>I may be a fan of ManufactuerProduct.com for names (e.g. DodgeViper, ChevyLumina) rather than product.com. However, I am MORE in favor of viper.dodge.com and lumina.chevy.com, if we want to stick with heirarchy.
One bad decision in the design of DNS was that the toplevel name appears to the right. It should have been com.dodge.chevy instead of the other way around. The UK computer scientists tried to set it up that way, but they lost. This is a bit strange, because most hierarchical directory systems already operated left-to-right instead of right-to-left.
The consequence is that there is a break between the hostname and directory path in a URL, where the direction changes. Most people don't understand that. So instead of having http://com.dodge.viper/ or http://com.dodge/viper as alternatives, they want to register the composite name because otherwise nobody would be able to find it.
When DNS was defined, this problem was catered for by having a hierarchical name system. The same name could exist under different toplevel labels. In fact, once trademarked names started to be registered, the registries should have created obligatory subdomains corresponding to the categories of trademarks, so that a trademark for computers could not collide with a trademark for household appliances.
Now, the exact opposite is happening. Everyone is registering their name under all possible toplevel labels, thus further polluting the system.
Probably a new hierarchy should be created where everyone can register only names in appropriate categories. I.e. the classical trademark registering process has to be completed first.
>I have no idea why someone hasn't put an imaginatively evil payload in a modern virus.
That is because the intent of modern viruses is not to destroy the machine (as with the early ones) but to make them available as spam relays, hacking outposts, etc.
Destroying data would make the owner aware of the situation, and he/she would remove the infection.
I hate to disappoint you, but your linksys box is not a hardware firewall. It is a dedicated microcomputer that runs a SOFTWARE firewall.
The potential for an exploit that pierces this firewall or erases all its program memory is not less than with the product currently under attack.
All firewalls can have bugs. This is determined by the quality of the software, and the fact that it runs in a small plastic box is not automatically going to improve that. Calling it "hardware" isn't going to do that either.
They have the money to control everything, and no way to spend it on improvement of their existing products. (they don't think that fixing bugs is improving the product)
SO they start looking around and finding things to control. The top search engine uses their biggest competitor OS, so that needs to be gone. Also it provides a large knowledgebase about competing systems, that must be eradicated. Once MS controls the search engine business, they can influence the documents that the world is going to read. Less positive info about Linux, more about Windows.
Of course they will tell you that the above isn't true, but they told that before and things always turned out to be different later.
The US government does not like it when other people are right where they are wrong. Hey guys, where are those weapons of mass destruction?
They don't even get the clue that "terrorism" is the result of superpowers fighting wars against small groups of people with different views than their own, hence a "war on terrorism" is just going to increase terrorism.
I would not want funding from such people. Tomorrow they might start a war against you.
>YAST? well, the day it actually works, and does something useful I'll consider it.
Another requirement is that you actually study what it does to determine if that is useful to you. Up to now you apparently did not do that.
YaST does not, like some older Unix administration programs, take over all administration from you and prohibit your own changes. For example, you can add users with commandline tools like useradd or by editing the 4 relevant files, and YaST will have no problem with that.
>I also found that you HAD to do things SuSE's way -- if there wasn't a button for it in YaST, the SuSE configurator (and generally, there was.. YaST is probably the most comprehensive config tool for Linux), or YaST didn't give you all the options you needed, you couldn't do it yourself because YaST would stomp all over your changes.
No. In SuSE 9.0 it works like this: YaST is modifying the files in/etc/sysconfig. These are basically shell files that list a number of variables with values. When you click on a button, something is modified there. Then, SuSEconfig reads those files and modifies the package configuration files (usually under/etc). This is where your files may be overwritten.
However, in the files in/etc/sysconfig there are several variables that can turn off the SuSEconfig processing for that subsystem. When you set those correctly, you can modify the underlying files without trouble.
Why would SuSE move to Debian packages? They have always used RPM and it is an accepted standard for commercial Linux distributions.
When you want to de-install unused software, one way is to list (rpm -qa) what you have installed, select candidates from that (e.g. grep on "lib") and then try to rpm -e them. When there is nothing depending on them, they will be removed.
>Digitenne has been in operation for a year or so in the Netherlands.
>Indeed, the service is a little cheaper than the common cable system
Digitenne offers only about 2/3 the channels of a typical cable system. It seems attractive until you notice that it has no BBC, no Belgium channels, no German channels, etc.
A satellite receiver setup costs less than Digitenne and offers much, much more. I am considering to end my cable subscription and looked at Digitenne as a backup for bad weather conditions and to complete the channel lineup, but the offering is very limited indeed.
>At any rate, just because its one password in no way means you can't have a cluster of 5000 servers all storing and accepting transactions for it.
Sure, but you still have a single system that is a single point of failure. E.g. when it goes down because of a software error like not working on date 04-04-04 you have a big problem.
(dont tell me that is impossible. years ago I spent most of the day hunting for a problem that in the end only turned out to happen on 10-04. It happened because of some bug in a datacomm protocol implementation. In those days 04 was used to delimit one packet on the wire. when a 04 occurred in the data it was prefixed by 10 and the receiver would turn the 10 04 into a 04 again. this particular buggy implementation did not consider that 10 04 could be in the data as well)
Does anybody know how centralized hotmail is? Is it one serverroom full of machines, serving all the world? Or is it spread like akamaitech, which has servers located all over the world and uses DNS tricks to send you to a "nearby" server?
Two of these in a RAID-1 configuration should make a good replacement for the typical home user's VHS tape collection. HD recording of standard TV today takes about 2GB per hour, so 200 hours or about 70 tapes worth of video could be stored on a disk.
I think what is funny is not that it is about Bill Gates, but it is about the army shooting at someone they just vaguely suspect of doing something they don't like.
Have you watched the recent Irak footage on CNN? There the army is firing from the safe shelter of a helicopter, at three presumably innocent (until proven different) people walking between a truck and a van. When one of them is wounded but still alive after the first round, they fire a second one.
Probably there are even more worried that these employees receive the free copy, recognize that they cannot install it on the computer at work, and take it home.
When companies send bottles of wine or packages of delicatessen, they also don't expect the goods to be consumed at the workplace.
Why are they not all migrating to VMSK, the magical modulation that promises to exceed the Shannon limit by orders of magnitude? Approaching it by.5dB seems to be not very much of an accomplishment, compared to that.
Checkout http://www.vmsk.org/ where all the claims are made. Supposedly you could compress all communication to 1Hz bandwidth, or so.
>You can calculate the best possible compression scheme for handling arbitrary data. That is, the compression algorithm which, if you fed it every possible combination of input data, would compress the data the best.
That algorithm is a simple "copy" operation, compressing the input to an output that is the same size. It is not possible to construct a compression algorithm that will compress every possible combination of input data with a better result.
You forget (or almost forget) to consider that for $45 you buy only Microsoft "Windows", their operating system with Internet Explorer, Mediaplayer and notepad.
For $79.99 at SuSE you buy an operating system plus the entire product line of applications. When you go back to Microsoft, you would have to add Office, Exchange server, SQL server, Visual C++, Visual whatever, and the list would go on and on and on. The price of that entire lot would be astronomical compared to the $79.99
In that context, $45 for just the bare OS is pretty steep indeed.
Slashdot Mirror
>I may be a fan of ManufactuerProduct.com for names (e.g. DodgeViper, ChevyLumina) rather than product.com. However, I am MORE in favor of viper.dodge.com and lumina.chevy.com, if we want to stick with heirarchy.
One bad decision in the design of DNS was that the toplevel name appears to the right.
It should have been com.dodge.chevy instead of the other way around.
The UK computer scientists tried to set it up that way, but they lost.
This is a bit strange, because most hierarchical directory systems already operated left-to-right instead of right-to-left.
The consequence is that there is a break between the hostname and directory path in a URL, where the direction changes. Most people don't understand that.
So instead of having http://com.dodge.viper/ or http://com.dodge/viper as alternatives, they want to register the composite name because otherwise nobody would be able to find it.
When DNS was defined, this problem was catered for by having a hierarchical name system.
The same name could exist under different toplevel labels.
In fact, once trademarked names started to be registered, the registries should have created obligatory subdomains corresponding to the categories of trademarks, so that a trademark for computers could not collide with a trademark for household appliances.
Now, the exact opposite is happening. Everyone is registering their name under all possible toplevel labels, thus further polluting the system.
Probably a new hierarchy should be created where everyone can register only names in appropriate categories. I.e. the classical trademark registering process has to be completed first.
What is their User Agent string?
Probably something like this:
Googlebot/2.1 (compatible; MSN 1.0)
>I have no idea why someone hasn't put an imaginatively evil payload in a modern virus.
That is because the intent of modern viruses is not to destroy the machine (as with the early ones) but to make them available as spam relays, hacking outposts, etc.
Destroying data would make the owner aware of the situation, and he/she would remove the infection.
>buy some sort of hardware firewall.
>I reccomend Linksys
I hate to disappoint you, but your linksys box is not a hardware firewall.
It is a dedicated microcomputer that runs a SOFTWARE firewall.
The potential for an exploit that pierces this firewall or erases all its program memory is not less than with the product currently under attack.
All firewalls can have bugs. This is determined by the quality of the software, and the fact that it runs in a small plastic box is not automatically going to improve that.
Calling it "hardware" isn't going to do that either.
They have the money to control everything, and no way to spend it on improvement of their existing products.
(they don't think that fixing bugs is improving the product)
SO they start looking around and finding things to control.
The top search engine uses their biggest competitor OS, so that needs to be gone.
Also it provides a large knowledgebase about competing systems, that must be eradicated.
Once MS controls the search engine business, they can influence the documents that the world is going to read. Less positive info about Linux, more about Windows.
Of course they will tell you that the above isn't true, but they told that before and things always turned out to be different later.
Blind computer users have used these for many years.
The SuSE Linux distribution even supports their use during OS installation!
SuSE Linux has been released on DVD, then on 2 DVDs and the 9.0 version is on a double-sided DVD.
The US government does not like it when other people are right where they are wrong.
Hey guys, where are those weapons of mass destruction?
They don't even get the clue that "terrorism" is the result of superpowers fighting wars against small groups of people with different views than their own, hence a "war on terrorism" is just going to increase terrorism.
I would not want funding from such people.
Tomorrow they might start a war against you.
>YAST? well, the day it actually works, and does something useful I'll consider it.
Another requirement is that you actually study what it does to determine if that is useful to you.
Up to now you apparently did not do that.
YaST does not, like some older Unix administration programs, take over all administration from you and prohibit your own changes.
For example, you can add users with commandline tools like useradd or by editing the 4 relevant files, and YaST will have no problem with that.
>I also found that you HAD to do things SuSE's way -- if there wasn't a button for it in YaST, the SuSE configurator (and generally, there was.. YaST is probably the most comprehensive config tool for Linux), or YaST didn't give you all the options you needed, you couldn't do it yourself because YaST would stomp all over your changes.
/etc/sysconfig. These are basically shell files that list a number of variables with values. When you click on a button, something is modified there. /etc). This is where your files may be overwritten.
/etc/sysconfig there are several variables that can turn off the SuSEconfig processing for that subsystem. When you set those correctly, you can modify the underlying files without trouble.
No.
In SuSE 9.0 it works like this:
YaST is modifying the files in
Then, SuSEconfig reads those files and modifies the package configuration files (usually under
However, in the files in
Why would SuSE move to Debian packages? They have always used RPM and it is an accepted standard for commercial Linux distributions.
When you want to de-install unused software, one way is to list (rpm -qa) what you have installed, select candidates from that (e.g. grep on "lib") and then try to rpm -e them. When there is nothing depending on them, they will be removed.
SuSE has had a very smooth upgrade path for a long time. /etc too much, an upgrade to 9.1 should be very easy.
When you have not tweaked the files in
Of course you will need to get the new CD's or DVD.
>Digitenne has been in operation for a year or so in the Netherlands.
>Indeed, the service is a little cheaper than the common cable system
Digitenne offers only about 2/3 the channels of a typical cable system.
It seems attractive until you notice that it has no BBC, no Belgium channels, no German channels, etc.
A satellite receiver setup costs less than Digitenne and offers much, much more.
I am considering to end my cable subscription and looked at Digitenne as a backup for bad weather conditions and to complete the channel lineup, but the offering is very limited indeed.
>At any rate, just because its one password in no way means you can't have a cluster of 5000 servers all storing and accepting transactions for it.
Sure, but you still have a single system that is a single point of failure.
E.g. when it goes down because of a software error like not working on date 04-04-04 you have a big problem.
(dont tell me that is impossible. years ago I spent most of the day hunting for a problem that in the end only turned out to happen on 10-04. It happened because of some bug in a datacomm protocol implementation. In those days 04 was used to delimit one packet on the wire. when a 04 occurred in the data it was prefixed by 10 and the receiver would turn the 10 04 into a 04 again. this particular buggy implementation did not consider that 10 04 could be in the data as well)
Does anybody know how centralized hotmail is?
Is it one serverroom full of machines, serving all the world?
Or is it spread like akamaitech, which has servers located all over the world and uses DNS tricks to send you to a "nearby" server?
Two of these in a RAID-1 configuration should make a good replacement for the typical home user's VHS tape collection.
HD recording of standard TV today takes about 2GB per hour, so 200 hours or about 70 tapes worth of video could be stored on a disk.
But of course you will put two of these on each controller, so you need more than 100MB.
The low-end server that arrived at work yesterday has two 10kRPM drives that each read 66 MB/s sustained. Datarates are improving all the time.
Of course they do. A disk with 4 platters is like 4 disks with 1 platter in RAID-0 (striped) configuration.
When there is a fixed failure chance per platter, one can expect the device failure rate to go up with the number of platters.
I think what is funny is not that it is about Bill Gates, but it is about the army shooting at someone they just vaguely suspect of doing something they don't like.
Have you watched the recent Irak footage on CNN?
There the army is firing from the safe shelter of a helicopter, at three presumably innocent (until proven different) people walking between a truck and a van. When one of them is wounded but still alive after the first round, they fire a second one.
I would not be proud to be an American.
Probably there are even more worried that these employees receive the free copy, recognize that they cannot install it on the computer at work, and take it home.
When companies send bottles of wine or packages of delicatessen, they also don't expect the goods to be consumed at the workplace.
Of course I know about this :-)
Why are they not all migrating to VMSK, the magical modulation that promises to exceed the Shannon limit by orders of magnitude? Approaching it by .5dB seems to be not very much of an accomplishment, compared to that.
Checkout http://www.vmsk.org/ where all the claims are made. Supposedly you could compress all communication to 1Hz bandwidth, or so.
[of course I do not believe this]
>You can calculate the best possible compression scheme for handling arbitrary data. That is, the compression algorithm which, if you fed it every possible combination of input data, would compress the data the best.
That algorithm is a simple "copy" operation, compressing the input to an output that is the same size.
It is not possible to construct a compression algorithm that will compress every possible combination of input data with a better result.
You forget (or almost forget) to consider that for $45 you buy only Microsoft "Windows", their operating system with Internet Explorer, Mediaplayer and notepad.
For $79.99 at SuSE you buy an operating system plus the entire product line of applications.
When you go back to Microsoft, you would have to add Office, Exchange server, SQL server, Visual C++, Visual whatever, and the list would go on and on and on. The price of that entire lot would be astronomical compared to the $79.99
In that context, $45 for just the bare OS is pretty steep indeed.