I think other reviewers pretty much hit the nail on the head when they say that price is not really the issue. That said, I don't really like the idea of having to use a client to access the music off of a site. For one, you're dependant on the reliability of the media server. For another, you are banking on the fact that the client won't create a root kit for an intruder to gain access to your machine. Obviously, making a tcp or udp connection to the media server pokes all kinds of holes in a firewall. So, I Warner can keep its 10 cent music. It would cost me way more than 10 cents to fix a computer that has been rooted and assimilated into a bot net.
I've had excellent results with this particular product. Spamd uses blacklisting, greylisting, and tarpitting. It really is delightfully evil and still makes me smile because it includes a fake smtp daemon which sets the tcp rcv window to 1. This is a kick in the nuts to the spammer. I've used it with resounding success at a client who was recieving 2000 spam emails a day. Prior to implementing spamd, we were using just a Barracuda. When I combined spamd and the Barracuda, spamd caught about 1975 of the spam messages and the barracuda took over from there. No false positives and we've been running for three months. This link details how to set it up, http://www.linux.com/feature/61103.
To the person whom modded me as flamebait:
I am very, very sorry for you. Have you forgotten what it is like to be down and out and struggling? Have you spent so much time in front of the computer screen, that you have lost your humanity? I hope you will not be a coward and explain just why, when we have starving, homeless, and sick people, you feel throwing money away is a good thing. Perhaps you should transit to the Bush Company camp.
What a large waste of money. Why do we need to explore a geologically dead orbitting rock and sand ball? Don't we have homeless, sick, and displaced people in our own country that should be cared for first before a money is spent frivolously on some stupid moon exploration? Don't we have grave environmental concerns that need to be addressed? There is still a lot of science to be done here on planet earth to protect and save her.
You always want servers wired because they need guarranteed good quality transport methods. Additionally, you would want your SAN or NAS to be wired . . . . a wireless SAN would be really bad. Also, as other slashdotters have noticed, some databases don't play well over a wireless connection. That said, Web Apps will play well wirelessly wherein persistent connections aren't absolutely necessary. Security isn't even that much of an issue anymore as you can use IPSEC to protect traffic very reliably. I am not naive enough to believe that it is bulletproof but it is highly secure.
I used to be an OO fan but it is still a bit slow and clunky. I still think that Office 2003 wins out. With continued improvement, OO will get there but right now, it is not quite as usable as Office. I sincerely hope that OO will improve because I like the idea of using open source software whenever feasible. Given its developer base, OO should just keep getting better.
A whole new low
on
AMD NDA Scandal
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
This is a whole new low for AMD, an overt lie and being caught at it. I am really disappointed. I would have expected better from a company that previously worked so well with open source and the media.
Yes, the issue is not so simple. It really depends upon the company, its situation in the market, and the like. But, generally speaking there is significant cost savings in using some things as open source. In the case of a small contract call center in my area, open source was the saving grace for the company. Their IT overhead was so great that the company felt it could not longer be competitive and was considering closing doors. Indeed, the IT department shrank to three people. But these three intrepid people replaced the proprietary Nortel Telephone system that was bleeding them dry on maintenance, support, and just plain babysitting with two Asterisk servers and SNOM telephones. The second largest expense was on the maintenance of their exchange server. So, exchange was phased out in favor of Zimbra. Zimbra was brought online in a week's time and has seen 99.999% uptime with only looking at the logs once a week versus babysitting an exchange server every day. This is not some case study, this is my friend that achieved remarkable results. Asterisk and Zimbra have put this call center back in the black. My friend does see some merits to proprietary, i.e. Active Directory. Simply put, he needs it to adaquetaly manage his workstations. He thinks once Samba4 hits a release, there is potential for phasing out the windows domain controllers. Soon, Windows will be relegated to a SQL server. My friend says that programmers are working furiously to convert to an *AMP solution.
The telecommunications lobby in this country is huge and I guarrantee that the bill will be defeated. Anyway, as is prototypical of politics these days, the bill is only half-assed concieved. A contract usually implies a guarrantee of minimum service level. What about when the Sprint, ATT, and T-Mobile's of the worlds service works great for thirty days and all of a sudden quality drops off sharply? I am sure this has happened before. Shouldn't you have a right to kick the provider to the curb if this happens and they fail consistently to fix the problem? If you are paying for a service, shouldn't you have the right to recieve what you pay for? My guess, and correct me if I am wrong, that paying for a service and not recieving it is criminal. There needs to be a recourse for those who enter into a contract against abuses such as this. Well, at least there is an easy way to get out of a Sprint contract: call customer service 30 times a month for two months. Then, they'll fire you without termination fee!!
This is kind of curious (and scary) that a botnet could be this powerful. It really highlights the vulnerability of proprietary operating systems, Windows in particular. No operating system is 100% secure but some are definitely more secure than others. Open-source operating systems are patched and fixed faster.
If a botnet like this was used for morally acceptable purposes, this would be the great human computing experiment. The real fear is that computers could be hijacked in a botnet for cracking purposes. The more resources you can throw at a problem, the faster the problem will be solved. Imagine throwing 10 million zombie nodes at a Department of Defense classified system. The daners and implications would be far reaching.
The GPL has hindered code sharing. Do you remember the Broadcom wireless driver debacle wherein Theo recieved a nasty gram for porting the code to BSD? No, well here goes. Theo recieved a warning from the Linux project maintainers of a Broadcom wireless driver. This was really in poor code-sharing taste and ultimately caused the cancellation of the porting efforts. In the end, both Linux and BSD users lost out. Was OpenBSD really going to profit from it or commercialize it, no! It is simply in the spirit of hardware support. Now, let us look at OpenSSH, a fine product from OpenBSD. Linux and GPL people use it all of the time. I am hard pressed to find a more significant contribution to Linux. After all, OpenSSH is the foundation of secure remote administration, logins, tunnelling, and more. Now, someone tell me what Linux has contributed to BSD of similar significance as I cannot think of any.
As much as I love the ideals behind BSD and GPL licenses, basic corporate greed will exploit the work of others. It happens all of the time (throughout history, even) and there is precious little recourse. As much as I would love to see the FSF sue MS for violating the GPL, it may really only be an effort in vain. The Microsoft Legal machine has funds that rival small countries. It would take a major grassroots effort and the mobilization of millions to force punitive damages on the large companies that use GPL licensed software w/o contributing back. Look at what Sun has done to OpenBSD and Theo. Sun used OpenBSD SSH code and when Theo approached Sun for donations for a hack-a-thon, he was not even given the time of day. The GPL/BSD licensed sofwtare depends upon the honesty and integrity of would-be users. Basically, if you use GPL/BSD licensed software in your code, do the right thing because it is the right thing.
Ah, welcome to the family. For extra money, I worked at Geek Squad over the holidays and it did suck. Compared to the prices charged, the salary was very meager. I especially hated the people coming in with spyware/virus problems because they were more ornary than others. I also don't think trying to sell the client on creating restore discs is a bad thing, especially when most of the consumers are either neophytes or relative novices. Charging 28 bucks is, however, outrageous.
As a side note, I love the FreeBSD concept of jails. If you must run services that are known problems, run them inside of a FreeBSD jail. If the machine becomes compromised, the attacker cannot break out of jail because the OS is unaware of anything existing outside of the service jail. The OS thinks the jail is the root. Simply wipe out the jail and reinstall the jail with added extra security measures.
Security is more than just making certain that your operating system is patched and up to date. Good security practices only start at OS updates. Look at your perimeter defenses. Are there ports that you could specifically block outgoing as well as incoming? Are you using a strong password? This article is not FUD at all. This could happen to any system where competent security audits and mesasures are not taken. In fact, this gives a junior admin some guidelines to begin the detective work of figuring out if a system has been compromised. Bottom line, this attack should not have happened as it likely was not done by a skilled attacker. A competent admin will also be aware of what is running on his or her machine and the open files. As a final note, once a system has been compromised, I could never trust it again without a full blown format and OS reinstall.
To Michael Moore's website, http://www.michaelmoore.com./ The more press given to abuse by insurers and health care companies, the less it is going to happen. I consider this outright abuse. This country punishes the sick and injured. No wonder we are ranked 37th in Healthcare in the Industrialized world. I find it sad that the poorest of the Canadians, Britons, and the French are likely to live longer than the poorest Americans. The blame, lack of access to healthcare and greed from the insurance companies. I submitted this link to michael moore's website. I encourage all to do the same. Clarian should not be able to get away with this; especially being a Methodist hospital system. I thought a fundamental tenet of Christianity was forgiveness. Even Jesus Christ himself said the power to heal is greater than to hurt.
I am fine with Microsoft wanting to open up their source code but OSI needs to go through the proposal with a fine tooth comb. Prior to approval, OSI needs to make certain that this is truley open source, not the shared source propaganda a few years ago that placed such stipulations on the "openness" as to preclude being used in an open source project. In fact, this Shared Source was such the proverbial crap that Samba (and others) had to ask developers that signed on to the MS Royalty free agreements and Shared Source agreements not to participate. If that isn't a wolf in sheep's clothing, I don't know what is.
I question the reliability of this article because obviously Dell would not be seeking to expand its production of Linux-based (Ubuntu) PCs if they did not believe there is a solid market. Linux and the BSDs have been (and are) ready for the desktop. Unfortunately, Microsoft's desktop market share is so vast that it will be more of a "chipping away" than a large scale migration from Windows to Linux on the desktop. Meanwhile I applaud efforts like Dell's and I hope for continued penetration of open source into the market place. Instead of ruing that Linux and the BSDs are not running on the desktop, let's celebrate their pervasiveness at the server end. Despite the F.U.D. pump MS is running against open source, we continue to see more open source adoption for servers. Shortly, UNIX will take advantage of the wonderful work of Samba 4 and replace Windows as the Active Directory Domain Controller, File, and Print server.
Well, if you think about it, Beowulf and similar Linux clusters take advantage of network speed to distribute processing load. This isn't really a case where the network does the computing but with 40 GBs of bandwith, you can perform some serious parallel processing.
AT&T is whinning because it and the two other dominant mobile carriers will no longer be able to charge exhorbitant amounts for service. What Google is doing will not inhibit mobile broadband growth but greatly increase it. AT&T is really saying that it will be unable to compete with Google's rates.
Well, there are standards and there are standards. I'd like to know what kind of "restrictions" the GSM carrier will apply. They may tweak the technology such to make it impossible to use the phone.
This phone looks kind of sexy. Mostly, I like that it is open source. I wonder if you could get it to work with AT&T or T-Mobile or any GSM carrier . . . .
Being in business for myself at one time, I can understand why Sprint wants to terminate people that are calling Customer Service 25+ times per month. Some people you just can't please. I got rid of those customers myself. I am sure some customers lie to weasel discounts and credits. Plus it isn't a sudden termination, they provide ample notice and a defined shut off date. I am not a shill for Sprint but I'll let you know about a friend of mine whom had his contract terminated for having most of his calls on roaming. Turns out he lives in an area where his phone picks up the roaming tower more often than a Sprint one. Not only did Sprint not charge a termination fee, but they reduced his balance to zero, and told him that he would not have to pay anything at the shutoff date almost a month later. That isn't getting rid of a customer but a gracious way of delivering bad news. I have their Nextel service and, you know what, it does suck. But then again so does cell service in the U.S. Nextel is just convenient for work. The two way works well but the phone is known to drop off. In the end, prepaid cellular is even worse. You get nickled and dimed for everything.
The FUD machine strikes again. We have already been over this debate. Open Source will always be more secure because everyone has access to the code. Security holes will be found and patched at a much faster; sometimes within hours of discovery. We all know about Microsoft's (as an example) abysmal security record and the long time they take to patch holes. Look at Sony's rootkit as another example of how closed source software applications are actually insecure. Funny how there are fewer publicized security problems with Open Source. This is most likely because, in the Open Source world the problem is corrected before it is spotted on radar.
Perhaps, the FCC (and NSA) is concerned that it will have a harder time snooping in on our conversations because Open Source encryption will improve at a faster rate due to community involvement. So, they spread a little FUD, if not outright lies, in the hopes that people will use the closed source communication stuff and the government may merrily go about its listening posts.
Slashdot Mirror
I think other reviewers pretty much hit the nail on the head when they say that price is not really the issue. That said, I don't really like the idea of having to use a client to access the music off of a site. For one, you're dependant on the reliability of the media server. For another, you are banking on the fact that the client won't create a root kit for an intruder to gain access to your machine. Obviously, making a tcp or udp connection to the media server pokes all kinds of holes in a firewall. So, I Warner can keep its 10 cent music. It would cost me way more than 10 cents to fix a computer that has been rooted and assimilated into a bot net.
I've had excellent results with this particular product. Spamd uses blacklisting, greylisting, and tarpitting. It really is delightfully evil and still makes me smile because it includes a fake smtp daemon which sets the tcp rcv window to 1. This is a kick in the nuts to the spammer. I've used it with resounding success at a client who was recieving 2000 spam emails a day. Prior to implementing spamd, we were using just a Barracuda. When I combined spamd and the Barracuda, spamd caught about 1975 of the spam messages and the barracuda took over from there. No false positives and we've been running for three months. This link details how to set it up, http://www.linux.com/feature/61103.
To the person whom modded me as flamebait: I am very, very sorry for you. Have you forgotten what it is like to be down and out and struggling? Have you spent so much time in front of the computer screen, that you have lost your humanity? I hope you will not be a coward and explain just why, when we have starving, homeless, and sick people, you feel throwing money away is a good thing. Perhaps you should transit to the Bush Company camp.
What a large waste of money. Why do we need to explore a geologically dead orbitting rock and sand ball? Don't we have homeless, sick, and displaced people in our own country that should be cared for first before a money is spent frivolously on some stupid moon exploration? Don't we have grave environmental concerns that need to be addressed? There is still a lot of science to be done here on planet earth to protect and save her.
You always want servers wired because they need guarranteed good quality transport methods. Additionally, you would want your SAN or NAS to be wired . . . . a wireless SAN would be really bad. Also, as other slashdotters have noticed, some databases don't play well over a wireless connection. That said, Web Apps will play well wirelessly wherein persistent connections aren't absolutely necessary. Security isn't even that much of an issue anymore as you can use IPSEC to protect traffic very reliably. I am not naive enough to believe that it is bulletproof but it is highly secure.
I used to be an OO fan but it is still a bit slow and clunky. I still think that Office 2003 wins out. With continued improvement, OO will get there but right now, it is not quite as usable as Office. I sincerely hope that OO will improve because I like the idea of using open source software whenever feasible. Given its developer base, OO should just keep getting better.
This is a whole new low for AMD, an overt lie and being caught at it. I am really disappointed. I would have expected better from a company that previously worked so well with open source and the media.
Yes, the issue is not so simple. It really depends upon the company, its situation in the market, and the like. But, generally speaking there is significant cost savings in using some things as open source. In the case of a small contract call center in my area, open source was the saving grace for the company. Their IT overhead was so great that the company felt it could not longer be competitive and was considering closing doors. Indeed, the IT department shrank to three people. But these three intrepid people replaced the proprietary Nortel Telephone system that was bleeding them dry on maintenance, support, and just plain babysitting with two Asterisk servers and SNOM telephones. The second largest expense was on the maintenance of their exchange server. So, exchange was phased out in favor of Zimbra. Zimbra was brought online in a week's time and has seen 99.999% uptime with only looking at the logs once a week versus babysitting an exchange server every day. This is not some case study, this is my friend that achieved remarkable results. Asterisk and Zimbra have put this call center back in the black. My friend does see some merits to proprietary, i.e. Active Directory. Simply put, he needs it to adaquetaly manage his workstations. He thinks once Samba4 hits a release, there is potential for phasing out the windows domain controllers. Soon, Windows will be relegated to a SQL server. My friend says that programmers are working furiously to convert to an *AMP solution.
The telecommunications lobby in this country is huge and I guarrantee that the bill will be defeated. Anyway, as is prototypical of politics these days, the bill is only half-assed concieved. A contract usually implies a guarrantee of minimum service level. What about when the Sprint, ATT, and T-Mobile's of the worlds service works great for thirty days and all of a sudden quality drops off sharply? I am sure this has happened before. Shouldn't you have a right to kick the provider to the curb if this happens and they fail consistently to fix the problem? If you are paying for a service, shouldn't you have the right to recieve what you pay for? My guess, and correct me if I am wrong, that paying for a service and not recieving it is criminal. There needs to be a recourse for those who enter into a contract against abuses such as this. Well, at least there is an easy way to get out of a Sprint contract: call customer service 30 times a month for two months. Then, they'll fire you without termination fee!!
If a botnet like this was used for morally acceptable purposes, this would be the great human computing experiment. The real fear is that computers could be hijacked in a botnet for cracking purposes. The more resources you can throw at a problem, the faster the problem will be solved. Imagine throwing 10 million zombie nodes at a Department of Defense classified system. The daners and implications would be far reaching.
The GPL has hindered code sharing. Do you remember the Broadcom wireless driver debacle wherein Theo recieved a nasty gram for porting the code to BSD? No, well here goes. Theo recieved a warning from the Linux project maintainers of a Broadcom wireless driver. This was really in poor code-sharing taste and ultimately caused the cancellation of the porting efforts. In the end, both Linux and BSD users lost out. Was OpenBSD really going to profit from it or commercialize it, no! It is simply in the spirit of hardware support. Now, let us look at OpenSSH, a fine product from OpenBSD. Linux and GPL people use it all of the time. I am hard pressed to find a more significant contribution to Linux. After all, OpenSSH is the foundation of secure remote administration, logins, tunnelling, and more. Now, someone tell me what Linux has contributed to BSD of similar significance as I cannot think of any.
As much as I love the ideals behind BSD and GPL licenses, basic corporate greed will exploit the work of others. It happens all of the time (throughout history, even) and there is precious little recourse. As much as I would love to see the FSF sue MS for violating the GPL, it may really only be an effort in vain. The Microsoft Legal machine has funds that rival small countries. It would take a major grassroots effort and the mobilization of millions to force punitive damages on the large companies that use GPL licensed software w/o contributing back. Look at what Sun has done to OpenBSD and Theo. Sun used OpenBSD SSH code and when Theo approached Sun for donations for a hack-a-thon, he was not even given the time of day. The GPL/BSD licensed sofwtare depends upon the honesty and integrity of would-be users. Basically, if you use GPL/BSD licensed software in your code, do the right thing because it is the right thing.
Ah, welcome to the family. For extra money, I worked at Geek Squad over the holidays and it did suck. Compared to the prices charged, the salary was very meager. I especially hated the people coming in with spyware/virus problems because they were more ornary than others. I also don't think trying to sell the client on creating restore discs is a bad thing, especially when most of the consumers are either neophytes or relative novices. Charging 28 bucks is, however, outrageous.
As a side note, I love the FreeBSD concept of jails. If you must run services that are known problems, run them inside of a FreeBSD jail. If the machine becomes compromised, the attacker cannot break out of jail because the OS is unaware of anything existing outside of the service jail. The OS thinks the jail is the root. Simply wipe out the jail and reinstall the jail with added extra security measures.
Security is more than just making certain that your operating system is patched and up to date. Good security practices only start at OS updates. Look at your perimeter defenses. Are there ports that you could specifically block outgoing as well as incoming? Are you using a strong password? This article is not FUD at all. This could happen to any system where competent security audits and mesasures are not taken. In fact, this gives a junior admin some guidelines to begin the detective work of figuring out if a system has been compromised. Bottom line, this attack should not have happened as it likely was not done by a skilled attacker. A competent admin will also be aware of what is running on his or her machine and the open files. As a final note, once a system has been compromised, I could never trust it again without a full blown format and OS reinstall.
To Michael Moore's website, http://www.michaelmoore.com./ The more press given to abuse by insurers and health care companies, the less it is going to happen. I consider this outright abuse. This country punishes the sick and injured. No wonder we are ranked 37th in Healthcare in the Industrialized world. I find it sad that the poorest of the Canadians, Britons, and the French are likely to live longer than the poorest Americans. The blame, lack of access to healthcare and greed from the insurance companies. I submitted this link to michael moore's website. I encourage all to do the same. Clarian should not be able to get away with this; especially being a Methodist hospital system. I thought a fundamental tenet of Christianity was forgiveness. Even Jesus Christ himself said the power to heal is greater than to hurt.
I am fine with Microsoft wanting to open up their source code but OSI needs to go through the proposal with a fine tooth comb. Prior to approval, OSI needs to make certain that this is truley open source, not the shared source propaganda a few years ago that placed such stipulations on the "openness" as to preclude being used in an open source project. In fact, this Shared Source was such the proverbial crap that Samba (and others) had to ask developers that signed on to the MS Royalty free agreements and Shared Source agreements not to participate. If that isn't a wolf in sheep's clothing, I don't know what is.
So we can now go, "precisely 88 miles per hour." Sorry, folks, had to say it.
I question the reliability of this article because obviously Dell would not be seeking to expand its production of Linux-based (Ubuntu) PCs if they did not believe there is a solid market. Linux and the BSDs have been (and are) ready for the desktop. Unfortunately, Microsoft's desktop market share is so vast that it will be more of a "chipping away" than a large scale migration from Windows to Linux on the desktop. Meanwhile I applaud efforts like Dell's and I hope for continued penetration of open source into the market place. Instead of ruing that Linux and the BSDs are not running on the desktop, let's celebrate their pervasiveness at the server end. Despite the F.U.D. pump MS is running against open source, we continue to see more open source adoption for servers. Shortly, UNIX will take advantage of the wonderful work of Samba 4 and replace Windows as the Active Directory Domain Controller, File, and Print server.
Well, if you think about it, Beowulf and similar Linux clusters take advantage of network speed to distribute processing load. This isn't really a case where the network does the computing but with 40 GBs of bandwith, you can perform some serious parallel processing.
AT&T is whinning because it and the two other dominant mobile carriers will no longer be able to charge exhorbitant amounts for service. What Google is doing will not inhibit mobile broadband growth but greatly increase it. AT&T is really saying that it will be unable to compete with Google's rates.
Well, there are standards and there are standards. I'd like to know what kind of "restrictions" the GSM carrier will apply. They may tweak the technology such to make it impossible to use the phone.
This phone looks kind of sexy. Mostly, I like that it is open source. I wonder if you could get it to work with AT&T or T-Mobile or any GSM carrier . . . .
Being in business for myself at one time, I can understand why Sprint wants to terminate people that are calling Customer Service 25+ times per month. Some people you just can't please. I got rid of those customers myself. I am sure some customers lie to weasel discounts and credits. Plus it isn't a sudden termination, they provide ample notice and a defined shut off date. I am not a shill for Sprint but I'll let you know about a friend of mine whom had his contract terminated for having most of his calls on roaming. Turns out he lives in an area where his phone picks up the roaming tower more often than a Sprint one. Not only did Sprint not charge a termination fee, but they reduced his balance to zero, and told him that he would not have to pay anything at the shutoff date almost a month later. That isn't getting rid of a customer but a gracious way of delivering bad news. I have their Nextel service and, you know what, it does suck. But then again so does cell service in the U.S. Nextel is just convenient for work. The two way works well but the phone is known to drop off. In the end, prepaid cellular is even worse. You get nickled and dimed for everything.
Perhaps, the FCC (and NSA) is concerned that it will have a harder time snooping in on our conversations because Open Source encryption will improve at a faster rate due to community involvement. So, they spread a little FUD, if not outright lies, in the hopes that people will use the closed source communication stuff and the government may merrily go about its listening posts.