Was away on a job for Christmas one year and some of the people wanted to decorate the work space for the holiday. We had a xmas tree but no lights and no way to get any (the company said they couldn't justify a chopper run for xmas lights). I took two wires and soldered them to pins 2 and 5 on a DB-9 connector, then ran the wires parallel to each other about a centimeter apart. Tore apart an old device to get a bunch of different colored LEDs out and then soldered them between the wires every 2-3", reversing the polarity of every other LED (used hot glue to make sure they wouldn't short out). Then I wrote a quick little program to open a serial port and turn the break state on and off at intervals of ~700ms. A serial port's idle state is -5V and its break state is +5V. So when I plugged the connector in, half the LEDs would light on the idle state, and the other half would light on the break state. I would consider that unusual.

How can you build good applications without knowledge of math, theories, and algorithms; and what use are such things if you're not going to apply them?

So, this is the oil companies' way of ensuring future income? Perhaps they will use this to argue that oil is, in fact, a renewable resource.

You may laugh now, but what will you do when riots break out in 2012? Hollywood is a bunch of Nazis (figuratively speaking). They see fear, and they see profit. They're just cashing in on the game the History Channel has been playing for years. If saying every prophet in the history of the world predicted destruction on 2012 gets you more money, then why not do it, right? Unfortunately, it seems this has gone much farther than the 2000 scare. With so many people freaked out about this whole thing, I think there is real potential for a minor cataclysm in 2012, caused by Hollywood and the television networks themselves. Not the end of the world, but possibly a major blow to civilization.

And I know it seems ridiculous, but you have to remember: Humans are emotional creatures. Poke their feelings and all logic goes out the window.

Religions didn't start off as a scam. But form any institution, and people will rise to power within that institution to take advantage of its constituents. It happens everywhere, from Catholicism to the government to the Red Cross. While the uppers of many religious institutions may have been taking advantage of the lowers for years, the central belief that holds them together has remained the same for centuries... this applies to all religious institutions that I've seen, except for Scientology: which is clearly, without question, a scam. I honestly can't figure out how Scientology still exists. The fact that people are willing to believe in such a thing as Scientology makes me question my faith as a Christian. And that makes me a sad panda.

I'm going to use all these negative mods as evidence of the M$ shills that fucking infest this board. It's been taken over. Holy fuck. Guys, you are earning your money. And blowing your mod points. Slashdot: you have lost a contributor with me. I'm out. Just get paid directly from M$ and be done with the facade.

I've gotten popped for every response I've given, but I have enough karma to buy Florida, so I don't care. (I post at 1 for fun.) But you seem genuine and intelligent, so you deserve some answers.

First of all, I run only one linux server. Everything else is OS X. So, no I'm not married to linux and I do run proprietary software when it is most useful to do so.

But I also have a problem with the semantics of "botnet" because the use of the word outside of the technical community has the connotation of an autonomously replicating system. I now understand technical people want to give the word a more relaxed meaning and they enforce that definition with negative mod points. But, outside of the technical community, the "generally accepted" definition is vague and if you asked Joe Regular Guy directly, you'd probably learn that autonomous propagation is implicit, once you explained the concept to him. "Botnet" ain't exactly in Funk and Wagnalls, by the way.

Also, my first linux box was rootkitted through the FTP server, and so I learned about the pitfalls of poor security on linux a long time ago. No one needs to explain to me that it can be vulnerable.

The lesson here is to not use the word "a*******f" and "M*******t" in the same sentence. That will get you popped by hidden forces and flamed by Anonymous Cowards.

On OS X, matplotlib (pylab), numpy, and scipy are all single click installers now for python 2.5, which is itself a single click installer. I put all these through their paces daily and the newest installs are rock solid.

Just as you wouldn't buy OS X 10.6 and install it before the second point upgrade (e.g. 10.6.2), you shouldn't try to upgrade to python 2.6 before all of the other scientific packages are ready.

Maintaining a python 2.5 scientific environment has never been easier on OS X and ubuntu. I think it's even easy on windows with enthought.

Astroturfers get paid. You decide.

You don't get mod points because when you get them you mod inappropriately.

Ok. I went back and read the definitions.

I like this one:

And you like the one that fits your fiscal agenda. So I'm not the only one who selects their definitions, am I? You. Are. An. Astroturfer.

Define "generally accepted".

I suspect you are astroturfing for MS here and so will want "botnet" to mean "any set of two or more compromised computers". But that definition means that the number of windows botnets would be astronomical, so be careful about your definitions.

Instead I propose the following definition:

botnet: an automated and self propagating network of compromised machines.

If "self propagating" is essential to the definition of "botnet" then the group of manually compromised linux machines is not a botnet.

It's not that easy on MS windows. After you click the link to the tennis player nudie pix, your machine locks up. Then you have to *hard reboot* (without the help of the blue screen to let you know your computer crashed). Only after you hard reboot, usually by pulling the power cord all the way out, can you run the botnet software.

Windows really isn't as user friendly for botnets as everyone thinks it is. I hope 7 does better.

This isn't technically a botnet:

These are simply rootkitted servers and they appear to have been done manually. The unique aspect of this is that it seems to be coordinated, so the MS astroturf team has decided to call it a "botnet".