There was only one death I wanted to see. The sight of Jack's cold, dead body sinking into that dark, shark-infested ocean made that entire interminable movie worth seeing. The only thing that would have made it better would be if the sharks had lasers to cook him first.
Even more amusing is the IMDB entry:
Jack Dawson was a character in the hit movie "Titanic" in 1997. His love was with Rose DeWitt Butiker, a first class rich person. Jack was third class. Jack got on the boat by winning a poker game with his two buddies. While Jack was on the Titanic, he was arrested as the boat began to sink, but Rose came to save him. Jack died on April 15, 1912, after the Titanic sank because of hypothermia.
Apparently the Titanic sank because of hypothermia. Poor ship just needed a blanket and a Cup O' Noodles.
Coincidentally, I just installed it yesterday. They're distributing netqmail 1.06, which is qmail 1.03 plus some patches. Check out the web site.
Charles Cazabon, Dave Sill, Henning Brauer, Peter Samuel, and Russell Nelson have put together a netqmail-1.06 distribution of qmail. It is comprised of qmail-1.03 plus the recommended patches and some documentation.
That said, if there are no major bugs and the software is feature complete, I wouldn't really expect many new releases. Releases for the sake of it just increase LOC and bug count.
I've been meaning to play with djbdns. I think qmail is orders of magnitude easier to deal with than sendmail. (Seriously -- WTF is up with sendmail.cf? Just run it through PGP and have the user edit the results. It won't be much different.) If DJBDNS lives up to the expectation I have from qmail, I'm sure it's worth the effort.
Please. It's a minor test distro that's for private use and is apparently not intended to go anywhere. The developers don't want attention, and actively discourage it on their site. If three friends and I decided to start a pet distro for our own purposes and that we never intended to make public, would you like to hear about it?
Anyway, I wasn't "whining", as you assert. I was simply observing that there is an apparent disconnect between the contents of the site ("leave us alone") and a front page/. announcement. It has nothing to do with "cute and fluffy".
I also find a certain degree of irony in the fact that you're trolling, yet advising others in your sig to ignore the trolls. Funny too, because I usually enjoy your posts. You're usually not the trolling type.
So maybe the story is that they pissed someone off by their exclusionary attitude or by dissing Gentoo/someone's mom/etc, so they put it on Slashdot just to generate interest where it wasn't welcome.
Sounds like the makings of a geek soap opera.
Join us next on "As The Nerd Turns" when 1337h4x0r's ambitions to work on a private Linux distro are thwarted by the nefarious Anonymous Reader! Will the site be slashdotted? Will countless newbs flock to this entertainingly hostile distro? Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion!
I don't see any harm. I was just wondering why they bothered announcing it on/. when it seems like they don't really want anyone to be interested in it. *shrug*
In fact, I can readily see the utility of forking an existing distribution for use as a custom dev platform -- especially if they want to try something crazy and disruptive. Go for it, have fun, learn something, hopefully contribute what you learned back to mainstream distros. Maybe more people should do it.
Maybe, but I didn't read it that way. I got more of a "This is our project, leave us alone. It doesn't interest you." That doesn't sound like much of a pitch to developers. The only allusion they made to allowing any outside influence was when they said they probably don't want what you have to offer.
And no, we don't want to use Exherbo to implement your pet project. Especially not if it's a stupid pet project. Go and inflict it upon Gentoo, they think that porting ebuilds to run on SunOS 2 ksh under Cygwin is a great idea.
The above paragraph does not apply if your pet project is something we find interesting.
That last bit was the only "inviting" thing on the whole site, and it doesn't amount to much more than a "Try your luck, see if we think you're 1337 enough." Then again, the whole point was obviously to discourage most people. I guess it worked on me. Maybe some people are attracted by that attitude, but they're probably not the type of people you'd want to work with.
From the looks of this it's just a sandbox for a few guys to try out some ideas. It'll probably never amount to anything other than hopefully some cool new ideas. Those ideas will probably then be reincorporated into Gentoo or some other projects.
The major problem seems to have been that they couldn't try out their ideas in Gentoo mostly due to political problems, so they made another Gentoo-esque platform they could directly control.
I wonder why the hell this was even "announced" anyway. From the web site, it's incredibly obvious that this is a pet project by a few developers who just want to try some stuff out. Why is this on Slashdot? They don't want or need any outside involvement.
From the site:
OK, I Want to Try Exherbo
No you don't.
Yes I Do
OK, maybe you do, but we don't particularly want you to try it because we don't want to deal with you whining when you find that absolutely nothing works. Exherbo isn't in a fit state for users. We might get there one day, but it's not a priority. Right now, all we care about is getting it into a fit state for a small number of developers.
[ more snarky stuff amounting to "buzz off" ]
Really, all we provide is a few things that the few people working on all this find useful for themselves. When we have something for anyone else, we'll let you know.
You're missing the point. The point is not *how* to track them down once you know the murder weapon. The problem with EM is that it doesn't necessarily leave a defining mark like a bullet would. (I guess strong enough might leave a burn mark, but I'm assuming that wouldn't be the case.) You'd first need to determine that a magnet was even used in the first place before knowing you should track down purchasers of electromagnets.
The post that started this off asked about weaponization of this tech. Given that, you need to assume that a weapon would be reasonably portable, and would be used in an instance where the murderer/assassin didn't want to leave a mark. It's obviously hypothetical right now, and might not even be possible.
Isn't there some sort of authentication for DNS a la SSL certificates? If not, would this take a major overhaul of the DNS system to support it?
As I understand it, there's also a man-in-the-middle type of attack with DNS where a local router (possibly a Hacked By Chinese(tm) "Cisco" router) will substitute its own DNS replies instead of passing the query to the real DNS server.
Couldn't both of these issues be resolved by having a field on the DNS record where the reply is signed by the DNS server? Leave the original field as-is, but add a field where the same reply is cryptographically signed. Then systems who support it can verify it. I can't imagine it'd take very long for Linux and BSD to support it, and Mac and Windows probably would follow along eventually.
What's wrong with this idea? Does it already exist in some form and just isn't widely used?
I was more referring to the situation where they simply have recovered a body after the fact and need to piece together what happened. Presumable the body or equipment would have been moved.
Besides, you don't think what's enormous today can't be small and mobile tomorrow? Tell that to the ENIAC folks.
Well, I don't watch CSI, but I've seen it a few times on CourtTV^W TrueTV. Maybe they do give the impression that it's more infallible than it really is, I don't know.
Either way, if they can do it at all, that's still more than they can track an EM pulse, or even identify that one was used. At least a bullet, when used, is fairly obvious.
Apparently. I told my wife I'm going to build a huge electromagnet in the garage, but she said it'd probably just make me sterile.*
Considering my kids, I'm not sure that'd be such a bad thing.
* the above conversation is for comedic effect only, and never, in fact, took place. The wife's pretty pissed off today, and has probably been considering *other* means of making me sterile.
I remember when I was a kid and the anti-smoking thing was really starting to kick in. I'll never forget my uncle -- a smoker -- said this would happen. He said "You know, now it's smokes, but I guarantee you, they'll be going after fast food next."
Welcome to the present. The libs are way too predictable. This was called about 10 years in advance.
I used to work at Morgan Stanley. Their unix and linux environments are incredible. I've worked at several large financial companies, and Morgan Stanley was probably the best (read: most mature, robust) technical environment I've ever seen.
I didn't know they'd released Aurora publicly, but I'll definitely need to check it out now.
I'd have to think that forensics units would have a harder time tracking down the person who fired an EM pulse. They've gotten pretty good at matching bullets to guns.
You seem to forget that the Linux forums are generally stellar for resolving HOW-TO questions. Additionally, there are FAQs and instructional blog posts that are readily accessible through Google. In other words, "Toggle That Doohicky" is easily obtained in the FOSS environment as well, and can be done WITHOUT sitting on hold and taking your chances with the quality of the rep who answers.
Additionally, if the source were available, features you want could be added, someone ambitious enough could actually investigate *why* the damn thing works the way it does, and it'd probably have working Linux and Mac versions by now.
This was my issue with Joomla too. When I tried it out, I immediately recognized that it was extremely powerful software and that, if I spent enough time with it, I could probably make it do lots of cool stuff. Unfortunately, I don't have that kind of patience. After spending quite a lot of frustrating time on the admin interface where things didn't work as I expected, or were buried so deep that I wound up forgetting how to get there, I just gave up and went to WordPress. After using that for a while, I gave that up and went to Drupal, and have been happy so far.
I'm not religious about CMSs, because they're all obviously well written and very powerful, but the relative ease with which I learned Drupal and even made some simple plugins for an app at I was writing at work really won me over.
A major point of a CMS is to shorten the startup time. If the CMS takes days to learn the basics and weeks or months to really learn, it isn't really accomplishing that goal. I need something now, or at least soon, so I follow the path of least resistance with this type of software.
I set up a site for my son's Cub Scout pack using Drupal. It took like ten minutes to set up followed by some tweaking over the next few days. The cub master just took it and ran with it, and, for the most part, it's great. Minimal effort on my part.
When they'd initially asked me to be webmaster, they were just using static HTML pages on an FTP site, and it was going to be a lot of hand-coding, uploading pictures, all that. I knew I could never make a decent-looking site on my own, as I have no artistic ability whatsoever.
By setting up Drupal, I was able to give them a framework that did everything they wanted -- permissions for various parts of the site, calendaring (embedded Google Calendar), publish on demand, add forms and flyers, etc -- all in a heartbeat. I would have spent a looong time doing that by hand, and, honestly, I don't have that much time to spend on a volunteer effort like that.
I've tried Joomla, Wordpress, and Drupal. While I've personally settled on Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress are incredible systems that provide a very solid basis for any site. All that time you would have spent re-inventing the wheel poorly can be spent writing customizations instead, which gets you weeks or years ahead in the long run.
The difference for me and my volunteer work was the difference between an awful hand-coded site done in a few hours, or a fully-themeable, user-controlled system, ready to go in minutes. It makes the time spent volunteering seem so much more "worth it" when the finished product isn't some half-baked solution they're going to throw out next year.
Slashdot Mirror
Picking up women.
(... who need their computers fixed.)
Even more amusing is the IMDB entry:
Apparently the Titanic sank because of hypothermia. Poor ship just needed a blanket and a Cup O' Noodles.
That said, if there are no major bugs and the software is feature complete, I wouldn't really expect many new releases. Releases for the sake of it just increase LOC and bug count.
I've been meaning to play with djbdns. I think qmail is orders of magnitude easier to deal with than sendmail. (Seriously -- WTF is up with sendmail.cf? Just run it through PGP and have the user edit the results. It won't be much different.) If DJBDNS lives up to the expectation I have from qmail, I'm sure it's worth the effort.
And at the end if Titanic, the ship sinks!
* spoiler alert! (Was I supposed to say that first?)
Please. It's a minor test distro that's for private use and is apparently not intended to go anywhere. The developers don't want attention, and actively discourage it on their site. If three friends and I decided to start a pet distro for our own purposes and that we never intended to make public, would you like to hear about it?
/. announcement. It has nothing to do with "cute and fluffy".
Anyway, I wasn't "whining", as you assert. I was simply observing that there is an apparent disconnect between the contents of the site ("leave us alone") and a front page
I also find a certain degree of irony in the fact that you're trolling, yet advising others in your sig to ignore the trolls. Funny too, because I usually enjoy your posts. You're usually not the trolling type.
Thanks for the pointer. Like everything else, it seems my original ideas have been thought of years ago. :-)
.com and .org at first, that'd be a huge step forward.
Judging by the other replies to your post, it seems like there's some hope. Even if it was just
It's okay. I was entertained by the idea. :-)
Interesting.
So maybe the story is that they pissed someone off by their exclusionary attitude or by dissing Gentoo/someone's mom/etc, so they put it on Slashdot just to generate interest where it wasn't welcome.
Sounds like the makings of a geek soap opera.
Join us next on "As The Nerd Turns" when 1337h4x0r's ambitions to work on a private Linux distro are thwarted by the nefarious Anonymous Reader! Will the site be slashdotted? Will countless newbs flock to this entertainingly hostile distro? Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion!
Someone call NBC.
I don't see any harm. I was just wondering why they bothered announcing it on /. when it seems like they don't really want anyone to be interested in it. *shrug*
In fact, I can readily see the utility of forking an existing distribution for use as a custom dev platform -- especially if they want to try something crazy and disruptive. Go for it, have fun, learn something, hopefully contribute what you learned back to mainstream distros. Maybe more people should do it.
That last bit was the only "inviting" thing on the whole site, and it doesn't amount to much more than a "Try your luck, see if we think you're 1337 enough." Then again, the whole point was obviously to discourage most people. I guess it worked on me. Maybe some people are attracted by that attitude, but they're probably not the type of people you'd want to work with.
From the looks of this it's just a sandbox for a few guys to try out some ideas. It'll probably never amount to anything other than hopefully some cool new ideas. Those ideas will probably then be reincorporated into Gentoo or some other projects.
The major problem seems to have been that they couldn't try out their ideas in Gentoo mostly due to political problems, so they made another Gentoo-esque platform they could directly control.
From the site:
Soooooo.... What was the point again?
You're missing the point. The point is not *how* to track them down once you know the murder weapon. The problem with EM is that it doesn't necessarily leave a defining mark like a bullet would. (I guess strong enough might leave a burn mark, but I'm assuming that wouldn't be the case.) You'd first need to determine that a magnet was even used in the first place before knowing you should track down purchasers of electromagnets.
The post that started this off asked about weaponization of this tech. Given that, you need to assume that a weapon would be reasonably portable, and would be used in an instance where the murderer/assassin didn't want to leave a mark. It's obviously hypothetical right now, and might not even be possible.
Here's my question:
Isn't there some sort of authentication for DNS a la SSL certificates? If not, would this take a major overhaul of the DNS system to support it?
As I understand it, there's also a man-in-the-middle type of attack with DNS where a local router (possibly a Hacked By Chinese(tm) "Cisco" router) will substitute its own DNS replies instead of passing the query to the real DNS server.
Couldn't both of these issues be resolved by having a field on the DNS record where the reply is signed by the DNS server? Leave the original field as-is, but add a field where the same reply is cryptographically signed. Then systems who support it can verify it. I can't imagine it'd take very long for Linux and BSD to support it, and Mac and Windows probably would follow along eventually.
What's wrong with this idea? Does it already exist in some form and just isn't widely used?
I was more referring to the situation where they simply have recovered a body after the fact and need to piece together what happened. Presumable the body or equipment would have been moved.
Besides, you don't think what's enormous today can't be small and mobile tomorrow? Tell that to the ENIAC folks.
Well, I don't watch CSI, but I've seen it a few times on CourtTV^W TrueTV. Maybe they do give the impression that it's more infallible than it really is, I don't know.
Either way, if they can do it at all, that's still more than they can track an EM pulse, or even identify that one was used. At least a bullet, when used, is fairly obvious.
Apparently. I told my wife I'm going to build a huge electromagnet in the garage, but she said it'd probably just make me sterile.*
Considering my kids, I'm not sure that'd be such a bad thing.
* the above conversation is for comedic effect only, and never, in fact, took place. The wife's pretty pissed off today, and has probably been considering *other* means of making me sterile.
I remember when I was a kid and the anti-smoking thing was really starting to kick in. I'll never forget my uncle -- a smoker -- said this would happen. He said "You know, now it's smokes, but I guarantee you, they'll be going after fast food next."
Welcome to the present. The libs are way too predictable. This was called about 10 years in advance.
I used to work at Morgan Stanley. Their unix and linux environments are incredible. I've worked at several large financial companies, and Morgan Stanley was probably the best (read: most mature, robust) technical environment I've ever seen.
I didn't know they'd released Aurora publicly, but I'll definitely need to check it out now.
I'd have to think that forensics units would have a harder time tracking down the person who fired an EM pulse. They've gotten pretty good at matching bullets to guns.
Perhaps she has a magnetic personality, then?
Um, yes.
You seem to forget that the Linux forums are generally stellar for resolving HOW-TO questions. Additionally, there are FAQs and instructional blog posts that are readily accessible through Google. In other words, "Toggle That Doohicky" is easily obtained in the FOSS environment as well, and can be done WITHOUT sitting on hold and taking your chances with the quality of the rep who answers.
Additionally, if the source were available, features you want could be added, someone ambitious enough could actually investigate *why* the damn thing works the way it does, and it'd probably have working Linux and Mac versions by now.
I think it's Digital Fortress.
Fortunately, the Slashdot Hive Mind has a safety shutdown when the story rolls off the front page.
This was my issue with Joomla too. When I tried it out, I immediately recognized that it was extremely powerful software and that, if I spent enough time with it, I could probably make it do lots of cool stuff. Unfortunately, I don't have that kind of patience. After spending quite a lot of frustrating time on the admin interface where things didn't work as I expected, or were buried so deep that I wound up forgetting how to get there, I just gave up and went to WordPress. After using that for a while, I gave that up and went to Drupal, and have been happy so far.
I'm not religious about CMSs, because they're all obviously well written and very powerful, but the relative ease with which I learned Drupal and even made some simple plugins for an app at I was writing at work really won me over.
A major point of a CMS is to shorten the startup time. If the CMS takes days to learn the basics and weeks or months to really learn, it isn't really accomplishing that goal. I need something now, or at least soon, so I follow the path of least resistance with this type of software.
I set up a site for my son's Cub Scout pack using Drupal. It took like ten minutes to set up followed by some tweaking over the next few days. The cub master just took it and ran with it, and, for the most part, it's great. Minimal effort on my part.
When they'd initially asked me to be webmaster, they were just using static HTML pages on an FTP site, and it was going to be a lot of hand-coding, uploading pictures, all that. I knew I could never make a decent-looking site on my own, as I have no artistic ability whatsoever.
By setting up Drupal, I was able to give them a framework that did everything they wanted -- permissions for various parts of the site, calendaring (embedded Google Calendar), publish on demand, add forms and flyers, etc -- all in a heartbeat. I would have spent a looong time doing that by hand, and, honestly, I don't have that much time to spend on a volunteer effort like that.
I've tried Joomla, Wordpress, and Drupal. While I've personally settled on Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress are incredible systems that provide a very solid basis for any site. All that time you would have spent re-inventing the wheel poorly can be spent writing customizations instead, which gets you weeks or years ahead in the long run.
The difference for me and my volunteer work was the difference between an awful hand-coded site done in a few hours, or a fully-themeable, user-controlled system, ready to go in minutes. It makes the time spent volunteering seem so much more "worth it" when the finished product isn't some half-baked solution they're going to throw out next year.