absolutely no purpose other than getting clueless sysadmins to pay you money.
My logs are filled with attempts to exploit MS-specific vulnerabilities, even though the server (correctly) advertizes itself as Apache.
> But there are many surveys out there:/ index.html
.de figures, where it has almost 90%.
> http://www.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/200310
This link is really interesting because it has surveys by tld.
As was mentioned earlier, no survey is perfect but they all have their value if you can compare them and understand what exactly they count.
A first look at securityspace shows huge differences:
- Apache lovers will love the
- Italy surprised me with 46% MS
- China is a strong MS supporter it seems: 63% (33% for Apache). Does it mean that price does play a role in the choice after all? In China, I suppose nobody actually pays MS. Or does MS have much better support for Chinese localization?
- The US military also seem to like MS (65%)
etc.
I'll try to find how they get their samples.
(use the drop down [1-25, 26-50 etc] to get the full list)
:-)
You use the drop down, or script it or whatever, then give a link to all the collected HTML, and I will be glad to do the rest (extracting URLs and probing them).
Sorry, but I'm not ready to do it all, just for our amsement...
Already done that and that.
If you get me all the pages, I will extract the URLs and get the server info.
collect statistics from real world surfing ?
Didn't someone do that survey for porn sites before?
Why doesn't someone do a survey on what Fortune 100 / 500
Because you have to buy the list, or at least be a subscriber.
Forbes has a few lists from which one could get data, after some scripting to get the full list instead of very little chunks, and then get the link of the page showing the URL.
So with "the nation's 500 fastest-growing private companies, from Inc magazine" data (see parent), the dominance of MS, to my great chagrin, is even worse:Who can find some interesting top-something companies list on which MS would get the low rating it deserves?
If you're into this sort of thing (and have a little time to spare), here is some more data for you survey-chart-whatever nerds.
What are "the nation's 500 fastest-growing private companies, from Inc magazine" running?
Inc.com publishes the company list including website for free, so with the help of Perl, I got the HTTP headers for these 500 companies. 44 sites appeared to be down, and didn't respond. For the 456 others, get the data in various formats and enjoy.
Of course, if you do make fancy graphs with it, please give us the link.
(and you should probably give credit to Inc.com for making the original company listing available for free)
There is not much point in bashing one or the other survey as being biased. Of course they are (whether intentionally or not), since a single survey will only ever show a single perspective.
- Netcraft shows servers by hostnames
- Port80 shows servers for US Fortune 1000 companies
Both are interesting (even though the Port80 graphs suck, and their software is broken).
But both are meaningless by themselves if you want a serious view of server software usage.
Adding Netcraft's SSL survey (which isn't free) would help to get yet another perspective.
Then a breakdown by IP addresses instead of hostnames would be interesting, but Netcraft doesn't seem to publish that.
And what about non-US Fortune-N companies?
And web servers whose main business relies on the web (as this post suggests)?
And stuff you definitely cannot get like the sites with the most traffic? (maybe you could get "sites-with-a-lot-of-traffic-which-do-banner- advertizing-with-major-banner-advertizing- companies").
If you take the survey for what it is, it's interesting. Just don't expect it to tell you more than it can.
Port80 is not about market share, it's about market share in US-based Fortune 1000 companies this summer. A very limited, but nonetheless interesting survey (if you care for surveys, that is).
Who will do a survey of slashdotted sites? Shouldn't be too difficult. Anybody bored in some rainy region of the globe?
Well, I don'tknow. I can easily imagne the concept being old. But the first time I saw it, it was in Ami Pro (1 or 2?), and at the time, the current versions of Word, Wordperfect or other apps didn't have it.
Too bad these are preInternet days, almost like prehistory. No Google...
doesn't the A in ASCII stand for American?
So instead of ANSI don't we need a INSI (I standing for international) standard?
That sounds like a very good idea. To make it shorter, we could call it ISO (International Standards Organization). Yeah, what a terrific idea. Let's get a domain name straight away. Maybe iso.org? Sounds cool? Well someone took that already: ISO.
There is!
The server says it's sending latin-1 (iso-8859-1): Unfortunately, some coder was bored and decided to kill some time by writing a conversion routine that would transcode all posts by removing the accents. I hope (s)he enjoyed that rainy Sunday afternoon, spent on breaking stuff that works flawlessly on the rest of the web.
(you may have noticed I would favor accents on
The undercurrent of most of the discussion here is that the current lack of unicode characters reflects a sort of digital American unilateralism.
It certainly does when Slashcode rejects accented characters (making this discussion difficult at times).
But as far as DNS is concerned, I'm also not sure this Ponycode ride is worth the trouble.
I for one am quite happy to approximate German letters with the closest equivalent.
That is not a very good example, because in German, it is very easy and "looks/feels" ok. They happen to use only one type of accent on a few vowels, always producing the same transformation which can be decently approximated with an "e".
It's not as simple with many other (even Western European) languages.
See this post or a few others
You already have that!
Look at your keyboard layouts. In Windows it's called "English (United States) - United States International" or something. Never looked for it in Linux, but it certainly exists.