Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Slashback

Slashback: Deception, Fusion, Membership 254

Posted by timothy from the philipino-connection-#2 dept.
Slashback arrives tonight with updates on the lukewarm path to cold fusion, one more update on what Microsoft claims is "the way out" (really, this time), a hopeful look at Mandrake's Club, and more -- read on below for the details.

"Congratulations! You may already own goats.cx!" King Mongo writes: "Well, well. First Verisign sent mail to trick domain owners into switching registrars ( as described earlier on Slashdot ); today I received a similar letter from Verisign asking me to renew cruel-intention.com with them. The problem is, I never bought cruel-intention.com and I've never used Verisign as a registrar. But what's this? Whois says I've owned it since September 2001? And the Technical Contact is Verisign? And it's registered for 10 years? You can bet I'll be contacting my state AG, as well as the USPS Inspectors' office; what if the domain name was offensive, or actionable (it may even be a DMCA violation)? Verisign has taken it upon themselves to hijack my identity and expose me to litigation! At least they let me know!"

Port softly, and carry a big Club. joestar writes: "Just seen in Mandrake Linux news... It seems that the recent call for Mandrake Club subscriptions had a double effect: it was a financial success for MandrakeSoft ($390,000 since the Club was first created on November 28th, 2001), and at the same time it generated lots of questions about this new approach of doing business with Free-Software. In a really interesting message, MandrakeSoft's CEO Jacques Le Marois gives all details about the Club results and why and how they are currently inventing a new business model dedicated to Free-Software oriented companies, since the traditional business models fail for these companies. Actually I'm impressed."

OK, perhaps we only have the way sideways. gh0ul writes "news.com is featuring an article regarding Microsoft and Unisys' joint venture to steer companies/individuals away from Unix and branch in to the corporate servers based on Windows2000. With all the negative impact towards 'wehavethewayout.com', im supprised they kept it going.. guess that $28 million matters.."

We've patented that way to think, sorry. An Anonymous Coward writes: "The Symantec marketing droids are on the rampage again. After patenting their definition update technology, this time they patented heuristic virus scanning. When will this insanity end? :P"

I'll believe it when it's powering my air-car. abburdlen writes: "A month ago an article in the Journal Science appeared hyping the possibility of tabletop fusion. Quick summary: Sonoluminescence in heavy acetone ... temperature of collapsing bubbles reaching temperature hotter than the Sun ... evidence of fusion. There was some excitement. There were also many initial skeptics. Looks like the doubtful win again. From the APS, 'The possibility of a major discovery has been obscured by substandard experimental techniques.' Ouch."

One day we'll all have decent bandwidth, right? Pathway writes "I know this has been looked at by slashdot before, but here's a good update comparing the Zipp Fiber to the Terabyte Triangle in Spokane at thelocalplanet.com. In the article, they compare how one prodject is so successful, while the other is foundering. It's a good read."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Slashback: Deception, Fusion, Membership More

Slashback: Deception, Fusion, Membership

Comments Filter:

  • Mirrors. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by saintlupus ( 227599 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @08:06PM (#3287911)
    why and how they are currently inventing a new business model dedicated to Free-Software oriented companies, since the traditional business models fail for these companies.

    Hey, how about some dedicated FTP bandwidth for club members? I know the release of the PPC-8.2 may well flatten the public servers.

    --saint

    • Re: (Score:3, Flamebait)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Yeah, you're right -- they're definitely going to need to offer members something real for their money in order to reach the membership numbers they're talking about. Right now, basically all you get is the ability to download some closed-source software, which is kinda lame -- people don't run Linux in order to run closed source. I bought one of Mandrake's boxed distributions, and am using it now, but I'm not even tempted to join the club based on what they're offering now.

      I also don't understand how they can claim 3 million users worldwide. Where would numbers that high come from? They'd have to be desktop users, since most users are desktop users. Let's say there are a billion computer users worldwide, and 0.5% of them (according to a recent Slashdot story) use Linux. That makes 5 million desktop Linux users worldwide. How can 3 million of them be using Mandrake? Is Mandrake really more popular on the desktop than every other Linux distro put together?? I suspect they're double-counting people. After all, it's notoriously difficult for web sites to get accurate counts of unique visitors.

  • Both Microsoft and Unisys have declined to comment on the cause of the outage. It is unknown whether there was a technical problem at the hosting site or whether the site was merely bombarded with requests from IT managers clamoring for copies of the free papers on the site.

    Yeah sure... millions of slashdotters thought that they could actually find a way out from Micro$oft!!!!!

  • cool! (oh wait) (Score:2, Insightful)

    by phrontist ( 559617 )
    Desktop Fusion would be incredible but I doubt this will work. I mean if it reaces temps hotter then the sun how can I keep it on my desk?

    • Re:cool! (oh wait) (Score:5, Funny)

      by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @08:13PM (#3287950) Homepage Journal
      Obviously you're not an AMD owner...
    • Here's a vastly oversimplified reason you could probably keep it on your desk:

      If you have enough energy to raise one molecule of acetone by 1,000,000 centigrade degrees, you also only have enough energy to raise 1,000,000 molecules of acetone by 1 centigrade degree.

      That one molecule would be spectacularly hot, but the amount of energy in relation to the mass of surrounding fluid (assuming a couple of liters of fluid) is fairly low. The problem would be if you get the rate of fusion too high, and raise the whole mass 1,000,000 centigrade degrees.

    • Re:cool! (oh wait) (Score:2, Informative)

      by jamesc ( 37895 )
      Desktop Fusion would be incredible but I doubt this will work. I mean if it reaces temps hotter then the sun how can I keep it on my desk?

      Others have addressed your confusion between temperature and actual energy content, but there's one thing more: The surface of the sun is not hot enough to cause nuclear fusion. They need to get near the temperature of the Sun's core to have a chance of fusion.

      Actually, it's worse than that. To get fusion you have three factors involved: temperature, time, and pressure. All three multiplied together form a fusion quality number:

      temperature * time * pressure * constant
      In the Sun's core all three are enormous. In the experimental reactors, the time is short (milliseconds vs. millenia) and the pressure is much less (whatever they can manage with magnetic fields and/or inertia vs. the weight of an entire star). As a result, the temperature has to be even higher than that in the Sun's core.

      They can offset this by using isotopes that are easier to fuse (deuterium and tritium), but that only helps so much.

  • Goats.cx? (Score:3, Funny)

    by toupsie ( 88295 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @08:07PM (#3287919) Homepage
    "Congratulations! You may already own goats.cx!"

    I would rather own goatse.cx [goatse.cx] instead. Imagine the number of hits from losers you would get!

    • Re:Goats.cx? (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Bastard, I just clicked on your link, YYAARRRRKKKKK. >:( >:( >:(

    • Re:Goats.cx? (Score:4, Funny)

      by quantaman ( 517394 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @08:28PM (#3288015)
      Just think of all the poor /. newbies who just clicked on your highly rated link to see what it was! I never saw I would see a goatse.cx higher than -1.

      • Re:Goats.cx? (Score:3, Funny)

        by s20451 ( 410424 )
        They gotta learn somehow. Come to think of it, maybe we should have some elaborate initiation ritual for newbies ... where they have to endure the trials of goatse.cx and JonKatz before earning their Slashdot membership.

        • Re:Goats.cx? (Score:3, Funny)

          by Anonymous Coward
          where they have to endure the trials of goatse.cx and JonKatz before earning their Slashdot membership

          You say that as if they're two different things... :P

    • Wow! (Score:2, Funny)

      by wiredog ( 43288 )
      A goatsex link that's on-topic and in context.

  • Check out this bullshit (Score:5, Funny)

    by 1010011010 ( 53039 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @08:09PM (#3287922) Homepage

    Both Microsoft and Unisys have declined to comment on the cause of the outage. It is unknown whether there was a technical problem at the hosting site or whether the site was merely bombarded with requests from IT managers clamoring for copies of the free papers on the site.


    Oh yeah! Spin, baby! spin!
    • or whether the site was merely bombarded with requests from IT managers clamoring for copies of the free papers on the site.

      "We have the way out! (except when you get a whole mess o' hits, then we can't find the way.)"

    • Re:Check out this bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Toddarooski ( 12363 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @09:03PM (#3288155)
      This ain't exactly Microsoft-spin. (I think in this case they were smart enough to keep a low profile.) Note that Microsoft and Unisys refused to comment -- the sentence you're quoting was written by the news.com reporter, and not some Microsoft PR dude.

      I think instead, it's a subtle bit of sarcasm on Mr. Kanellos' part. Go back and read it again.

      --

    • Re:Check out this bullshit (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Or maybe Verisign hijacked wehavethewayout.com and gave it to King Mongo for a few days.

      "If I were King Mongo for just one day..."

    • This amount of spin can only be generated by a buttered cat drive [dancris.com], thereby proving the existence of this highly secretive technology!
    • Both Microsoft and Unisys have declined to comment on the cause of the outage. It is unknown whether there was a technical problem at the hosting site or whether the site was merely bombarded with requests from IT managers clamoring for copies of the free papers on the site.

      Not to be a wet blanket, but that sentence is obviously the article author's tongue-in-cheek comment. If Microsoft and Unisys declined to comment, then how could they say anything about clamoring IT managers?

    • Re:Check out this bullshit (Score:4, Funny)

      by elfkicker ( 162256 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @10:10PM (#3288402)
      The best part is, that after the mad dash to change from a BSD/Apache setup over to IIS is that they are still running a MySQL backend [theregus.com].

      This is about as embarrassing as the time I accidentally mixed up my boss's 12 year-old son's site with shemalesonline.com

    • Expensive Experts (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Gurp ( 7581 ) <glennp@NoSpam.null.net.nz> on Friday April 05, 2002 @12:01AM (#3288742)
      Remember how, according to Microsoft/Unisys, companies shouldn't need "expensive experts"?

      So far, their non-experts:

      1) Installed a system that has embarrassed the company (by using the competitor's OS)
      2) While fixing this, it was down for ages (more embarrassment)
      3) Now that it's up, it's a sitting duck (with MySQL bound to the external network interface) for crackers

      Now, tell me again about how companies shouldn't use experts?

  • Very Interesting Read on Cold Fusion (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BigBlockMopar ( 191202 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @08:09PM (#3287923) Homepage

    Professor David Goodstein of Caltech has a very interesting paper on the physics of cold fusion [caltech.edu] and the history of the initial "discovery". He doesn't predict Mr. Fusion reactors strapped to the backs of our DeLoreans anytime soon.

  • Maze (Score:5, Funny)

    by phrontist ( 559617 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @08:11PM (#3287938) Homepage Journal
    wehavethewayout.com has that image with the window at the end of a maze, and it leads off to a drop. very good analogy :-) ---------- Phrontist=Geek [phrontist.org]
    • The light is coming from the maze side of the window.
      They have the way out of the light into the dark.

  • Support alternate roots (Score:4, Informative)

    by davidu ( 18 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @08:12PM (#3287944) Homepage Journal

    There is a way to begin to move away from Verisign
    OpenNIC :: http://www.opennic.unrated.net/ [unrated.net]

    The OpenNIC is a user owned and controlled Network Information Center offering a democratic, non-national, alternative to the traditional Top-Level Domain registries.

    Membership in the OpenNIC is open to every user of the Internet. All decisions are made either by a democratically elected administrator or through a direct ballot of the interested members and all decisions, regardless of how they are made, within OpenNIC are appealable to a vote of the general membership.

    Using their root zone will have NO adverse effects on your current websurfing but it will allow you to view alternative roots which have been democratically decided upon.

    Check it out!

    --davidu
    • The problem though is that if I want everyone to access my OpenNIC site, their ISPs must also add the OpenNIC root servers. I don't see that happening anytime soon.

      Jason

    • OpenNIC will never catch on (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Starship Trooper ( 523907 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @09:18PM (#3288203) Homepage Journal
      And there are a number of reasons why, but I can tell you the one most glaring and obvious reason: aesthetics. The original TLDs .com, .org, .net, .edu, and .mil are all short, easy to type, one syllable to pronounce (except for .edu), and most importantly look good at the end of a domain name.

      From OpenNIC's TLD list [unrated.net], you have chosen the TLDs .glue, .indy, .geek, .null, .oss, .parody, and .bbs. All of these are either horribly narrow-reaching and have no reason to be a TLD (.geek, .oss, .parody), sound stupid (.glue, .indy), look stupid (.geek, .oss, .bbs), or are too long (all of them except .oss and .bbs).

      These are the same reasons nobody wants a domain under .biz, .info, .museum or any of the other "official" new TLDs. Geeks seem to be naturally deficient at proper design [themes.org], so I'm not blaming what is essentially a geek project for having this problem. An alternative to the monstrosity Verisign and ICANN have made of their root servers is severely needed. But, if I may, I would like to suggest you ditch these ugly TLDs and put some more thought into choosing names people actually would want on the end of their site names. Think to yourself, would you seriously consider getting a ".parody" domain? Here are some tips:

      • The TLDs must all be short. Extremely short. No more than 3 characters. Preferably monosyllabic.
      • Don't use ugly letters like 'y', 'k', or 'z', especially at the beginning or end of the domain.
      • Avoid catering to special interests. ".com", ".org" and ".net" all work because they're broad and unspecific. TLDs like ".geek" and ".oss" are just going to make nongeeks roll their eyes and look elsewhere.
      • Most importantly, before you approve a new TLD, seriously ask yourself (and preferably a few other regular people), "would I buy a domain under this TLD?" Few people are going to want a ".geek" domain, I can tell you.
      I really want to see a project like this succeed, but you have to create domains that appeal to broad ranges of people, are easy to type and remember, and look good.
      • Really what we want is to have any top-level domain you can think of. Having just .coms is stupid - it was fine at the time, but now that everybody and their dog has a site, it's like trying to find a new hotmail address - there's none left. I don't accept thisismynewwebpagenamebecausealltheothersaretaken. com as a valid solution.

      • Sure - kick the danes, while you're at it! (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Hektor_Troy ( 262592 ) on Friday April 05, 2002 @10:32AM (#3290202)
        Don't use ugly letters like 'y', 'k', or 'z', especially at the beginning or end of the domain.

        .dk is an official TLD for the "danish" part of the web.

        Thank you for telling us, that our TLD is ugly.

        Go suck on my.dk ;-)
      • The reasons you give are interesting but sound an awful lot like the oft-mentioned FUD we hear about on Slashdot from time to time.

        You are expressing a shocking (to me) level of doubt in something which is a clearly better alternative to the ridiculous conservatism in the TLD world. The TLDs OpenNIC has chosen aren't good enough for you. Suggest some! Isn't that the point? It's a system that's open enough that everyone can help make it better, instead of something like ICANN. That's the point of OpenNIC. Open. NIC. Not ICANN.

        (For the record, I hadn't heard of OpenNIC until today)

        Someone in another thread mentioned this, and it's true: what we really want is any TLD at all. Why append three letters to a URL when it's mostly meaningless now?

        Most parties purchase .com, .org and .net of their chosen name -- effectively eliminating any meaning the TLDs were meant to have. VeriSign (admittedly, according to something I read on the OpenNIC site) no longer requests any justification for choice of TLD because they realize everybody just wants all of them.

        So how is the TLD remotely meaningful?

        And FYI there has been acceptance of the new ICANN-endorsed TLD's.

        I live in New York City and am a regular user of the MTA's (Metropolitan Transit Authority) services, most obviously and frequently the subway. Everywhere the MTA's old URL used to be on posters and signs, there is a little circle with "new" or something, and their new URL: http://www.mta.info.

        ".info" used to look stupid to me, too, but now it looks pretty darn normal.

        So, general acceptance or not, some people seem to be finding this useful. "Think outside the box" and you'll eventually realize that the TLDs can actually convey useful information about a URL.

        All it takes to make the unfamiliar familiar and the awkward comfortable is a little love and clarity. Why wait?
    • Using their root zone will have NO adverse effects on your current websurfing but it will allow you to view alternative roots which have been democratically decided upon.

      Technically, I think that this is not quite right. I believe that OpenNic does not support the icann .biz zone.
      Personally, I would have a hard time finding a way to care less than I already do about anything under .biz, so I use OpenNIC as my DNS root.
    • Yes, I tried that once but they make it extremely hard for anyone who's not using OpenNIC to contact them, so I wasn't able to get it working. I might try again someday.

  • I'm looking for "the way out" (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Pinball Wizard ( 161942 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @08:14PM (#3287961) Homepage Journal
    so I'm writing Perl functions to serve as drop-in replacements for people porting asp applications to perl. (I'm porting an application now, unfortunately Chilisoft asp couldn't handle the traffic this site gets).

    So far I've gotten Trim, InStr, InStrRev, Left, Right, and a few others done. Having these functions really make translating the code a lot easier.

    I wonder, is this too trivial to post on sourceforge? I'd love to share.

    • No, it's not too trivial. Sounds like a great idea to me. Actually, I could see the use of a number of codebases to help people escape from ASP: one for Perl, one for PHP, one for JSP, etc. ...
    • so I'm writing Perl functions to serve as drop-in replacements for people porting asp applications to perl.

      Ummmm... you can cover a lot of ground if you just install Apache::ASP [apache-asp.org].

  • Is there a good registrar review site anywhere? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Jelloman ( 69747 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @08:14PM (#3287963)
    domainnamebuyersguide.com was mentioned here about a year ago, but it's since been bought by a registrar (which is why I didn't make it a link).

    Since there are so many ill-behaved registrars out there (starting with the root of all DNS evil, Verisign), I would really like to see some unbiased reviews of some of them. But Googling around, I'm having a hard time finding anything.

    I'm mostly looking for a registrar whose customer agreement does not state somewhere in subparagraph J that they actually own my domain and can take it away anytime they feel like it for no good reason. I know the courts have said that they have that right anyway, at least in the US, but I'd at least prefer that they not shove it in my face.
    • Gandi [gandi.net] has worked great for me. Only 12 euros per year (about $10) and their terms of service are very good (you actually own the domain). They also do website and e-mail redirection for free.
    • Well, back before domainnamebuyersguide was bought out, I used it to pick Domain Discover [domaindiscover.com]

      Their prices have gone up a little since I originally registered arnor.net and my other site, but their domain registration agreement is still readable, clearly states that you own the domain, and they can only take it away according to ICANN policies or non-payment. The web site makes it easy to modify the configuration for your domains. The free features like email and web site forwarding are really useful. If I register more domains, I'll keep going there.

      And I should also mention Hosting-Network, Inc [featureprice.com] where I've got my site. I'm on the $60/year plan, they don't mess with your site, server is BSD/Apache with PHP,CGI and Perl, you get email addresses, lots of webspace, and your own IP address. It rocks.

      At prices like this, everyone should have their own domain, website, and set of email addresses...

    • Re:Is there a good registrar review site anywhere? (Score:4, Informative)

      by washirv ( 130045 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @09:20PM (#3288211)
      I can't recommend gandi [gandi.net] (www.gandi.net) highly enough. In addition to the small and entirely pro-consumer terms of service, it's really cheap: a mere $10. And since I switched to them, the email address that I use to register domain names has stopped getting spam. (The old one that I used with netsol still gets plenty). These guys are the best.
      --
      kurukshetra [kurukshetra.org] all the desi news and views you could use
    • Joker [joker.com] is an excellent registrar. They charge 12 Euros per year, they have good service, they never spam you...
    • Just do a search for the words 'network', 'solutions', and 'sucks' in google and you'll find everything you need to know about them.

      Personally, I use gandi.net - it's cheap, and it works for me.

      I utterly hate netsol/verisign and everything they represent. There's a domain I wanted to buy recently that had expired almost a year ago, and I emailed to ask when I could expect it to be deleted from their database. Here's their response and my subsequent reply:

      On Thu, 28 Feb 2002 CustomerService@networksolutions.com wrote:

      > >
      > Thank you for contacting VeriSign.
      >
      > VeriSign, Inc., periodically deletes domain names that are up
      > for deletion in bulk since bulk deletion better enables us to
      > insure that only those domain names that are actually up for
      > deletion are properly deleted (as compared to running a deletion
      > process).

      Excuse me?

      > The dates on which these bulk deletions occur are arbitrarily
      > selected by our engineering department based upon system loading
      > and other technical factors. In order to protect against
      > an overload of our systems, we do not disclose these deletion dates.

      So, to answer my question, it appears the answer is "When we feel like
      it". Since this domain has been expired for almost a year, and you do
      deletions in bulk, I think it's safe to extrapolate this to mean "Never".

      > You may, therefore, either continue to check our site for the
      > availability of the domain name and attempt to obtain it through
      > the public registration process, contact http://www.snapnames.com

      Who will charge me $45 for the privilege of monitoring a domain that I'll
      never be able to buy because you won't delete it from the database.

      > to attempt to back-order this domain, or, in the alternative, contact
      > the listed registrant directly and discuss the possibility of
      > executing a registrant name change agreement.

      Since the current owner is a domain squatter, indicating my interest in
      the domain would undoubtedly trigger them to charge an extortionate price.
      This seems extremely bizarre considering the fact that they no longer
      actually own this domain. By not deleting expired records, you're
      effectively saving domain squatters huge amounts of money since they don't
      actually need to renew the domain to retain ownership.

      > Best regards,
      > pat002

      Thanks, pat002. Your answer is pretty much what I had expected. I know
      that there's nothing you can personally do to help me, so I'd ask that you
      pass my email onto whatever superior you can. Perhaps eventually someone
      will realise that it's these sort of questionable business practices that
      are driving many many people to use alternate domain registrars.

  • Other instances? More Proof? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by sourcehunter ( 233036 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @08:17PM (#3287974) Homepage
    "Verisign has taken it upon themselves to hijack my identity and expose me to litigation! At least they let me know!"

    Has this happened to anyone else? I'm a bit skeptical of this. This could really land Verisign into some HOT HOT HOT water. It ain't like Verisign is going to target ONE person. If this has only happened to ONE person, then perhaps someone else registered the domain. What other domains does this guy have? Anything similar? Info Info info!!!! The slashback doesn't give much!

    • A very similar thing happened to me, except I actually recieved a bill for someone else's domain!

      I notified (networksolutions at the time) them about their error and they actually wanted me to fax them a copy of my driver's license to verify my identity!

      I finally emailed the admin contact listed for the domain and told them if they wanted their domain they needed to sort things out.

      As it turned out, it was a stupid data entry error by some minimum wage slave... they mistyped one character and assigned me as the billing contact rather than the correct person...

      For the life of me I can't understand how this company is still in business.... I have had nothing but problems whenever I delt with them, and their prices are inordiate...

      Doug

  • What DB is wehavethewayout.com? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by (H)elix1 ( 231155 ) <slashdot.helix@nOSPaM.gmail.com> on Thursday April 04, 2002 @08:18PM (#3287979) Homepage Journal
    Jumping over to The Register [theregister.co.uk]

    But is the site itself entirely clean? The server yesterday revealed that some interesting ports were left open. The most interesting of which is port 3306, which is used by MySQL and Postgres. Since wehavethewayout.com was a BSD/Apache combination, it was almost certainly running an open source database, too. While Unisys has switched the front-end server to Windows IIS, the most likely explanation for keeping this port open is that the back-end still interfaces to a MySQL database. MySQL is cross platform, and there's a Windows version too. This would certainly make for a rapid port, as it doesn't require a rewrite of the cgi scripts.

    Oh, will the pain never end (grin)...
    • fyi-- port 3306 is typically MySQL, not PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL typically runs on 5432.

      Still, it's a fair assumption they were running MySQL. Possibly just out of the box -- does MySQL listen to a network port by default? PostgreSQL only listens on unix domain sockets by default, you actually have to edit the config to get it to listen to the network.

    • The most interesting of which is port 3306, which is used by MySQL and Postgres.

      Postgres (at least on my systems) defaults to tcp/5432.

  • Strangely, the Mandrake Club story, which is great, went to Slashback among other stories. Slashdot editors somtimes act strangely.

  • Clarification regarding "the way out" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Jayde Stargunner ( 207280 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @08:28PM (#3288017)
    Last time I checked, the site really wasn't touting IIS for web hosting, but using Windows servers for enterprise solutions. That's a pretty different situation.

    It's also quite possible that since this really isn't an "in-house" Microsoft deal, they didn't have their web developers working on it...they probably farmed it out to some starving web-heads from SF for an absurdly low price. That said, most web developers don't develop for MS boxes simply because hosting companies charge twice as much for Windows space as a general rule.

    Sure, it may seem like some mass hypocricy or something...but if the website isn't about "Use IIS for hosting two-page, temp web pages!" there really isn't much of an issue.

    Also, notice the page has at the bottom:
    "©1994-2002 Unisys Corporation. All rights reserved."
    NOT
    "©1994-2002 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved."

    -Jayde
    • Sure, it may seem like some mass hypocricy or something...but if the website isn't about "Use IIS for hosting two-page, temp web pages!" there really isn't much of an issue.

      I agree with the sentiment that this isn't about web hosting, but then again its about business. Appearances are important and downtime just looks bad period for potential customers. It may not be logical, but if my storefront is falling apart you probably won't walk in to check out my products regardless of their merits.

      Well maybe it is logical, if a company can't properly set up a marketing site how much faith can one have in its other decisions in outsourcing. At a certain point you just have to ask yourself, "Who is making these outsourcing decisions and why do they still have a job?"

      On top of that, this is a marketing attempt against open source which has very little marketing muscle. Its just plain embarassing to see the world's wealthiest corporation falter in front of some geeks and some IBM marketing.
      • Appearances are important and downtime just looks bad period for potential customers.
        You don't pull the plug on the old system until the new system is ready. If you don't know when the new system will be ready, that itself speaks volumes.

        Speaking of IBM marketing, I keep remembering the Cheddar.com commercial, although in the case of wehavethewayout.com, Swiss and Limburger seem more appropriate than Roquefort.
    • Lets put it this way. If they can't use the platform they're promoting for hosting a simple set of webpages, why should I trust it with mission critical data? They promote the idea that inexspensive MSCEs can handle their machines, and what do they have after they switch the server to Windows -- downtime. If it was just the fact they were using non-Windows servers to host this, that would be one thing, but changing the platform, and then having mysterious "configuration problems", does not paint a good picture for what they're trying to sell.

  • Substandard techniques? (Score:3, Funny)

    by quantaman ( 517394 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @08:32PM (#3288034)
    reaching temperature hotter than the Sun ... evidence of fusion.

    From the APS, 'The possibility of a major discovery has been obscured by substandard experimental techniques.

    What kind of experimental technique could account for that kind of error? Oops! Maybe maybe we shouldn't have set it up in a nuclear reactor that must be where the heat is coming from!!
    • What the hell are you talking about? The APS article stated that the temperatures produced by caviation were widely accepted. They criticized other parts of the experiment, pointing out some inconsistencies in the detection times for related events and possible sources of noise.

  • Patents (Score:5, Informative)

    by felipeal ( 177452 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @08:33PM (#3288041) Homepage
    When will this insanity end?

    I don't know if this is the case with Symantec, but I have a friend that works for a company in the semi-conductors business, and that company has a patent-incentive policy: for each patent request filled, the author receives a US$500 bonus. If the request is approved (and the company - not the author, of course - gets the patent), he/she gets another US$2000.

    That would explain a lot of crazy/stupid/useless patents...
    • getting a $2500 bonus hardly explains the crazy patent scenario. For the extra effort involved you might as well get a paper route, you'd make similar money either way. And that's even with the help of the big company lawyers assisting with the writeup.

      Whats more important is that your name is on a patent. This makes a big difference to some folks, and employers as well. For the individual, it's kinda the professional equivalent of getting a research paper published.

    • Re:Patents (Score:4, Insightful)

      by zmooc ( 33175 ) <zmooc@[ ]oc.net ['zmo' in gap]> on Thursday April 04, 2002 @09:50PM (#3288335) Homepage
      I think the main reason for this bonus-system is to stimulate employees with good innovative ideas to "give" the idea to the company. most employees of most companies are required to do that by their contract anyway. This is probably just meant as an extra bonus for not keeping the idea to yourself (and making money of it yourself). This is pretty standard actually; a lot of good ideas come from education/experience you get by working at the company so they'd like to profit from that. I don't think it was meant to have as many patents as possible.

  • wehavethewayout.com FTP (Score:3, Interesting)

    by silvaran ( 214334 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @08:36PM (#3288049)
    They really did a number on this one. For a few days, while the site was down, they were running the default anonymous FTP server. It's still up, but they removed all traces of FreeBSD.

    You can still log in as anonymous, but there's just a dummy html file there. Before, you could find /bin/ls. Doing a 'file' on it revealed it was a FreeBSD binary. Hmm.. hanging around on an IIS server? Wow, imagine that.

    The PR people know their stuff. I would imagine they took plenty of courses during those several days of downtime to learn how 'cp -R *' actually works.
    • Who ever said it was IIS ?

      It's BSD/Apache as a quick check of a million other posts on this and other sites would have found out and even the site in question would have told you. Microsoft runs BSD and UNIX very heavily internally and has done since the network was first set up

      Now why they would choose apache over IIS is up to you to guess ?

  • I'm not defending them but... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by DeadBugs ( 546475 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @08:50PM (#3288109) Homepage
    Unisys has been in the computer buisness from the beginning long before Microsoft was around. After the fallout between Microsoft and IBM, Unisys became deeply involved with Micorsoft providing servers and direct tech support for Microsoft products. They are not as fortunate as IBM to have jumped off the boat long ago. Their siding with Microsoft because they have so much invested, if everyone went to Linux tommorow Microsoft would not be the only company to suffer.
  • Interesting that even though they managed to get another box up with win 2k, that they are going with the older OS for their flag ship promo site.

    And we are supposed to trust them when they don't even bother getting a site up running XP as the OS?

    Given that this is a flag ship promo site, you would think they would have all the OS issues sorted out well in advance.

    If I was witty, I would think up something to do with the activation screwing them up.

    • Not really. XP is for the consumer and workstation versions. The server is Windows.NET and that's not out yet. So as far as they are concerned, everybody should be using Win2k for serving still.
    • And we are supposed to trust them when they don't even bother getting a site up running XP as the OS?

      Aaaargh. Win2K is a server OS. Windows XP is a desktop OS. Why would you use a desktop OS to host a website? That's almost as asinine as expecting palm.com to be running on an array of palm pilots.

      Anyway, the campaign was about Big Iron data servers, not web servers.
    • Because Windows XP is a desktop OS. .net server, which will replace windows 2000 server, is currently in beta/development.

  • Unix is the light (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Trevelyan ( 535381 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @09:09PM (#3288174)
    look at the pic on www.wehavethewayout.com notice the light shines out from their unix represntation, in to the dark MS world.
    which way would you go, from the light into the dark or from the dark in to the light?

    thier PR ppl missed that metaphore =)

    hehe

    • Re:Unix is the light (Score:2, Interesting)

      by smeng ( 571333 )
      Schmuks. You would think that with the amount of money that they spend on marketing, they would at least have realised something like this. Oh well, free advertising for Unix I suppose :D
    • They do have the way out!
      I closed a few IE windows, got back to the one for wehavethewayout.com, and Internet Explorer (5.0 on NT4) crashed on me.
      Now what that has to do with going from the lighted and a-maze-ing unix side to the dark and bottomless pit Microsoft Windows side, I have no idea.

  • Versign: They're Bastards! (Score:4, Informative)

    by IronTek ( 153138 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @10:39PM (#3288495)
    A friend of mine had registered a domain through Network Solutions (Verisign) and had renewed it for several years.

    Last year, when his domain was coming up to expire, he didn't want to pay Verisign's fees...so he just figured he's let it lapse and maybe go reregister it with someone else...trouble is, though its expired, Verisign hasn't released the domain!

    So my friend can't renew/reregister with anyone except Verisign b/c they won't release the domain back into the pool of available domains!

  • No surprise about Mandrake (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Richthofen80 ( 412488 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @11:00PM (#3288546) Homepage
    Mandrake's finacial success doesn't suprise me. People are willing to pay for the membership in the club because Mandrake linux is perhaps one of the best distributions. Easy to use, reliable, but by no means just for a novice user.
    I tried redhat at first, because thats what I heard was one of the best. But I found Mandrake to be friendlier to me, a windows user. It hasn't crashed in two months, and runs my apache server just fine. Also shares my home network connection, so I don't have to pay at&t the extra cash for extra IPs.

    And I actually paid for my copy, bought it at staples. worth every penny.

  • "hacking" see "Whining " (Score:5, Funny)

    by autopr0n ( 534291 ) on Friday April 05, 2002 @12:46AM (#3288866) Homepage Journal
    As a hacker, I felt it entirely natural to begin to attempt to encapsulate, measure, and then control reality with software. (For what I mean by the word "hack," see http://www.tuxedo.org/ ~esr/ jargon/jargon.html#hack:. To interact with a computer in a playful and exploratory rather than goal-directed way. 'Whatcha up to?' 'Oh, just hacking.' " Criminals need to get themselves another word, we had it first.)

    Wank, wank, wank.

    Well, keep that up and "hacker" will soon mean "a whinny little bitch." I'm so sick of that crap (well, thankfully it's mostly died down of late). It is entirely possible for words to have multiple meanings. The fact that a word you think sounds "cool" does not give you license to go out and try to change the English language. Sheesh.

    • Re:"hacking" see "Whining " (Score:4, Insightful)

      by neo ( 4625 ) on Friday April 05, 2002 @11:26AM (#3290508)
      The fact that a word you think sounds "cool" does not give you license to go out and try to change the English language. Sheesh.

      Actually it does. English is a living language and usage dictates the meanings of words. A dictionary is not the guide to how words are spelled and what they mean, it is rather a reflection of usage.

      From Ambrose Bierce:

      "DICTIONARY, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. "

  • Cold Fusion story and other things (Score:3, Funny)

    by connorbd ( 151811 ) on Friday April 05, 2002 @12:49AM (#3288872) Homepage
    I once pursued a woman who happened at the time to be an Allaire employee, long before the Macromedia buyout. Beautiful girl, a little short in the brains department, but I didn't figure that out until long after she crushed my heart by hitting on my boss right in front of me. But anyway. Ever since then I've always thought that there was something weirdly appropriate about the fact that someone like her -- bimbo-in-geek's-clothing -- would work for a company whose flagship product was called Cold Fusion. (I met some people a while later who had worked with her -- I got the sense that my impression of her was not far off from the impression she gave around the office.)

    As for the matter of wehavethewayout.com... Two companies that had it coming. The dinosaur and the Borg... wonder how much fingerpointing is going on right now. (Come to think of it, Rick Belluzzo... never mind.)

    /Brian

  • More of the firestorm about that fusion experiment (Score:4, Interesting)

    by sunhou ( 238795 ) on Friday April 05, 2002 @12:51AM (#3288881)
    There were two more articles in Science about this "bubble fusion" stuff: one, called To publish or not to publish [sciencemag.org] that explains why they published the article despite the controversy, and another one called 'Bubble Fusion' Paper Generates a Tempest in a Beaker [sciencemag.org] which has some opposing viewpoints. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure you need to be a subscriber or at a university which subscribes to access those (I access it through my university account).

    It's all very interesting, and I'll be curious to see what the final conclusions are. I'm still not sure if I think it was best to publish now, or wait for more independent confirmation. At least they didn't try to hide all the controversy (they even point out that senior science managers at Oak Ridge Lab contacted the journal and asked them to delay publishing the paper..)

  • Physics Today has an article on cold fusion (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    There's an analysis called Skepticism Greets Claim of Bubble Fusion [aip.org] on Physics Today's web site.
  • Our hostmaster@ address received (about 8 months ago) numerous emails from versign asking us to renew domains we didnt really own.

    If I remember correctly, there were all along the lines of:
    fart-sluts.com
    shitonmyface.com
    ..etc..

    I wish I still had the list, there were so funny!

  • wehavetheway... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Guido69 ( 513067 ) on Friday April 05, 2002 @01:18AM (#3288958) Homepage
    ...to Adobe? Anyone else think it's odd that the only format offered for the reports is pdf? Also noticed that there aren't any FrontPage headers in the site source. Hmmm. Perhaps Linux does have a chance on the desktop. I sense a new trend starting in Redmond.

  • Good Registrar (Score:2, Informative)

    by chmod4755 ( 523694 )
    I personally use gandi[http://gandi.net] for all of my domain registrations. I find them fast, very easy to deal with, and straight forward.

    I would recommend Gandi to any person registering a domain.

  • Could Terabyte's tagline be any more obnoxious? (Score:3, Funny)

    by nobodyman ( 90587 ) on Friday April 05, 2002 @02:45AM (#3289156) Homepage
    The slogan on their website reads:
    "Nothing is more important than bandwidth."

    Oh really? Well then PLEASE SHOOT ME NOW. Because I was hoping that the cure for AIDS and/or Cancer, the resolution of the Israeli/Palestine conflict, and perhaps cold fusion would be a big deal.

    I recently had DSL installed, so apparently it's all downhill from here.

Slashdot Top Deals

"May your future be limited only by your dreams." -- Christa McAuliffe

Close