It's sad and mildly amusing to see the contortions people have to go through to justify how wonderful their toys are. I don't get it. I can run damn near anything I want on a network made up of three 486s (11-32mb RAM), one 586/60 (yes, they really DID make those:) with a bit under 5gigs of hardware RAID, and a sparc IPX. A friend of mine has more RAM, drive space, and processor power in one machine (by a couple factors) than I do combined and... he can still really only run the same stuff. When 90% of the actual important content of the web alone (we'll not even talk about telnet or anything else) is text, a lot of times it just flat out don't matter.:)
Lanir, who plays with ancient, arcane toys but not PDA's unfortunately.:)
I won't go into brands as I haven't shopped audio stuff recently. But there are a few general bits of advice that could serve you well.
Buy pieces. If you bought it all at once, at least half of it is crap. You can see this for yourself by playing with such a system in the store and turning off the main speakers. The dinky surround sound and center speakers that come with most sets are about of the same high quality as you might find in a $30 boombox. You're spending real money here. You deserve better.
With a large screen TV I think you'll be most happy with a system capable of a lot of bass. This means 12-15" woofers in whatever speakers you buy. I'd personally go with 4-6 individual speakers depending on your room size if you want to really feel like you're in the theatre. Where the sound is coming from is about as important as what it's coming from. More on that in a minute.
Don't buy 2 way speakers. This refers to how many actual speaker cones are in the cabinet you get. 2 way means you have a woofer and a tweeter 'n that's it. Remember, these have to carry the entire range of sound you want to hear. Everything from the Dinos walking to the trilling of birds. But without extra cones in the cabinet to balance things out, you've got one cone trying to handle speech and bass guitar all at the same time. I personally have 4 way speakers, 15" woofer, midrange cone, a cone tweeter and a tiny non-cone tweeter of another design to carry the really high range sounds.
Back to spacing... Ever wonder why car stereos sound so good? They don't use large speakers. They don't have a lot of space to deal with. And they're made with the same technology. It's all in where the speakers are and where the sound is going. Figure out what your room is like. Where people will be when listening to this. Visualize the sound coming out of the speakers. Will it bounce off the hard wall? Or will that couch just dampen a lot of it? Arrange things accordingly. You want a lot of overlap, ideally at about the same distance so that one side isn't drowning out the other. But if that can't be arranged, well, that's what balance controls are for.
Don't bother with a separate preamp and tuner. They're too expensive and I doubt you'd notice them adding much. Get one unit that does both. As mentioned elsewhere, the connections are the main thing when choosing a tuner. Anything even roughly like 100 watts/channel is more than enough to rattle you out of bed and make your ears bleed. So just check the specs and make sure it handles either the entire 20Hz - 20KHz range or something acceptably close to this and you'll be fine.
There is another -possible- solution to the advertising mess.
The press. And by that I don't mean Slashdot, Brave GNU World, Linuxworld, or any other strictly Open Source/Free Software news source. I mean CNN. The New York Times. ABC. Things the average person has a realistic chance of reading or hearing. But an issue like this couldn't be taken to the press right now anyway. They have no idea what the GPL is or what it stands for. And that's the major problem here. So far, the publications that mention linux talk about it being better or worse than Windows, easy or hard to install, relatively inexpensive, and freely downloadable off the internet. That last is the ONLY trace of a mention that the GPL gets. So whether they have a coder who's fallen to the Dark Side or if someone just made a dumb mistake, this sort of thing will happen again. This is just another proving point. Free Software has now gained enough recognition to be noticed and considered as a viable option -despite- the fact that a lot of people instinctively don't trust free deals. Now that it's been proven to be valuable, the community has to be ready to defend it.
There are a couple of ways to get the word out about the GPL. One is to try to make programming an easier thing to do. Something anyone can at least give a stab at. Gnome is nice and will surely make the system easier to use, but the source will still be black magic. Another possibility would be to find a way to advertise. If enough people were interested and contributed the money to get it aired, one short ad could mention a whole slew of really powerful open source projects. Think about it. Honestly, how hard would it be to sell the world on Apache, OpenSSH, and Beowulf? I know not all of those are GPL'ed, but frankly the obstacle here is understanding open source. Once that's done, explaining the GPL is -easy- and can be done in a simple sentence.
Just some thoughts...
Lanir
This is a project that could use a few more people becoming involved with it. And judging by the level of misunderstanding apparent in those who dislike the Hurd, it certainly doesn't hurt to try and get some of the real facts out. Simply put: Lotsa this stuff aint been done before (or has only been done by proprietary OSes). The writer seems sympathetic to this and interested in the project. A basis of comparison makes the new ideas a lot easier to understand, so they compared it to Linux. Because if it'd been compared to Windows 2000 we'd have all either laughed our asses off or just been puzzled 'cause we've never seen it.:)
7) I _believe_ (please correct me if I'm wrong) that the HURD is being developed using CVS.
Yup. It's using CVS. I couldn't tell you where, though. For that, start hunting at the
GNU Hurd page. You may also want to visit the real Debian/Hurd home page.
Re:So with old machines...
on
Linux Routers
·
· Score: 1
Cool! I'm running linux on an old Acer system as my firewall. 16mb RAM, 486/33, 270mb hard drive. I can slap it around and rewire it any way I please. It's hooked to a 486/33 NCR laptop with 11mb RAM that's the main display and X terminal on the system. An HP NetServer LM (P60, 128mb RAM) running Solaris does a lot of the graphical work like running Netscape. Why Solaris? Hardware support (I couldn't find an open source system with drivers for EISA Mylex hardware RAID controllers). I have a DSL hookup, running whatever services I feel like is just a matter of setting them up and adjusting my firewalling and forwarding rules. And while I'm learning the tricks to get this done, I'm also learning how things work. There is no Magic Button to drop pings from everywhere but a few trusted servers. There's no need have your mouse perform the Macharena while clicking through the Gettysburg address in morse code just to access some hidden functionality. This is the true benefit of open source solutions. I think too many people get used to knowing things and forget that. Someone could write an interface for ipfwadm, ipchains, or ipmasqadm and make it look as pretty as they liked. But when it comes right down to it, you can look under the hood and see how the magic works. This holds just as true for my router as it does for the machine I sit at. This is an idea that's still spreading. It hasn't hit all ends of the market. But companies such as Myricom and IBM have produced open source software. Conglomerates such as the ISC and Kame forward research and developement of IPsec, IPv6, and other radical new toys. Closed, proprietary systems can be useful for ideas. New directions to go in (I could write a series of shell scripts to pull off the rather convenient Solaris 'share' commands, for example). But who wants to be stuck with them? Hell, this book is even a good example of how to make money doing this. Everybody needs HOWTO's and man pages, and bound hardcopy is -convenient-.
I can kind of agree with this.
On another note, the viewpoint some who are in favor of censorship would like to foster about sex (it's evil, bodies are nasty things and must be hidden, etc) is roughly equivalent to showing a Christian an anatomically correct picture of the Madonna laying on her back nude, legs spread, with a needle full of heroin in her arm and a sleepy smile on her face.
Did that image disturb you? Should it be censored?
If so, consider the other viewpoint. This all boils down to a simple statement about not letting your children be raised up with values you cannot support or agree with.
In my case, can I censor out your censorship or am I stuck with your values?
If I am, what does that say about this whole equal rights, everyone having a right to their own religion and philosophy thing?
Um. I'm trying to think of a nice way to say this. Let's try a couple examples:
1: You see a website. It has a smiling anime chic with purple hair.
You despise purple hair.
You go elsewhere.
2: You enter the URL of a website.
Your computer never gets there.
You see some vague message that's LESS helpful and informative than your standard M$ encrypted help message.
You have very little idea why you couldn't get through, but you aint gettin' nowhere.
See a slight difference here?
Censorship is only justified when it's keeping people from dying or having their quality of life greatly downgraded. That's one thing people actually AGREE on, no matter what side they're on with this one. The disagreement is over what kind of impact unclothed adults have on children, and who's getting money/power out of this whole censorship deal.
If I have to put up with censorship because some drooling moron can't get off his lead ass to go blip to another web site or change the channel, I think -I'm- going to run for president just so I can bitch at people for being that damn stupid.
This's pretty much my point of view as well. The security concerns, etc. are quite real. Windows users get scared enough when someone uses something like VNC to grab their mouse or other childishness. Think back to the days when MS shipped word processors that crashed (haven't used any lately, I assume they're better: I'm naive =). Can you imagine using one that depends on network connectivity for anything even half-assed serious? And another thing. How do you track down bugs? Stick to X. It's about as close as you get to this right now. The only real difference is most programs don't provide a separate front end and back end for you to run on separate computers. That's what makes FreeCiv fun. Lanir
Lawyers don't help much when you're dumb enough to drown in your own spit. Is there a financial version of the Darwin Awards? Although on second thought I bet there isn't. Financial people do things like this all the time, as far as I can tell. I still don't have a CueCat. I personally don't want any involvement in this round of shenanigans whatsoever. Let 'em die so we can all laugh about the idiocy a couple years from now. 'Cause it's only funny if the general public doesn't buy into this. Otherwise, it's just pathetic. Lanir People are sheep. Baaaaaaah!
Heya. I've read much of the above commentary and no one seems to've hit this part of things so I will.
Basic point: No online banking scheme is secure.
Sub-point: Some are more secure than others.
If your bank is not using SSL for online banking, stop right now and save yourself some trouble. Call them up and make sure that web access to your account is completely disabled. Without a lot of checking (which would be more of a pain in the ass than solving your problem -while- using your old bank... details below), you aren't likely to know whether internet traffic to your bank is properly handled and filtered or if there's another host at their end which can packet sniff. If they're just a colo or a virtual host on someone's webfarm, anyone else with an account on the same net can get curious.
If they use SSL, you're still not guaranteed security but it's at least not a completely trivial thing to get your account information. Then you get into OS security and how intelligent the hosting ISP -really- is when it comes to filtering at their routers. I've seen some that are. I've seen none that are vehemently pro-active about it. I'm fairly certain that many NT/Lucent shops out there are content to merely keep the frequency of reboots as low as possible. Sometimes a customer will want to keep using a piece of software that is dependant upon an outdated version of an OS (read: as secure as swiss cheese). That's where you really get into the necessity for filtering at the routers so that only the traffic that's absolutely necessary gets through.
Other posters have noted that there are protocols which are quite well suited for everything that could be needed for a (reasonably) secure and usable online banking transaction. You seem to understand the JavaScript used by this bank. If you telnet in to the server handling these transactions (and hopefully need to authenticate yourself via SSL) you can probably manually input any function you wish to call. I've not had personal experience with it, but I believe C-Kermit compiled with OpenSSL support will allow you to pull this off. It's all just bits in the end, and most of the time it's even ASCII. I've used similar methods to deal with mail via pop3 (and to a lesser extent smtp) for years. I didn't have a home base to read and save email onto, so learning a bit of the protocol was much easier than constantly installing and deleting mail clients. We don't need no stinking national ISP's! =)
First obnoxious truth: Schmucks get rich. Go ahead and try to argue that one. I'll laugh at you.
Second, he's very likely not as anti-free speech/free beer as some of the other posters would have him portrayed. Ignorance on the net is ugly but curable just like in the real world. the only difference is on the net if you make a fool of yourself, people make links to your page and laugh at you. IRL, your friends tend to find subtler ways of curing this situation. That said, tho, it is damned annoying to run into. Hopefully someone will point out in a tactful way (ie, one that he/his publisher will listen to) that textfiles take up jack for bandwidth and bandwidth is relatively cheap. At the rates I'm used to, 600 paying customers x $1 pays for the needed bandwith and leaves half to split between publisher, agent, author, and webmaster (should be same as publisher..?).
Third, if you want online books from people who understand the media and are not going to occasionally show their ignorance, you're looking in the wrong place. Either wait for a sci-fi author to go this route (maybe they know better than to try this yet? Dunno.:) or go pay a visit to Project Gutenburg and browse the classics.
Other than that, about the only other option I can think of is if you want to email me. I'm a CompSci major but writing is what I'd really like to be doing... but I don't have time to waste trying to break into the publishing racket. And generating a useful amount of traffic on a website has it's own issues. So... if you really want something, drop me a line and tell me what genres you're interested in. I'm best at Sci-Fi and fantasy but other formats could be an interesting challenge. No charge for the first try, the real goal would be to test the waters and see what could work (and if anyone under the sun is even vaguely interested or if I should hammer away on those CS books:). And yes I know a/. comment is a strange place to advertise but what the hell.
Me see 'um possible problem with this.
Joe Blow runs Windows.
Joe has Crusoe based laptop.
Joe can presumably update his CodeMorphing(some other schmucks TM) at any time.
Windows is stable and secure. I know 'cause it tells me that as I install it.
Me really see 'um potential for problems with this. =)
-Lanir
Disclaimer: FUD is bad. Be informed. Look up the info and make up your own mind. I'm not a shepherd and I sure as hell hope you're not sheep. =)
I'm going through this issue right now. A friend of mine and I started off in the same boat a couple years ago. Neither of us knew a thing except how to be a Win95 Power User (laugh, I do now:). I was working full time at a gas station and tired of the BS associated with that. I bought us a book that came with a copy of Slackware 3.2 and we went from there. Amazingly enough, we never touched the newsgroups or IRC channels. We learned almost entirely from man-pages, that book, and online docs. After awhile we set up a network with primitive firewalling (which got much improved as time went on) and did IP Masqing for another Linux box and various Win boxen. By this point we were quite competent users of Linux and as administrators we could manage to keep things running fairly well in an undemanding environment. Now on to the interesting part.:) At that point, I left for school. I took a semester, they taught me basic Java (Yay... how... useful:P). I decided that school was not for me and left. After I was done with that, he started work at a starting position in an ISP. He's been there around a year and is now one of their system administrators. I took a year and a half break from college for financial reasons and have now started up again this semester. I'm not taking any CS classes, I'm stuck wading through other requirements. Where we're at is pretty simple. He's a leg up on me by a significant amount in a lot of practical issues. I know enough Java to write stuff to the screen. He knows some C and a bunch of system and configuration goo, as well as a fair amount of Solaris. I have to scrape to get a tech job while he currently has some options should he need to leave where he's at. Obviously in the short run, it kinda looks like I should have gotten a job instead of playing around with school. But I don't have a degree yet, so we'll see what happens in a few years. If this really is an annual column, I'll update the story next year.:) Oh, I do want to add a couple quick personal viewpoints on this. I think that where you go is at least as important as going or not. It's terribly easy to get dragged into a place that wants to teach you a few good things and a bunch of crap 'n chuck you out the window. Look for someplace that hits heavy on the theory. It may seem silly but that's the stuff you're really there for. Any fool can pick up "C for Dummies" and figure out how to print crap to the screen. Going from a complete lack of what php3 was to knowing how to make a shopping cart with it took all of an afternoon for me. These are not the things that job security is made of. Stick through the boring stuff, twiddle your thumbs while they dumb down the material so anyone can get through it, and do your serious explorations on your own, after they've equipped you with the basics. When I was bored of learning Java, I looked up the political mess surrounding it and decided it was too likely to be a dead end for me. I also manually updated a libc5 system to glibc2 and learned a lot as I fixed the things that broke. I'm also mildly disappointed at the way this issue is being tossed about. At the risk of over generalizing and being guilty of the same thing I'm accusing others of doing, I'll say that Slashdot is the last place I'd have expected to find people expounding upon the virtues of one "cookie cutter" solution over another. Nothing is right for everyone and few things are even right for most people. I don't think either theoretical or practical knowledge are terribly useful all on their own. Theory aids in innovation and practicality gets things done. I'm going back to school because I've already learned a lot on my own and now I want to complete the picture and become well rounded.
There is a Linux distribution with much the same philosophy. It's still being worked on from my understanding of things, tho I'm not at all an authoritative source. The name of the distribution is Nexus and the website is here. As usual, the proper reply to "Why isn't there a widget for this?" is "Because you haven't written it yet." If you want this, help out and do what you can.
In my opinion, whether there is technical merit to this article or not, it sucks. And the reason is the way it's written. It blows in, drops hints of details like throwing candy at a crowd of children, then moves on to other things. It reads like a sales pitch, and a bad one at that.
What I see as the real issue here is how people get compensated for adding something to the culture. Whether it's music or software, prose, poetry, art or photos, as long as it can be made digital it can be copied infinitely. By anyone, because the means to do so are cheap and necessary for a computer to be more than a rather lousy paperweight. People have to get compensated somehow for the effort, or they don't do it. But there are currently a lot of hangers-on and middlemen that look to be losing a job sometime in the not too distant future. With the current state of things, you can't ditch them yet, but they're growing less necessary as time goes on. Who cares if you download a song from the internet or get it from a record store? The artist certainly wouldn't as long as they got something out of it.
So right now there are a lot of artists who aren't sure how to distribute their stuff over the internet and continue the lifestyle they're accustomed to. And there are a lot of record companies, publishers, and whatnot that are looking at a much less certain future than any of them would likely have envisioned even ten years ago. Kind of sucks to suddenly be wondering about your pension. So of course they're going to fight tooth and claw over this issue and they're going to try to get the big bad government to squish anything that threatens them.
You see, the only reason this all -has- to happen is because no one has come forward and offered a solution that gives EVERYONE a way to back down gracefully and compromise. When that happens, then we can point fingers and mutter about the Evil Empire.
Ok, I'm going to give an example here pulled from my memory of history. I'm pretty sure this is right but not certain. It's the 'memory' part of that statement that scares me.;) The first step Hitler took on the road to the Jewish Holocaust was a harmless one. They were all supposed to wear a Star of David to mark them as being Jewish. Different. You're smart. Think about it. Oh, and just for the record, no, I don't think this program means children will start being sent off to camps and slaughtered in droves. If you need to read that into it, go read "A Modest Proposal" by Swift and conveniently forget that it's satire. The whole point here is just that separating people out into groups tends to be an inherently dangerous thing. It's not the information that's bad. It's the -extreme- potential for abuse. Remember, the people who are going to be using this are the ones who're responsible for not having let it get this bad in the first place. Teachers and parents. The kids are just a prize in the middle for whoever wins this little corner of the information war.
-Lanir P.S. Doubt the accuracy of any of this? Doubt something Katz said? Look up the statistics! Find out for yourself. Libraries make good resources and ironically enough, even a school library should be quite sufficient to the task. Don't be afraid to ask for help.
Hrm. I tried compiling glibc2.0-something. It curled up and died. Same for 2.1 Same results for 2.1 Ditto for 2.1.1 See a trend here?:) It's arguable that I dunno enough to do this right. Or maybe the machine I was on wasn't quite up to it, tho it was a 486 so it -should- have been. But anyway, that's why I didn't just upgrade from source. If someone cares to share with me the trick to getting glibc2 to compile right, I'd be happy 'cause then I can consider the time I spent trying it an educational experience. =)
Slackware 3.6 comes with glibc 2.06pre7. It made for a decent upgrade for me because I have a 486DX2 as well and it's a total pain trying to shift libraries. I still can't get glibc 2.1 to compile, which is obnoxious when it takes 24+ hours to find out.
For that matter, what's the deal with the 'political issues' that keep it off most of the FTP sites?
Slashdot Mirror
It's sad and mildly amusing to see the contortions people have to go through to justify how wonderful their toys are. I don't get it. I can run damn near anything I want on a network made up of three 486s (11-32mb RAM), one 586/60 (yes, they really DID make those :) with a bit under 5gigs of hardware RAID, and a sparc IPX. A friend of mine has more RAM, drive space, and processor power in one machine (by a couple factors) than I do combined and... he can still really only run the same stuff. When 90% of the actual important content of the web alone (we'll not even talk about telnet or anything else) is text, a lot of times it just flat out don't matter. :)
Lanir, who plays with ancient, arcane toys but not PDA's unfortunately. :)
I won't go into brands as I haven't shopped audio stuff recently. But there are a few general bits of advice that could serve you well.
Buy pieces. If you bought it all at once, at least half of it is crap. You can see this for yourself by playing with such a system in the store and turning off the main speakers. The dinky surround sound and center speakers that come with most sets are about of the same high quality as you might find in a $30 boombox. You're spending real money here. You deserve better.
With a large screen TV I think you'll be most happy with a system capable of a lot of bass. This means 12-15" woofers in whatever speakers you buy. I'd personally go with 4-6 individual speakers depending on your room size if you want to really feel like you're in the theatre. Where the sound is coming from is about as important as what it's coming from. More on that in a minute.
Don't buy 2 way speakers. This refers to how many actual speaker cones are in the cabinet you get. 2 way means you have a woofer and a tweeter 'n that's it. Remember, these have to carry the entire range of sound you want to hear. Everything from the Dinos walking to the trilling of birds. But without extra cones in the cabinet to balance things out, you've got one cone trying to handle speech and bass guitar all at the same time. I personally have 4 way speakers, 15" woofer, midrange cone, a cone tweeter and a tiny non-cone tweeter of another design to carry the really high range sounds.
Back to spacing... Ever wonder why car stereos sound so good? They don't use large speakers. They don't have a lot of space to deal with. And they're made with the same technology. It's all in where the speakers are and where the sound is going. Figure out what your room is like. Where people will be when listening to this. Visualize the sound coming out of the speakers. Will it bounce off the hard wall? Or will that couch just dampen a lot of it? Arrange things accordingly. You want a lot of overlap, ideally at about the same distance so that one side isn't drowning out the other. But if that can't be arranged, well, that's what balance controls are for.
Don't bother with a separate preamp and tuner. They're too expensive and I doubt you'd notice them adding much. Get one unit that does both. As mentioned elsewhere, the connections are the main thing when choosing a tuner. Anything even roughly like 100 watts/channel is more than enough to rattle you out of bed and make your ears bleed. So just check the specs and make sure it handles either the entire 20Hz - 20KHz range or something acceptably close to this and you'll be fine.
Lanir
There is another -possible- solution to the advertising mess. The press. And by that I don't mean Slashdot, Brave GNU World, Linuxworld, or any other strictly Open Source/Free Software news source. I mean CNN. The New York Times. ABC. Things the average person has a realistic chance of reading or hearing. But an issue like this couldn't be taken to the press right now anyway. They have no idea what the GPL is or what it stands for. And that's the major problem here. So far, the publications that mention linux talk about it being better or worse than Windows, easy or hard to install, relatively inexpensive, and freely downloadable off the internet. That last is the ONLY trace of a mention that the GPL gets. So whether they have a coder who's fallen to the Dark Side or if someone just made a dumb mistake, this sort of thing will happen again. This is just another proving point. Free Software has now gained enough recognition to be noticed and considered as a viable option -despite- the fact that a lot of people instinctively don't trust free deals. Now that it's been proven to be valuable, the community has to be ready to defend it. There are a couple of ways to get the word out about the GPL. One is to try to make programming an easier thing to do. Something anyone can at least give a stab at. Gnome is nice and will surely make the system easier to use, but the source will still be black magic. Another possibility would be to find a way to advertise. If enough people were interested and contributed the money to get it aired, one short ad could mention a whole slew of really powerful open source projects. Think about it. Honestly, how hard would it be to sell the world on Apache, OpenSSH, and Beowulf? I know not all of those are GPL'ed, but frankly the obstacle here is understanding open source. Once that's done, explaining the GPL is -easy- and can be done in a simple sentence. Just some thoughts... Lanir
This is a project that could use a few more people becoming involved with it. And judging by the level of misunderstanding apparent in those who dislike the Hurd, it certainly doesn't hurt to try and get some of the real facts out. Simply put: Lotsa this stuff aint been done before (or has only been done by proprietary OSes). The writer seems sympathetic to this and interested in the project. A basis of comparison makes the new ideas a lot easier to understand, so they compared it to Linux. Because if it'd been compared to Windows 2000 we'd have all either laughed our asses off or just been puzzled 'cause we've never seen it. :)
Yup. It's using CVS. I couldn't tell you where, though. For that, start hunting at the GNU Hurd page. You may also want to visit the real Debian/Hurd home page.
Cool! I'm running linux on an old Acer system as my firewall. 16mb RAM, 486/33, 270mb hard drive. I can slap it around and rewire it any way I please. It's hooked to a 486/33 NCR laptop with 11mb RAM that's the main display and X terminal on the system. An HP NetServer LM (P60, 128mb RAM) running Solaris does a lot of the graphical work like running Netscape. Why Solaris? Hardware support (I couldn't find an open source system with drivers for EISA Mylex hardware RAID controllers). I have a DSL hookup, running whatever services I feel like is just a matter of setting them up and adjusting my firewalling and forwarding rules. And while I'm learning the tricks to get this done, I'm also learning how things work. There is no Magic Button to drop pings from everywhere but a few trusted servers. There's no need have your mouse perform the Macharena while clicking through the Gettysburg address in morse code just to access some hidden functionality.
This is the true benefit of open source solutions. I think too many people get used to knowing things and forget that. Someone could write an interface for ipfwadm, ipchains, or ipmasqadm and make it look as pretty as they liked. But when it comes right down to it, you can look under the hood and see how the magic works. This holds just as true for my router as it does for the machine I sit at. This is an idea that's still spreading. It hasn't hit all ends of the market. But companies such as Myricom and IBM have produced open source software. Conglomerates such as the ISC and Kame forward research and developement of IPsec, IPv6, and other radical new toys. Closed, proprietary systems can be useful for ideas. New directions to go in (I could write a series of shell scripts to pull off the rather convenient Solaris 'share' commands, for example). But who wants to be stuck with them?
Hell, this book is even a good example of how to make money doing this. Everybody needs HOWTO's and man pages, and bound hardcopy is -convenient-.
Lanir
I can kind of agree with this.
On another note, the viewpoint some who are in favor of censorship would like to foster about sex (it's evil, bodies are nasty things and must be hidden, etc) is roughly equivalent to showing a Christian an anatomically correct picture of the Madonna laying on her back nude, legs spread, with a needle full of heroin in her arm and a sleepy smile on her face.
Did that image disturb you? Should it be censored?
If so, consider the other viewpoint. This all boils down to a simple statement about not letting your children be raised up with values you cannot support or agree with.
In my case, can I censor out your censorship or am I stuck with your values?
If I am, what does that say about this whole equal rights, everyone having a right to their own religion and philosophy thing?
Think about it.
Um. I'm trying to think of a nice way to say this. Let's try a couple examples:
1: You see a website. It has a smiling anime chic with purple hair.
You despise purple hair.
You go elsewhere.
2: You enter the URL of a website.
Your computer never gets there.
You see some vague message that's LESS helpful and informative than your standard M$ encrypted help message.
You have very little idea why you couldn't get through, but you aint gettin' nowhere.
See a slight difference here?
Censorship is only justified when it's keeping people from dying or having their quality of life greatly downgraded. That's one thing people actually AGREE on, no matter what side they're on with this one. The disagreement is over what kind of impact unclothed adults have on children, and who's getting money/power out of this whole censorship deal.
If I have to put up with censorship because some drooling moron can't get off his lead ass to go blip to another web site or change the channel, I think -I'm- going to run for president just so I can bitch at people for being that damn stupid.
This's pretty much my point of view as well. The security concerns, etc. are quite real. Windows users get scared enough when someone uses something like VNC to grab their mouse or other childishness. Think back to the days when MS shipped word processors that crashed (haven't used any lately, I assume they're better: I'm naive =). Can you imagine using one that depends on network connectivity for anything even half-assed serious? And another thing. How do you track down bugs?
Stick to X. It's about as close as you get to this right now. The only real difference is most programs don't provide a separate front end and back end for you to run on separate computers. That's what makes FreeCiv fun.
Lanir
Lawyers don't help much when you're dumb enough to drown in your own spit.
Is there a financial version of the Darwin Awards? Although on second thought I bet there isn't. Financial people do things like this all the time, as far as I can tell.
I still don't have a CueCat. I personally don't want any involvement in this round of shenanigans whatsoever. Let 'em die so we can all laugh about the idiocy a couple years from now. 'Cause it's only funny if the general public doesn't buy into this. Otherwise, it's just pathetic.
Lanir
People are sheep. Baaaaaaah!
Heya. I've read much of the above commentary and no one seems to've hit this part of things so I will.
Basic point: No online banking scheme is secure.
Sub-point: Some are more secure than others.
If your bank is not using SSL for online banking, stop right now and save yourself some trouble. Call them up and make sure that web access to your account is completely disabled. Without a lot of checking (which would be more of a pain in the ass than solving your problem -while- using your old bank... details below), you aren't likely to know whether internet traffic to your bank is properly handled and filtered or if there's another host at their end which can packet sniff. If they're just a colo or a virtual host on someone's webfarm, anyone else with an account on the same net can get curious.
If they use SSL, you're still not guaranteed security but it's at least not a completely trivial thing to get your account information. Then you get into OS security and how intelligent the hosting ISP -really- is when it comes to filtering at their routers. I've seen some that are. I've seen none that are vehemently pro-active about it. I'm fairly certain that many NT/Lucent shops out there are content to merely keep the frequency of reboots as low as possible. Sometimes a customer will want to keep using a piece of software that is dependant upon an outdated version of an OS (read: as secure as swiss cheese). That's where you really get into the necessity for filtering at the routers so that only the traffic that's absolutely necessary gets through.
Other posters have noted that there are protocols which are quite well suited for everything that could be needed for a (reasonably) secure and usable online banking transaction. You seem to understand the JavaScript used by this bank. If you telnet in to the server handling these transactions (and hopefully need to authenticate yourself via SSL) you can probably manually input any function you wish to call. I've not had personal experience with it, but I believe C-Kermit compiled with OpenSSL support will allow you to pull this off. It's all just bits in the end, and most of the time it's even ASCII. I've used similar methods to deal with mail via pop3 (and to a lesser extent smtp) for years. I didn't have a home base to read and save email onto, so learning a bit of the protocol was much easier than constantly installing and deleting mail clients. We don't need no stinking national ISP's! =)
Hope this helps some...
Lanir
First obnoxious truth: Schmucks get rich. Go ahead and try to argue that one. I'll laugh at you.
Second, he's very likely not as anti-free speech/free beer as some of the other posters would have him portrayed. Ignorance on the net is ugly but curable just like in the real world. the only difference is on the net if you make a fool of yourself, people make links to your page and laugh at you. IRL, your friends tend to find subtler ways of curing this situation. That said, tho, it is damned annoying to run into. Hopefully someone will point out in a tactful way (ie, one that he/his publisher will listen to) that textfiles take up jack for bandwidth and bandwidth is relatively cheap. At the rates I'm used to, 600 paying customers x $1 pays for the needed bandwith and leaves half to split between publisher, agent, author, and webmaster (should be same as publisher..?).
Third, if you want online books from people who understand the media and are not going to occasionally show their ignorance, you're looking in the wrong place. Either wait for a sci-fi author to go this route (maybe they know better than to try this yet? Dunno. :) or go pay a visit to Project Gutenburg and browse the classics.
Other than that, about the only other option I can think of is if you want to email me. I'm a CompSci major but writing is what I'd really like to be doing... but I don't have time to waste trying to break into the publishing racket. And generating a useful amount of traffic on a website has it's own issues. So... if you really want something, drop me a line and tell me what genres you're interested in. I'm best at Sci-Fi and fantasy but other formats could be an interesting challenge. No charge for the first try, the real goal would be to test the waters and see what could work (and if anyone under the sun is even vaguely interested or if I should hammer away on those CS books :). And yes I know a /. comment is a strange place to advertise but what the hell.
Lanir
lanir@wildmail.com
Me see 'um possible problem with this.
Joe Blow runs Windows.
Joe has Crusoe based laptop.
Joe can presumably update his CodeMorphing(some other schmucks TM) at any time.
Windows is stable and secure. I know 'cause it tells me that as I install it.
Me really see 'um potential for problems with this. =)
-Lanir
Disclaimer: FUD is bad. Be informed. Look up the info and make up your own mind. I'm not a shepherd and I sure as hell hope you're not sheep. =)
I'm going through this issue right now. A friend of mine and I started off in the same boat a couple years ago. Neither of us knew a thing except how to be a Win95 Power User (laugh, I do now :). I was working full time at a gas station and tired of the BS associated with that. I bought us a book that came with a copy of Slackware 3.2 and we went from there. :) :P). I decided that school was not for me and left. After I was done with that, he started work at a starting position in an ISP. He's been there around a year and is now one of their system administrators. I took a year and a half break from college for financial reasons and have now started up again this semester. I'm not taking any CS classes, I'm stuck wading through other requirements. :)
Amazingly enough, we never touched the newsgroups or IRC channels. We learned almost entirely from man-pages, that book, and online docs. After awhile we set up a network with primitive firewalling (which got much improved as time went on) and did IP Masqing for another Linux box and various Win boxen. By this point we were quite competent users of Linux and as administrators we could manage to keep things running fairly well in an undemanding environment. Now on to the interesting part.
At that point, I left for school. I took a semester, they taught me basic Java (Yay... how... useful
Where we're at is pretty simple. He's a leg up on me by a significant amount in a lot of practical issues. I know enough Java to write stuff to the screen. He knows some C and a bunch of system and configuration goo, as well as a fair amount of Solaris. I have to scrape to get a tech job while he currently has some options should he need to leave where he's at. Obviously in the short run, it kinda looks like I should have gotten a job instead of playing around with school. But I don't have a degree yet, so we'll see what happens in a few years. If this really is an annual column, I'll update the story next year.
Oh, I do want to add a couple quick personal viewpoints on this. I think that where you go is at least as important as going or not. It's terribly easy to get dragged into a place that wants to teach you a few good things and a bunch of crap 'n chuck you out the window. Look for someplace that hits heavy on the theory. It may seem silly but that's the stuff you're really there for. Any fool can pick up "C for Dummies" and figure out how to print crap to the screen. Going from a complete lack of what php3 was to knowing how to make a shopping cart with it took all of an afternoon for me. These are not the things that job security is made of. Stick through the boring stuff, twiddle your thumbs while they dumb down the material so anyone can get through it, and do your serious explorations on your own, after they've equipped you with the basics.
When I was bored of learning Java, I looked up the political mess surrounding it and decided it was too likely to be a dead end for me. I also manually updated a libc5 system to glibc2 and learned a lot as I fixed the things that broke.
I'm also mildly disappointed at the way this issue is being tossed about. At the risk of over generalizing and being guilty of the same thing I'm accusing others of doing, I'll say that Slashdot is the last place I'd have expected to find people expounding upon the virtues of one "cookie cutter" solution over another. Nothing is right for everyone and few things are even right for most people. I don't think either theoretical or practical knowledge are terribly useful all on their own. Theory aids in innovation and practicality gets things done. I'm going back to school because I've already learned a lot on my own and now I want to complete the picture and become well rounded.
There is a Linux distribution with much the same philosophy. It's still being worked on from my understanding of things, tho I'm not at all an authoritative source. The name of the distribution is Nexus and the website is here. As usual, the proper reply to "Why isn't there a widget for this?" is "Because you haven't written it yet." If you want this, help out and do what you can.
In my opinion, whether there is technical merit to this article or not, it sucks. And the reason is the way it's written. It blows in, drops hints of details like throwing candy at a crowd of children, then moves on to other things. It reads like a sales pitch, and a bad one at that.
What I see as the real issue here is how people get compensated for adding something to the culture. Whether it's music or software, prose, poetry, art or photos, as long as it can be made digital it can be copied infinitely. By anyone, because the means to do so are cheap and necessary for a computer to be more than a rather lousy paperweight. People have to get compensated somehow for the effort, or they don't do it. But there are currently a lot of hangers-on and middlemen that look to be losing a job sometime in the not too distant future. With the current state of things, you can't ditch them yet, but they're growing less necessary as time goes on. Who cares if you download a song from the internet or get it from a record store? The artist certainly wouldn't as long as they got something out of it.
So right now there are a lot of artists who aren't sure how to distribute their stuff over the internet and continue the lifestyle they're accustomed to. And there are a lot of record companies, publishers, and whatnot that are looking at a much less certain future than any of them would likely have envisioned even ten years ago. Kind of sucks to suddenly be wondering about your pension. So of course they're going to fight tooth and claw over this issue and they're going to try to get the big bad government to squish anything that threatens them.
You see, the only reason this all -has- to happen is because no one has come forward and offered a solution that gives EVERYONE a way to back down gracefully and compromise. When that happens, then we can point fingers and mutter about the Evil Empire.
Ok, I'm going to give an example here pulled from my memory of history. I'm pretty sure this is right but not certain. It's the 'memory' part of that statement that scares me. ;)
The first step Hitler took on the road to the Jewish Holocaust was a harmless one. They were all supposed to wear a Star of David to mark them as being Jewish. Different.
You're smart. Think about it.
Oh, and just for the record, no, I don't think this program means children will start being sent off to camps and slaughtered in droves. If you need to read that into it, go read "A Modest Proposal" by Swift and conveniently forget that it's satire.
The whole point here is just that separating people out into groups tends to be an inherently dangerous thing. It's not the information that's bad. It's the -extreme- potential for abuse. Remember, the people who are going to be using this are the ones who're responsible for not having let it get this bad in the first place. Teachers and parents.
The kids are just a prize in the middle for whoever wins this little corner of the information war.
-Lanir
P.S. Doubt the accuracy of any of this? Doubt something Katz said? Look up the statistics! Find out for yourself. Libraries make good resources and ironically enough, even a school library should be quite sufficient to the task. Don't be afraid to ask for help.
Hrm. I tried compiling glibc2.0-something. :)
It curled up and died.
Same for 2.1
Same results for 2.1
Ditto for 2.1.1
See a trend here?
It's arguable that I dunno enough to do this right. Or maybe the machine I was on wasn't quite up to it, tho it was a 486 so it -should- have been. But anyway, that's why I didn't just upgrade from source. If someone cares to share with me the trick to getting glibc2 to compile right, I'd be happy 'cause then I can consider the time I spent trying it an educational experience. =)
Slackware 3.6 comes with glibc 2.06pre7. It made for a decent upgrade for me because I have a 486DX2 as well and it's a total pain trying to shift libraries. I still can't get glibc 2.1 to compile, which is obnoxious when it takes 24+ hours to find out.
For that matter, what's the deal with the 'political issues' that keep it off most of the FTP sites?