I think what it really showed was what you said.. every system has cracks and determined people will always find a way through those cracks.
All this extra security is there for one reason and one reason only... because it makes people FEEL better. Some guys bring boxcutters onto planes and hijack them and cause a mess... so we start enforcing every arbitrary rule in the book , whether it would have made any difference or not.
People see armed gaurds and silly carry on bag restrictions and think "good the powers that be are doing something". Thats ALL it really accomplishes. People are NO safer now than ever before. However, the truth is they were never in much danger as I still believe you are about as likely to die from terrorist acts as you are to die from say, a lightning strike.
Maybe is a sysadmin thing but I think about security, and after the last time I flew out of logan I thought about those box cutters. I dunno, I am pretty damned sure I could get something comparable on the plane if I really wanted to.
I mean a box cutter? be serious! hell make it out of plastic and then you just need to hide the blades. Do you know how easy it is to hide a razor blade amongst things? fuck bring a laptop and shove the blade into the floppy drive or in the case behind the screen.
Hell fuck it... just train them in proper hand to hand combat. Put a few people on the plane (like they did) with the right training and the boxcutter is just a formality. Give them pens if you really think they need a weapon.
> You have no business sneaking around a nuclear plant.
And who exactly are you to tell me my buisness? Are you me all of a sudden? Are you a nuclear power plant? Guessing you are neither, I don't think you are qualified to be making that determination.
Sheesh. Some people really seem to like telling other people their buisness.
Ill note this is pretty easy to demonstrate too. I had a south facing window in my office for a while (I have since moved offices) and was playing iwth light reflection. I had a prism and a few other things. Basically, we hat ethe overhead lkighting and leave it off, but I needed some light, so I figured, why not harness the sun?
So I took some cdrs that I didn't need and threw them on my window sill.
Damn did they ever change color quick. Went from dark green to bright pink over the course of a month or so. I still have them now on my window sill. They reflect light just fine but, ill be damned if there is any intelligable data still on them.
Not only will I not be buying them, I sent an email to thge email address provided in the replacement message to let the people at American Greetings know what I think of their practice (worded appropriately respectfully and professionally, afterall, I generally just ignore random name calling and general beligerence) and that I intend to be both boycotting them and informing everyone I know as to their practices and asking them to join in the boycott.
A B10? is that a plane? F50? Is that one of those annoying light trucks that people bomb around in and dream of even more obnoxious trucks like the F150?
The bug is just so much less ambiguous. Even my favorite vehicle the motorcycle varies in size enough that you couldn't use them (motorcycle? did you meant the Goldwing 1800 or the rebel 250? or was that a Bandit 600? or maybe a little suzuki 125? Does a vespa count?)
I cant think of too many cars that A) have been made about the exact same size always and B) will be instantly recognizable and easy to visualize the size of for people worldwide as the VW bug. Maybe the VW Minibus but, thats wrong on just so many levels.
> I just love the F-150, I don't really need it.. I want it. > As a male in his 20s, I feel the need for large 4x4 power.
As another male in his 20s I can certainly understand that. I feel the same urges myself. PMore power grunt grunt.
However I also realise it and try not to make my decisions in life based on it.
Except I did buy a motorcycle. Want 40 MPG in the city and better on the higheway? Just about any bike will do it.... and still out accelerate nearly anything on the road.
In fact, thats 40 MPG while out accelerating everything and generally zooming around like an idiot who doesn't give a shit about his gas milage.
Not to mention the balls factor... you can have all the F-150's you want, nothing is as cool as a bike. Whens the last time you were in a F-150 and some dude in a shitbox rolled down his window at a stoplight and started telling you about the truck he used to have?
Happens all the time on my bike. In fact, it took me several months to get over the fact that heads would turn as I rode doen the street. People would randomly wave or give a thumbs up (especially other riders but less often in the city)
Oh yea, and all the cagers get so jealous when you scoot through a traffic jam and get shave a good 20 mins off your commute.
Of course, you have to be more careful, and you have to practice riding and think about how you stay alive on a bike if you wanna ride long term. However, thats just the price you pay for style and efficiency.
You know thats extremely rude. You are obviously quite inept, how about a lesson.
You see when you are making a "straw man" argument, you need to first build up your straw man. Good start, bad analogies are always key to building a good straw man.
You need followthrough though. Ya see, after building your strawman, you are suposed to then attack him and tear him down. A single sarchastic remark about opressive governments (notice you are the first one using that phrase too) just don't cut it.
If you want a more in depth look at the straw man, just read any essay by Ayn Rand, she was really good at them and used them to great effect.... hell some people actually still take her seriously!
> Quite a lot of things such as this are sold everyday. > We have stores that sell drug paraphernalia like water bongs, yet smoking > and possessing marijuana is illegal. They claim it is for tobacca. Yeah, right!
Actually I wager you havn't paid attention to the head shops lately. A few weeks back Mr Ashcroft decided that these were illegal and the "For Tobacco use only" labels were not enough.
So his cronies under the public names of "Operation Headhunter" and "Operation Pipe Dreams" raided a bunch of headshops (online retailers of pipes and "brick and mortor" shops).
Its a sad day when it becomes illegal to sell pretty artfully done peices of glass. Especially for someone like myself who collects glass pipes.
I know a company that does telephone calls for liberal non-profit groups and charities (ie fundraisers... aka telemarketers) and all of the dumb terminals that the callers log in to runs sco.
Of course, this same company has been taking 5 years to migrate from a foxpro backend database to oracle (still not done) and has a pretty incompetent IT staff (or so friends I have that are callers tell me, one of whom is on the road to unix-saavy)
I agree with Bush.... if not in exact statement in sentiment when he said "Democracy is not America's gift to the world, it is the Almighty's gift to humanity". Now my views on "the Almighty" aside, I agree. Government with input from the people is a goodness, even when poorly implimented.
I think getting rid of opressors and fighting wars of liberation is worthwhile and something I support.
Where I disagree is that Bush is the man to do it. Frankly, I don't trust his motivations. I oppose displacing Saddam simply because I see no proof that we really truely intend to do anything to properly empower the people of Iraq.
And when is the last time the US made any sort of sacrifice for the UN?
Arn't we kin do fhypocrits to wipe our ass with every treaty that the UN or anyone asks us to sign, and then to point our finger at Iraq and say they arn't playing fair?
The Bush administration said that the Iraq issue will "test the relevance of the UN". Personally, I think the kyoto protocol already did that. The US decided YEARS ago that the UN wasn't really relevant and was to be used as nothing more than a vehicle to push OUR agenda on the rest of the world.
Besides...look at the region. Can you honestly say that a person ruling a country in that region can be considered a competent ruler AND NOT have nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs?
Just look at who they boarder and then tell me they shouldn't have weapons of mass destruction. Fuck, if I were in Saddam's shoes I would too!
> Glad to hear it's so stable, hopefully they'll keep it up for a good long > time...I use my.cs account for news, so I can get to my.newsrc from > anywhere...
There are no plans to get rid of it. Though there has been some murmer of a desire to have somebody (some day, in our copious free time) to try and gauge about how many people actually use the beast.
> Usenet is great because it lets you choose your UI and get in touch > with people of all sorts of different interests.
I agree, and I like usenet, no really I do.
However it seems to be I dunno. About every year or so I start reading news and keep it up for a week, then lose it. The signal to noise ratio seems low (hell I don't really even read comments on/. anymore unless an article particularly interests me like say, my director being quoted in a news article;) )
I mean I WANT to read news, maybe I just need a better client? Ive been using slrn and its nice... colorization of stuff, doesn't take up more screen real estate than my 80x24 boarderless Eterm window...
I can read news for as long as I can keep up... after I miss a few days on a group with alot of posts, I get lost and the cost to catch up, seems to just grow exponentially. (that and I can't figure out how to read news from the news server my home ISP gives me... and when it comes to personal news reading and mailing list stuff I don't like ot use my "Tufts" identity - if thats not obvious from my published email here)
In fact, I believe this is probably the first/. thread where I have admitted my employer to being anything other than "A University"... just because I do like to "keep the worlds seprate".
> I think the rise of the web and the move to seperate online desktops (rather > than shelling into the big servers) removed a big part of Usenet culture at > Tufts (and elsewhere)
Sure has. We still have a big honkin news server of course, often joking that its our most reliable service. Never goes down, never needs any attention.
I don't even remember the last time I saw mail to news@ - I think we get a couple of requests a year. (I don't ever remember us getting alot but ive only been here for a few years now and usenet was definitly on its way out by then)
I currently see 49 messages on tufts.general the first apears to be from 12 Sep 2000. The most recent was Jan 17th of last year.
Thats why I can't get into usenet. Its just become all too sad.
>> Is this Grant of the "3 musketeers" Grant? Hiya! >> >Yes, it's me.
Can't say as I really know who you are but I sure have seen alot of files you own and my reference to what emerald used to be and an old document we found talking about what emerald used to be...
I believe it was a rant of yours that went out in email about emerald being severely underpowered. Found it in an old box as we cleaned stuff out a while back. (now emerald is severely overpowered for what it does given that email delivery has been turned off... )
> So Pearl was this VMS system, mostly around for running Stats programs. > As more and more students started getting accounts and dialing in > (1200 or 2400 baud for the most part) Pearl got slower and overburdened 'til > it couldn't be used for its original purposes.... it eventually founds its way to sit on a desk in the TAB basement to languish powered off until it was revived for a while as an mail test machine (under a different name) and was finnaly decomissioned again recently.
I bet thats more than you ever wanted to know about it. (and yes, for some period of time the desk it sat on was mine, however it was there before me, so I guess I sat at its desk for a while)
> Emerald was a Unix system (DEC?) brought in as "the email machine", > everyone would log in and use Pine, around 93-94.
And remained as such for a while (tho it used to do imap too) until I believe we decomissioned all mail services on it last month. (dragged me kicking and screaming over to trumpeter... how I miss procmail... )
Emerald saw several hardware incarnations over the years. I have seen references from before my time that it was once a Decstation 3000 or some similarly underpowered DEC hardware (even then, or so the old rant we found cleaning out some old boxes states).
The current setup is kinda spiffy and the attached raid array is proof that the Dec enginners were both brillient and crack smokers), but as we have gotten away from that platform and the whole big monolithic servers thing, I can't for the life of me remember what it is (and I am too lazy to look it up)
> Went to Worst Place Imaginable, huh? You have my sympathies.
Well I dropped out after 1 year... but I did graduate from their night Unix/C/C++ program a few years later.
That aside, other than being in Worcester, WPI was a pretty nice place. I actually liked it alot and always did figure that if I was going to go back to school for real, thats where I would still want to go.
(assuming I didn't decided to completely change careers and go for law or something equally non-tech)
Nope Tufts a nice database of Mac addresses and who owns them. Its really quite slick. You can't get a DHCP address without registering. Well you CAN but the only thing on all the net that you can get to is the registration server, because unregistereds end up on a private locked down net.
Its all pretty slick and I would like to say that Tufts is unique in it, however, about 7 years ago when I went to WPI they were quite swift about MACs themselves. I remember a fellow student bought a new NIC card and sold his old one...
about 10 mins after both people put their machines back on the net, they got emails from the network admins asking if it was a permanent change.
However your right, they wouldn't have needed such a slick setup to catch this, a simple managed switch (who still uses hubs?) could have done this.
Such a nice general purpose trick. Though one best used by a person with a sense (even a small one) of tact and subtlety, because its just silly when done wrong.
For example the smackhead that made some smack reference to me in the bar hoping I could poinbt her at the nearest dealer. When I missed the reference (not being or generally associating with smackheads) she tried again, and then proceded to make gestures and use emphasis to drive the point home that she is hoping I know where to get her some illegal drugs because of course I know exactly what she is talking about. ("Come on don't be stupid, your not a cop or somethin are you" was about where I really tuned in)
Certainly an example of the inappropriate use of a technique used to advance interpersonal relationships and gaurd against social faux-pas, succeeding in doing neither.
Also a good thing to remember is if they get the reference, it may be that they just have a bunch of friends who are gay (or insert other relevant interest, sexual preference, or subculture instead), and thats cool too... because it means it probably doesn't bother them at the least and you may meet other people through them;)
That or you picked the wrong reference because everybody gets it.
um this is a conversation about a guide on a website...published by the original author, personallty?
cuz everything I saw in these articles was. No hetro-run publishing houses in sight. Just a couple of people wtritting what they know.
As for compiled....make some notes and send them on in and see if they want to add them... or write your own stuff entirely, like they did,
Don't mean to sound hasrsh but, these are if nothing else some amusing articles that some may find helpfull, and they can only cover the aspects that they know about.
>>"Then they all have different license terms." > This is something you should look into before you buy the software
This remind sme of the time that, as a joke, we go tin some new legato licenses and I said to my boss "This has an EULA on it. I want to open it and install the software but I am pretty sure that I am not authorized to enter the University into binding contracts, maybe we should send this to the legal department"
There was a good chuckle we got out of it but... isn't it the case? I dunno about YOU but I am no lawyer! How can I, a lowly sysadmin, be expected to be the person negotiating and entering into contracts on behalf of the organization at large? In any legal sense I am not even qualified to understand these things. I can't make a real legal interpretation... yet I am still expected to just blindly get these word filled envelopes and open them as if its "just normal" (and it IS just normal)
While I agree that you are right, a contract hardly needs to be in writting to be a contract, there is a bit more to software licenses than that.
First of all Software license "contracts" are very complex. WHile certainly if we make a verbal agreement that I am going to sell my car to you for $X then we have a contract and I have to do it... fine.
However, how can you agree to a contract that you have never seen?
I dunno about you but ive just about never seen a software license for a peice of software BEFORE I bought it. Hell, much of the time its just some random peice of paper inside a box that I ALREADY PAID FOR.
Now lets talke the car example, I put a peice of paper inside the car and attache it to the ignition that says "by using this car you agree to X" then I sell it to you without you ever seeing it...
SHould you be bound by the "terms" on the ignition?
Frankly, I think this is silly. Who in there right mind would actually sign a contract that allows some random 3rd party to come barging in and do a work crippling audit any time they please? Should something so drastic be allowed to be "assumed" to be a normal part of such contracts?
Common wisdom that "a contract must be signed" does exist for a reason. If there is no formal signed contract then the judge has alot of leeway in deciding. If its wreitten on paper and signed then the person is attesting in writting to understanding the terms of the contract and if he doesn't understand then he is still in the wrong because he attested to it and agreed.
When its not signed and under such dubious circumstances, the judge gets to decide whether the parties involved really has such an agreement and what is reasonable assumption for such an agreement under the circumstances.
Um not exactly. The GPL says you can't restrict ANYONE ELSE from distributing.
So you CAN cgharge a fee to download. You can even package it up and sell it on store shelves. You CANNOT stop anyone who gets it from you from doing the same (or giving it away for free).
Now, you may dislike that too, but the specific restriction that you cited (that its not possible to charge for binaries) doesn't exist.
In fact, the original author can chose to distribute under a non-gpl license in addition to the GPL if he likes.
And getting back on topic...this sounds very similar to pine. Debian you will notice doesn't distribute pine because pine doesn't allow binaries built from modified source to be distributed. So debian has no license... so debian obeyed the licence.
the mplayer people ask why "Debian legal" thinks it knows better hwat the GPL means than they do. Its not that at all. Its that debian, as a distributer, at som elevel has to answer the question "Do we have license to distribute what we are distributing" and they are basing that decision solely on the text of the licenses involved. Its that simple.
Debian, by policy, does not violate software licenses. Quite simple. Debian also does not accept special licensing terms (ie "You the debian group may distribute this, but noone else may") as they are. Since debian is doing the distributing, its the debain people (not the authors of the stuff being distributed) that have to make the call as to whether the license gives them permission to distribute since it is debian that puts its neck on the chopping block if it distributes something they have no permission to distribute.
-Steve (a rather inactive debian developer, who used to read the debian mailing lists and thinks this issue is nothing new)
So you go to the next store and ask, and the next store, until some minimum wage worker behind the counter just doesn't give a shit and sells you the blanks, maybe you might have to say "Oh shit, I left my locksmiths ID at home".
If that don't work, then don't use a key blank. you could make a master out of a hacksaw blade if you wanted to. It might not last long, when used as a key, but it can be done.
Or get a cheap kit from the art store and pour a bunch of acrylic molds to make key blanks of exactly the type you need. Its a bit more expensive, and also may not last as long as a metal key, but hey, this is hardly an obstacle.
Slashdot Mirror
I think what it really showed was what you said.. every system has cracks and determined people will always find a way through those cracks.
All this extra security is there for one reason and one reason only... because it makes people FEEL better. Some guys bring boxcutters onto planes and hijack them and cause a mess... so we start enforcing every arbitrary rule in the book , whether it would have made any difference or not.
People see armed gaurds and silly carry on bag restrictions and think "good the powers that be are doing something". Thats ALL it really accomplishes. People are NO safer now than ever before. However, the truth is they were never in much danger as I still believe you are about as likely to die from terrorist acts as you are to die from say, a lightning strike.
Maybe is a sysadmin thing but I think about security, and after the last time I flew out of logan I thought about those box cutters. I dunno, I am pretty damned sure I could get something comparable on the plane if I really wanted to.
I mean a box cutter? be serious! hell make it out of plastic and then you just need to hide the blades. Do you know how easy it is to hide a razor blade amongst things? fuck bring a laptop and shove the blade into the floppy drive or in the case behind the screen.
Hell fuck it... just train them in proper hand to hand combat. Put a few people on the plane (like they did) with the right training and the boxcutter is just a formality. Give them pens if you really think they need a weapon.
-Steve
> You have no business sneaking around a nuclear plant.
And who exactly are you to tell me my buisness? Are you me all of a sudden? Are you a nuclear power plant? Guessing you are neither, I don't think you are qualified to be making that determination.
Sheesh. Some people really seem to like telling other people their buisness.
-Steve
Ill note this is pretty easy to demonstrate too. I had a south facing window in my office for a while (I have since moved offices) and was playing iwth light reflection. I had a prism and a few other things. Basically, we hat ethe overhead lkighting and leave it off, but I needed some light, so I figured, why not harness the sun?
So I took some cdrs that I didn't need and threw them on my window sill.
Damn did they ever change color quick. Went from dark green to bright pink over the course of a month or so. I still have them now on my window sill. They reflect light just fine but, ill be damned if there is any intelligable data still on them.
-Steve
Not only will I not be buying them, I sent an email to thge email address provided in the replacement message to let the people at American Greetings know what I think of their practice (worded appropriately respectfully and professionally, afterall, I generally just ignore random name calling and general beligerence) and that I intend to be both boycotting them and informing everyone I know as to their practices and asking them to join in the boycott.
I encourage others to do the same.
-Steve
> Or 65536 CPU?
I didn't know they were still designing 65 series CPUs. The last I saw was the 65816.
-Steve
A B10? is that a plane? F50? Is that one of those annoying light trucks that people bomb around in and dream of even more obnoxious trucks like the F150?
The bug is just so much less ambiguous. Even my favorite vehicle the motorcycle varies in size enough that you couldn't use them (motorcycle? did you meant the Goldwing 1800 or the rebel 250? or was that a Bandit 600? or maybe a little suzuki 125? Does a vespa count?)
I cant think of too many cars that A) have been made about the exact same size always and B) will be instantly recognizable and easy to visualize the size of for people worldwide as the VW bug. Maybe the VW Minibus but, thats wrong on just so many levels.
-Steve
> I just love the F-150, I don't really need it.. I want it.
> As a male in his 20s, I feel the need for large 4x4 power.
As another male in his 20s I can certainly understand that. I feel the
same urges myself. PMore power grunt grunt.
However I also realise it and try not to make my decisions in life based on it.
Except I did buy a motorcycle. Want 40 MPG in the city and better on the higheway? Just about any bike will do it.... and still out accelerate nearly anything on the road.
In fact, thats 40 MPG while out accelerating everything and generally zooming around like an idiot who doesn't give a shit about his gas milage.
Not to mention the balls factor... you can have all the F-150's you want, nothing is as cool as a bike. Whens the last time you were in a F-150 and some dude in a shitbox rolled down his window at a stoplight and started telling you about the truck he used to have?
Happens all the time on my bike. In fact, it took me several months to get over the fact that heads would turn as I rode doen the street. People would randomly wave or give a thumbs up (especially other riders but less often in the city)
Oh yea, and all the cagers get so jealous when you scoot through a traffic jam and get shave a good 20 mins off your commute.
Of course, you have to be more careful, and you have to practice riding and think about how you stay alive on a bike if you wanna ride long term. However, thats just the price you pay for style and efficiency.
-Steve
You know thats extremely rude. You are obviously quite inept, how about a lesson.
You see when you are making a "straw man" argument, you need to first build up your straw man. Good start, bad analogies are always key to building a good straw man.
You need followthrough though. Ya see, after building your strawman, you are suposed to then attack him and tear him down. A single sarchastic remark about opressive governments (notice you are the first one using that phrase too) just don't cut it.
If you want a more in depth look at the straw man, just read any essay by Ayn Rand, she was really good at them and used them to great effect.... hell some people actually still take her seriously!
-Steve
> Quite a lot of things such as this are sold everyday.
> We have stores that sell drug paraphernalia like water bongs, yet smoking
> and possessing marijuana is illegal. They claim it is for tobacca. Yeah, right!
Actually I wager you havn't paid attention to the head shops lately. A few weeks back Mr Ashcroft decided that these were illegal and the "For Tobacco use only" labels were not enough.
So his cronies under the public names of "Operation Headhunter" and "Operation Pipe Dreams" raided a bunch of headshops (online retailers of pipes and "brick and mortor" shops).
Its a sad day when it becomes illegal to sell pretty artfully done peices of glass. Especially for someone like myself who collects glass pipes.
-Steve
Well...define enterprize...
I know a company that does telephone calls for liberal non-profit groups and charities (ie fundraisers... aka telemarketers) and all of the dumb terminals that the callers log in to runs sco.
Of course, this same company has been taking 5 years to migrate from a foxpro backend database to oracle (still not done) and has a pretty incompetent IT staff (or so friends I have that are callers tell me, one of whom is on the road to unix-saavy)
-Steve
See I agree and disagee....
I agree with Bush.... if not in exact statement in sentiment when he said "Democracy is not America's gift to the world, it is the Almighty's gift to humanity". Now my views on "the Almighty" aside, I agree. Government with input from the people is a goodness, even when poorly implimented.
I think getting rid of opressors and fighting wars of liberation is worthwhile and something I support.
Where I disagree is that Bush is the man to do it. Frankly, I don't trust his motivations. I oppose displacing Saddam simply because I see no proof that we really truely intend to do anything to properly empower the people of Iraq.
-Steve
And when is the last time the US made any sort of sacrifice for the UN?
Arn't we kin do fhypocrits to wipe our ass with every treaty that the UN or anyone asks us to sign, and then to point our finger at Iraq and say they arn't playing fair?
The Bush administration said that the Iraq issue will "test the relevance of the UN". Personally, I think the kyoto protocol already did that. The US decided YEARS ago that the UN wasn't really relevant and was to be used as nothing more than a vehicle to push OUR agenda on the rest of the world.
Besides...look at the region. Can you honestly say that a person ruling a country in that region can be considered a competent ruler AND NOT have nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs?
Just look at who they boarder and then tell me they shouldn't have weapons of mass destruction. Fuck, if I were in Saddam's shoes I would too!
-Steve
> Glad to hear it's so stable, hopefully they'll keep it up for a good long .cs account for news, so I can get to my .newsrc from
/. anymore unless an article particularly interests me like say, my director being quoted in a news article ;) )
/. thread where I have admitted my employer to being anything other than "A University"... just because I do like to "keep the worlds seprate".
> time...I use my
> anywhere...
There are no plans to get rid of it. Though there has been some murmer of a desire to have somebody (some day, in our copious free time) to try and gauge about how many people actually use the beast.
> Usenet is great because it lets you choose your UI and get in touch
> with people of all sorts of different interests.
I agree, and I like usenet, no really I do.
However it seems to be I dunno. About every year or so I start reading news and keep it up for a week, then lose it. The signal to noise ratio seems low (hell I don't really even read comments on
I mean I WANT to read news, maybe I just need a better client? Ive been using slrn and its nice... colorization of stuff, doesn't take up more screen real estate than my 80x24 boarderless Eterm window...
I can read news for as long as I can keep up... after I miss a few days on a group with alot of posts, I get lost and the cost to catch up, seems to just grow exponentially. (that and I can't figure out how to read news from the news server my home ISP gives me... and when it comes to personal news reading and mailing list stuff I don't like ot use my "Tufts" identity - if thats not obvious from my published email here)
In fact, I believe this is probably the first
-Steve
> I think the rise of the web and the move to seperate online desktops (rather
> than shelling into the big servers) removed a big part of Usenet culture at
> Tufts (and elsewhere)
Sure has. We still have a big honkin news server of course, often joking that its our most reliable service. Never goes down, never needs any attention.
I don't even remember the last time I saw mail to news@ - I think we get a couple of requests a year. (I don't ever remember us getting alot but ive only been here for a few years now and usenet was definitly on its way out by then)
I currently see 49 messages on tufts.general the first apears to be from 12 Sep 2000. The most recent was Jan 17th of last year.
Thats why I can't get into usenet. Its just become all too sad.
-Steve
>> Is this Grant of the "3 musketeers" Grant? Hiya!
>>
>Yes, it's me.
Can't say as I really know who you are but I sure have seen alot of files you own and my reference to what emerald used to be and an old document we found talking about what emerald used to be...
I believe it was a rant of yours that went out in email about emerald being severely underpowered. Found it in an old box as we cleaned stuff out a while back. (now emerald is severely overpowered for what it does given that email delivery has been turned off... )
-Steve
Trivia time...
... it eventually founds its way to sit on a desk in the TAB basement to
> So Pearl was this VMS system, mostly around for running Stats programs.
> As more and more students started getting accounts and dialing in
> (1200 or 2400 baud for the most part) Pearl got slower and overburdened 'til
> it couldn't be used for its original purposes.
languish powered off until it was revived for a while as an mail test machine
(under a different name) and was finnaly decomissioned again recently.
I bet thats more than you ever wanted to know about it. (and yes, for some period of time the desk it sat on was mine, however it was there before me, so I guess I sat at its desk for a while)
> Emerald was a Unix system (DEC?) brought in as "the email machine",
> everyone would log in and use Pine, around 93-94.
And remained as such for a while (tho it used to do imap too) until I believe we decomissioned all mail services on it last month. (dragged me kicking and screaming over to trumpeter... how I miss procmail... )
Emerald saw several hardware incarnations over the years. I have seen references from before my time that it was once a Decstation 3000 or some similarly underpowered DEC hardware (even then, or so the old rant we found cleaning out some old boxes states).
The current setup is kinda spiffy and the attached raid array is proof that the Dec enginners were both brillient and crack smokers), but as we have gotten away from that platform and the whole big monolithic servers thing, I can't for the life of me remember what it is (and I am too lazy to look it up)
-Steve
> Went to Worst Place Imaginable, huh? You have my sympathies.
Well I dropped out after 1 year... but I did graduate from their night Unix/C/C++ program a few years later.
That aside, other than being in Worcester, WPI was a pretty nice place. I actually liked it alot and always did figure that if I was going to go back to school for real, thats where I would still want to go.
(assuming I didn't decided to completely change careers and go for law or something equally non-tech)
-Steve
Youd like to think that wouldn't you.
Nope Tufts a nice database of Mac addresses and who owns them. Its really quite slick. You can't get a DHCP address without registering. Well you CAN but the only thing on all the net that you can get to is the registration server, because unregistereds end up on a private locked down net.
Its all pretty slick and I would like to say that Tufts is unique in it, however, about 7 years ago when I went to WPI they were quite swift about MACs themselves. I remember a fellow student bought a new NIC card and sold his old one...
about 10 mins after both people put their machines back on the net, they got emails from the network admins asking if it was a permanent change.
However your right, they wouldn't have needed such a slick setup to catch this, a simple managed switch (who still uses hubs?) could have done this.
-Steve
Such a nice general purpose trick. Though one best used by a person with a sense (even a small one) of tact and subtlety, because its just silly when done wrong.
;)
For example the smackhead that made some smack reference to me in the bar hoping I could poinbt her at the nearest dealer. When I missed the reference (not being or generally associating with smackheads) she tried again, and then proceded to make gestures and use emphasis to drive the point home that she is hoping I know where to get her some illegal drugs because of course I know exactly what she is talking about.
("Come on don't be stupid, your not a cop or somethin are you" was about where I really tuned in)
Certainly an example of the inappropriate use of a technique used to advance interpersonal relationships and gaurd against social faux-pas, succeeding in doing neither.
Also a good thing to remember is if they get the reference, it may be that they just have a bunch of friends who are gay (or insert other relevant interest, sexual preference, or subculture instead), and thats cool too... because it means it probably doesn't bother them at the least and you may meet other people through them
That or you picked the wrong reference because everybody gets it.
-Steve
um this is a conversation about a guide on a website...published by the original author, personallty?
cuz everything I saw in these articles was. No hetro-run publishing houses in sight. Just a couple of people wtritting what they know.
As for compiled....make some notes and send them on in and see if they want to add them... or write your own stuff entirely, like they did,
Don't mean to sound hasrsh but, these are if nothing else some amusing articles that some may find helpfull, and they can only cover the aspects that they know about.
-Steve
>>"Then they all have different license terms."
> This is something you should look into before you buy the software
This remind sme of the time that, as a joke, we go tin some new legato licenses and I said to my boss "This has an EULA on it. I want to open it and install the software but I am pretty sure that I am not authorized to enter the University into binding contracts, maybe we should send this to the legal department"
There was a good chuckle we got out of it but... isn't it the case? I dunno about YOU but I am no lawyer! How can I, a lowly sysadmin, be expected to be the person negotiating and entering into contracts on behalf of the organization at large? In any legal sense I am not even qualified to understand these things. I can't make a real legal interpretation... yet I am still expected to just blindly get these word filled envelopes and open them as if its "just normal" (and it IS just normal)
-Steve
While I agree that you are right, a contract hardly needs to be in writting to be a contract, there is a bit more to software licenses than that.
First of all Software license "contracts" are very complex. WHile certainly if we make a verbal agreement that I am going to sell my car to you for $X then we have a contract and I have to do it... fine.
However, how can you agree to a contract that you have never seen?
I dunno about you but ive just about never seen a software license for a peice of software BEFORE I bought it. Hell, much of the time its just some random peice of paper inside a box that I ALREADY PAID FOR.
Now lets talke the car example, I put a peice of paper inside the car and attache it to the ignition that says "by using this car you agree to X" then I sell it to you without you ever seeing it...
SHould you be bound by the "terms" on the ignition?
Frankly, I think this is silly. Who in there right mind would actually sign a contract that allows some random 3rd party to come barging in and do a work crippling audit any time they please? Should something so drastic be allowed to be "assumed" to be a normal part of such contracts?
Common wisdom that "a contract must be signed" does exist for a reason. If there is no formal signed contract then the judge has alot of leeway in deciding. If its wreitten on paper and signed then the person is attesting in writting to understanding the terms of the contract and if he doesn't understand then he is still in the wrong because he attested to it and agreed.
When its not signed and under such dubious circumstances, the judge gets to decide whether the parties involved really has such an agreement and what is reasonable assumption for such an agreement under the circumstances.
-Steve
Goin gto answer email? Really? So after years in prison and then quite a while with no net access the FIRST thing he plans to do is answer email?
Bullshit!
No way. First things first... Net Porn!
-Steve
Um not exactly. The GPL says you can't restrict ANYONE ELSE from distributing.
So you CAN cgharge a fee to download. You can even package it up and sell it on store shelves. You CANNOT stop anyone who gets it from you from doing the same (or giving it away for free).
Now, you may dislike that too, but the specific restriction that you cited (that its not possible to charge for binaries) doesn't exist.
In fact, the original author can chose to distribute under a non-gpl license in addition to the GPL if he likes.
And getting back on topic...this sounds very similar to pine. Debian you will notice doesn't distribute pine because pine doesn't allow binaries built from modified source to be distributed. So debian has no license... so debian obeyed the licence.
the mplayer people ask why "Debian legal" thinks it knows better hwat the GPL means than they do. Its not that at all. Its that debian, as a distributer, at som elevel has to answer the question "Do we have license to distribute what we are distributing" and they are basing that decision solely on the text of the licenses involved. Its that simple.
Debian, by policy, does not violate software licenses. Quite simple. Debian also does not accept special licensing terms (ie "You the debian group may distribute this, but noone else may") as they are. Since debian is doing the distributing, its the debain people (not the authors of the stuff being distributed) that have to make the call as to whether the license gives them permission to distribute since it is debian that puts its neck on the chopping block if it distributes something they have no permission to distribute.
-Steve
(a rather inactive debian developer, who used to read the debian mailing lists and thinks this issue is nothing new)
So you go to the next store and ask, and the next store, until some minimum wage worker behind the counter just doesn't give a shit and sells you the blanks, maybe you might have to say "Oh shit, I left my locksmiths ID at home".
If that don't work, then don't use a key blank. you could make a master out of a hacksaw blade if you wanted to. It might not last long, when used as a key, but it can be done.
Or get a cheap kit from the art store and pour a bunch of acrylic molds to make key blanks of exactly the type you need. Its a bit more expensive, and also may not last as long as a metal key, but hey, this is hardly an obstacle.
-Steve