Open source CGI's are fine, if you don't need anything more than Matt Wright's guestbook -- if you're like the other 99% of the world that needs something genuinely useful, you'll have to put some nuts and bolts together. Proprietary code protects internal information. Would an honest person volunteer to help you work out a script for accessing a corporate database for free?
Security through obscurity works, just don't depend on it as your first line of defense. If you don't know who's watching or where the loot is, there's really not much point of picking the lock.
I am living with friends in Minneapolis -- when they moved there in December 1998, USWest wouldn't offer DSL because they were only wiring homes, not apartments, then the story changed a few months later, when they said that there was some problem with the lines in that area, and DSL wouldn't be possible. When I moved there a month ago, I tried ssigning them up, at which point they said that we were good up to 512KBps! Upon further research, we learned that the apartment is less than four blocks away from the CO.
Cable isn't even an option in Minneapolis and St. Paul, MN -- it's fast, but only one way service that requires a dialup connection. DSL and leased lines are the only two *true* dedicated connections.
We have gotten great bandwidth out of the 256k access, often hitting 30KB/s between the two systems using that connection, but upon "dialing in" this past weekend (USWest uses PPP), we got no answer -- If anything, USWest is overselling ports, though their backbone *in general* does leave something to be desired, compared to MR.net. I don't think they're even multihomed -- everything on USWest's backbone in Minnesota seems to get routed straight to MCI in Chicago.
---------------------------------------------
As far as cable vs. DSL, I have brought up the point before -- DSL offers a choice. You can get service from the baby Bell, or at least one CLEC in most areas, and then choose one of a dozen different ISP's, depending on the package/service you want. Speed _is not_ everything... --
George C. Scott has started some kind of a cross-story thread here on/., or maybe I've just been reading too many comments;).
Hmmm, first there's the mention of Dr. Strangelove, then the Transmeta story, where someone proposed they were building a "doomsday machine", and then out of the blue, this guy dies!
What's next? Are we going to find out that GSC has been seeding Transmeta with VC money, too? --
I may be a bit offtopic or out of line when I say that I hope this doesn't skew the results of the current/. poll. Sympathy votes and poor rationale has pushed several unqualified people to the top of the polls, especially in Minnesota, where I live. Write in Dr. Nick Riviera! --
You can use the word "fsck" (deliberately misspelled, guess I'm a prude) in a domain name.
The whole story of how NSI was pressed into it with repeatedly queries against WHOIS for references to the word used to be at www.fscking.com, but it's no longer there. That address now leads to a porn site, but just about everything on the web is only one or two clicks away from porn anyway...
Being of African descent (as well as some Polish and German) and having been called a "nigger" myself, and the loss of one more possible mouthpiece for that kind of bigotry is a Good Thing.
I don't see any problem or inconsistency with the way Network Solutions approves domain names. On top of rules and regulations, some businesses actually make judgement calls using common sense. "Negros" is a word that would probably be denied to someone in the U.S., but accepted from Mexico, where the word means "black". Rules don't fit every occasion.
Lastly, if you don't like the way NSI makes policy on domain registration, why not go somewhere else? Network Solutions isn't the only choice anymore... --
Every search engine goes through a phase of being the latest and greatest, each offering new concepts that will make searching "deeper, more accurate, and faster". Yahoo!, AltaVista, MetaCrawler, and Ask Jeeves (I'll exclude Dogpile because it sucks) have all had the spotlight at one time or another, and then made somewhat halfassed attempts to incorporate the better features of other sites into theirs, including Google's page caching feature.
Cached pages are a great idea, however, and as I proposed last week, Slashdot should attempt to use similar technology for a few of those sites that are subjected to "The Slashdot Effect".
For now, Google works pretty well because most search engine tip sites are unaware of it. Soon, those sites will be updated so that workarounds, tricks, and other methods to trick the engine into working for the rabid site promoter will make the results just as inaccurate.
My own thought on how to make a search engine work well is to somehow tie the results to Yahoo!. It would be a raw-text search, which could then be compared to Yahoo!'s anemic directory of sites. As the number of links from a related Yahoo site to a candidate page increases, the candidate's score would decrease.
I'm crying foul on the moderations I've been given on this story. It's true that the government finds ways to mess things up, e.g. crypto laws, software patents, etc.
M2 has seemed to make moderations a bit more accurate, but I don't see it working out for me here. Unless somebody actually goes to the page and sees what I'm talking about -- "Alpha" in ten hours, and the EV series are cranking out units faster than LensCrafters...
I didn't make up those "CPU's". They are actually listed on the page! Please follow the link and see for yourself.
visit the SETI@home CPU type statistics page. -- Alpha EV6 and EV67's are rockin' ass^H^H^H, if not as much as the "Intel Puntium" or "PowderPC" chips... --
Just imagine a recursive $15M cluster of multiple Beowulf clusters... how's that?
It wouldn't surprise me one bit -- U.S. government agencies seem to find ways of being excessive, duplicitous, overly redundant, and do things in an excessively superfluous manner.
Maybe Rob can use some of the quick IPO cash from Bendover and put it into this site -- or maybe they've already gotten advances, and that's why Slashdot's been up and working for a change this afternoon?
I'm no troll -- in fact, I pretty much stay away from bridges altogether...
... and spend it on some redundancy for/. -- the new server seemed to work pretty well for a while, but it's been as bad or worse in the past few days than it's ever been...
/. should do the same thing, espeically for so-called "cool cases" links, which seem to get slashdotted the worst. I'll bet lots of these cool cases actually host the site, but those cumbersome designs overheat the systems until they crash and (sometimes literally) burn. With the case on, my CPU runs a full 15C hotter than with it off...
Google uses Squid or some other proxy/cache to harvest all of its web pages, *then* indexes them. If a link is dead, you can use their cached version instead (and see the headers) -- it's great for all the bad links you find in web searches.
The obscene part about memory prices is the fact that two chips of lower density have become cheaper than one chip of higher density. Back in the SIMM days, denser chips cost less per MB, simply because you were buying more, and the manufacture costs were nominally lower.
This was true even in 1995, when the price for the kind of RAM most people needed (30 pin 1MB SIMMs) was about $40 apiece. The reason for that, I was told, was because "The factory that made epoxy for *every* memory manufacturer was destroyed in the Kobe earthquake.", but you may have heard another B.S. excuse. I didn't believe it then, and I don't believe it now.
Of course, there is one thing that is similar to 1995 -- Microsoft is set to release another bloated hog of an operating system in the next couple of months. If history repeats itself, look for a steep drop when memory manufacturers find out that people simply *won't* pay obscene amounts of money for memory, even if it does slow the OS...
US West is a *fine* ISP, and the connection I see at my friend's place in Minneapolis is great, but the $18 is only good if you're willing to buy a $15/mo. phone package to get a few bucks knocked off the price of their ISP service. If you sign up from their website, they don't explain that you can get Internet access from an ISP other than USWEST.NET.
* The Minneapolis/St. Paul area has a simplex cable system, so uploads must be done via modem if you have cable, which gives DSL a (regional) advantage.
* DSL gives you several more choices. You can use the local Bell or at least one certified CLEC such as Covad. There are tons of ISP's also waiting for independent thinkers to use their services.
* It may not (always) be as fast or cheap to use 256k DSL, you can get some added value, like a static IP, or a subnet of 8 IP's at a reasonable rate (not $10/ea., more like $20 for eight.). The package that seems most interesting is $25/mo. with a static IP, 20 hours of dialup when I'm away from home, and two email addresses. The rates for addon packages are much more reasonable.
* The "snoop" policies that the @Home network was going to implement/did implement are just plain uncool -- it's not ISP's business to see what websites I'm visiting, especially if I can't opt out. If you don't have @Home cable, then you're probably using RoadRunner (Time Warner) or MediaOne(formerly US West), but where's your choice?
The ring/star topology arguments are bunk, of course... I've never seen bottlenecks related to anything other than the backbone of your ISP, even though peak hours slow down cable at two points instead of one.
If you can get cable, and they offer the kinds of features you want, go ahead and get it -- if you need a better set of features, you'll find them on DSL.
Yeah, I had the same problem with the language when I tried M2. I personally think that a lot of posts are marked too generously or inaccurately (especially the "funny" ones), but moderation using the terms "fair" or "unfair" doesn't quite make sense.
Comments on moderation are probably going to go on for a while, and once something's set, there will be some bemoaning about the final version anyway, so here's my feedback before it goes out of alpha and into, ahem, 'bayta'.
I agree with the suggestion that fair/unfair be relabeled accurate/inaccurate, and if you disagree with the moderation, you should be able to specify that you thought the moderation comment was wrong, or if you thought the comment was over/underrated.
************************** Perhaps I skimmed the M2 article a little too quickly, but exactly what is the point of moderating the moderators? Does it simply alter the scores for comments on *old* stories? Does a poster getting bad treatment gain karma (which of course does not affect AC's)? Does the feedback come back to/. moderators?
My fault for not catching on if some of the answers are already out there -- I should RTFM, but I wouldn't want anyone getting the wrong idea about me reading "man pages"...
No single person/group "invented" the computer -- just like the telephone, there were at least a dozen variations on a single concept coming out at the same time. If company A releases product X in 1999, but company B releases competing product Y in 2000 because they spent the time for extra research, who's really first? Company B might have gotten to the preproduction model first, for that matter...
Being in Minnesota, I have heard all of this Iowa State propaganda before. I'm believe there's even a school that claims that it came before ISU!
Iowa has the problem of having technology-savvy people with absolutely no inspiration to use it. considered 'really cool' by all but advanced Java In hog country, even now, the power of scrolling text is unimpressive to the masses, and programmers.
By the way my great^2000 grandfather "invented" the wheel, and *his* great^2000 grandfather "invented" fire.;)
Linux will last longer than Java, because it is more cross-platform than Java itself -- Sun has wasted much time getting Java into your toaster that they stopped trying to get it into PC's!
Furthermore, Linux has been sending mail for years, and as the Law of Software Envelopment goes: "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.". Has Mozilla revived the Java mailer?
If Java ran the world, the your blender would be able to talk to your refrigerator and tell it to make more ice, but the blender wouldn't be fast enough to crush the ice.
If Linux ran the world, the kitchen appliances would not be able to "talk" to each other, but would have some sort of obfuscated sign language or sequence of beeps, hacked together with a bunch of Perl scripts, cron jobs, and a couple rolls of duct tape.
If Windows ran the world... Oh, it already does. I see why everyone is looking for the Next Big Thing.
You can disable permanent *and* session cookies in WinIE5 without a lot of difficulty. I don't think that there's as much flexibility built into IE4, but you could get close to it.
It also helps if you download IE PowerTweaks for IE5, plus the MS and AltaVista powertoys for IE4+. Digital Blasphemy also has some handy hooks into the Merriam-Webster online Dictionary and Thesaurus (US Eng.). You don't need them to do this, but it's much faster and more pleasant to browse if you do.
Tools > Internet Options > Security Tab
Set Custom Level for the Internet Zone
Go to the Cookies section of the tree and disable the "Allow cookies that are stored on your computer" option, then press OK.
Select the "Trusted Sites" zone.
Add "slashdot.org" to the Trusted Sites Zone, then press OK.
Set a custom level of security for Trusted Sites, reset to Medium Security (or a custom level), but enable permanent cookies.
You can spend about fifteen minutes tweaking it -- pretty simple stuff. Use Windows IE for a while sometime, as horrible as it might sound to some of you, and try to say that IE isn't better than Navigator 4.x at anything. No, it's not perfect, but better. We'll see how Mozilla does, but it's just been taking a year and a half now...
Packet writing is really lame, unless you don't understand how to use a disc-burning app like CDRWin or Easy CD Creator (this smells like a Windows app). Packet writers like DirectCD are handy but slow, and the UDF disc format it uses can't be read by many older drives.
If you want to store files somewhere other than on the HDD or the network, use a high-volume, fully rewritable storage medium like SuperDisk.
The Zip/SuperDisk issue is another thread altogether though...
Slashdot Mirror
Open source CGI's are fine, if you don't need anything more than Matt Wright's guestbook -- if you're like the other 99% of the world that needs something genuinely useful, you'll have to put some nuts and bolts together. Proprietary code protects internal information. Would an honest person volunteer to help you work out a script for accessing a corporate database for free?
Security through obscurity works, just don't depend on it as your first line of defense. If you don't know who's watching or where the loot is, there's really not much point of picking the lock.
BTW, it's called "PC Weak"...
--
I am living with friends in Minneapolis -- when they moved there in December 1998, USWest wouldn't offer DSL because they were only wiring homes, not apartments, then the story changed a few months later, when they said that there was some problem with the lines in that area, and DSL wouldn't be possible. When I moved there a month ago, I tried ssigning them up, at which point they said that we were good up to 512KBps! Upon further research, we learned that the apartment is less than four blocks away from the CO.
Cable isn't even an option in Minneapolis and St. Paul, MN -- it's fast, but only one way service that requires a dialup connection. DSL and leased lines are the only two *true* dedicated connections.
We have gotten great bandwidth out of the 256k access, often hitting 30KB/s between the two systems using that connection, but upon "dialing in" this past weekend (USWest uses PPP), we got no answer -- If anything, USWest is overselling ports, though their backbone *in general* does leave something to be desired, compared to MR.net. I don't think they're even multihomed -- everything on USWest's backbone in Minnesota seems to get routed straight to MCI in Chicago.
---------------------------------------------
As far as cable vs. DSL, I have brought up the point before -- DSL offers a choice. You can get service from the baby Bell, or at least one CLEC in most areas, and then choose one of a dozen different ISP's, depending on the package/service you want. Speed _is not_ everything...
--
George C. Scott has started some kind of a cross-story thread here on /., or maybe I've just been reading too many comments ;).
Hmmm, first there's the mention of Dr. Strangelove, then the Transmeta story, where someone proposed they were building a "doomsday machine", and then out of the blue, this guy dies!
What's next? Are we going to find out that GSC has been seeding Transmeta with VC money, too?
--
My condolences to the family of Mr. Scott.
I may be a bit offtopic or out of line when I say that I hope this doesn't skew the results of the current /. poll. Sympathy votes and poor rationale has pushed several unqualified people to the top of the polls, especially in Minnesota, where I live. Write in Dr. Nick Riviera!
--
You can use the word "fsck" (deliberately misspelled, guess I'm a prude) in a domain name.
The whole story of how NSI was pressed into it with repeatedly queries against WHOIS for references to the word used to be at www.fscking.com, but it's no longer there. That address now leads to a porn site, but just about everything on the web is only one or two clicks away from porn anyway...
Being of African descent (as well as some Polish and German) and having been called a "nigger" myself, and the loss of one more possible mouthpiece for that kind of bigotry is a Good Thing.
I don't see any problem or inconsistency with the way Network Solutions approves domain names. On top of rules and regulations, some businesses actually make judgement calls using common sense. "Negros" is a word that would probably be denied to someone in the U.S., but accepted from Mexico, where the word means "black". Rules don't fit every occasion.
Lastly, if you don't like the way NSI makes policy on domain registration, why not go somewhere else? Network Solutions isn't the only choice anymore...
--
Every search engine goes through a phase of being the latest and greatest, each offering new concepts that will make searching "deeper, more accurate, and faster". Yahoo!, AltaVista, MetaCrawler, and Ask Jeeves (I'll exclude Dogpile because it sucks) have all had the spotlight at one time or another, and then made somewhat halfassed attempts to incorporate the better features of other sites into theirs, including Google's page caching feature.
Cached pages are a great idea, however, and as I proposed last week, Slashdot should attempt to use similar technology for a few of those sites that are subjected to "The Slashdot Effect".
For now, Google works pretty well because most search engine tip sites are unaware of it. Soon, those sites will be updated so that workarounds, tricks, and other methods to trick the engine into working for the rabid site promoter will make the results just as inaccurate.
My own thought on how to make a search engine work well is to somehow tie the results to Yahoo!. It would be a raw-text search, which could then be compared to Yahoo!'s anemic directory of sites. As the number of links from a related Yahoo site to a candidate page increases, the candidate's score would decrease.
My $0.02.
--
I'm crying foul on the moderations I've been given on this story. It's true that the government finds ways to mess things up, e.g. crypto laws, software patents, etc.
M2 has seemed to make moderations a bit more accurate, but I don't see it working out for me here. Unless somebody actually goes to the page and sees what I'm talking about -- "Alpha" in ten hours, and the EV series are cranking out units faster than LensCrafters...
I didn't make up those "CPU's". They are actually listed on the page! Please follow the link and see for yourself.
--
visit the SETI@home CPU type statistics page. -- Alpha EV6 and EV67's are rockin' ass^H^H^H, if not as much as the "Intel Puntium" or "PowderPC" chips...
--
Just imagine a recursive $15M cluster of multiple Beowulf clusters... how's that?
It wouldn't surprise me one bit -- U.S. government agencies seem to find ways of being excessive, duplicitous, overly redundant, and do things in an excessively superfluous manner.
Maybe Rob can use some of the quick IPO cash from Bendover and put it into this site -- or maybe they've already gotten advances, and that's why Slashdot's been up and working for a change this afternoon?
I'm no troll -- in fact, I pretty much stay away from bridges altogether...
--
... and spend it on some redundancy for /. -- the new server seemed to work pretty well for a while, but it's been as bad or worse in the past few days than it's ever been...
Moderate this down, please.
--
/. should do the same thing, espeically for so-called "cool cases" links, which seem to get slashdotted the worst. I'll bet lots of these cool cases actually host the site, but those cumbersome designs overheat the systems until they crash and (sometimes literally) burn. With the case on, my CPU runs a full 15C hotter than with it off...
Google uses Squid or some other proxy/cache to harvest all of its web pages, *then* indexes them. If a link is dead, you can use their cached version instead (and see the headers) -- it's great for all the bad links you find in web searches.
The obscene part about memory prices is the fact that two chips of lower density have become cheaper than one chip of higher density. Back in the SIMM days, denser chips cost less per MB, simply because you were buying more, and the manufacture costs were nominally lower.
This was true even in 1995, when the price for the kind of RAM most people needed (30 pin 1MB SIMMs) was about $40 apiece. The reason for that, I was told, was because "The factory that made epoxy for *every* memory manufacturer was destroyed in the Kobe earthquake.", but you may have heard another B.S. excuse. I didn't believe it then, and I don't believe it now.
Of course, there is one thing that is similar to 1995 -- Microsoft is set to release another bloated hog of an operating system in the next couple of months. If history repeats itself, look for a steep drop when memory manufacturers find out that people simply *won't* pay obscene amounts of money for memory, even if it does slow the OS...
US West is a *fine* ISP, and the connection I see at my friend's place in Minneapolis is great, but the $18 is only good if you're willing to buy a $15/mo. phone package to get a few bucks knocked off the price of their ISP service. If you sign up from their website, they don't explain that you can get Internet access from an ISP other than USWEST.NET.
* The Minneapolis/St. Paul area has a simplex cable system, so uploads must be done via modem if you have cable, which gives DSL a (regional) advantage.
* DSL gives you several more choices. You can use the local Bell or at least one certified CLEC such as Covad. There are tons of ISP's also waiting for independent thinkers to use their services.
* It may not (always) be as fast or cheap to use 256k DSL, you can get some added value, like a static IP, or a subnet of 8 IP's at a reasonable rate (not $10/ea., more like $20 for eight.). The package that seems most interesting is $25/mo. with a static IP, 20 hours of dialup when I'm away from home, and two email addresses. The rates for addon packages are much more reasonable.
* The "snoop" policies that the @Home network was going to implement/did implement are just plain uncool -- it's not ISP's business to see what websites I'm visiting, especially if I can't opt out. If you don't have @Home cable, then you're probably using RoadRunner (Time Warner) or MediaOne(formerly US West), but where's your choice?
The ring/star topology arguments are bunk, of course... I've never seen bottlenecks related to anything other than the backbone of your ISP, even though peak hours slow down cable at two points instead of one.
If you can get cable, and they offer the kinds of features you want, go ahead and get it -- if you need a better set of features, you'll find them on DSL.
Yeah, I had the same problem with the language when I tried M2. I personally think that a lot of posts are marked too generously or inaccurately (especially the "funny" ones), but moderation using the terms "fair" or "unfair" doesn't quite make sense.
/. moderators?
Comments on moderation are probably going to go on for a while, and once something's set, there will be some bemoaning about the final version anyway, so here's my feedback before it goes out of alpha and into, ahem, 'bayta'.
I agree with the suggestion that fair/unfair be relabeled accurate/inaccurate, and if you disagree with the moderation, you should be able to specify that you thought the moderation comment was wrong, or if you thought the comment was over/underrated.
**************************
Perhaps I skimmed the M2 article a little too quickly, but exactly what is the point of moderating the moderators? Does it simply alter the scores for comments on *old* stories? Does a poster getting bad treatment gain karma (which of course does not affect AC's)? Does the feedback come back to
My fault for not catching on if some of the answers are already out there -- I should RTFM, but I wouldn't want anyone getting the wrong idea about me reading "man pages"...
No single person/group "invented" the computer -- just like the telephone, there were at least a dozen variations on a single concept coming out at the same time. If company A releases product X in 1999, but company B releases competing product Y in 2000 because they spent the time for extra research, who's really first? Company B might have gotten to the preproduction model first, for that matter...
;)
Being in Minnesota, I have heard all of this Iowa State propaganda before. I'm believe there's even a school that claims that it came before ISU!
Iowa has the problem of having technology-savvy people with absolutely no inspiration to use it. considered 'really cool' by all but advanced Java In hog country, even now, the power of scrolling text is unimpressive to the masses, and programmers.
By the way my great^2000 grandfather "invented" the wheel, and *his* great^2000 grandfather "invented" fire.
Linux will last longer than Java, because it is more cross-platform than Java itself -- Sun has wasted much time getting Java into your toaster that they stopped trying to get it into PC's!
Furthermore, Linux has been sending mail for years, and as the Law of Software Envelopment goes: "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.". Has Mozilla revived the Java mailer?
If Java ran the world, the your blender would be able to talk to your refrigerator and tell it to make more ice, but the blender wouldn't be fast enough to crush the ice.
If Linux ran the world, the kitchen appliances would not be able to "talk" to each other, but would have some sort of obfuscated sign language or sequence of beeps, hacked together with a bunch of Perl scripts, cron jobs, and a couple rolls of duct tape.
If Windows ran the world... Oh, it already does. I see why everyone is looking for the Next Big Thing.
You can disable permanent *and* session cookies in WinIE5 without a lot of difficulty. I don't think that there's as much flexibility built into IE4, but you could get close to it.
It also helps if you download IE PowerTweaks for IE5, plus the MS and AltaVista powertoys for IE4+. Digital Blasphemy also has some handy hooks into the Merriam-Webster online Dictionary and Thesaurus (US Eng.). You don't need them to do this, but it's much faster and more pleasant to browse if you do.
You can spend about fifteen minutes tweaking it -- pretty simple stuff. Use Windows IE for a while sometime, as horrible as it might sound to some of you, and try to say that IE isn't better than Navigator 4.x at anything. No, it's not perfect, but better. We'll see how Mozilla does, but it's just been taking a year and a half now...
Packet writing is really lame, unless you don't understand how to use a disc-burning app like CDRWin or Easy CD Creator (this smells like a Windows app). Packet writers like DirectCD are handy but slow, and the UDF disc format it uses can't be read by many older drives.
If you want to store files somewhere other than on the HDD or the network, use a high-volume, fully rewritable storage medium like SuperDisk.
The Zip/SuperDisk issue is another thread altogether though...