Comment Re:The site is back up now. (Score 0) 561
Add the following line to your /etc/hosts file.
205.234.222.18 www.ratemycop.com ratemycop.com
205.234.222.18 www.ratemycop.com ratemycop.com
Submission + - Which ISPs Are Spying on You? (wired.com)
firesquirt writes: In an article from WIRED
http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/20 07/05/isp_privacy
The few souls that attempt to read and understand website privacy policies know they are almost universally unintelligible and shot through with clever loopholes. But one of the most important policies to know is your internet service provider's — the company that ferries all your traffic to and from the internet, from search queries to BitTorrent uploads, flirty IMs to porn.
Submission + - Archaeologist claims to have found HMAS Sydney (timesonline.co.uk)
Mendy writes: Tim Ankers, a British archaeologist claims to have found the wreck of the HMAS Sydney, lost during World War 2. He says that he's done this using software he wrote called Merlindown which can analyse satelite photographs to "peer 75m into the earth and 16,000 metres beneath the seas". The Times has a little more information here
Submission + - Review: Linux System Administration
Bob Uhl writes: "I've just finished reading O'Reilly's latest GNU/Linux title, Linux
System Administration (full disclosure: I was sent a reviewer's copy).
Bottom line up front: it's a handy introduction for the beginner
GNU/Linux sysadmin, and a useful addition to an experienced sysadmin's
bookshelf.
The book is essentially a survey of various Linux system-administration tasks: installing Debian; setting up LAMP; configuring a load-balancing, high-availability environment; working with virtualisation. None of the chapters are in-depth examinations of their subjects; rather, they're enough to get you started and familiar with the concepts involved, and headed in the right direction. I like this approach, as it increases the likelihood that any particular admin will be able to use the material presented. I've been working with Apache for almost a decade now, but I've not done any virtualisation; some other fellow may have played with Linux for supercomputing, but never done any web serving with it; we both can use the chapters which cover subjects new to us.
I really like some of the choices the authors made. A lot of GNU/Linux 'administration' books focus on GUI tools — I've seen some which don't even bother addressing the command line! I've long said that if one isn't intimately familiar with the shell — if one cannot get one's job done with it — then one isn't really a sysadmin. Linux System Administration approaches nearly everything from the CLI, right from the get-go. Kudos!
The authors also deserve praise for showing, early on, how to replace Sendmail with Postfix. In 2007, there's very, very little reason to use Sendmail: unless you know why you need it, you almost certainly don't. Postfix is more stable and far more secure.
Another nice thing is how many alternatives are showcased: Xen & VMware; Debian, Fedora & Xandros; CIFS/SMB & NFS; shell, Perl, PHP & Python and so forth. One really great advantage of Unix in general and GNU/Linux in particular is choice — it's good to see a reference work which implicitly acknowledges that.
The authors are also pretty good about calling out common pitfalls — several got me, once upon a time. It'd have been nice to have had a book like this when I was cutting my teeth...
Lastly, I liked that the authors & their editor weren't afraid to refer readers to books from other publishers, in addition to O'Reilly's (uniformly excellent) offerings. Not all publishers would be so forthright; O'Reilly merits recognition for their openness.
The book's not quite perfect, though. I wish that PostgreSQL had at least been mentioned as a more powerful, more stable (and often faster in practice) alternative to MySQL, and one doesn't actually need to register a domain in order to set up static IP addressing. Still, these are pretty minor quibbles.
I'd say that the ideal audience for this book is a small-to-medium business admin who'd like to start using Linux, or who already is but doesn't really feel confident yet. It covers enough categories that at least a few are likely to be relevant. Even an experienced admin will probably find some useful stuff in here."
The book is essentially a survey of various Linux system-administration tasks: installing Debian; setting up LAMP; configuring a load-balancing, high-availability environment; working with virtualisation. None of the chapters are in-depth examinations of their subjects; rather, they're enough to get you started and familiar with the concepts involved, and headed in the right direction. I like this approach, as it increases the likelihood that any particular admin will be able to use the material presented. I've been working with Apache for almost a decade now, but I've not done any virtualisation; some other fellow may have played with Linux for supercomputing, but never done any web serving with it; we both can use the chapters which cover subjects new to us.
I really like some of the choices the authors made. A lot of GNU/Linux 'administration' books focus on GUI tools — I've seen some which don't even bother addressing the command line! I've long said that if one isn't intimately familiar with the shell — if one cannot get one's job done with it — then one isn't really a sysadmin. Linux System Administration approaches nearly everything from the CLI, right from the get-go. Kudos!
The authors also deserve praise for showing, early on, how to replace Sendmail with Postfix. In 2007, there's very, very little reason to use Sendmail: unless you know why you need it, you almost certainly don't. Postfix is more stable and far more secure.
Another nice thing is how many alternatives are showcased: Xen & VMware; Debian, Fedora & Xandros; CIFS/SMB & NFS; shell, Perl, PHP & Python and so forth. One really great advantage of Unix in general and GNU/Linux in particular is choice — it's good to see a reference work which implicitly acknowledges that.
The authors are also pretty good about calling out common pitfalls — several got me, once upon a time. It'd have been nice to have had a book like this when I was cutting my teeth...
Lastly, I liked that the authors & their editor weren't afraid to refer readers to books from other publishers, in addition to O'Reilly's (uniformly excellent) offerings. Not all publishers would be so forthright; O'Reilly merits recognition for their openness.
The book's not quite perfect, though. I wish that PostgreSQL had at least been mentioned as a more powerful, more stable (and often faster in practice) alternative to MySQL, and one doesn't actually need to register a domain in order to set up static IP addressing. Still, these are pretty minor quibbles.
I'd say that the ideal audience for this book is a small-to-medium business admin who'd like to start using Linux, or who already is but doesn't really feel confident yet. It covers enough categories that at least a few are likely to be relevant. Even an experienced admin will probably find some useful stuff in here."
Submission + - VM Enables 'Write-Once, Run Anywhere' Linux Apps
An anonymous reader writes: A startup will soon launch 'a kind of holy software grail,' according to an article at LinuxDevices. The dual-licensed (one of which is GPL) technology is claimed to enable more or less normal Linux applications to run — without requiring recompilation — under Windows, Mac, or Linux, with a look and feel native to each. 'As with Java, Lina users will first install a VM specific to their platform, after which they can run binaries compiled not for their particular OS, but for the VM, which aims to hide OS-specific characteristics from the application. Lina comprises a platform-specific application that virtualizes the host PC's x86 processor... A lightly modified Linux kernel (2.6.19, for now) runs on top of the VM. Under the Linux kernel is a filesystem with standard Linux libraries modified to map resources such as library, filesystem, and system calls to analogous resources on the host platform.' Further details, including an entertaining video or two are at OpenLina.com
Submission + - Fix what slows Apache down by optimizing PHP
An anonymous reader writes: As the load on an application increases, the bottlenecks in the underlying infrastructure become more apparent in the form of slow response to user requests. This article discusses many of the server configuration items that can make or break an application's performance and focuses on steps you can take to optimize Apache and PHP.
Journal Journal: Google Summer of Code 2007 Accepted Projects Listed
The Google Summer of Code website now provides a full list of the projects accepted for Summer of Code 2007. Organizations have a varying number of accepted slots ranging from about 3 projects up to 10 or more for some of the larger organizations. Lets hold a congratulations for all the accepted applicants and best wishes for successful project completions.
Journal Journal: Karma 3
I have noticed that whenever I get modded + Funny my Karma goes down.
Is this normal? I can't seem to find anything in the FAQ about it.
Is this normal? I can't seem to find anything in the FAQ about it.
Bookmark Today @ PC World Ringtones Guaranteed to Empty a Crowded Room (pcworld.com)
Journal Journal: The apocalypse is coming: I have mod points again 17
I knew I shouldn't have come here and discovered that I had them. Not only do I feel the need to spend my mod points, but I had to waste time looking up how to spell apocalypse.
Journal Journal: A little help here...
Can this possibly be true?
brought to me by a very enlightened person on the verge of reaching nirvana at any moment now:
Ground-level ozone has the same beneficial screening effects on ultraviolet radiation as stratospheric ozone.
Does this mean more pollution will actually save us?
Can we end the ban on CFCs?
Bookmark GMs JET POWERED CARS (greatcarstv.com)
Feed Chernobyl Incident Had Fewer Long-Term Health Impacts Than Expected (sciencedaily.com)
A new study has found that risks from radiation exposure to people involved in the Chernobyl incident may be much less significant than most of us think.
Congress to Fight Piracy with Education Funds 163
Nomihn0 writes "The RIAA has announced that the House Education and Labor committee is considering an amendment, HR1689, to the Higher Education Act of 1965. The proposal would allocate federal education funds to anti-piracy measures on college campuses. Most concerning is the bill's wording. It's claimed that the proposal would 'save telecommunications bandwidth costs.' In other words, the government will fund private packet filtering and preferential bandwidth allocation. 'The Higher Education Act (HEA) generally allows schools to spend the money they receive only on certain prescribed areas such as financial aid grants and Pell loans. The new bill would allow that money to be used for more things, but does not contain a request for additional funding. Whether schools would be interested in using a limited pool of federal money to police student file-swapping remains to be seen.'"
Feed GNUMP3d: A small, portable, MP3/OGG streaming server (newsforge.com)
Suppose you want to let a friend thousands of miles away listen to a song from your computer. Perhaps you just want to open up the music library on your computer to a select few while you're on another client on your local area network. Enabling file sharing might be overkill. Instead, you can use a streaming server such as GNUMP3d. Streaming servers are useful for more than Internet radio; they can let people choose individual songs from your music library and play them -- no need to configure NFS, SSH, or Samba.
