Well, realize that you're also cutting off other people, such as the department head that I support, who is blind, and uses a screen reader to navigate the web (quite well, in fact, it amazed me the first time I saw him working). He's not from Hicksville, he has a PhD and is using a Pentium 4 2.4Ghz machine with screen reader software.
Verhoeven is a no-talent ass-clown. His Best movie is Basic Instinct, and that's not saying much. His sci-fi work is all hokey, and he completely ruined Starship Troopers. For all of you who never read the book, this isn't the typical rant from book fans about movie versions, this is a perversion of all that was good about Starship Troopers.
Verhoeven managed to simultaneously remove all the cool sci-fi stuff (such as the powered suits) and the interesting social ideas, such as requiring military service for full citizenship. So what were we left with? Squishy bugs and Doogie Howser dressed like a Nazi.
Re:Scudder/ The Past Through Tomorrow
on
New Heinlein Novel
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· Score: 1
As I recall, in To Sail, Maureen invests heavily in the company that invents the Sun Power Screens, because Lazarus tipped her off about it while visiting from the future.
I apologize to anyone who hasn't read those books, as I'm sure this post looks like nonsense.:)
Definitely, Time Enough For Love is one of my favorites, by far. One of the few books that has ever brought tears to my eyes, in fact. It helps to read Methusaleh's Children first, of course, but Time has so many great quotes, stories, and parables, that it's worth reading over and over again.
Amazon has it up for pre-order already, here's a link, complete with my referral code, for the lazy.:)
I'm excited as all get out about this, I've read everything else he ever published, and I think I have at least one copy of everything, even the hard-to-find Notebooks of Lazarus Long booklet. I'm really curious to see how this stacks up with his other early work, like "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel", "Space Cadet", etc. Have Spacesuit was the first sci-fi book I ever read, and it got me hooked at an early age.
The fact that Spider Robinson is involved puts my mind at ease. He was good friends, and a great admirer of Heinlein, and I can't see him doing anything that would disgrace RAH.
Yes, but simple games can make you think too. Take Tetris as an example, it's a game that's simple to learn, but difficult to master, and quick thinking, reflexes, and strategy are all rewarded. Because it's simple, it has a lot of fans.
While I own an Xbox, not a Gamecube, I think Nintendo is right here. Some of my favorite games of all time came out of Nintendo, and many of them are "simple". For instance, Mario Kart 64 is a masterpiece of gaming, and it is pretty easy to pick up, but hard to master, which is the hallmark of a good game.
That said, I'm playing Star Wars Galaxies right now, which is supremely complex, and I don't even understand a lot of it, though I've been playing for nearly two months. It's still fun, but I can't hand it over to my wife or my dad for 10 minutes, and expect them to appreciate it at all.
By comparison, my wife was hooked on Bust-A-Move in about 5 minutes, because the controls and rules are simple. My dad loves to play video games, if I play a game that has only a few buttons, he doesn't want to have to remember 40 combinations of buttons to play the game, so this is why he mostly likes racing games. Gas, Brake, Steer, Shift, okay, pretty simple, but the games certainly aren't easy.
Care to reference a specific Q article with that FUD you're spreading? I can say that Linux updates often break things too, I've hosed boxes with apt-get before, does that mean I should never use Linux, or that I should never update it?
Auto-Update doesn't install Service Packs, so SP4 will never automatically install if you have it turned on. They still have to be installed manually, or by pushing out an.msi through Group Policy.
You want to know what a real University setting is like? I've worked at 2 of the 3 state Universities here, and generally it's a mishmash of 20% Win95, 40% Win98, 20% Win2000, and 20% Windows XP machines, none of which authenticate to a domain, administered by someone who started working there as a student, but was kept on after graduation because they were cheap labor.
Patches? Well the user should take care of that, right? After all, they've got Internet Explorer, they can surely remember to visit WindowsUpdate and get patches on their own.
Oh, AntiVirus definitions? Well, our software doesn't update those automatically, you've got to click the icon and push update every month or so, but the users can do that.
None of the above is hyperbole, and were actually the standard practices as recently as 18 months ago.
Heck, doing testing? That'd require a SECOND computer for each technician! That'd cost money! We can't afford to but TWO computers for one person, we're already splurging on 1 IT person per 500 computers! Oh, and we gave you 1 student who's slightly above minimum wage too. What more do you want?
The lack of firewall on our campus is out of my hands, that's above me, at the Network Services level. We're one of the three public universities in the state, and none of them have firewalls. Believe me, we've asked for it, and have been repeatedly told that it's a matter of policy for us to be "open". I'm not saying I agree with that policy, but we have a distributed support model, and I have no control over it. So why should I be fired for that?
As for auto-updates, ideally you're going to want to use SUS, (which I also mentioned in my reply, and you ignored in an attempt to make me look dumb) but the reality is a lot of Universities and small-businesses don't even have a Domain in place for their users, much less something as sophisticated as SUS or SMS. I'd much rather take my chance on some patch causing some minor problems, than have machines sit for YEARS without any patches being applied, as is the case without auto-update. Use SUS for machines in a domain, where you can actually start applying group policy, but if you've got a machine stuck in some dark, damp, grad student office in the basement, that you maybe will see once every 2-3 years, at least try to get Auto-Update turned on.
As for AutoUpdates breaking things, sure, it could happen. But I'd rather suffer a random broken application than be rooted. I'd much rather have machines booted off the network from a borked net driver than being used for a DDoS attack.
Please provide for me an example of Microsoft patch provided in the Critical Updates section of Windows Update that has rendered 100% of systems inoperable or required a reinstalltion of the OS at any time in the last 18 months.
And, I was referring to the Sysadmins who hadn't done ANYTHING, and there are several. I asked my wife if they'd done anything at the Ad Agency she works at. They haven't. There are a large number of posts on Slashdot from people running Windows who didn't even know that the vulnerability existed before today. Those are the people I take issue with, people who said "Oh, the firewall will protect us" or "Oh, I'll run WindowsUpdate the next time I happen to be at one of those machines" or "I don't feel like installing those patches that the system tray is telling me to install right now".
If any Windows shops actually get hit hard by this, the Sysadmins need to be reprimanded or fired. My Co-Worker and I manage about 375 PCs at a University which has no firewall, though the NetBIOS ports are blocked at the border router.
You should have had auto-updates turned on for your boxes and/or been using SUS server to push these kind of updates out. We had autoupdates on, and then when the free scanner tool from eeye.com came out last week, we used that to scan the rest of our machines to identify any that didn't get the patch yet (not everyone has bene migrated into our domain yet, and there are some rogue NT 4 boxes around still).
As a result, we had everything reasonbly secure last Monday, and AFAIK there are no vulnerable machines on any of our subnets, according to my scans.
So, uh, what were you other Windows admins doing when you should have been doing your job?
SAN FRANCISCO--Novell Inc. dismissed reports that it is planning to phase out new NetWare development in favor of Linux.
A Novell executive Wednesday told eWEEK that the Provo, Utah, company has no plans of cutting NetWare development in favor of Linux, as some reports had indicated.
Chris Stone, vice chairman of the company, said NetWare will continue in maintenance mode, comments Novell officials said were taken out of context.
Chris Stone speaks out on Ximian, Microsoft and SCO. Read his interview with Microsoft Watch.
"We're into Linux, that's why we're here," said a Novell executive, who asked not to be identified. "That's why we bought Ximian. And we said that with Version 7.0 you'll have a choice of either upgrading to the NetWare base or moving to Linux. But with $400 million of our revenue in NetWare, that would be ridiculous for us to abandon development on it."
Bruce Lowry, top spokesman for Novell, said, "The bottom line is no. The whole thing with Linux is an additive thing. We're not dumping NetWare, we're adding Linux."
In a statement, Jack Messman, chairman, president and chief executive of Novell, addressed the issue firmly. "A recent news report coming out of the LinuxWorld Conference suggests that Novell is considering stopping development of NetWare. We're not," he said. "Despite Novell's firm and frequent statements concerning continued development and support for NetWare, discussion of Novell's Linux strategy invariably leads to concern over Novell's NetWare commitment. Let us put those concerns to rest.
"We have also announced that NetWare 7.0 is in development, that it will run on both the NetWare and Linux kernels, and that we will have more to say on it when it is appropriate. This is hardly a sign of reduced commitment. NetWare is not going away. Period," Messman said in his statement.
I had one, it was mildly entertaining with Punch Out and Rad Racer, but pretty much useless for any other game. Your arm would get seriously fatigued too, for instance, for Rad Racer you held your arm out in front of you like you had it on top of a steering wheel. How long can you hold your arm straight out before it starts to hurt? 10 minutes? Good luck finishing the game...
Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?
on
150 Mbit/s DSL.
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· Score: 1
I have a Sprint phone with USB cable for my laptop. My secret to avoid their stupid little picture mangling server is to run everything through a VPN back to my employer, I had to do this because they were blocking the secure IMAP port for some reason, and discovered that it actually made the web look "good" again.:)
Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?
on
150 Mbit/s DSL.
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· Score: 1
Here in Cedar Falls, Iowa, our city runs its own cable company, complete with cable modem service. If you want to pay for it, you can get some great bandwidth. I'm on their business class service with a static IP, 10Mbps down/1.5Mbps up for only about $90/month. Basic service starts at $35/month, which has forced Mediacom to lower their rates in this area to match.
I like BitTorrent a lot, I've been using it to grab Alias episodes the last few days. I've never watched the show, but now that my TiVo is starting to look pretty empty, a co-worker convinced me to start watching Alias. So far, I like it, and there's a great BitTorrent listing here:
I don't know, my blog has some very useful information that Google serves out to a lot of people needing help, for instance, this page is a lifesaver when you hose your Win2000 install using Easy CD Creator, and a lot of people still e-mail me, 2 years later, to thank me for writing it up.
Our network maxes out at night when we release the throttle on the student network, a slashdotting like this was barely a blip in our traffic graphs, which you can find at:
Oh, and for those interested, it's running Win2000 Pro on a 600mhz CPU with 256MB RAM. It's an old Dell Precision workstation, I think it's a 220, if I recall correctly. The thing is stable, even throughout the slashdotting, just the poor CPU couldn't churn fast enough. Next time we try something like this, we'll put it on one of our dual-Xeon servers.:)
Well, the server wasn't really intended for this, it's basically a test server, if you read the site:
http://weblogs.csbs.uni.edu/
It's running on an old box, mostly used just for some internal communications within our network, getting maybe 400 hits a day, not 40,000/hour, which is what we hit at the peak.:)
I'm the admin of the server in question, it's running Manila from Userland as the web server/weblog product. Everything is dynamic on there, even the pictures are served out of the database, and it's basically running out of CPU horsepower in this case, Frontier.exe is using about 90% of my CPU time.:)
I'm the admin of the server, thanks, I just restarted Manila, the weblog server that site is using, and it's back in action. It'd already taken at least 65,000 hits, and was still trying to serve before it died.:)
I'll keep an eye on it, and try to keep it functional, but mirrors are certainly appreciated.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, realize that you're also cutting off other people, such as the department head that I support, who is blind, and uses a screen reader to navigate the web (quite well, in fact, it amazed me the first time I saw him working). He's not from Hicksville, he has a PhD and is using a Pentium 4 2.4Ghz machine with screen reader software.
Verhoeven is a no-talent ass-clown. His Best movie is Basic Instinct, and that's not saying much. His sci-fi work is all hokey, and he completely ruined Starship Troopers. For all of you who never read the book, this isn't the typical rant from book fans about movie versions, this is a perversion of all that was good about Starship Troopers.
Verhoeven managed to simultaneously remove all the cool sci-fi stuff (such as the powered suits) and the interesting social ideas, such as requiring military service for full citizenship. So what were we left with? Squishy bugs and Doogie Howser dressed like a Nazi.
As I recall, in To Sail, Maureen invests heavily in the company that invents the Sun Power Screens, because Lazarus tipped her off about it while visiting from the future.
:)
I apologize to anyone who hasn't read those books, as I'm sure this post looks like nonsense.
Definitely, Time Enough For Love is one of my favorites, by far. One of the few books that has ever brought tears to my eyes, in fact. It helps to read Methusaleh's Children first, of course, but Time has so many great quotes, stories, and parables, that it's worth reading over and over again.
Yep, the notebooks are all "illuminated" by a caligrapher. It makes a nice little coffee-table type book if you're a hard-core Heinlein fan.
Amazon has it up for pre-order already, here's a link, complete with my referral code, for the lazy. :)
I'm excited as all get out about this, I've read everything else he ever published, and I think I have at least one copy of everything, even the hard-to-find Notebooks of Lazarus Long booklet. I'm really curious to see how this stacks up with his other early work, like "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel", "Space Cadet", etc. Have Spacesuit was the first sci-fi book I ever read, and it got me hooked at an early age.
The fact that Spider Robinson is involved puts my mind at ease. He was good friends, and a great admirer of Heinlein, and I can't see him doing anything that would disgrace RAH.
Yes, but simple games can make you think too. Take Tetris as an example, it's a game that's simple to learn, but difficult to master, and quick thinking, reflexes, and strategy are all rewarded. Because it's simple, it has a lot of fans.
While I own an Xbox, not a Gamecube, I think Nintendo is right here. Some of my favorite games of all time came out of Nintendo, and many of them are "simple". For instance, Mario Kart 64 is a masterpiece of gaming, and it is pretty easy to pick up, but hard to master, which is the hallmark of a good game.
That said, I'm playing Star Wars Galaxies right now, which is supremely complex, and I don't even understand a lot of it, though I've been playing for nearly two months. It's still fun, but I can't hand it over to my wife or my dad for 10 minutes, and expect them to appreciate it at all.
By comparison, my wife was hooked on Bust-A-Move in about 5 minutes, because the controls and rules are simple. My dad loves to play video games, if I play a game that has only a few buttons, he doesn't want to have to remember 40 combinations of buttons to play the game, so this is why he mostly likes racing games. Gas, Brake, Steer, Shift, okay, pretty simple, but the games certainly aren't easy.
Yep, I was like "Office X has a serial number?" I've only ever used the version we're licensed for, which doesn't require any...
Care to reference a specific Q article with that FUD you're spreading? I can say that Linux updates often break things too, I've hosed boxes with apt-get before, does that mean I should never use Linux, or that I should never update it?
Auto-Update doesn't install Service Packs, so SP4 will never automatically install if you have it turned on. They still have to be installed manually, or by pushing out an .msi through Group Policy.
You want to know what a real University setting is like? I've worked at 2 of the 3 state Universities here, and generally it's a mishmash of 20% Win95, 40% Win98, 20% Win2000, and 20% Windows XP machines, none of which authenticate to a domain, administered by someone who started working there as a student, but was kept on after graduation because they were cheap labor.
Patches? Well the user should take care of that, right? After all, they've got Internet Explorer, they can surely remember to visit WindowsUpdate and get patches on their own.
Oh, AntiVirus definitions? Well, our software doesn't update those automatically, you've got to click the icon and push update every month or so, but the users can do that.
None of the above is hyperbole, and were actually the standard practices as recently as 18 months ago.
Heck, doing testing? That'd require a SECOND computer for each technician! That'd cost money! We can't afford to but TWO computers for one person, we're already splurging on 1 IT person per 500 computers! Oh, and we gave you 1 student who's slightly above minimum wage too. What more do you want?
The lack of firewall on our campus is out of my hands, that's above me, at the Network Services level. We're one of the three public universities in the state, and none of them have firewalls. Believe me, we've asked for it, and have been repeatedly told that it's a matter of policy for us to be "open". I'm not saying I agree with that policy, but we have a distributed support model, and I have no control over it. So why should I be fired for that?
As for auto-updates, ideally you're going to want to use SUS, (which I also mentioned in my reply, and you ignored in an attempt to make me look dumb) but the reality is a lot of Universities and small-businesses don't even have a Domain in place for their users, much less something as sophisticated as SUS or SMS. I'd much rather take my chance on some patch causing some minor problems, than have machines sit for YEARS without any patches being applied, as is the case without auto-update. Use SUS for machines in a domain, where you can actually start applying group policy, but if you've got a machine stuck in some dark, damp, grad student office in the basement, that you maybe will see once every 2-3 years, at least try to get Auto-Update turned on.
As for AutoUpdates breaking things, sure, it could happen. But I'd rather suffer a random broken application than be rooted. I'd much rather have machines booted off the network from a borked net driver than being used for a DDoS attack.
Please provide for me an example of Microsoft patch provided in the Critical Updates section of Windows Update that has rendered 100% of systems inoperable or required a reinstalltion of the OS at any time in the last 18 months.
And, I was referring to the Sysadmins who hadn't done ANYTHING, and there are several. I asked my wife if they'd done anything at the Ad Agency she works at. They haven't. There are a large number of posts on Slashdot from people running Windows who didn't even know that the vulnerability existed before today. Those are the people I take issue with, people who said "Oh, the firewall will protect us" or "Oh, I'll run WindowsUpdate the next time I happen to be at one of those machines" or "I don't feel like installing those patches that the system tray is telling me to install right now".
If any Windows shops actually get hit hard by this, the Sysadmins need to be reprimanded or fired. My Co-Worker and I manage about 375 PCs at a University which has no firewall, though the NetBIOS ports are blocked at the border router.
You should have had auto-updates turned on for your boxes and/or been using SUS server to push these kind of updates out. We had autoupdates on, and then when the free scanner tool from eeye.com came out last week, we used that to scan the rest of our machines to identify any that didn't get the patch yet (not everyone has bene migrated into our domain yet, and there are some rogue NT 4 boxes around still).
As a result, we had everything reasonbly secure last Monday, and AFAIK there are no vulnerable machines on any of our subnets, according to my scans.
So, uh, what were you other Windows admins doing when you should have been doing your job?
Well, according to an eWeek story from today, this News.com article is entirely wrong:
s p
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,1212139,00.a
SAN FRANCISCO--Novell Inc. dismissed reports that it is planning to phase out new NetWare development in favor of Linux.
A Novell executive Wednesday told eWEEK that the Provo, Utah, company has no plans of cutting NetWare development in favor of Linux, as some reports had indicated.
Chris Stone, vice chairman of the company, said NetWare will continue in maintenance mode, comments Novell officials said were taken out of context.
Chris Stone speaks out on Ximian, Microsoft and SCO. Read his interview with Microsoft Watch.
"We're into Linux, that's why we're here," said a Novell executive, who asked not to be identified. "That's why we bought Ximian. And we said that with Version 7.0 you'll have a choice of either upgrading to the NetWare base or moving to Linux. But with $400 million of our revenue in NetWare, that would be ridiculous for us to abandon development on it."
Bruce Lowry, top spokesman for Novell, said, "The bottom line is no. The whole thing with Linux is an additive thing. We're not dumping NetWare, we're adding Linux."
In a statement, Jack Messman, chairman, president and chief executive of Novell, addressed the issue firmly. "A recent news report coming out of the LinuxWorld Conference suggests that Novell is considering stopping development of NetWare. We're not," he said. "Despite Novell's firm and frequent statements concerning continued development and support for NetWare, discussion of Novell's Linux strategy invariably leads to concern over Novell's NetWare commitment. Let us put those concerns to rest.
"We have also announced that NetWare 7.0 is in development, that it will run on both the NetWare and Linux kernels, and that we will have more to say on it when it is appropriate. This is hardly a sign of reduced commitment. NetWare is not going away. Period," Messman said in his statement.
I don't know what they're going for, but I have one. I'd gladly let it go for $250. :)
I had one, it was mildly entertaining with Punch Out and Rad Racer, but pretty much useless for any other game. Your arm would get seriously fatigued too, for instance, for Rad Racer you held your arm out in front of you like you had it on top of a steering wheel. How long can you hold your arm straight out before it starts to hurt? 10 minutes? Good luck finishing the game...
I have a Sprint phone with USB cable for my laptop. My secret to avoid their stupid little picture mangling server is to run everything through a VPN back to my employer, I had to do this because they were blocking the secure IMAP port for some reason, and discovered that it actually made the web look "good" again. :)
Here in Cedar Falls, Iowa, our city runs its own cable company, complete with cable modem service. If you want to pay for it, you can get some great bandwidth. I'm on their business class service with a static IP, 10Mbps down/1.5Mbps up for only about $90/month. Basic service starts at $35/month, which has forced Mediacom to lower their rates in this area to match.
Ain't competition great?
I like BitTorrent a lot, I've been using it to grab Alias episodes the last few days. I've never watched the show, but now that my TiVo is starting to look pretty empty, a co-worker convinced me to start watching Alias. So far, I like it, and there's a great BitTorrent listing here:
Alias Archive
I haven't as much luck getting movies, they seem to take forever, but I grabbed Red Hat 9 via BitTorrent, and it was damned fast when it debuted...
I don't know, my blog has some very useful information that Google serves out to a lot of people needing help, for instance, this page is a lifesaver when you hose your Win2000 install using Easy CD Creator, and a lot of people still e-mail me, 2 years later, to thank me for writing it up.
He's not a student, he's staff. :)
And, we don't pay per megabyte, Iowa has the Iowa Communications Network for which UNI pays a flat fee.
Our network maxes out at night when we release the throttle on the student network, a slashdotting like this was barely a blip in our traffic graphs, which you can find at:
http://www.uni.edu/netstats/
Oh, and for those interested, it's running Win2000 Pro on a 600mhz CPU with 256MB RAM. It's an old Dell Precision workstation, I think it's a 220, if I recall correctly. The thing is stable, even throughout the slashdotting, just the poor CPU couldn't churn fast enough. Next time we try something like this, we'll put it on one of our dual-Xeon servers. :)
Well, the server wasn't really intended for this, it's basically a test server, if you read the site:
:)
http://weblogs.csbs.uni.edu/
It's running on an old box, mostly used just for some internal communications within our network, getting maybe 400 hits a day, not 40,000/hour, which is what we hit at the peak.
I'm the admin of the server in question, it's running Manila from Userland as the web server/weblog product. Everything is dynamic on there, even the pictures are served out of the database, and it's basically running out of CPU horsepower in this case, Frontier.exe is using about 90% of my CPU time. :)
I'm the admin of the server, thanks, I just restarted Manila, the weblog server that site is using, and it's back in action. It'd already taken at least 65,000 hits, and was still trying to serve before it died. :)
:)
I'll keep an eye on it, and try to keep it functional, but mirrors are certainly appreciated.