So how did you get it fixed up that you don't have a phone number for your DSL line? That *is* freaky. DSL is one of the reasons I keep my landline. The other being that I call internationally sometimes, which horrendously expensive on a mobile phone - a call to anywhere in North America (from the Netherlands, Europe) will cost me about 5 US Cents a minute. Most of Europe the same. On a mobile phone calling there will cost me around 75 US Cents a minute. But it'd still be pretty cool to just have DSL and no phone number... hehe.
I was wondering that myself. If you look at the code, you'll see it downloads a different MS-BUGFIX.exe (at least, the URL is different), depending on a random number... I can't imagine it doing anything worse than what the original script already does...
It doesn't only send itself via email to everyone on your list, it also (if you use mIRC) sends it to others using DCC. It wipes out files with the following extensions: MP3, MP2, CSS, HTML, JPG, JPEG, JSE, WSH, JS, SCT, HTA, and VBS (may have forgotten some). It'll muck about in your registry. It's not only in the UK... it's sweeping accross the continent as people are logging in and reading their email. Apparently it originated from Manilla, the Philippenes (or so it says in the script itself), but this maybe someone who is making someone else look bad (the email address in the script says: ispyder@mail.com). It also tries to download an executable (1 of 4 different, random executables). It changes IE's Start Page.
This is someone with a serious grudge against people who use Microsoft mail programs.:-)... Makes me all the more happy I don't use Windows.
There's a VSB script I saw to fix most of the damage in the registry, but it looks like the site I got it from has been slashdotted, and I don't have the necessary bandwidth to mirror it (or the original script, which I have too). Email me if you do.
Actually, this version of Red Hat asks you just that. It's quite customizable. It'll ask you if you want a GNOME workstation, a KDE workstation, an AfterStep workstation, a server, or custom. I haven't tried out all the different installs. I'm guessing the server install leaves a lot of the eyecandy and other multimedia stuff out.
Until about RH 5.2 you could actually do a network install (FTP or NFS). I wonder why they stopped doing that. Now you have to make a custom boot disk, which is annoying, but not disasterous.
I don't know why you say that it's hard to keep track of what's where, because RPM is extremely powerful. You can ask any file from what package it came from, and then remove that package if you want. You can see what files belong to a package and exactly where it's gonna put them during the install. During the install you can select exactly which packages you want and each package has information on what it does. I always look for RPMs of programs before tar.gz files, just because I think make install is messy, and some make files don't have make uninstall in them (yeah, I should've looked at the makefile first). And I don't enough about coding to want to read through the source code looking for malicious code, so I usually just install the binaries from RPMs, which are plentyful on the web.
I don't know which things about NFS you had problems with. Of all the Linux systems I'm on, it works quite allright. It's sometimes a little flakey if there's still stuff running when you try to umount, but that can be fixed with the right options.
It sounds like you're the kind of person who'd find the 'custom' option during the install useful, and select which RPMs you install. I really doubt that it'd be easier to make install all the packages then still have to configure them, and make sure they are put in the right runlevels.
Well, as the previous poster pointed out, you can install it under a FAT partition, but the other nice feature is that you don't have to use disk druid or fdisk if you don't want to during the install. It'll make a default partitioning which has swap space,/boot (of about 20 megs) and / (takes whatever else is left). Useful if you're lazy or not familiar with partitioning.
I've got a Nokia 3210, which, for whatever reason, isn't available in the US, which is a shame, because IMHO, it's the sexiest phone available. It has an internal antenna and beautiful curves. It's fairly small, and lies nicely in your hand. The internals are the same as many other Nokia phones. It's very popular here in Europe. Check out the Nokia 3210
Sorry this is a little offtopic... 2 things: 1) Netscape under Unix doesn't like large lists where you have to "Select One" (the country). Very annoying. Had to use Lynx instead. Is there a workaround? 2) Can't North Americans get it in their thick skulls that not every country in the world has states and/or provinces. It always bugs the hell out of me when it has a field for State/Province which is required. And they talk about wanting to have diversity in their member base and wanting to have Internet users in other countries represented as well... this really shines out as a piece of North American bias.
Doesn't look like a booth to me... just looks like a bunch of people sitting on the floor having fun? And why isn't it way more busy? It's only a guess, but if you've been using Linux your bound to have heard of Slashdot...:)
It's good to hear this, though. Because that means that the musicians themselves aren't planning on going SDMI as well. I mean, we as consumers can choose not to buy SDMI enabled devices, but what if musician choose to use it? I could see the Slashdot crowd not buying SDMI devices, because they know better, but if music not in SDMI format is difficult to find, the Joe Average will happily buy SDMI devices because that's all he can get music for. In the end, we'd still be screwed.
Of course, in the meantime, the encryption scheme will have been broken and/or people will have figured out a way to intercept the music. There's no real need for concern.
There's an interesting little program with which you can converse. It's called gNiall, and you can find it at Freshmeat. You talk to it, and it looks for which words come next to which word and how often. So then it constructs sentences based upon these words. They're usually pretty nonsensical, but sometimes it'll reply something profound or really "on-topic" and it'll make you wonder. It's good fun to play with, although you can't feed it books yet to learn. Check it out!
Well, take South Africa for example. They now have GSM cellular phone coverage for the whole country. They've skipped stringing copper in large parts of the country, the rural areas. People there have cell phones, which are much more practical in terms of infrastructure (you only need some base stations (which don't need to be wired either, cause you can use microwave to link 'em all up). I can see the same thing happening in 3rd world countries. A $300 palmtop computer with which you can read and write email and do some browsing is gonna be much more useful to these people than a huge electricity hungry desktop PC which costs at least three times that.
Cheers!
Costyn.
YETI@Home hits the nail on the head
on
YETI@Home
·
· Score: 2
THe YETI@Home parody is quite funny, but it actually conveys the problem of SETI@Home quite well. I don't run the client because it eats resources like anything. I don't have or need a very powerful computer, and I find it unacceptable that the Linux client takes 12MB of memory. Not even Netscape is that resource hungry. Leaving the client running in the background under Windows slows everything down to a crawl too.. it seems to do a crappy job of 'nice-ing' itself.... and if I let it complete it's job, it submits a packet that took 60+ hours to complete, while under Linux it takes only 20 hours... The 60 hours would seriously do bad things to my average completion time for one block.:) Ok, maybe that's not the point, but I wonder what goes wrong under Windows...
Since I'm a more classic SF fan, I recommend Robert Heinlein. I've always enjoyed his imagination (of future scenarios) and his plotlines, although sometimes his characters may be a little lacking. Asimov is of course very good, and the entire Foundation series is a masterpiece along with all his robot novels. Arthur C Clarke is another master of SF, but he barely needs mentioning. Of course there's the elusive Douglas Adams, but you can't call yourself an serious SF fan until you've read some of his Hitchhiker trilogy. If you're looking for other funny SF, try Harry Harrison.
Well, that was a short selection from my bookcase. I have tried reading some of the more recent SF authors, but they seem to be either only action or endless political drivel, which both get boring quickly.
Oh, nearly forgot to mention William Gibson, but he needs no mentioning.:)
I was coding a Perl piece the other day, and I hadn't done so in a while, and it'd gotten pretty messy. Anyways, it turned out that there was a variable assignment that was supposed to assign a string to a variable, but the subroutine from which it was called had the same name (I'll be using quotes more often now.:). Turns out that Red Hat 6.0 has no user limits set, and that any user can bring the whole system down just by writing a simple script that keeps calling itself and bogs up all the memory, then the swap space, and then it began shooting off random processes... well, you know how it goes. This surprised me quite a bit. I'm sure there must be other distro's out there that have this problem, and I call it a problem, cause I think that this is not something that every admin should have to think of when installing their system.
Yeah, I mean this is all froody & stuff, but with QWest already being able to transfer the entire Library of Congress in no appreciable amount of time from the east coast to the west coast, I don't so much see the need for even higher speed backbones as for the upgrading of the local loop. We're seeing quite a bit of that now with high speed cable modems and DSL. It seems like these are a big jump over the gradual increments in yer average phone modem that we've always had.
I'm not saying this kinda research is bad, but what's the point if that bandwidth is not being utilized because the local loop is still so slow? Yes, I know, when you bunch em all toghether you get formiddable bandwidth, but that is also a reason why there should also be money invested in things that utilize bandwidth better, like MBONE.
That's pretty sad... The article was posted on Slashdot and in less than an hour, the puzzle is already solved. I guess the Slashdot community has a bunch of clever people that could go work for GCHQ. Me thinks they're pretty desperate, aye?:)
There was a link in the page to a cached copy of his page that someone grabbed before his hosting company took his page down:
http://www.pc-radio.com/maxus.htm
There's a strange client-side pull though, so be prepared to hit that stop button to be able to read the page (before being redirected to a non existing CGI script).
This is really annoying... Not the fact that we have to 25% again, but the fact that it took so long for them to say anything at all, while, as far as I can tell from the article, the problem was already known before we reached the 100% mark?
I disagree. I use a pretty standard RedHat 6.0 installation, and I always use RPMs whenever I can. However, some packages come as tar.gz only (I understand not everyone wants to package their stuff). It seems to me that more than 50% of the targzs I download and try to compile with the above instructions are aborted because of some error or that it can't find the file. I never learnt C (we were taught Java at our uni), and I don't have the time to learn C, so debugging the compile output is not something I can do. It's always infuriating when another packages refuses to compile correctly. That's why gzipped tars are *not* a great system for those of us who don't know C.
This would be really cool and I would imagine, not too hard to implement. It could be the implementation of the display without the 'holographic display' needed. Kinda reminds me of an episode of Beyond 2000 from long ago. They had split up the screen in 2 parts, and if you crossed your eyes just right, you saw everything in 3D. They had a camera for each eye. It worked fantastically well, and required absolutely no extra hardware to implement it, just careful alignment of the camera's.
Now all we need is an intuitive way to display everything. Which brings me back to the Kill-A-Process-Using-Doom interface. Wouldn't it be neat if you wrote a Total Conversion for Doom or Quake, used the split screen (or two monitors) and you'd have a true 3D interface.
What they've done here with 3Dwm looks pretty cool, but what's the point of viewing a Netscape window from different angles? It's still a 2D plane... I don't see the point, frankly. Having a larger desktop space (to deposit your various windows on) is easier to conceptualize (and work with) than having various 2D planes (containing windows) left, right, on top and behind you.
Time International Magazine has a full length story on it. You might want to take a look at this well reported objective story. Here's the link to the online story:
Slashdot Mirror
So how did you get it fixed up that you don't have a phone number for your DSL line? That *is* freaky. DSL is one of the reasons I keep my landline. The other being that I call internationally sometimes, which horrendously expensive on a mobile phone - a call to anywhere in North America (from the Netherlands, Europe) will cost me about 5 US Cents a minute. Most of Europe the same. On a mobile phone calling there will cost me around 75 US Cents a minute. But it'd still be pretty cool to just have DSL and no phone number... hehe.
Cheers!
Costyn.
I was wondering that myself. If you look at the code, you'll see it downloads a different MS-BUGFIX.exe (at least, the URL is different), depending on a random number... I can't imagine it doing anything worse than what the original script already does...
That'll teach me to preview... what it says is: < i hate go to school>
Weird... I have a slightly different version which has an additional "tag" in the header:
It doesn't only send itself via email to everyone on your list, it also (if you use mIRC) sends it to others using DCC. It wipes out files with the following extensions: MP3, MP2, CSS, HTML, JPG, JPEG, JSE, WSH, JS, SCT, HTA, and VBS (may have forgotten some). It'll muck about in your registry. It's not only in the UK... it's sweeping accross the continent as people are logging in and reading their email. Apparently it originated from Manilla, the Philippenes (or so it says in the script itself), but this maybe someone who is making someone else look bad (the email address in the script says: ispyder@mail.com). It also tries to download an executable (1 of 4 different, random executables). It changes IE's Start Page.
:-) ... Makes me all the more happy I don't use Windows.
This is someone with a serious grudge against people who use Microsoft mail programs.
There's a VSB script I saw to fix most of the damage in the registry, but it looks like the site I got it from has been slashdotted, and I don't have the necessary bandwidth to mirror it (or the original script, which I have too). Email me if you do.
Cheers!
Costyn.
Actually, this version of Red Hat asks you just that. It's quite customizable. It'll ask you if you want a GNOME workstation, a KDE workstation, an AfterStep workstation, a server, or custom. I haven't tried out all the different installs. I'm guessing the server install leaves a lot of the eyecandy and other multimedia stuff out.
Until about RH 5.2 you could actually do a network install (FTP or NFS). I wonder why they stopped doing that. Now you have to make a custom boot disk, which is annoying, but not disasterous.
I don't know why you say that it's hard to keep track of what's where, because RPM is extremely powerful. You can ask any file from what package it came from, and then remove that package if you want. You can see what files belong to a package and exactly where it's gonna put them during the install. During the install you can select exactly which packages you want and each package has information on what it does. I always look for RPMs of programs before tar.gz files, just because I think make install is messy, and some make files don't have make uninstall in them (yeah, I should've looked at the makefile first). And I don't enough about coding to want to read through the source code looking for malicious code, so I usually just install the binaries from RPMs, which are plentyful on the web.
I don't know which things about NFS you had problems with. Of all the Linux systems I'm on, it works quite allright. It's sometimes a little flakey if there's still stuff running when you try to umount, but that can be fixed with the right options.
It sounds like you're the kind of person who'd find the 'custom' option during the install useful, and select which RPMs you install. I really doubt that it'd be easier to make install all the packages then still have to configure them, and make sure they are put in the right runlevels.
Anyway, my 2 Eurocents.
Cheers!
Costyn.
Well, as the previous poster pointed out, you can install it under a FAT partition, but the other nice feature is that you don't have to use disk druid or fdisk if you don't want to during the install. It'll make a default partitioning which has swap space, /boot (of about 20 megs) and / (takes whatever else is left). Useful if you're lazy or not familiar with partitioning.
Cheers!
Costyn.
I've got a Nokia 3210, which, for whatever reason, isn't available in the US, which is a shame, because IMHO, it's the sexiest phone available. It has an internal antenna and beautiful curves. It's fairly small, and lies nicely in your hand. The internals are the same as many other Nokia phones. It's very popular here in Europe. Check out the Nokia 3210
Cheers,
Costyn.
Sorry this is a little offtopic... 2 things:
1) Netscape under Unix doesn't like large lists where you have to "Select One" (the country). Very annoying. Had to use Lynx instead. Is there a workaround?
2) Can't North Americans get it in their thick skulls that not every country in the world has states and/or provinces. It always bugs the hell out of me when it has a field for State/Province which is required. And they talk about wanting to have diversity in their member base and wanting to have Internet users in other countries represented as well... this really shines out as a piece of North American bias.
Hahahhaahahaa
Doesn't look like a booth to me... just looks like a bunch of people sitting on the floor having fun? And why isn't it way more busy? It's only a guess, but if you've been using Linux your bound to have heard of Slashdot... :)
Cheers!
CvD.
It's good to hear this, though. Because that means that the musicians themselves aren't planning on going SDMI as well. I mean, we as consumers can choose not to buy SDMI enabled devices, but what if musician choose to use it? I could see the Slashdot crowd not buying SDMI devices, because they know better, but if music not in SDMI format is difficult to find, the Joe Average will happily buy SDMI devices because that's all he can get music for. In the end, we'd still be screwed.
Of course, in the meantime, the encryption scheme will have been broken and/or people will have figured out a way to intercept the music. There's no real need for concern.
Cheers!
Costyn.
Tuxgames.com seems slashdotted... I keep getting an internal server error. Oh well, try again later.
Cheers!
CvD.
There's an interesting little program with which you can converse. It's called gNiall, and you can find it at Freshmeat. You talk to it, and it looks for which words come next to which word and how often. So then it constructs sentences based upon these words. They're usually pretty nonsensical, but sometimes it'll reply something profound or really "on-topic" and it'll make you wonder. It's good fun to play with, although you can't feed it books yet to learn. Check it out!
Cheers!
Costyn.
Well, take South Africa for example. They now have GSM cellular phone coverage for the whole country. They've skipped stringing copper in large parts of the country, the rural areas. People there have cell phones, which are much more practical in terms of infrastructure (you only need some base stations (which don't need to be wired either, cause you can use microwave to link 'em all up). I can see the same thing happening in 3rd world countries. A $300 palmtop computer with which you can read and write email and do some browsing is gonna be much more useful to these people than a huge electricity hungry desktop PC which costs at least three times that.
Cheers!
Costyn.
THe YETI@Home parody is quite funny, but it actually conveys the problem of SETI@Home quite well. I don't run the client because it eats resources like anything. I don't have or need a very powerful computer, and I find it unacceptable that the Linux client takes 12MB of memory. Not even Netscape is that resource hungry. Leaving the client running in the background under Windows slows everything down to a crawl too.. it seems to do a crappy job of 'nice-ing' itself.... and if I let it complete it's job, it submits a packet that took 60+ hours to complete, while under Linux it takes only 20 hours... The 60 hours would seriously do bad things to my average completion time for one block. :) Ok, maybe that's not the point, but I wonder what goes wrong under Windows...
Cheers!
Costyn.
Since I'm a more classic SF fan, I recommend Robert Heinlein. I've always enjoyed his imagination (of future scenarios) and his plotlines, although sometimes his characters may be a little lacking. Asimov is of course very good, and the entire Foundation series is a masterpiece along with all his robot novels. Arthur C Clarke is another master of SF, but he barely needs mentioning. Of course there's the elusive Douglas Adams, but you can't call yourself an serious SF fan until you've read some of his Hitchhiker trilogy. If you're looking for other funny SF, try Harry Harrison.
:)
Well, that was a short selection from my bookcase. I have tried reading some of the more recent SF authors, but they seem to be either only action or endless political drivel, which both get boring quickly.
Oh, nearly forgot to mention William Gibson, but he needs no mentioning.
Cheers
Costyn.
I was coding a Perl piece the other day, and I hadn't done so in a while, and it'd gotten pretty messy. Anyways, it turned out that there was a variable assignment that was supposed to assign a string to a variable, but the subroutine from which it was called had the same name (I'll be using quotes more often now. :). Turns out that Red Hat 6.0 has no user limits set, and that any user can bring the whole system down just by writing a simple script that keeps calling itself and bogs up all the memory, then the swap space, and then it began shooting off random processes... well, you know how it goes. This surprised me quite a bit. I'm sure there must be other distro's out there that have this problem, and I call it a problem, cause I think that this is not something that every admin should have to think of when installing their system.
Cheers!
Costyn.
Yeah, I mean this is all froody & stuff, but with QWest already being able to transfer the entire Library of Congress in no appreciable amount of time from the east coast to the west coast, I don't so much see the need for even higher speed backbones as for the upgrading of the local loop. We're seeing quite a bit of that now with high speed cable modems and DSL. It seems like these are a big jump over the gradual increments in yer average phone modem that we've always had.
I'm not saying this kinda research is bad, but what's the point if that bandwidth is not being utilized because the local loop is still so slow? Yes, I know, when you bunch em all toghether you get formiddable bandwidth, but that is also a reason why there should also be money invested in things that utilize bandwidth better, like MBONE.
Cheers!
Costyn.
That's pretty sad... The article was posted on Slashdot and in less than an hour, the puzzle is already solved. I guess the Slashdot community has a bunch of clever people that could go work for GCHQ. Me thinks they're pretty desperate, aye? :)
Cheers!
Costyn.
There was a link in the page to a cached copy of his page that someone grabbed before his hosting company took his page down:
http://www.pc-radio.com/maxus.htm
There's a strange client-side pull though, so be prepared to hit that stop button to be able to read the page (before being redirected to a non existing CGI script).
Cheers!
Costyn.
This is really annoying... Not the fact that we have to 25% again, but the fact that it took so long for them to say anything at all, while, as far as I can tell from the article, the problem was already known before we reached the 100% mark?
I will still continue to support them, however.
Cheers!
Costyn.
I disagree. I use a pretty standard RedHat 6.0 installation, and I always use RPMs whenever I can. However, some packages come as tar.gz only (I understand not everyone wants to package their stuff). It seems to me that more than 50% of the targzs I download and try to compile with the above instructions are aborted because of some error or that it can't find the file. I never learnt C (we were taught Java at our uni), and I don't have the time to learn C, so debugging the compile output is not something I can do. It's always infuriating when another packages refuses to compile correctly. That's why gzipped tars are *not* a great system for those of us who don't know C.
Cheers!
Costyn.
This would be really cool and I would imagine, not too hard to implement. It could be the implementation of the display without the 'holographic display' needed. Kinda reminds me of an episode of Beyond 2000 from long ago. They had split up the screen in 2 parts, and if you crossed your eyes just right, you saw everything in 3D. They had a camera for each eye. It worked fantastically well, and required absolutely no extra hardware to implement it, just careful alignment of the camera's.
Now all we need is an intuitive way to display everything. Which brings me back to the Kill-A-Process-Using-Doom interface. Wouldn't it be neat if you wrote a Total Conversion for Doom or Quake, used the split screen (or two monitors) and you'd have a true 3D interface.
What they've done here with 3Dwm looks pretty cool, but what's the point of viewing a Netscape window from different angles? It's still a 2D plane... I don't see the point, frankly. Having a larger desktop space (to deposit your various windows on) is easier to conceptualize (and work with) than having various 2D planes (containing windows) left, right, on top and behind you.
Cheers!
Time International Magazine has a full length story on it. You might want to take a look at this well reported objective story. Here's the link to the online story:
0 ,3266,31865,00.html
http://www.pathfinder.com/time/magazine/articles/
Cheers!