All right... all right... but apart from the computer and the space shuttle and the internet and atomic power and better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what has the government done for us?
Pretty much the same here - SPF records aren't particularly hard to implement, after all. On the receiving side, I just check for SPF failure (i.e. somebody e-mailing from somewhere other than the domain's SPF-registered mail server), and even those just get sent to users' junk mail folders. I'm certainly not bouncing anything because of them. Based on my mail server reports, it looks like the low SPF filtering is catching about 0.5% of the mail volume that flows my direction, which isn't much, but it's 0.5% less than I would be dealing with otherwise and was implemented "for free", so I'm not complaining.
Both. It's a gift to perception to help you better understand the world around you, which is a horrible piece of malice that systematically destroys everything your childhood has ever loved and cherished, leaving you a half empty shell of a human being not worth living.
The bigger issue here is that it doesn't matter if it can only hit the user profile. The user profile has access to their browser keychain, all of their documents, and anything else the user might use on a regular basis. If that disappears or is compromised, it's just as bad for the user as if all of the executables in/bin and/sbin were replaced with nasty rootkit doppelgangers. Unfortunately, there's not a whole heck of a lot you can do about that, save for initiatives like SELinux or effectively tying users' hands in their own profiles, neither of which they're terribly gung-ho about. Heck, users didn't like it when Vista asked if a user wanted to do something potentially dangerous - how do you think they'd feel if UbuntuHatooWare Linux said they couldn't do something in their own Documents folder?
What I call implicit (less explicit would more curate)is the way Ubuntu (may be other distros I don;t know, I'm a gentoo user)) uses it, yes you have to enter a password, But opening a terminal and typing "su" (or sudo for that matter) is more explicite. Meaning you won't do it just for pleasure, and therefore most likely you know what you're about to do.
True - opening a terminal is more explicit. It's also a good way to get inexperienced users to do things like sudo./runnastyscript.sh because the installer documentation for their screensaver says to. Ultimately, you're just relying on security through obscurity; namely, the obscurity of the terminal to most non-tech savvy computer users. Besides, if you're double-clicking on an installation package, it should be rather explicit and obvious that you're trying to install something. Most users will do whatever it takes to install that software if they think they want it, whether it's typing in a password in a gksudo prompt or running a malicious install script from the command line.
Except if the screensaver happens to have some other program attached to the installation package, it'll be installed with root privileges without you knowing about it. Once that happens, you're done - it can rename system files, replace existing system files with its own 'dirty' files, or do anything else that root can do (i.e. practically anything), including preventing you from ever uninstalling it. They don't call it a "rootkit" because it first came out on Windows.
Indeed. Or, just give it to the local Goodwill. They'll even pick it up for you. If you don't have one, I'm sure there's a thrift store somewhere that'll take it, or even a pawn shop.
Better yet, claim it's an mp3/mp4 encoder for linux with editing capabilities (or any other software sorely missing on Linux) and post it online. I'd bet half of the people who mock windows users for downloading and installing untrusted software would download this, type in their root password, and let it install.
Heh. I worked in a small office once where their backbone was a 24-port hub. Better yet, they were using thin clients for everything, so they were slamming that hub every single second of every single day. Once the hub was replaced, it was amazing how many of their "performance issues" disappeared...
$150/month in a company with 150 employees is barely a rounding error, assuming it's even remotely profitable. That's $1/employee; assuming that this guy's in the US, they're standard-issue white collar drones, and he's not working in the Bay Area or anywhere else where salaries are distorted, they're probably each pulling in roughly $3000-4000 a month in salary alone, not including benefits or business payroll taxes.
Performance-per-watt becomes far more important when you're running a datacenter. When you're just getting an office network set up, who cares?
To be fair, you probably shouldn't allow direct WAN-accessible SSH access to your Linux-driven OpenLDAP server, either. Allowing significant public access to applications hosted on the same box that all your user names and passwords are stored on (or replicated on, if you have more than one of said boxes lying around) might be a bit more secure on Linux than it is on Windows, but it doesn't mean it's a good idea.
Think of it this way - do you think it's a good idea to mix Gnome and directory services on the same box? Feeling a little uneasy right about now, right?? Okay, how about allowing users remote access to said server with sufficient permissions where they could log in, launch an X Window of some sort, and run OpenOffice on that server? Yeah, I wouldn't do it either if I could avoid it, which is the entire point of not mixing terminal servers and domain controllers.
In theory, vector graphics is what Inkscape is for. Like GIMP, it too is free in the usual liquor and screaming ways. Like GIMP, it's pretty good for free, but not quite up to the same level of spit and polish that its closed-source commercial competitors offer. Still, it's better than nothing.
Part of it has to do with space - base Ubuntu fits on a CD, while base OpenSUSE fits on a DVD. Given a choice between downloading a 600MB file and a 5GB one, I'll take the 600MB one if it gets the job done. Plus, it's not like "sudo apt-get install build-essential" or "sudo apt-get install linux-headers" is that difficult. As for the artificial restrictions on root (i.e. Ubuntu doesn't assign a password to the root user, so you can't log in as root unless you change that), that's easily worked around too since, unlike OpenSUSE, Ubuntu's sudo is set up with full root permissions so you can do whatever you want that way without (a) memorizing another password and (b) leaving a default user name available to hack against. Personally, I like it better that way - for me, sudoing (or gksudoing, for that matter) my way around a system beats the pants out of su-ing into root and forgetting to bump myself back down when I'm done. Your mileage, of course, may vary, which is why we have so many distributions in the first place.
That said, yeah, I have to admit, green is a much better color scheme than brown. Too bad it was already taken.
Yeah, you're probably logged in as the admin user. Drupal seems to keep credentials cached for quite some time; I'm not sure how long it is by default, but I'd wager it's over a week. By default, there isn't a login page or node - instead, logging in is usually set up as a block. That said, if you lose it entirely, just punch in the URL for your Drupal installation and append "?q=user" to the end (e.g. http://www.fabrikam.com/?q=user). If you're logged in, it'll give you some stats regarding your account. If you're not, it'll ask you to log in. That said, don't panic about your user ID - they'd still need your password. Plus, when you installed Drupal, it should have asked you what you wanted to name the administrator ID, so the chances that someone can hit it via a "default" user login are pretty slight.
If you're really worried about it, though, just delete the database that Drupal is sitting in and delete the files that you had your Drupal installation in. Of course, this assumes that you set up a separate database for your Drupal installation that isn't tied into your existing site (Please tell me you did this...) and assuming that you have a separate directory for all of your Drupal files. Once you do that, Drupal is gone, never to return unless you choose to reinstall it.
O'Reilly's Using Drupal is pretty helpful with the basics. I'm not going to lie to you, there's definitely some opaque terminology in there, but I've noticed that seems to be true with CMSes in general. I still tend to squint a bit when I have to think about vocabularies and taxonomies, so don't feel too bad.
Once you figure out that just about everything in Drupal is a database object, it all starts to make sense. A "node" is functionally the same as a database table. A "view" is functionally the same as a database query. "Vocabularies" and "taxonomies", meanwhile, can be thought of as related tables that you can use to fine-tune your queries (erm... "Views"). Just as you can have two tables with identical data types but different names, and just as you might do that for organizational purposes (i.e. one table stores shop equipment, the other stores shop inventory), you can use "nodes" with similar data types but different names. In fact, if memory serves, a "Page", "Story", and "Blog Post" all use the same data types, but are given different names so you can treat each one differently if you're so inclined. Similarly, just as you can have a table with a column that stores related information with another table (say, a key that corresponds to a specific manufacturer), you can attach a taxonomy to a class of nodes (Page, Story, Blog, custom, whatever), and even have what amounts to sub-taxonomies ("Vocabularies").
To be honest, the data structure format isn't what drives me slightly insane about Drupal. No, in my case, it's the rather frustrating experience of finding the right combination of modules that actually does something useful. For example, let's say you want a contact form. Naturally, you would use the built-in Contact module, right? Ah, but then you're limited to only having one contact form on the entire site - that's probably not what you want. Let's see if somebody expanded it. Well, there's the Contact Forms module, which lets you split out each contact form category into a separate page. But, what if you want each contact form page to be able to handle a bunch of categories, or what if you want to control the URL it generates? Chances are, if you want a contact form that you can move around, or even have more than one contact form, you need a way to store contact forms as something that Drupal natively moves around so you can treat them like every other object in your system. So, now what? Do we try Contact Form On Node? What if I want it in a block? Shall we give Contact Form Blocks a try? Or do we try Form Block? Or, do we use the Webform module, which gives us forms as nodes? Or, do we just write our own module and be done with it? Then there's the matter of theming...
Don't get me wrong. If you know what you're doing and you have the time and patience to get through it, you can do some pretty cool stuff with Drupal. That said, if the only CMS you've ever touched in your life was something like Wordpress, you're in for a rough ride.
Hey, I work in IT and I have a BS in Computer Science, you insensitive clod!
Honestly, after doing lots and lots of programming in college, I realized that I really didn't want to make a career out of doing that for 50+ hours a week. Sometimes, it's just nice to stare at a log file for a while, y'know?
It is truly amazing how badly old cars can handle when you put stock wheels and tires that are a marked improvement over the bias-ply tires of the time, isn't it?
Re:Its the Intel Lawsuit - Google Style
on
Less Than Free
·
· Score: 1
Close - Intel was paying HP and Dell not to use AMD's chips. Big difference. In this case, Google isn't threatening to rescind payment if somebody decides they also want to use map data from TomTom or some other provider.
Re:You can't pay a negative amount
on
Less Than Free
·
· Score: 1
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the concept of paying negative amounts the entire point of double-entry accounting? Basically, if you pay me, I have to record a positive payment in the assets column and a negative payment in the liabilities column?
Why would the invisible hand let a company take in 3 times their operating costs year after year? Surely if there is actually a low barrier to entry somebody out there would settle for just a measly 200% markup.
Probably because Google is really good at it. Plus, Google's competitors don't enjoy the economies of scale that Google enjoys, so, assuming their price point matches Google, they might be "settling" for that 200% markup off the same price point that Google can use to reach 300%.
It's the capitalist version of the old adage, "When you're running away from a bear, you don't have to outrun the bear - you just have to outrun the person behind you." If everybody else's costs are three times yours, well, why not charge their rates instead of the cheapest rate you can charge? It's not like anybody is going to undercut you.
Actually, the problem wasn't that MS was bundling things with Windows that it "shouldn't". The problem was that they were charging higher prices to those that bundled competing software with Windows and handicapping the OS and its documentation so competitors wouldn't be able to write competing software. One is attempting to enter and compete in a new market. The other is attempting to nuke an existing market from orbit, just to be sure.
Ultimately, it all comes down to equality. If everybody can play by the same rules, that's fine. If one entity uses its power to write a totally different set of rules for itself while saddling its competitors with an entirely different set of rules, that's a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
All right... all right... but apart from the computer and the space shuttle and the internet and atomic power and better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what has the government done for us?
Pretty much the same here - SPF records aren't particularly hard to implement, after all. On the receiving side, I just check for SPF failure (i.e. somebody e-mailing from somewhere other than the domain's SPF-registered mail server), and even those just get sent to users' junk mail folders. I'm certainly not bouncing anything because of them. Based on my mail server reports, it looks like the low SPF filtering is catching about 0.5% of the mail volume that flows my direction, which isn't much, but it's 0.5% less than I would be dealing with otherwise and was implemented "for free", so I'm not complaining.
Both. It's a gift to perception to help you better understand the world around you, which is a horrible piece of malice that systematically destroys everything your childhood has ever loved and cherished, leaving you a half empty shell of a human being not worth living.
The bigger issue here is that it doesn't matter if it can only hit the user profile. The user profile has access to their browser keychain, all of their documents, and anything else the user might use on a regular basis. If that disappears or is compromised, it's just as bad for the user as if all of the executables in /bin and /sbin were replaced with nasty rootkit doppelgangers. Unfortunately, there's not a whole heck of a lot you can do about that, save for initiatives like SELinux or effectively tying users' hands in their own profiles, neither of which they're terribly gung-ho about. Heck, users didn't like it when Vista asked if a user wanted to do something potentially dangerous - how do you think they'd feel if UbuntuHatooWare Linux said they couldn't do something in their own Documents folder?
True - opening a terminal is more explicit. It's also a good way to get inexperienced users to do things like sudo ./runnastyscript.sh because the installer documentation for their screensaver says to. Ultimately, you're just relying on security through obscurity; namely, the obscurity of the terminal to most non-tech savvy computer users. Besides, if you're double-clicking on an installation package, it should be rather explicit and obvious that you're trying to install something. Most users will do whatever it takes to install that software if they think they want it, whether it's typing in a password in a gksudo prompt or running a malicious install script from the command line.
Except if the screensaver happens to have some other program attached to the installation package, it'll be installed with root privileges without you knowing about it. Once that happens, you're done - it can rename system files, replace existing system files with its own 'dirty' files, or do anything else that root can do (i.e. practically anything), including preventing you from ever uninstalling it. They don't call it a "rootkit" because it first came out on Windows.
I am proud to be the shepherd of this herd of sharks and I am gonna lead you to the top in this industry of ... of--
In Soviet Slashdot, Beowulf clusters clouds in hurds forever!
(Gnu meme is gnu.)
When were the days of the informed buyer, exactly?
Indeed. Or, just give it to the local Goodwill. They'll even pick it up for you. If you don't have one, I'm sure there's a thrift store somewhere that'll take it, or even a pawn shop.
No, that's KaBOOL. It returns "false", by the way.
I run Ubuntu, you insensitive clod!
Heh. I worked in a small office once where their backbone was a 24-port hub. Better yet, they were using thin clients for everything, so they were slamming that hub every single second of every single day. Once the hub was replaced, it was amazing how many of their "performance issues" disappeared...
$150/month in a company with 150 employees is barely a rounding error, assuming it's even remotely profitable. That's $1/employee; assuming that this guy's in the US, they're standard-issue white collar drones, and he's not working in the Bay Area or anywhere else where salaries are distorted, they're probably each pulling in roughly $3000-4000 a month in salary alone, not including benefits or business payroll taxes.
Performance-per-watt becomes far more important when you're running a datacenter. When you're just getting an office network set up, who cares?
To be fair, you probably shouldn't allow direct WAN-accessible SSH access to your Linux-driven OpenLDAP server, either. Allowing significant public access to applications hosted on the same box that all your user names and passwords are stored on (or replicated on, if you have more than one of said boxes lying around) might be a bit more secure on Linux than it is on Windows, but it doesn't mean it's a good idea.
Think of it this way - do you think it's a good idea to mix Gnome and directory services on the same box? Feeling a little uneasy right about now, right?? Okay, how about allowing users remote access to said server with sufficient permissions where they could log in, launch an X Window of some sort, and run OpenOffice on that server? Yeah, I wouldn't do it either if I could avoid it, which is the entire point of not mixing terminal servers and domain controllers.
In theory, vector graphics is what Inkscape is for. Like GIMP, it too is free in the usual liquor and screaming ways. Like GIMP, it's pretty good for free, but not quite up to the same level of spit and polish that its closed-source commercial competitors offer. Still, it's better than nothing.
Part of it has to do with space - base Ubuntu fits on a CD, while base OpenSUSE fits on a DVD. Given a choice between downloading a 600MB file and a 5GB one, I'll take the 600MB one if it gets the job done. Plus, it's not like "sudo apt-get install build-essential" or "sudo apt-get install linux-headers" is that difficult. As for the artificial restrictions on root (i.e. Ubuntu doesn't assign a password to the root user, so you can't log in as root unless you change that), that's easily worked around too since, unlike OpenSUSE, Ubuntu's sudo is set up with full root permissions so you can do whatever you want that way without (a) memorizing another password and (b) leaving a default user name available to hack against. Personally, I like it better that way - for me, sudoing (or gksudoing, for that matter) my way around a system beats the pants out of su-ing into root and forgetting to bump myself back down when I'm done. Your mileage, of course, may vary, which is why we have so many distributions in the first place.
That said, yeah, I have to admit, green is a much better color scheme than brown. Too bad it was already taken.
Yeah, you're probably logged in as the admin user. Drupal seems to keep credentials cached for quite some time; I'm not sure how long it is by default, but I'd wager it's over a week. By default, there isn't a login page or node - instead, logging in is usually set up as a block. That said, if you lose it entirely, just punch in the URL for your Drupal installation and append "?q=user" to the end (e.g. http://www.fabrikam.com/?q=user). If you're logged in, it'll give you some stats regarding your account. If you're not, it'll ask you to log in. That said, don't panic about your user ID - they'd still need your password. Plus, when you installed Drupal, it should have asked you what you wanted to name the administrator ID, so the chances that someone can hit it via a "default" user login are pretty slight.
If you're really worried about it, though, just delete the database that Drupal is sitting in and delete the files that you had your Drupal installation in. Of course, this assumes that you set up a separate database for your Drupal installation that isn't tied into your existing site (Please tell me you did this...) and assuming that you have a separate directory for all of your Drupal files. Once you do that, Drupal is gone, never to return unless you choose to reinstall it.
O'Reilly's Using Drupal is pretty helpful with the basics. I'm not going to lie to you, there's definitely some opaque terminology in there, but I've noticed that seems to be true with CMSes in general. I still tend to squint a bit when I have to think about vocabularies and taxonomies, so don't feel too bad.
Once you figure out that just about everything in Drupal is a database object, it all starts to make sense. A "node" is functionally the same as a database table. A "view" is functionally the same as a database query. "Vocabularies" and "taxonomies", meanwhile, can be thought of as related tables that you can use to fine-tune your queries (erm... "Views"). Just as you can have two tables with identical data types but different names, and just as you might do that for organizational purposes (i.e. one table stores shop equipment, the other stores shop inventory), you can use "nodes" with similar data types but different names. In fact, if memory serves, a "Page", "Story", and "Blog Post" all use the same data types, but are given different names so you can treat each one differently if you're so inclined. Similarly, just as you can have a table with a column that stores related information with another table (say, a key that corresponds to a specific manufacturer), you can attach a taxonomy to a class of nodes (Page, Story, Blog, custom, whatever), and even have what amounts to sub-taxonomies ("Vocabularies").
To be honest, the data structure format isn't what drives me slightly insane about Drupal. No, in my case, it's the rather frustrating experience of finding the right combination of modules that actually does something useful. For example, let's say you want a contact form. Naturally, you would use the built-in Contact module, right? Ah, but then you're limited to only having one contact form on the entire site - that's probably not what you want. Let's see if somebody expanded it. Well, there's the Contact Forms module, which lets you split out each contact form category into a separate page. But, what if you want each contact form page to be able to handle a bunch of categories, or what if you want to control the URL it generates? Chances are, if you want a contact form that you can move around, or even have more than one contact form, you need a way to store contact forms as something that Drupal natively moves around so you can treat them like every other object in your system. So, now what? Do we try Contact Form On Node? What if I want it in a block? Shall we give Contact Form Blocks a try? Or do we try Form Block? Or, do we use the Webform module, which gives us forms as nodes? Or, do we just write our own module and be done with it? Then there's the matter of theming...
Don't get me wrong. If you know what you're doing and you have the time and patience to get through it, you can do some pretty cool stuff with Drupal. That said, if the only CMS you've ever touched in your life was something like Wordpress, you're in for a rough ride.
Hey, I work in IT and I have a BS in Computer Science, you insensitive clod!
Honestly, after doing lots and lots of programming in college, I realized that I really didn't want to make a career out of doing that for 50+ hours a week. Sometimes, it's just nice to stare at a log file for a while, y'know?
It is truly amazing how badly old cars can handle when you put stock wheels and tires that are a marked improvement over the bias-ply tires of the time, isn't it?
Close - Intel was paying HP and Dell not to use AMD's chips. Big difference. In this case, Google isn't threatening to rescind payment if somebody decides they also want to use map data from TomTom or some other provider.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the concept of paying negative amounts the entire point of double-entry accounting? Basically, if you pay me, I have to record a positive payment in the assets column and a negative payment in the liabilities column?
Probably because Google is really good at it. Plus, Google's competitors don't enjoy the economies of scale that Google enjoys, so, assuming their price point matches Google, they might be "settling" for that 200% markup off the same price point that Google can use to reach 300%.
It's the capitalist version of the old adage, "When you're running away from a bear, you don't have to outrun the bear - you just have to outrun the person behind you." If everybody else's costs are three times yours, well, why not charge their rates instead of the cheapest rate you can charge? It's not like anybody is going to undercut you.
Actually, the problem wasn't that MS was bundling things with Windows that it "shouldn't". The problem was that they were charging higher prices to those that bundled competing software with Windows and handicapping the OS and its documentation so competitors wouldn't be able to write competing software. One is attempting to enter and compete in a new market. The other is attempting to nuke an existing market from orbit, just to be sure.
Ultimately, it all comes down to equality. If everybody can play by the same rules, that's fine. If one entity uses its power to write a totally different set of rules for itself while saddling its competitors with an entirely different set of rules, that's a problem.