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  1. mbox _should_ go away forever on What Mailbox Format Do You Use And Why? · · Score: 2
    maildir is a superior format by far. Since you don't have to open/read/close every mail you can just stat all the files in a directory to get uids, etc. The overhead is really low. It's a good performance boost.

    To delete an email in mbox you have to read the entire spool file, then write it out without the one email. Very slow, very resource intensive.

    Wu-Imap supports maildir, however the problem is that imap needs information such as the subject and sender from the header of the email. That brings you right back to open/close/read on every mail. Why bother?

    Where I work we use wu-imap for pop. We didn't realize the performance implications until the last minute, then wrote a patch to the code that doesn't load the body of the email until it is needed. With that patch, you can't run imap, only the pop gateway but the performance is great. We might have used qmail or something similar if we had it to do over again, but at the time we had a lot invested in wu-imap and went with it, _with_ our patches. Otherwise wu-imap loads every mail from the mailbox into memory... kinda defeats the whole purpose of maildir. (btw.. we have 54k named users popping two 300mhz single cpu suns.)

    Maildir also performs better over nfs. That's because 1) stat isn't expensive, 2) don't have to load the enitre file over the network just to delete one email, and 3) no locking issues.

    Finally, note that most people who pop their email don't even have new email. This is the most important fact. Mbox format requires that you read the whole spool just so that a client can say, OK, I already have these emails. Very wasteful.

    So go with pop, shun imap, go with maildir. Imap would be great if you had a integrated MUA/MDA which could save headers in a database or somesuch upfront. Otherwise imap requires too much as a protocol I think.

  2. Linux : Shiny Toy :: Windows : Corporate crap on Is Linus Killing Linux? · · Score: 1
    Read Kernel Traffic. Linux is Linus's. If you don't like that, develop for somebody else's OS... make your drivers elsewhere.

    A non-profit organization funded by IBM, et. al... Nobody wants their feet held to the fire. If IBM wants to make a release, then they have every right under the GPL to do so. I think that the linux community would encourage them as well, just as NSA's, rtlinux, etc. have been encouraged. Why don't they make their own Linux? Because Linux=Linus? Yes, well no, maybe, not.

    The truth is that there are a lot of design innovations in linux. Between it and the tools that come with any normal distro there are a wealth of features you don't find on most commercial unixes. To me Linux is like taking off the back cover of a watch and seeing the pieces move.

    In a production environment it's sooo nice to be able to make changes sans reboot and get helpful dmesg output, and not have to jump through hoops to get a strace or struss installed. These debugging tools for the developer are the joy of the administrator.

    Anyway, the point is that Linux is a gift from the people who write it. They are going to do what they like-- and they're going to do it in an open forum. If you don't like it, PICK UP THE GPL and WRITE YOUR OWN. Everyone will benefit.

    Besides, I always get a kick out of these release announcements. I thought it was pretty funny.

  3. Re:Could the DMCA be applied? on Secure Private Web Sites and Wiretapping · · Score: 1
    DMCA applies to copyright. To apply it to this case, wouldn't the pilot (and anyone else) have to have an explicit copyright notice at the bottom of each page? I don't really want live in a world where every private idea has to be Mirandized-- where we qualify every phone call with "You do not have to right to record this conversation."

    There is such a thing as a 'reasonable expectation of privacy'. A call on a payphone in a crowded room doesn't afford the same level of privacy. However, can you say the same thing about a cordless phone? Is the harm done best resolved in criminal court or civil court? How can you set a price on that? How can you prevent someone with a CB and a crystal replacement (or any number or electrical engineers) from making a listening device?

    Who's liable? -- I think it's the companies that make the phones!! Just like DVD makes are liable for the their inability to make strong encryption.

    The problem with DMCA is it punishes consumers for the manufacturer's bad product while encouraging the manufacturer to ship same product. The DVD people must wake up in a cold sweat when they think about the implications of 16 year olds blowing away their encryption-- so they hide behind the law.

    Besides the technology, the other problem that's always hurt privacy concerns is cost. i.e. your company has a mailserver and bandwidth that they pay for. They should be able to sneak a peek! It's been hard to convice people that the same rules that apply to phone should apply there.

    What has changed people's attitudes on that is some IT manager's opionions on email snooping. Other people in the company don't like it. If you are an admin, it's like being a priest or a phone company employee. Yeah- you see a bit here or there because you have to, but most admins definitely don't want to. Especially not people they know.

    When your boss tells his superiors that he wants to snoop email-- it's because he wants to snoop his employees most likely. Next he wants to snoop his superiors. Yes there are legitimate reasons for looking through email (porn, porn, porn) and you have to fight porn unless you want to get sued. But without policy it is a dangerous thing.

    Hopefully we will see some postive work being done on this front.

  4. Re:filtering by FreeBSD/NetBSD on Theo de Raadt Responds · · Score: 2

    If you're scared of spamming and mail bombing, stay off the internet. Frankly, any good admin worth his salt would want to see how his boxes stand up under such a load, rather than be a big weenie and run away from a fight.

    So what I read is: Theo threatened to mailbomb, and didn't? Link to mail thread

    Just bizarre. Frankly there are a lot of high horses out there. OpenBSD is a good system. I'm not a big fan of BSD, but I encourage people to use OpenBSD just to try it and learn. (I did run it for a while on a sparc and it ran better than linux on that box.)

    Every OS has it's place. OpenBSD is just canadian and has balls (big encrypted balls.) It's neat and it ships with things like ssh out of the box.

    I'm just very depressed lately (lately being a long time now) of hate-mailers and winers on slashdot--- the people who write the software (free) that we use (quality) often don't get the respect they deserve.

    Anyway, that's my 2 cents.

  5. Fred Moody is an idiot on Fred Moody Says Linux Worst Operating System Ever · · Score: 1
    Really a lot of substance in the article. Seems like he interviewed a lot of people in coming to these conclusions.

    Not the type of journalism I would expect from abc news.

  6. Sounds like a real crappy ISP on ISPs Victimizing DoS Victims? · · Score: 1
    1. So, what does the ISP do when its their own servers that are getting pegged? Cancel their accounts?

    2. How are the attackers grok'ing the location of the target? Is it a dial-in? Dedicated line? Co-lo? Seems rather odd. There could be a whole other story there.

    Sounds like a fishy story to me. Not quite enough details.

  7. I have not been pleased with UT's linux support on Unreal Engine Linux Ports Not Dead? · · Score: 1
    I paid for a linux version of Quake 3-- at first they were taking a while to release patchlevels between different platforms. With 1.17 they all came out at the same time-- I think that trend will continue.

    However, UT seems to have pawned off their stuff onto SourceForge and it seems to have floundered.

    Seems to me, most people don't use D3D because of the higher overhead of programming with it. It's slower and clunkier than GL. Many of the commands are the same, but the invocation is not as clean with D3D.

    I'll bet some $$ that Epic is motivated by the X Box, and not by technical considerations.

  8. Re:Not quite fair on Intel FDIV bug vs ILUVYOU · · Score: 1
    This table seemes to say that the bug in M$ Outlook is responsible for the ILOVEYOU virus...which it isn't. The feature or bug in M$ Outlook is there because it is supposed to be helpful (which it probably isn't), but it is not malicious, and would not causes any damage if somebody else had not tried to be malicious.

    Dude, I'll grant you that it doesn't run automatically, however, the security problem is the ease with which programs can get access to the address book. Just like the 'feature' that allowed pron sites to nuke your back button, this one needs to go bye-bye.

    The problem for M$ is the VB is too integrated into everything, and security was never an integral part of VB. (For M$ security is a -feature- that is provided by 3rd parties like Symantec and NA.)

    If you ever got to look at the code for the vicodan virus (same guy who wrote Melissa- vicodan would randomly insert "Microsoft Word loves {your name}." throughout your documents.)-- The freakin' code had a line (I can't remember it exactly)-- options.macro.virusprotection = false. Holy crap! It shouldn't be that easy!

    That virus also overwrote menu item handlers (umm.. tools->macros) so that they wouldn't work anymore. All from VB!! Isn't anything illegal in VB?

    Microsoft is totally irresponsible to not fix the basic security problems that -plague- the office suite. They will have to! After the world gets hit by a few more viruses exactly like this one (read: Melissa), people will figure out that there are some unaffected platforms out there.

  9. Re:Motif C++ OpenGL on Motif's Not Dead · · Score: 1
    Can't they fix the damn file selection box? Netscape IS ugly, the select boxes are all the wrong size for any web developer, and if you've never run into the "aw, crap, I just hit a select box and now the text boxes won't work until I hit alt-tab seven times" bug, you haven't used Netscape at all.

    Netscape uses Motif because it's old code, written when there was nothing else. Anyone who thinks that Netscape for Unix was shipped by a unix user is crazy. If you use it for a week you'll find that it recognizes none of the common file extensions (tgz, gz, rpm, bz2, pkg). Navigator is usable, but Communicator will crash every 5 minutes or so. The page source option will crash on any page that's not padded with tons of newlines (and render practically any page with javascript in it.)

    These are longstanding bugs as well-- they have been around for the entire 4 series.

    Mozilla M14 looked good-- lots of improvements. I reminded me of the shift between Gnome .30 and Gnome .9x -- still some significant bugs, but some noticable improvements. Gnome 1.0 came out great (didn't really take that long either.) I'm hoping that when Mozilla 1.0.1 comes out, it will have the same level of quality.

  10. Re:Dead? It's not, but it should be. on Motif's Not Dead · · Score: 3
    I see commercial applications that are written in Motif all the time. There is nothing more painful than watching someone untrained in the zen of the Motif file selection box.

    Motif strikes me as an academic project-- it's too hierarchical. Top level programming is good, but not when its taken to the extreme. You end up with components that don't have a clue as to the function of the whole. It's the result of trying to be too many things to too many people, not beating a solid path to the goal, trying to be expandable in nonsensical ways, and desperately trying to avoid the eventual re-write.

    I'm sorry, but in my honest opinion, Motif is ugly, slow, and a bear to program. I think that it single handedly scared people away from writing X programs for a long time.

    The world is a much better place for having GTK and Qt, which were not designed with such lofty goals, but are much better products. What's more, they are still improving. I have a real issue with the 'innovation' that's taken place with Motif, when every time I see a program written with it, I feel like I've been magically transported back to 1991.

    Furthermore, any modern installation of HP/UX or Solaris that doesn't contain any GNU tools is being maintained by people whose lives are more difficult than they realize. Once you've got GNU gcc, make, bison, gzip (!), etc. no compilation (thanks to autoconf) is too difficult. Those programs are available as packages as well. GTK compiles well on Solaris (.. Qt was a pain the last time I tried, but that was over a year ago.)

    Really. Motif should die. CDE should die. Desktop environments aren't really necessary for most of these Motif applications. Just statically link them with Qt or GTK if you're that worried about what you're customers do and don't have.

    While we're on the subject, who are these open group people anyway? Their software development strategy is crap. X is the worst compile ever, follows none of the standard rules ("make World"?!?!). Why do they even bother using make when they recompile every .c file anyway?

    Just keep in mind-- these are the same people who invented the Imakefile!!

    gimp - the program that started it all

  11. I can't sit back and watch this! on Plans For Massive Web Tracking Via ISPs · · Score: 2

    Come on people.. This is hoax type material. I work for an ISP. Our mail log looks like one of those screens from the Matrix. Nobody is spying on you. Really.

    There are a lot of moral, legal, and technical reasons why this is not the case. I don't know about this Predictive Network stuff, but it sounds like a hoax being brought on by l33t h4x0rs.

  12. Re:NetApp vs EMC on Promote Your ATA66 Controller To A RAID Controller · · Score: 1

    I don't know about that whole netapp thing. Netapps are nice, but they're all nfs'd.. EMCs on the other hand provide fibre channel direct to the machine.

    EMCs are much, much more expensive however. They have a nice service plan (the service guy shows up and just replaces the power supply, disk, etc, and you really don't even have to know about it.)

    Does anyone have any experience with netapps in real production environments? Do they generate a ton of network traffic? Mount options that make them perform better? Comments?

  13. That's not what the article says!! on Busted for (L0pht)Crack Possession · · Score: 1
    Totally off base. Nowhere does it say that L0phtcrack has been banned or made illegal. I doubt that would ever happen-- unless M$ wants to hide the fact that LANMAN passwords can be hacked in three character segments. (no kidding.)

    What the article does say is that someone used l0phtcrack to extract passwords from a company and then log in as other users. A case of userid envy? Probably not.

    I don't agree with a $12,000 price tag for having to change passwords-- it's their fault for not teaching their users how to do that. Still, it's not l0phtcrack that is the problem (it's an auditing tool), but the guy "who thought he could get away with stuff."

    The real crime is that l0phtcrack can take 400 users and break 80% of their passwords in around four hours. Meanwhile, any decent encrypted unix password (not DES) can survive days of brute force attack.

  14. 64-bit won't be relevant to PCs until 2003, 2005?! on News on Pentium IV · · Score: 1

    Kind of a kooky statement from this article. Sure, there may still still be 16-bit code in Windows in 2003, or 2005... the rest of the world will be recompiling their distributions ASAP.

  15. Script kiddies are r3tard3d on Guide to Slashdot · · Score: 1

    Not my demographic-- been a long time since I was 14. H4Xor's.. whatever. Get a l1f3.

  16. South Carolina sold our driver's licenses on Perverts and Consumers · · Score: 1

    South Carolina sold all of its citizens driver's license photos to a company in New Jersey. $5,000 for 5 million people. Photos, the works. I'm not kidding. The kicker is that after there was a 'public outrage' (suprise), we could send mail to the people who bought the pictures and decline to be included. This was of course after our imformation was already in their hands. Our state attorney general also dropped out of the Microsoft case because he believed that AOL buying a financially desperate Netscape indicated competition was indeed occurring. The government needs to respect our privacy now, and worry about the more technical details when they become available. I think that politicans are as concerned with the interception of private communication as everyone else. 'Echelon' seems to be exciting these days for some people. It simply hasn't reached a level of concern yet. 49Mhz cordless phones are still popular (I have one!), and they are certainly not to be trusted. Nor (to some extent) are cable modems. (use ssh.) ..

  17. Why can't they just release a PRODUCT????? on The Battle That Could Lose Us The War · · Score: 1

    Ok. I've seen Milestone 10... it downloads... it renders. Can we get a web-widget?

    I'm sure that the folks at kde could use a libMozilla for kfm. (Which works pretty well on its own, btw.)

    What about gmozilla for Gnome based on the Mozilla library?

    I believe that great things are going on over there, but when are we going to get the goods? Any goods? Why go for the whole sh-bang (email, www, nntp) when the functionality that people out here are bleeding for is not that vast in scope. It would also allow existing developers in other areas to contribute to the project... and produce PRODUCT.

    -- waiting for libMozilla.so

    If we lose the broser, we will lose the war.

  18. Re:"Pass the buck" as a one player game on More Bad News From The Hellmouth · · Score: 1
    I think that you are missing the point. Yes, we can probe the child, prod the child, test the child, but in the end, what does that get us?

    Millions of kids go to school every day and don't get shot. Statistically speaking, they're more likely to die on the bus ride home. And this stuff isn't new either-- the biggest school massacre in U.S. history was a bombing in the 20s.

    What's the solution? Well, metal detectors, and locker searches, and psyche test, etc.. Remember the kids who pulled the fire alarm to get everyone outside? They used the school's own security infrastructure to increase the odds of killing someone. Do you think that you can deal with such a truely pervasive threat by increasing paranoia?

    The media has taken the school bully and elevated him to mythic proportions. Reality does not mesh with this view. The soution is to just let it go. Keep your wits about you and your eyes open. The last thing that we need is a false sense of security provided by (gasp!!) software. It's like the old "how do you stop a bull from charging?" joke.

    ------

    Since you brought it up, Expert systems? I think that Dell's 24 hour support line is a pretty good example of one: "Please jiggle the wire to the monitor. When your are finished press 1. Did that fix your problem press 1..." geez.. expert systems? bah!

  19. "Pass the buck" as a one player game on More Bad News From The Hellmouth · · Score: 3

    There's an awful trend in this country to give computers responsiblity for things that we cannot or won't do ourselves.

    I guess the idea is to dis-empower teachers and principals over the course of several decades, and then make up for that by providing a means of arbitrary decision-making (the computer). It's a great strategy, and I've seen it work very well at Universities. It has a tendency to leave the victim in a helpless state-- you have no person to complain to-- no one to blame.

    Would you let a net-nanny watch your kids? Would you let a computer drive your car? (And if you were in an accident, would you sue the software company?)

    The real Problem is that people have unrealistic and unjustified fears about school shootings.

    Some facts:

    1. The crime rate in America has been going down for the last 30 years or so. Don't look at the overall numbers like they report on the news! Look at the per capita rate. (i.e. crime/population)

    2. You're more likely to get killed on your busride home than shot at your desk.

    (btw.. missing children is the same story. By the time you weed out the kids who ran away, kidnapped by a parent, etc. it's only a handful that go missing each year.)

    People need to face their fears and take responsibility for their actions, and not make computers do their dirty work for them. The media needs to stop pretending to be objective and start offering real solutions.

  20. Did they even bother to install the RedHat updates on ZDNet Admits Mistakes in Recent SecurityTest · · Score: 1

    Wait a sec... They can't even bother to download the redhat updates?

    % ftp rpmfind.net
    ftp> cd linux/redhat/updates/6.0/i386
    ftp> bin
    ftp> prompt
    ftp> mget *

    % rpm -Uvh *.rpm

    Am I missing something, or is that too difficult for ZD? Much better than installing (and let's be honest, re-installing and re-installing) service packs. M$ support is simply horrible- if you did want to install only a particular patch, each has it's own method of install and uninstall.

    By comparison, try this with RedHat:

    % mkdir rpms
    % for pkg in `rpm -q -a`; do echo $pkg; rpm -q -i $pkg > rpms/$pkg; done

    That takes the list of rpms on your machine and makes a bunch of files in the rpms directory. The files have the same names as your installed packages, and each file contains a description of what the package does.

    Want to know what an individual file is for? You can rpm -q -f to find out what package it belongs to, or get real fancy and write a little program:

    #!/bin/sh

    rpm -q -i `rpm -q -f $1`

    save that as 'whatrpm' and then you can type 'whatrpm ' to find out what is there for.

    Definitely beats M$ sorry system.



  21. Re:Realistic benchmark? on First official SAP R/3 benchmarks on Linux · · Score: 1

    Most SAP developments take place in a multi-server environment. There is a box for code/configure, one for quality test, and one for production. Individual bits are moved between the boxes via "transports". No programming or configuration is done in the quality assurance or production boxes-- rather all code is introduced via the transport mechanism.

    Why buy an expensive Sun to be a development box, when you can outperform it with a quad linux machine at a better price?

    There are also a lot of companies who thought it wise to install SAP on NT w/ SQL server. General complaints are stability and speed. If these people can upgrade from NT -without purchasing additional hardware- then that could become an attractive option.

    SAP on linux would provide proof of linux's stability and speed in a very picky market. What's better is that people may purchase some heavy hitting hardware to run SAP. (Our production box is 2 gig ram / 5 processor Sun supplemented by 3 "application" servers w/ 3 gig ram and 4 processors each. They make good quake servers too!)