I mean, why are we suprised, and why is this article even mentioned on slashdot ?? Have you people forgotten that robots already make cars, computers, aeroplanes etc... What is the technical whizz-bangery involved in getting a 5-axis arm to flip a burger ? Its not like the robot has a taste test, and decides it needs more salt. This is just another example of talking-dog phenomenon - make a dog bark in a way that vaugely sounds like either :
Herro (Hello)
Sings happy birthday...
etc...
And you are guaranteed to win your local funniest home videos TV show. But get a robot to flip burgers and it gets on slashdot - what is this place coming to ??
People here are suggesting that it would be cool to make some server farm in the middle of the ocean, or in africa/asia away from the nasties of stupid western politics. I think this is a cool idea -- but people seem to forget that even ISP's have ISP's, and to if you set up your data haven you will need to buy bandwidth off someone, and to even survive you will need mega-bandwidth, and im sure MCI or Sprint or who ever you get your bandwidth off would have no problems disconnecting you if they got a cease-and-desist letter from someone in the right places. Of course there are cool ways around this that I like to fantasise about, such as setting up a server with a large number of upstream providers (ie. 50+), and using IP tunnels to make the packets harder to track down, and then setting up a per connection round robin scheme to help smear your network topology... But to do that sort of thing you would need lots of money, lots of disparate points of presence and some smarty pants network engineers...
Recently I was heavily involved in changing over from a Sendmail based system to a new mail system that had to be designed to cope with 50,000 users in an ISP setting.
To keep things short, I'll tell you where we ended up:
Postfix replacing sendmail for SMTP stuff. We decided to go this way for reasons of fairly straightforward compatability with sendmail in terms of alias and virtual user tables, but with an overall simpler configuration scheme. Postfix also appeared to be much more efficient in terms of CPU and Memory usage. One big plus was the off-the-shelf support for LDAP for users, maildrops and aliases. We are moving alot of our systems across to LDAP and one less application for me to add LDAP support to made things easier. At the office we run this on FreeBSD 3.4, and at home I have run it on BSD, Linux and Solaris with no problems.
Cyrus IMAP/POP server from Carnegie Mellon. Previously we were running Cubic Circle's cucipop program which proved to be a great package, but the code is so nutty that any attempts to hack it resulted in great frustration. Cyrus also offered LDAP support, but some hacking was required to get things to fit in with our schema, and to get the authentication just right. It took about 10 minutes to insert the code for DRAC (POP before SMTP authentication). Running on FreeBSD.
Smunge - a service side package I wrote to let users check 2 POP boxes as if they were one. This also has LDAP and DRAC support out-of-the-box (tm):) - Builds on Linux, Solaris and FreeBSD.
Hoarde IMP we used as a web email client (talking via imap, whereas dial up customers could only use pop)- Running on Solaris.
For Radius we currently use FreeSide, but we are moving towards Merit. I have written an LDAP authentication module for Merit, and I'm waiting for the OK from my bosses to GPL it. BSD and Solaris.
LDAP - we like LDAP:) We currently run OpenLDAP on a production server. We have tinkered with Netscapes Directory Server, but you can only configure that through some crappy slow java interface, and that kinda sucks.
As for the question of IMAP vs. POP, I think you really need to look at the practicalities of offering one over the other. I won't go over it all again (I know somone else has posted on the same line) but IMAP is not really the way to go for an ISP/dial-in/remote-user environment. I think it perhaps it was even on www.imap.org that I found a quote stating that IMAP was best utilised in a University environment.
I know I'm not really answering your question, but I thought you might be interested to see a path someone has taken.
This is a Mr Smarty Pants Geek In A Can post.... this guy obviously saw the phrase mailing list, and said "Wow, i know what that is, im going to post a reply that has nothing to do with the original question, but include a lot of links to vaugley related, but entirely useless sites within the scope of the question -- And get moderated up on it!!!"
But... why is it that more and more frequently questions are appearing on Ask Slashdot for no particular reason ? I used to like Ask Slashdot, because after i had resigned to the fact that there were goign to be no more new stories posted for the next 10 minutes, i had better spend my time learning something on Ask Slashdot It seems that over the last few months more and more questions relate to things that are almost exactly the same as the prime question answered in the freely and easily available HOWTO's or FAQ's. And then there have been a new breed of questions floating around, which just contain stupid ideas than no one has put any thought into before allowing them to be posted on Ask Slashot. For example, I think if i asked:
"Oh, at work we are trying to get our coffee machine to make coffee quicker and I came up with the idea of using a
beowulf cluster on linux, how would that work?"
I would pretty much be guaranteed a post. Which brings me back to this particular question regarding mailing lists. What did the poster really want to acheive by asking slashdot ? I mean, its quite obvious that we have no understanding of the workings of his workplace, and the issue of mailinglists is hardly a well defined topic, with justification for any answer other than personal choice. What was the poster expecting to find -- someone who was a guru in the art of carefully crafting the number of mailing lists in a corporate environment for maximising staff efficiency, happiness, inter-departmental communication and server loading ?... Oh yeah, I think there is an O'Reilly book out there on it, and RFC-743856 goes over the IEEE x782 spec for number of mailing lists really well.... The only reason why i can imagine that this person felt like posting this question was just to 'get something on slashdot'... Basically the only response they will get will be from people who like most of the people who post questions, only understand a small fraction of the issue at hand, but continue to act as if they know what they are on about.. I call this the Guru in a Can or GIC phenomenon. They are geeks or pseudo-geeks who pretend to be Mr Smarty Pants.. irc is full of them, and slashdot is too.. anyway, thats a totally different rant...
Lets look at some recent posts to Ask Slashot: Pen Based OS On the Net - the person said they looked and couldnt find a free OS for a pen based wierdo computer... What they really wanted to find :
Hi, I couldnt help noticing the particular bind you are in, and im gonna stop work on emacs, and some other things i do in between picking lint from my toes, and write GNU/Pen for you - Love RMS
Followup to the Hackers Diet - Some guy is proud that he looks less like RMS, and more like some skinny type guy.. What they really wanted to find:
WOW! IM SO IMPRESSED. My name is Tina and im 17 and I *REALLY* like hackers who do Tae Bo - I do Naked Tae Bo, and then sit and write Perl for hours.. Would you like to join me -- Im So Alone without you.. Im sure you will complete my life.. because Im always so busy with my naked Tae Bo, and coding Perl, I will only have time to bonk you!~!!!!
Losing my love of PERL asks how to send an attachment from the NT command line -- well i ask How do i optimise my asm level pthreads implementation on my HP-42S calculator.. but at least i dont ask it in public where I know the question is not of general value
Computers as microwave - Some putz has put together the idea of a flucluating electric current and magnetic radiation and is all impressed at how smart they are.. Well Mr Smarty Pants, Robert Maxwell thought the same things at the turn of last century, and Im pretty sure the Big Chip Dudes at intel/amd/motorola are familiar with a bit of Electromag theory - and the prolly are very well aware of the em emissions of their chips.. So whats your fscking point ?? -- you are just posting this because you want to look like a Mr Smarty Pants ala JEFF-K... nuff said. PS. this is a great example of a Geek in a Can question Cryptograpic IRC - freshmeat. Unix Software for Molecular Biology - freshmeat anyway.. the list goes on... If andover want to give me a job answering the large number of noise posts that are infecting what was otherwise a clean signal, sure.. email me. I think i could even write a program (whilst wearing my Mr Smarty Geek Coder Pants), that would answer any imaginable ask slashdot with :
rtfm
freshmeat
oh you are so smart, is there room in your heart for me to love you too?
Linux can do it!
Whilst i have your attention i might ask a quick question: How would I go about writing a program in Perl/Scheme/Lisp/PDP-11 asm that would take user input in string based english format over the web and interpret the string with a neural network running on a cluster of computers running either Linux, FreeBSD or GNU/Hurd on embedded machines running on a 0.04micron architecture (perhaps based on technology found in the soon to be announced Playstation 3). This software would need strong crypto to protect the privacy of its end users. It would then answer peoples questions!!
Some more ask slashdot questions: I got drunk last night, and i cant find my car keys, has anyone seen them?
Why is AOL always busy ?
I have this cool idea, i started C programming last week and i want to write an operating system with in built 3d accelleration so that i can run Daikatatana at 1289 fps, but im having problems making printf work ?
and then there is the whole gammut of posts which a co-worker variously describes as pseudo-contoversy/beating the dead-horse/argument for sake of argument... these posts generally ask a question which is known to generate the same old arguemnts with basically everyone agreeing... the questions are things like "Corporate giant X has release device Y but is not providing drivers for linux. Is this a bad thing ?" -- yeah, like some slashdot readers are going to say "No, its not a bad things, drivers should be closed source so that companies like microsoft can get more money" Other questions in this ilk include "Is WAVE profiling of geeks a bad thing?", "Are the US crypto export rules bad?", "Is the RIAA are bunch of well educated open minded professionals, representing the needs of the common artist?".....
Oh, and by the way, anything i have said here also goes for the general articles that have been posted to slashdot... double posts aside (yes, i can understand that people who have been given moderator god rights are obviously to busy to check out what has been posted in the last 24 hours before they post the same thing over and over and over...). One article that totally pissed me off was the one a few hours ago about Be discontinuing its developemnt of BeOS. The moderator did the right thing and checked if there was any basis in the post, found that there was none- said there was none in the post, but posted it anyway!!! WTF!@ I mean, its bad enough when things get posted like that NSAKEY thing from ages ago in Win 9x, with no basis in fact other than in the minds of a few consipiracy junkies who would jump Scully at any given chance.. But to post something knowing that its wrong -- i mean, how is that news ? for nerds or otherwise ??
when this story first came out i was so happy for those guys. i went to school with both the Johns, and used to code a bit with them. Ive taken the year off uni (so im not eligable to join in the acm), and working as a coder. My last job was to write an LDAP enabled pop-server, over the weekend and during that time my girlfried (working as a waitress) earned more than me. god the IT industry is in a crap state. or maybe i just struck out with a bad job.
heh. i dont know why im posting here. but on what turns out to be like $8 per hour, i cant afford professional help.
Of course Web-Masters should be responsible for all of the posts on their site. For example, Hotmail should be held accountable for anything that any one of its millions of users could post in an email. Slashdot should be responsible for the actions of any anonymous poster. and ZDNet should certainly be responsible for my posting here. Because I am about to swear - Fuck, Cunt, Shit, Cock-Sucker, Crack-Whore..
Aside from common sense, and the fact that I am located over 10,000km away from ZDNet, and that no one from ZDNet has ever contacted me personally, they should most certainly be responsible for my swearing above.
Actually. I had Corn Flakes for breakfast this morning, and I think you should be able to sue the manufacturer for letting me live, because I have committed crimes in the past, and I am likely to commit them in the future, and if it wasn't for all the companies that provide me with food, then no crimes would be comitted.
2 days ago i purchased a cheap motherboard, with the intention of evaluating it with the intention of building a small cluster (beowulf style, but with more specific computational goals).
I found a whole bunch of motherboards with on-board everything, including video, and 10/100 network cards, with boot roms.. The guy in the shop said "sure, linux will boot it fine", but as it turns out (after much packet sniffing in ethereal), these motherboards are using the Remote Program Load (0xFC) op of something called NetBEUI, a dying extension of a dead (novell) protocol.
All of yesterday I was thinking i had this junk motherboard on my hands, but if i can ever find the source for this NetBEUI for linux thingo, then hopefully I will be able to get this motherboard to boot, and then i start travelling to the land of cheap clustered computing.
Basically, my point is that although NetBEUI may be dead, some hardware manufacturers have opted for it as a cheap standard (even though it is not publicly spec'ed), over much nicer protocols such as bootp/tftp. I would love to find motherboards that support non-proprietary protocols, but at this point in time, my wallet can't support that.
At the ISP where i work at, one of my duties is managing our filtering software which is used by a large number of our educational customers. I can't really say which package that is, but it does involve one mentioned on the Peacefire page.
Recently we had some hardware troubles on our filtering box, and since it was repaired i have been keeping a close eye on the machine. Of the few things i have noticed about the general patterns of sites that are filtered :
Most porn is looked at when students are not at school. ie, the teachers are the ones doing the looking.
Most of the sites that are rejected by the filtering software is not correctly catagorized. A great illustration is www.freelolita.net - to save you the trouble of looking, its a site about a dolphin saving compaign - kinda along the lines of "Free Willy", but i guess if there was a Free Willy site, it would be blocked too.
If you want to find porn, there are plenty of places on the net which have heigher yields than surfing the web - eg, newsgroups, irc, icq... But the majority of the world thinks that the web is the internet. So, if they think that by blocking some sites, that they can sleep at night, fine In reality, all they will be doing is making it difficult for people to access legitimate sites, such as freelolita, whereas the porn will still flow free through other channels.
I am a resident of australia, our politicians understanding of the issues here is miserable. Not only are we stuck with a market economy and geography that denies us decent bandwidth, but our politicians want to tell us what we can look at. I firmly beleive that the internet was a place where people could be free
Anyway, usual disclaimers about my comments and their total independance from the position of my employers, and all that....
Dont tell a forum on slashdot which will be a magent to script kiddies that you are a sitting fat duck.
If I had any clue about anything more than the technical side of cracking, then perhaps i would be enticed to your claim of being 'on a constant cable' & 'clueless newbie'
For starters close off your ports, they're all open.
The article sounds pretty impressive, and i would surely like to have one in my computer... but... why is there a picture of what looks like a consumer grade HiFi component, with a `C3D Inc' sticker on it, whereas the photo above, of a `Clear Card' looks like it has been glued together in 10 minutes... When you click on the image of the HiFi thingo, you get taken to a picture of a rather dubious, non-descript piece of lab equipment with one of these FCD's sitting inside it. It all looks a bit dodgey to me...
For home use i just buy 19" 3U racks from a local electronics shop. These sell for about $100AU, and they are quite suitable. All you need to do is drill the holes in the right places, and put in about an hours work, and you have a nice custom rack case. Unfortunately for larger sized motherboards, like dual PII's, you really need 4U case so that you can make room for the power supply. I havent been able to find 4U cases in shops around here, but i have been toying with using a 3U and a 1U.
Please email me with the URL of your link to anything relating to the DVD stupidity. Here in australia i think i will be safe. i hope so. if not, i will fight.
Im very interested in the project of writing such a beast. I have been interested in natural language processing for years. Im also a C coder (under *nix). Anyone interested please email me at joshr@netspace.net.au
Have a quick check of their HTML source and u will find a big ugly microsoft frontpage bit of java that gives the pengiun a flashing third eye.
This raises a few questions:
i. Why do some people who do the good job of promoting linux fall back on M$ apps ?
ii. Why is this bunch (along with PLENTY of ppl on the web) using a sledgehammer to solve a simple problem. ie, why not use and animated gif or better a png instead of a crappy script ?
PS: My homepage is broken. I forgot to pay the DNS, if someone wants to pay for me, i would be greatful;)
I dont have the xdaliclock code in front of me, but from a quick peek at the gif, it seems odd that at one particular time the display would be reversed. It seems more like a hard coded-in 'cool thing' for people who were in front of the screen at midnight.. and with the 2600 page, yeah well.. i wish i had that idea too.. so many places coders could have taken the opportunity to scare the poop out of ppl with all this y2k crap that was going around last year.
Well.. Whilst you all may be rejoicing over the survival of your linux boxen etc.. Down here in australia things havent gone so well..
As you know we were one of the first countries to go through the rollover, and whilst your media was preparing to televise and stream your parties, they seemed to neglect the tremendous chaos that was going on down under.
As the clock approached midnight, i was at a friends apartment for an intimate gathering, and we had the tv on with a big display counting down. 00:05
00:04
00:03
00:02
00:01
00:00
Cheers everywhere from the drug induced gathering, except for one guy who had his watch upside-down and was convived we still had 6 hours to go.
Anyway, my point is that nothing went wrong during the actual rollover, but during the next few hours things started failing... the first thing i noticed was the some street lamps, and some shopfront lighting dimming. I was drunk, so i didnt take much notice of it, but in retrospect it was the beginning of the end.
As people crammed on the special 24 hour public transport, some trams started to fail. Most people figured the heavy load at 3am was stressing the system, and although mentioned briefly over the city-wide PA, the announcers were cautious to stress that this was not Y2K related.
I came home at around 4am, between 2 parties to have a quick shower, and check slashdot.. Just wanted to see how the world was faring up against this genormous evil that was facing the computers.
Slashdot didnt have much to say, nor did my computer.. I switched it on, heard the HDD start spinning, and jumped into the shower whilst my pc booted. I got out of the shower to find that my computer (which i was quite sure was Y2K compliant) was just booting, spinning the HDD, and rebooting.. I was a bit baffled and went to turn up my dim lights... Although when i got to the switch, they were already on full, but only shining half..
This scenario was not new to me, we have a power pole with a transformer on it just outside my window, and every now and then a possum manages to fry himself on the terminals and gives us a brown-out. So i popped outside, expecting to see a fried carcass.. But it was hard to see, all the street lights were out... Now that was fscked up, because the street lights run on a different grid in out street. Some serious shit was going down. Anyway, i stayed at home for the next few hours, phones were dead, and lights were dead.
To cut a long story short, its 10:30PM here, and all the computers are still screwed, and we are without power.
I havent even been able to see/. yet:(
I think im gonna start suffering withdrawal symptoms soon
Um, doesn't the millennium start in 2001 ?
PS: my websites down, i forgot to pay the DNS fee.. Any windows geek wanna pay it for me ??
Yes, i do have a tax file number, and as far as i know only 2 groups of people other than myself know it: my bank, and my employer. Its not used in the same way as the australia card was proposed. a cop cant pull me over and ask me for my tax file number. and even if he did get it, or anyone for that matter, it wouldnt bother me, because at the best they would only be able to find out what bank i use and who my employer is, not 2 details i hold that close to heart.
Re:Help, one australian who gives a shit!
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Profiling A Nation
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I just found out during the recent refferendum that my gf wasnt registered to vote. Cause at age 18 you get a thing in the mail saying "register... blah blah", and being a slack girl, she never got around to it. It turns out its only illegal not to vote if u are registered, but there is nothing stopping you from never registering in the first place. If only i knew this when i was 18.
josh
Re:Help, one australian who gives a shit!
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Profiling A Nation
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· Score: 1
- I dont use hotmail - I dont give out too many details (well, im starting to open up a bit, but thats a personal problem):) - Im one of the lucky few who have been using email for years (7+) and i dont have to weed out spam. But i am worried about people like my gf who have a hotmail account, and each day have to weed out the spam that fills her mailbox. I know its not because she posted to some innane list and forgot to use xxx@NOSPAM.xxxx - i find measures like that silly, its just about common sense. or rather a sense of knowing to make yourself heard, but hopefully only by the right people. - As for what can be done, im not sure. Luckily ppl like EFF have some clues, but unfortunately not the lobbyist muscle. If only i could some how demonstrate that decreasing our privacy would harm the wool trade or something... in that case ppl would notice josh (The original poster guy)
Help, one australian who gives a shit!
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Profiling A Nation
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· Score: 3
Being an australian, i think i know a bit about the australian psyche. Usually we are a pretty good bunch (not to be making a too sweeping generalisation), but compared to what we see of america i think we do ok. Our legal system is fair, and alot of the time i think our attitude comes down to 'she'll be right, mate'. This makes day to day living kinda cool, but the flip side being that when something important comes along, we do little to stop it. Just a few weeks ago we had a national refferendum to see if we wanted to become a republic. The history of past refferenda guided the outcome of this one, a 'No' vote -- a sad day for me personally. What im trying to say is that there is a general apathy here which is amplified when it comes to 'technical' issues, look at the work of Richard Alston (a federal senator) who is passing all that crap trying to ban porn on the internet.. At this stage i would like to thank/. for bringing to the attention of the world how behind we can be with some issues. But unfortunately, our easy attitude prevails with ppl never really getting off their ass to do something, unless they are threatened with a pay cut.
Here i go, i make a call to ppl to do something. I dont know what, but do something. Help us.
Slashdot Mirror
This is just another example of talking-dog phenomenon - make a dog bark in a way that vaugely sounds like either :
- Herro (Hello)
- Sings happy birthday...
- etc...
And you are guaranteed to win your local funniest home videos TV show. But get a robot to flip burgers and it gets on slashdot - what is this place coming to ??People here are suggesting that it would be cool to make some server farm in the middle of the ocean, or in africa/asia away from the nasties of stupid western politics.
I think this is a cool idea -- but people seem to forget that even ISP's have ISP's, and to if you set up your data haven you will need to buy bandwidth off someone, and to even survive you will need mega-bandwidth, and im sure MCI or Sprint or who ever you get your bandwidth off would have no problems disconnecting you if they got a cease-and-desist letter from someone in the right places.
Of course there are cool ways around this that I like to fantasise about, such as setting up a server with a large number of upstream providers (ie. 50+), and using IP tunnels to make the packets harder to track down, and then setting up a per connection round robin scheme to help smear your network topology... But to do that sort of thing you would need lots of money, lots of disparate points of presence and some smarty pants network engineers...
To keep things short, I'll tell you where we ended up
As for the question of IMAP vs. POP, I think you really need to look at the practicalities of offering one over the other. I won't go over it all again (I know somone else has posted on the same line) but IMAP is not really the way to go for an ISP/dial-in/remote-user environment. I think it perhaps it was even on www.imap.org that I found a quote stating that IMAP was best utilised in a University environment.
I know I'm not really answering your question, but I thought you might be interested to see a path someone has taken.
This is a Mr Smarty Pants Geek In A Can post.... this guy obviously saw the phrase mailing list, and said "Wow, i know what that is, im going to post a reply that has nothing to do with the original question, but include a lot of links to vaugley related, but entirely useless sites within the scope of the question -- And get moderated up on it!!!"
Wow. there actually *IS* an O'Reilly book on this... i was just kidding in my first post.
But.... first post !
:)
Natilie Portman slashdotted and petrified..
But yeah, i like the question.
I used to like Ask Slashdot, because after i had resigned to the fact that there were goign to be no more new stories posted for the next 10 minutes, i had better spend my time learning something on Ask Slashdot
It seems that over the last few months more and more questions relate to things that are almost exactly the same as the prime question answered in the freely and easily available HOWTO's or FAQ's.
And then there have been a new breed of questions floating around, which just contain stupid ideas than no one has put any thought into before allowing them to be posted on Ask Slashot. For example, I think if i asked
Which brings me back to this particular question regarding mailing lists. What did the poster really want to acheive by asking slashdot ? I mean, its quite obvious that we have no understanding of the workings of his workplace, and the issue of mailinglists is hardly a well defined topic, with justification for any answer other than personal choice. What was the poster expecting to find -- someone who was a guru in the art of carefully crafting the number of mailing lists in a corporate environment for maximising staff efficiency, happiness, inter-departmental communication and server loading ?... Oh yeah, I think there is an O'Reilly book out there on it, and RFC-743856 goes over the IEEE x782 spec for number of mailing lists really well....
The only reason why i can imagine that this person felt like posting this question was just to 'get something on slashdot'...
Basically the only response they will get will be from people who like most of the people who post questions, only understand a small fraction of the issue at hand, but continue to act as if they know what they are on about.. I call this the Guru in a Can or GIC phenomenon. They are geeks or pseudo-geeks who pretend to be Mr Smarty Pants.. irc is full of them, and slashdot is too.. anyway, thats a totally different rant...
Lets look at some recent posts to Ask Slashot
Pen Based OS On the Net - the person said they looked and couldnt find a free OS for a pen based wierdo computer... What they really wanted to find :
Followup to the Hackers Diet - Some guy is proud that he looks less like RMS, and more like some skinny type guy.. What they really wanted to find
Losing my love of PERL asks how to send an attachment from the NT command line -- well i ask How do i optimise my asm level pthreads implementation on my HP-42S calculator.. but at least i dont ask it in public where I know the question is not of general value
Computers as microwave - Some putz has put together the idea of a flucluating electric current and magnetic radiation and is all impressed at how smart they are.. Well Mr Smarty Pants, Robert Maxwell thought the same things at the turn of last century, and Im pretty sure the Big Chip Dudes at intel/amd/motorola are familiar with a bit of Electromag theory - and the prolly are very well aware of the em emissions of their chips.. So whats your fscking point ?? -- you are just posting this because you want to look like a Mr Smarty Pants ala JEFF-K... nuff said.
PS. this is a great example of a Geek in a Can question
Cryptograpic IRC - freshmeat.
Unix Software for Molecular Biology - freshmeat
anyway.. the list goes on... If andover want to give me a job answering the large number of noise posts that are infecting what was otherwise a clean signal, sure.. email me.
I think i could even write a program (whilst wearing my Mr Smarty Geek Coder Pants), that would answer any imaginable ask slashdot with :
Whilst i have your attention i might ask a quick question
How would I go about writing a program in Perl/Scheme/Lisp/PDP-11 asm that would take user input in string based english format over the web and interpret the string with a neural network running on a cluster of computers running either Linux, FreeBSD or GNU/Hurd on embedded machines running on a 0.04micron architecture (perhaps based on technology found in the soon to be announced Playstation 3). This software would need strong crypto to protect the privacy of its end users. It would then answer peoples questions!!
Some more ask slashdot questions:
I got drunk last night, and i cant find my car keys, has anyone seen them?
Why is AOL always busy ?
I have this cool idea, i started C programming last week and i want to write an operating system with in built 3d accelleration so that i can run Daikatatana at 1289 fps, but im having problems making printf work ?
and then there is the whole gammut of posts which a co-worker variously describes as pseudo-contoversy/beating the dead-horse/argument for sake of argument... these posts generally ask a question which is known to generate the same old arguemnts with basically everyone agreeing... the questions are things like "Corporate giant X has release device Y but is not providing drivers for linux. Is this a bad thing ?" -- yeah, like some slashdot readers are going to say "No, its not a bad things, drivers should be closed source so that companies like microsoft can get more money"
Other questions in this ilk include "Is WAVE profiling of geeks a bad thing?", "Are the US crypto export rules bad?", "Is the RIAA are bunch of well educated open minded professionals, representing the needs of the common artist?"
Oh, and by the way, anything i have said here also goes for the general articles that have been posted to slashdot... double posts aside (yes, i can understand that people who have been given moderator god rights are obviously to busy to check out what has been posted in the last 24 hours before they post the same thing over and over and over...). One article that totally pissed me off was the one a few hours ago about Be discontinuing its developemnt of BeOS. The moderator did the right thing and checked if there was any basis in the post, found that there was none- said there was none in the post, but posted it anyway!!! WTF!@ I mean, its bad enough when things get posted like that NSAKEY thing from ages ago in Win 9x, with no basis in fact other than in the minds of a few consipiracy junkies who would jump Scully at any given chance.. But to post something knowing that its wrong -- i mean, how is that news ? for nerds or otherwise ??
I really should get back to work.....
email: alancox-AT-i2pi.SOME-SPAM-BOT-IS-REALLY-GONNA-STE
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when this story first came out i was so happy for those guys. i went to school with both the Johns, and used to code a bit with them.
Ive taken the year off uni (so im not eligable to join in the acm), and working as a coder. My last job was to write an LDAP enabled pop-server, over the weekend and during that time my girlfried (working as a waitress) earned more than me. god the IT industry is in a crap state. or maybe i just struck out with a bad job.
heh. i dont know why im posting here. but on what turns out to be like $8 per hour, i cant afford professional help.
Of course Web-Masters should be responsible for all of the posts on their site. For example, Hotmail should be held accountable for anything that any one of its millions of users could post in an email. Slashdot should be responsible for the actions of any anonymous poster. and ZDNet should certainly be responsible for my posting here. Because I am about to swear - Fuck, Cunt, Shit, Cock-Sucker, Crack-Whore..
Aside from common sense, and the fact that I am located over 10,000km away from ZDNet, and that no one from ZDNet has ever contacted me personally, they should most certainly be responsible for my swearing above.
Actually. I had Corn Flakes for breakfast this morning, and I think you should be able to sue the manufacturer for letting me live, because I have committed crimes in the past, and I am likely to commit them in the future, and if it wasn't for all the companies that provide me with food, then no crimes would be comitted.
jdigital.
2 days ago i purchased a cheap motherboard, with the intention of evaluating it with the intention of building a small cluster (beowulf style, but with more specific computational goals).
I found a whole bunch of motherboards with on-board everything, including video, and 10/100 network cards, with boot roms.. The guy in the shop said "sure, linux will boot it fine", but as it turns out (after much packet sniffing in ethereal), these motherboards are using the Remote Program Load (0xFC) op of something called NetBEUI, a dying extension of a dead (novell) protocol.
All of yesterday I was thinking i had this junk motherboard on my hands, but if i can ever find the source for this NetBEUI for linux thingo, then hopefully I will be able to get this motherboard to boot, and then i start travelling to the land of cheap clustered computing.
Basically, my point is that although NetBEUI may be dead, some hardware manufacturers have opted for it as a cheap standard (even though it is not publicly spec'ed), over much nicer protocols such as bootp/tftp. I would love to find motherboards that support non-proprietary protocols, but at this point in time, my wallet can't support that.
Recently we had some hardware troubles on our filtering box, and since it was repaired i have been keeping a close eye on the machine. Of the few things i have noticed about the general patterns of sites that are filtered :
If you want to find porn, there are plenty of places on the net which have heigher yields than surfing the web - eg, newsgroups, irc, icq...
But the majority of the world thinks that the web is the internet. So, if they think that by blocking some sites, that they can sleep at night, fine
In reality, all they will be doing is making it difficult for people to access legitimate sites, such as freelolita, whereas the porn will still flow free through other channels.
I am a resident of australia, our politicians understanding of the issues here is miserable. Not only are we stuck with a market economy and geography that denies us decent bandwidth, but our politicians want to tell us what we can look at.
I firmly beleive that the internet was a place where people could be free
Anyway, usual disclaimers about my comments and their total independance from the position of my employers, and all that....
Now im upset
Why do i work against my morals
Dont tell a forum on slashdot which will be a magent to script kiddies that you are a sitting fat duck.
If I had any clue about anything more than the technical side of cracking, then perhaps i would be enticed to your claim of being 'on a constant cable' & 'clueless newbie'
For starters close off your ports, they're all open.
A firewall is a great place to start
The article sounds pretty impressive, and i would surely like to have one in my computer... but...
why is there a picture of what looks like a consumer grade HiFi component, with a `C3D Inc' sticker on it, whereas the photo above, of a `Clear Card' looks like it has been glued together in 10 minutes... When you click on the image of the HiFi thingo, you get taken to a picture of a rather dubious, non-descript piece of lab equipment with one of these FCD's sitting inside it. It all looks a bit dodgey to me...
I saw it a second ago, now its gone.
For home use i just buy 19" 3U racks from a local electronics shop. These sell for about $100AU, and they are quite suitable. All you need to do is drill the holes in the right places, and put in about an hours work, and you have a nice custom rack case.
Unfortunately for larger sized motherboards, like dual PII's, you really need 4U case so that you can make room for the power supply. I havent been able to find 4U cases in shops around here, but i have been toying with using a 3U and a 1U.
Please email me with the URL of your link to anything relating to the DVD stupidity. Here in australia i think i will be safe. i hope so.
if not, i will fight.
lets overcome
Im very interested in the project of writing such a beast. I have been interested in natural language processing for years. Im also a C coder (under *nix). Anyone interested please email me at joshr@netspace.net.au
yes. point taken. i did mean javascript.
Have a quick check of their HTML source and u will find a big ugly microsoft frontpage bit of java that gives the pengiun a flashing third eye.
:
;)
This raises a few questions
i. Why do some people who do the good job of promoting linux fall back on M$ apps ?
ii. Why is this bunch (along with PLENTY of ppl on the web) using a sledgehammer to solve a simple problem. ie, why not use and animated gif or better a png instead of a crappy script ?
PS: My homepage is broken. I forgot to pay the DNS, if someone wants to pay for me, i would be greatful
I dont have the xdaliclock code in front of me, but from a quick peek at the gif, it seems odd that at one particular time the display would be reversed. It seems more like a hard coded-in 'cool thing' for people who were in front of the screen at midnight.. and with the 2600 page, yeah well.. i wish i had that idea too.. so many places coders could have taken the opportunity to scare the poop out of ppl with all this y2k crap that was going around last year.
ps: the millennium doesnt start till 2001
Well.. Whilst you all may be rejoicing over the survival of your linux boxen etc.. Down here in australia things havent gone so well..
/. yet :(
As you know we were one of the first countries to go through the rollover, and whilst your media was preparing to televise and stream your parties, they seemed to neglect the tremendous chaos that was going on down under.
As the clock approached midnight, i was at a friends apartment for an intimate gathering, and we had the tv on with a big display counting down.
00:05
00:04
00:03
00:02
00:01
00:00
Cheers everywhere from the drug induced gathering, except for one guy who had his watch upside-down and was convived we still had 6 hours to go.
Anyway, my point is that nothing went wrong during the actual rollover, but during the next few hours things started failing... the first thing i noticed was the some street lamps, and some shopfront lighting dimming. I was drunk, so i didnt take much notice of it, but in retrospect it was the beginning of the end.
As people crammed on the special 24 hour public transport, some trams started to fail. Most people figured the heavy load at 3am was stressing the system, and although mentioned briefly over the city-wide PA, the announcers were cautious to stress that this was not Y2K related.
I came home at around 4am, between 2 parties to have a quick shower, and check slashdot.. Just wanted to see how the world was faring up against this genormous evil that was facing the computers.
Slashdot didnt have much to say, nor did my computer.. I switched it on, heard the HDD start spinning, and jumped into the shower whilst my pc booted. I got out of the shower to find that my computer (which i was quite sure was Y2K compliant) was just booting, spinning the HDD, and rebooting.. I was a bit baffled and went to turn up my dim lights... Although when i got to the switch, they were already on full, but only shining half..
This scenario was not new to me, we have a power pole with a transformer on it just outside my window, and every now and then a possum manages to fry himself on the terminals and gives us a brown-out. So i popped outside, expecting to see a fried carcass.. But it was hard to see, all the street lights were out... Now that was fscked up, because the street lights run on a different grid in out street. Some serious shit was going down.
Anyway, i stayed at home for the next few hours, phones were dead, and lights were dead.
To cut a long story short, its 10:30PM here, and all the computers are still screwed, and we are without power.
I havent even been able to see
I think im gonna start suffering withdrawal symptoms soon
Um, doesn't the millennium start in 2001 ?
PS: my websites down, i forgot to pay the DNS fee.. Any windows geek wanna pay it for me ??
Yes, i do have a tax file number, and as far as i know only 2 groups of people other than myself know it: my bank, and my employer. Its not used in the same way as the australia card was proposed. a cop cant pull me over and ask me for my tax file number. and even if he did get it, or anyone for that matter, it wouldnt bother me, because at the best they would only be able to find out what bank i use and who my employer is, not 2 details i hold that close to heart.
I just found out during the recent refferendum that my gf wasnt registered to vote. Cause at age 18 you get a thing in the mail saying "register... blah blah", and being a slack girl, she never got around to it. It turns out its only illegal not to vote if u are registered, but there is nothing stopping you from never registering in the first place. If only i knew this when i was 18.
josh
- I dont use hotmail :)
- I dont give out too many details (well, im starting to open up a bit, but thats a personal problem)
- Im one of the lucky few who have been using email for years (7+) and i dont have to weed out spam. But i am worried about people like my gf who have a hotmail account, and each day have to weed out the spam that fills her mailbox. I know its not because she posted to some innane list and forgot to use xxx@NOSPAM.xxxx - i find measures like that silly, its just about common sense. or rather a sense of knowing to make yourself heard, but hopefully only by the right people.
- As for what can be done, im not sure. Luckily ppl like EFF have some clues, but unfortunately not the lobbyist muscle. If only i could some how demonstrate that decreasing our privacy would harm the wool trade or something... in that case ppl would notice
josh (The original poster guy)
Being an australian, i think i know a bit about the australian psyche. Usually we are a pretty good bunch (not to be making a too sweeping generalisation), but compared to what we see of america i think we do ok. Our legal system is fair, and alot of the time i think our attitude comes down to 'she'll be right, mate'. /. for bringing to the attention of the world how behind we can be with some issues. But unfortunately, our easy attitude prevails with ppl never really getting off their ass to do something, unless they are threatened with a pay cut.
This makes day to day living kinda cool, but the flip side being that when something important comes along, we do little to stop it. Just a few weeks ago we had a national refferendum to see if we wanted to become a republic. The history of past refferenda guided the outcome of this one, a 'No' vote -- a sad day for me personally. What im trying to say is that there is a general apathy here which is amplified when it comes to 'technical' issues, look at the work of Richard Alston (a federal senator) who is passing all that crap trying to ban porn on the internet..
At this stage i would like to thank
Here i go, i make a call to ppl to do something. I dont know what, but do something. Help us.