To: support@milberg.com
From: marty@supine.xxx Subject: VA Linux Press Release
Dear Sir/Madam
I refer to your press release on the VA Linux class action law suit you have posted to your website (http://www.milberg.com/valinux/) and which is featured at Yahoo! (http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/010111/ny_milberg.html).
I am concerned about your use of "Linux" as short hand for "VA Linux" as it is possible this may create confusion. The term "Linux" refers to software (an operating system kernel) and people reading the press release may become confused between your use of the term as short hand and the software.
I would urge you to
edit the press release so that short hand references to VA Linux all use the term "the Company" to avoid such confusion.
well you could, but that would defeat the main benefit spammers utilise, which is the ability to send a single body with multiple (ie. hundreds if not millions) of RCPT TO addresses.
the current methodology makes the relay do all the work by making it contact all the smtp hosts of the people being spammed. by adding a unique web bug (and hence a unique body) for each receiver you would create an immense amount of load on the spammer's own system and network connection.
NSI has no problem transfering domains if they are paid up and still active. Registering with one of the openSRS resellers means your domain can be in someone elses control within two days (in my experience, no guarantees though, it can weeks).
See if you can pay you bills for the next year and then transfer it before it runs out again.
How many transactions will be enacted on the database each [ minute | hour | day | week ] whose need to be posted to the other servers will be critical?
If this number is small or non existent then would it be possible to keep a log of transactions (ie. store the SQL query) and run them against the other DB servers??
You need preferential voting like we have here in Australia.
I can vote for whoever I like in the knowledge that if they don't get up, I can steer my vote to a second preference and if they don't get up... etc. etc.
It means my vote counts in every way, rather then removing my vote from helping decide a two horse race.
...don't get me started on the college system...;)
The degree of difficulty goes up if they have made extensive use of spacer gifs (which need an alt='') and relevant images which haven't been named in a helpful way (14572.jpg instead of guy_clearing_bar_in_polevault.jpg) requiring each one to be opened, examined and alt text recorded for it.
Let us keep our fingers crossed that the html monkeys^H^H^H^H^H^H^H web design firm (would ibm outsource that?) made the pages easy to parse with perl or some such tool.
gnome is a desktop, with underlying infrastructure of libraries and gui tool kit, plus some applications based on said libraries and tool kit (gnucash, gnumeric, gedit etc. etc.), it has been around a while now (refer www.gnome.org)
helixcode, which hasn't been around so long, is a distribution of gnome (much like redhat is a distro of gnu/linux) so it bundles up the desktop, libraries, tool kit, apps etc. etc. checks for dependencies and then offers you a nice gui based update mechanism to make your life *so* much easier... (refer www.helixcode.com)
tell me, when was the last time you checked what updates were available for your distro / desktop ??
You certainly can't "agree to ignore" that clause of the GPL, but nor do I think you run into any difficulties if what you are providing is an unaltered, cost price, copy of a distribution that is available freely on the internet. Technically *you* are supposed to provide the source for a product you sell (ie. not rely on someone else's ftp server) but in this situation, offering to download it also would suffice.
My hosting provider lets me retrieve my email via POP but any sending has to be done via my dial-up ISPs SMTP box. Surely this is a solution that you could work with. Leave the authenticating to the ISP which is probably already doing it anyway!
Focusing on the point about this site being blocked by Net Nanny et al.
Is it too much to ask the content filtering software to pass thru anything from a.EDU server (or derivatives thereof) because you have to be a legitamite educational institution to register under that TLD.
If we can't trust educational institutions to not host porn or bomb making HOW-TOs, then who can we trust?
later marty
PS. of course this assumption falls over once you start thinking of what might be on a page at students.institution.edu... doh!
I appreciated that the article was more about the man and left his message in for context only. There are plenty of places and articles to discover the ideas and theories ESR expounds on (CatB etc.), but rarely have I been treated to one that is so concentrated on the man and his little "me-thinks".
Kudos to the author, too, for stooping to the "usual tabloid questions" only to provide the humour slant.
Does there need to be a point to anything? I like to think so. There certainly is here. Superficially no, but now i think about it the guy got to have a great time bashing on some hardware and software that weren't meant for the job he had in mind and came up with a cheap and beautiful solution. At first read (on the superficial level) it seemed like doing something for the sake of doing it. But, as you point out (to a tired me - i think karma needs to take into consideration fatigue and blood caffiene levels - Rob you listening?:*), that is what hacking is about.
As always you're free to not read anything you don't feel is fit.
I know... but i still like to think that/. acts as a filter, isolating things that are worth reading, sometimes i just don't get the feeling it is working so well these days. Then again, it could just be a lack of sleep.
Forgive my lack of humour, but what was the point of converting a router of all things to a MP3 player?
Building one from the ground up, reassembling one from odds and ends lying around or adding functionality to an existing product is only really "news" if it achieves something new, whether it be in terms of quality, quantity or uniqueness. I found the previous article about a player with 80 hrs of storage more newsworthy.
So/. isn't only about "news"... but where do we draw the line between something like this being interesting or lame?
I noticed the pictures illustrating the effect of menu fade was of Office, not well known for its limited use of widgets. Surely the more sensible use of toolbars is a more easily achieved and less obtrusive modification. I use the gnome editor and much prefer the minimalist use of widgets. And what will be the effect on the machines performance if every time it has finally finished the fade, you touch the mouse and it has to re-render the menus.
It seems like they built something "cool" and went looking for a use. I think better user interface design is the answer to screen clutter.
By analysing the orbits of 13 of these comets, Dr Murray has detected the tell-tale signs of a single massive object that deflected all of them into their current orbits. "Although I have only analysed 13 comets in detail," he told BBC News Online, "the effect is pretty conclusive. I have calculated that there is only about a one in 1,700 chance that it is due to chance."
Observing at that distance, what is the resolution of the tools (telescope?) he is using? And of the many calculations to determine trajectory for 13 different comets, what would be the probability for error?
Also, at that distance, the view we would get would appear to be effectively two dimensional with small depths very hard to perceive. Yes/no?? That being the case, how would the they determine the trajectory for a comet that would be three dimensional, without all the info?
But the new planet would be 30,000 times more distant from the Sun than the Earth, putting it a significant fraction of the distance to the nearest star.
What does he mean by significant fraction? 1/*000 ? 1/*000000 ? 1/*000000000 etc.....
Being so far from the Sun - three billion billion miles - it would take almost six million years to orbit it.
That being the case, how can they be sure it is orbiting our Sun?
Hope someone can shed a little light on these for me...
Don't know if it was mentioned by anyone else yet, but that piece of info about the crack coming from a US.mil installation was provided by a suit. I watched the program and he was supposed to be expounding on the new installation of boxen to run the ASX and got drawn on a comment he made about security. He mentioned they get lots of script kiddie style attacks, but said they got a couple of serious attacks recently, one local and one that "appeared" to come from a a US.mil box, but there was certainly no clarification ("Business Sunday" certainly isn't up to discussing spoofed IPs and compromised hosts).
The key word with Linux is community. You know that if you have problem Joe Bloggs on the other side of the globe has already had the same problem and probably made a note on a website or newsgroup about it.
If not people with years of experience and a wealth of knowledge are willing to offer advice online or at a local LUG meeting.
How could Sun organise something to match the scale of what Linux has going for it at the moment.
Everything always comes back to community... ask a Mac user, an Amiga user, a BeBoxer...
...and even if Solaris was free, could we afford the hardware to make use of what it has that Linux hasn't.
Marty
My $0.50 (adjusted for the rise in the price of gold)
As mentioned above, the "rest" of the world isn't quite ready for Linux, nor *BSD for that matter, just yet. Mainly because we haven't reduced it to the level of abstraction they enjoy living their life at.
There was an article "In the beginning their was a command line" by Neal Stephenson (sorry, don't have the URL on me!) that aptly described why people don't want to know any more then they need to. Why we watch the news to get 30 second snippets of a copy writers version of the truth, listen to the radio to get someone elses idea of what i should be listening to. Why people want us to know what a device driver or system call is and they can stay blissfully ignorant.
There was also an article that was linked from here a week or two back about 'linux lite' where a GUI to suit "the rest of the world" applied on a substrate of Linux (or *BSD:*) would be the product to compete with M$, not the OS we know (and love) at the moment.
And don't believe M$ needs to propagate any FUD. I am sure a much more significant negative image is created by word of mouth from people who jumped ship from M$ to Linux and had a bad experience because they really weren't prepared for it.
Slashdot Mirror
What have you done for the community today?
Lotteries are a tax on people who can't do math.
Does this mean this pool is a tax on people who haven't read "Mythical Man Month"...
marty
PS: yeah, i know you don't pay to enter, go along with the joke...
...you could create a unique URL for each spam.
well you could, but that would defeat the main benefit spammers utilise, which is the ability to send a single body with multiple (ie. hundreds if not millions) of RCPT TO addresses.
the current methodology makes the relay do all the work by making it contact all the smtp hosts of the people being spammed. by adding a unique web bug (and hence a unique body) for each receiver you would create an immense amount of load on the spammer's own system and network connection.
just my 2 cents
marty
Sure, stick to 2.2 for production machines that need to be solid as a rock.
But, if we want the bugs that are there to be ironed out, we need people to install this on as many *non-critical* systems as possible.
my 2.2 cents (GST included)
marty
You went about this the wrong way.
NSI has no problem transfering domains if they are paid up and still active. Registering with one of the openSRS resellers means your domain can be in someone elses control within two days (in my experience, no guarantees though, it can weeks).
See if you can pay you bills for the next year and then transfer it before it runs out again.
HTH
marty
How many transactions will be enacted on the database each [ minute | hour | day | week ] whose need to be posted to the other servers will be critical?
If this number is small or non existent then would it be possible to keep a log of transactions (ie. store the SQL query) and run them against the other DB servers??
You need preferential voting like we have here in Australia.
...don't get me started on the college system... ;)
I can vote for whoever I like in the knowledge that if they don't get up, I can steer my vote to a second preference and if they don't get up... etc. etc.
It means my vote counts in every way, rather then removing my vote from helping decide a two horse race.
Marty
Why do you use "Australia" like all of us down under are responsible for IBMs bad?
We aren't **that** much of a back water, some us did listen to users who surfed without images back in the mid 90's...
marty
The degree of difficulty goes up if they have made extensive use of spacer gifs (which need an alt='') and relevant images which haven't been named in a helpful way (14572.jpg instead of guy_clearing_bar_in_polevault.jpg) requiring each one to be opened, examined and alt text recorded for it.
Let us keep our fingers crossed that the html monkeys^H^H^H^H^H^H^H web design firm (would ibm outsource that?) made the pages easy to parse with perl or some such tool.
marty
I quote:
gnome is a layer of a user interface... it is still only two things:
it is built on top of X, then a window manager goes on top of gnome, as do the apps etc. etc...
later
marty
...rasterman and mandrake ??
www.valinux.com is what...
marty
gnome is a desktop, with underlying infrastructure of libraries and gui tool kit, plus some applications based on said libraries and tool kit (gnucash, gnumeric, gedit etc. etc.), it has been around a while now (refer www.gnome.org)
helixcode, which hasn't been around so long, is a distribution of gnome (much like redhat is a distro of gnu/linux) so it bundles up the desktop, libraries, tool kit, apps etc. etc. checks for dependencies and then offers you a nice gui based update mechanism to make your life *so* much easier... (refer www.helixcode.com)
tell me, when was the last time you checked what updates were available for your distro / desktop ??
HTH
marty
You certainly can't "agree to ignore" that clause of the GPL, but nor do I think you run into any difficulties if what you are providing is an unaltered, cost price, copy of a distribution that is available freely on the internet. Technically *you* are supposed to provide the source for a product you sell (ie. not rely on someone else's ftp server) but in this situation, offering to download it also would suffice.
Marty
My hosting provider lets me retrieve my email via POP but any sending has to be done via my dial-up ISPs SMTP box. Surely this is a solution that you could work with. Leave the authenticating to the ISP which is probably already doing it anyway!
Marty
Focusing on the point about this site being blocked by Net Nanny et al.
.EDU server (or derivatives thereof) because you have to be a legitamite educational institution to register under that TLD.
Is it too much to ask the content filtering software to pass thru anything from a
If we can't trust educational institutions to not host porn or bomb making HOW-TOs, then who can we trust?
later
marty
PS. of course this assumption falls over once you start thinking of what might be on a page at students.institution.edu... doh!
Kudos to the author, too, for stooping to the "usual tabloid questions" only to provide the humour slant.
cheers
marty
As always you're free to not read anything you don't feel is fit.
I know... but i still like to think that /. acts as a filter, isolating things that are worth reading, sometimes i just don't get the feeling it is working so well these days. Then again, it could just be a lack of sleep.
cheers
marty
Building one from the ground up, reassembling one from odds and ends lying around or adding functionality to an existing product is only really "news" if it achieves something new, whether it be in terms of quality, quantity or uniqueness. I found the previous article about a player with 80 hrs of storage more newsworthy.
So /. isn't only about "news"... but where do we draw the line between something like this being interesting or lame?
cheers
marty
I noticed the pictures illustrating the effect of menu fade was of Office, not well known for its limited use of widgets. Surely the more sensible use of toolbars is a more easily achieved and less obtrusive modification. I use the gnome editor and much prefer the minimalist use of widgets. And what will be the effect on the machines performance if every time it has finally finished the fade, you touch the mouse and it has to re-render the menus.
It seems like they built something "cool" and went looking for a use. I think better user interface design is the answer to screen clutter.
cheers marty
Observing at that distance, what is the resolution of the tools (telescope?) he is using? And of the many calculations to determine trajectory for 13 different comets, what would be the probability for error?
Also, at that distance, the view we would get would appear to be effectively two dimensional with small depths very hard to perceive. Yes/no??
That being the case, how would the they determine the trajectory for a comet that would be three dimensional, without all the info?
What does he mean by significant fraction?
1/*000 ?
1/*000000 ?
1/*000000000 etc.....
That being the case, how can they be sure it is orbiting our Sun?
Hope someone can shed a little light on these for me...
cheers
marty
cheers
marty
Cheers
Marty
If not people with years of experience and a wealth of knowledge are willing to offer advice online or at a local LUG meeting.
How could Sun organise something to match the scale of what Linux has going for it at the moment.
Everything always comes back to community... ask a Mac user, an Amiga user, a BeBoxer...
...and even if Solaris was free, could we afford the hardware to make use of what it has that Linux hasn't.
Marty
My $0.50 (adjusted for the rise in the price of gold)
There was an article "In the beginning their was a command line" by Neal Stephenson (sorry, don't have the URL on me!) that aptly described why people don't want to know any more then they need to. Why we watch the news to get 30 second snippets of a copy writers version of the truth, listen to the radio to get someone elses idea of what i should be listening to. Why people want us to know what a device driver or system call is and they can stay blissfully ignorant.
There was also an article that was linked from here a week or two back about 'linux lite' where a GUI to suit "the rest of the world" applied on a substrate of Linux (or *BSD :*) would be the product to compete with M$, not the OS we know (and love) at the moment.
And don't believe M$ needs to propagate any FUD. I am sure a much more significant negative image is created by word of mouth from people who jumped ship from M$ to Linux and had a bad experience because they really weren't prepared for it.
Just my US$0.10 (the oz dollar went up!)
Marty