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User: FauxPasIII

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  1. Vive PCS Vision ! on Life on the Road with 3G · · Score: 4, Informative

    I've had the service since early November, and I will be a sad, sad little boy if they ever deactivate it or change the pricing structure unfavorably. I principally use it with my laptop, and it's absolutely magnificent.

    I have the Sanyo 4900 phone, fwiw, and it shows up to Linux as a USB modem using the standard acm.o driver. I get a pretty high latency, about 350ms ping to my gateway, but the bandwidth is around 20K/s (that's kiloBYTES) when I'm in a strong service area, averages around 12 if I'm moving around. Coverage is good, albeit not perfect. I drove from Atlanta to St Louis with a ping going the whole time, and lost less than 10 packets. There are a few dead zones in the rural area south of St Louis where my parents live, but not many (and we haven't found ANY cell phones that work in those areas, T-Mobile and Cingular all die in the same places)

  2. Re:Why do I read the articles first? on Life on the Road with 3G · · Score: 1

    > He can't even read his email on his phone!

    Yes he can, he just doesn't like the mail viewer on his A500. RTFA.

    FWIW, I can attest to the suckage of the mail and web clients on the Sanyo 4900, also. But the real reason to have Vision is to use it with a laptop =)

  3. Re:Non-root privileges? on Zaurus SL-5600/SL-5500 Comparison Whitepaper · · Score: 5, Informative

    > Why wouldn't I just run as root?

    Why would you ?

    Seriously though, if you're logged in as root, you can do an end-run around lots of the mechanisms that make Linux as stable as it is. If you're a nonprivileged user, AND provided the kernel is doing it's job properly, it shouldn't be possible to make the thing crash.

  4. Re:Haters come out! on ISS Discovers A Remote Hole In Sendmail · · Score: 1

    >> Actually, its EASY to learn to not overflow buffers...

    I guess I don't understand the problem clearly enough, because it seems to be that there could be a way of automatically checking this at the source level.

  5. Re:Haters come out! on ISS Discovers A Remote Hole In Sendmail · · Score: 1

    > Sendmail is archaic garbage, and has had discovered buffer overflow problems
    > one after another for over 15 years...time to throw it out altogether.

    Well, I'm not so worried about buffer overflows, which can and do happen to anyone, as I am shoddy design. If somebody finds a buffer overflow in Postfix and I somehow neglect to patch it, then an attacker can run rampant in my postfix chroot jail as an unprivileged user... not something I want, but certainly a far shade from sendmail with its remote root holes.

  6. Re:Haters come out! on ISS Discovers A Remote Hole In Sendmail · · Score: 1

    Postfix doesn't even get it's own bullet ?

    Switch to Postfix !

  7. Save Money on Advice You Would Give to Your 12 Year-Old Self? · · Score: 1

    Save your money, the Bush Recession is coming !

  8. Re:Fail on Intel's Itanium 2: Succeed or Fail? · · Score: 3, Interesting

    > The companies that need and use 64-bit applications will not want those
    > applications running on commodity hardware. They'll want a well supported
    > platform and one that works time and again.

    That's certainly the conventional wisdom, but I'm not so sure if it applies in the near-to-long-term future. There's a great article in the Feb 03 issue of Red Herring that tangentially applies... they talk about the trend of companies to just buy farms of cheaper, redundant servers built from commodity hardware, instead of the behemoth workhorses of old... they mention Google, which is typically a bellwether for other large online operations.

    From a practical standpoint, why buy (and upkeep) a service contract with Sun or IBM when you can get 40 P4's or Athlons running FreeBSD for similar cost and replace them with parts from CompUSA at your leisure as they fail ?

  9. Re:Funny on P2P File Sharing Could Cost You A Bundle · · Score: 1

    >> Unlike the US, where a lot of people are still fuming about how Gore won the popular vote but won the election.

    Actually, we're fuming about the fact that Gore won the popular AND electoral vote, and Bush had his daddy lean on the Supreme Court Justices who owed him political favors to convince them to overturn the will of the voters in Flordia.

    Just to be accurate. =)

  10. I have to say... on Sprint DSL's Security Hole Easy As 1,2,3,4 · · Score: 1

    That's the funniest post I've ever read with a subject of "Shit".

  11. Minor wrongheadedness on Self-Regulating SSL Certificate Authority? · · Score: 2, Informative

    how does this prove the character of those running the SSL server?

    I think you're thinking about SSL in slightly the wrong way. It's intended to guarantee that

    1) The person you're talking to and who is talking to is precisely who they say they are
    and
    2) Nobody else is listening in to or interfering with the communication without the consent of either you or the other party.

    Besides, it's widely known that proving oneself virtuous is an NP-complete problem, and therefore beyond the scope of SSL.

  12. Here's an interesting bit... on Star Wars Galaxies Only to Allow One Character Per Account · · Score: 2


    "Agh! More forced grouping!"

    I'd prefer to think of it as a chance to get to know your neighbors. The fact is that something like 90-95% of you are unable to tell me the names and occupations of the people who live in the eight homes that lie adjacent to you: three across the street, three behind you, and the two on each side. In fact, a very large number of you have social circles that are built around your school or your job. Not only is this unnatural for humans, but it means that the groups you form are extremely homogeneous.

    As any biologist can tell you, homogenous populations go extinct very readily. As any teacher can tell you, exposure to different modes of thought makes for better citizens and better thinkers.


    I can't decide if I think he's incredibly pretentious or incredibly insightful for the comparisons he's making to evolutionary biological systems... in either case, it's a good sell for the game.

  13. Re:More programs should be this way on Turn-Key Linux Audio · · Score: 2

    > inthe land of 40gig is normal... there is no excuse.

    Except you don't benefit from any local bugfixes there are in any of the libs you're linked against... unless you release a whole new (n*10) meg binary every time a new point release of OpenGL or gtk+ or SDL or whatever comes out. But your point is well taken.

  14. Re:More programs should be this way on Turn-Key Linux Audio · · Score: 1

    >> it's apathy that is holding us back in seeing linux apps that install nice like OO.o, mozilla andall the loki games..

    I think more than that, it's the fact that the "nice installers" that come with all those tools don't inform the package management system of your distro about them, which is imporant for uninstallation, helps manage dependencies, and greatly eases distribution to multiple machines.

    Each of the main distros/package management systems has pretty good Guis built for that system, but nothing as good as Loki setup. It would be nice if that tool knew how to fake out dpkg and rpm and would auto-detect what was on the system... it would require the people putting together the packages to write up a dependency list for them tho. -shrug-

  15. Re:Documentation on the site on RealNetworks Releases Helix DNA Producer Source · · Score: 2

    >> Small command-line tools are appropriate for hacking together text processing filters,
    >> but I can't see them being useful for building a multimedia pipeline.

    Uhhhh... transcode much? Use it, and I imagine you'll find as I have that it absolutely shames every other program that has the same feature set for -any- platform.

  16. Re:GNU/Linux on OpenBSD Book Suggestions · · Score: 1

    >> Damn, now I'm tempted to start porting FreeBSD's userland in and release BSD/Linux.

    That would rule, actually. Do it. =)

  17. Re:Packet mangling! on Updating Quickbooks Forces Online Membership? · · Score: 4, Informative

    Dammit. Make that:

    firewall# iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -p tcp --dport 25 -d ${INTUIT_SMTP_SERV} -j DNAT --to ${FRIENDLY_SMTP_SERV}

  18. Re:Packet mangling! on Updating Quickbooks Forces Online Membership? · · Score: 2


    firewall# iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -p tcp --dport 25 -d ${INTUIT_SMTP_SERV} -j DNAT ${FRIENDLY_SMTP_SERV}

  19. Re:/. IS 1 MILLION on Pay to Play the U.S. Way · · Score: 2

    >> I'm Canadian. The American government is your responsibility, not mine.

    In principal that makes a lot of sense. In practice, what happens when Canada gets lumped into an Axis of Evil and becomes the next target? Y'all have WMD's, don't you?

    Even without looking into the future, wasn't it last week that Bush started basically extorting the Canadian government for money to fund the war on terror, saying it was time for Canada to "do its part" to protect the continent from "cowards that hate our freedoms" ?

    Dealing with an out-of-control imperialist oil-baron is the World's responsibility.

  20. Re:Interesting, but... on First Desktop Computer To Use Intel's XScale · · Score: 1

    >> Does a server have a need for excellent sound? Does a server need a GF4/Radeon 9700?

    In my experience, it doesn't need sound or video at all, I've just got a serial connection to mine which I admin through minicom =)

    That's why I thought it was strange for them to put a low-to-midrange gaming video card and 16 bit sound on board... if it was intended to be a server, that is. I just can't think of many roles for this machine that would justify the strange blending of ultra-high-bandwidth expansion and networking with midrange multimedia/gaming capabilities.

  21. Re:Interesting, but... on First Desktop Computer To Use Intel's XScale · · Score: 3, Interesting

    >> You know the first question 'the public' will have is... "...but does it run Windows?"

    I was going to respond by pointing out that, with 2 PCI-X slots and on-board gigabit ethernet, it's clear that this machine is built to be a server... then I noticed the integrated sound and Geforce2MX400 video. What a poor, mixed up little machine this is.

  22. Re:TCP/BEEP??? on SDSC Secure Syslog · · Score: 2

    > Yes. It's the Ellen Feiss protocol.

    Nah, beep's an actual protocol. You're thinking of 'bleep'.

  23. Re:Easy workaround. on Bitrate Peeling with Ogg Vorbis · · Score: 2

    > $100.00-$500.00 per foot for speaker cable...

    -nod- At some point, you have to yield to the law of diminishing returns, just like anything else. In all honesty, I can hear the difference between 160k mp3 and CD if I'm using my nice Grado headphones, but it doesn't bother me. Over that bitrate or using ogg I can't even hear it myself, but I've got untrained ears. (Thank goodness)

    Then again, I won't use anything but a genuine Tulip 21143 network card, so I guess everybody has to have their one thing to be irrational about ;-)

  24. Re:Audiophiles? on Bitrate Peeling with Ogg Vorbis · · Score: 3

    > I dont want to hear my symphony, or even my phish for that matter, sampled down to lower rates

    That's all well and good that you know what you want. Me, I want a format that can be downloaded in at least realtime (1 second of music in 1 second of download time) on a normal, lightly used network connection, and which takes up only reasonable amounts of space on disk.

    But hey, what do I know, I just do professional network consulting and system administration to pay my way through school. =D

  25. Re:Easy Solution on The Copyright Fuss Revisited · · Score: 1

    This is the most rational point of view I've ever heard on the issue, and it's lended me some concise, coherent language with which to explain this to people. Thank you.

    As far as its being likely to be implemented, as another poster said, you're going to have to find some way to provide for people who are filthy rich (and therefore, politically dominant) now to benefit somehow from the system or they'll scuttle it, just as proprietary software monopolies want to scuttle free software, just as the petroleum cartels continue to scuttle alternative-fuel vehicles. The people who own the world aren't going to relinquish their ownership by choice.