RPG Articles

So, lately I’ve heard a lot of people talking about how awesome Arch Linux is, and figured I’d try it out. The iso was downloaded, and a virtual machine created.

Step 1- Download. The iso is about 158MB, which is rather small, which is typically a good thing if you’re looking to be up and running quickly.

Step 2- Boot and install. Using VirtualBox I mounted the iso and booted from it. Install is menu driven and pretty straightforward. I was expecting more packages selectable during the install, but looking back I probably should have tried a net-install for that. Still, I miss the package selection in FreeBSD’s installer. OpenSuSE ain’t bad on this score, though I’m not fond of Novell, which keeps me at arms length on it.

EDIT- I forgot to mention that one sticking point, for anyone that isn’t familiar with linux at a fundamental level, is that the installer refuses to use any sort of script interface to write changes to the core config files, and instead gives you a list of them, which you can then select items from the edit in either nano or vim. Now, it’s a nice list, and you really shouldn’t have to change much beyond the network configuration, but it’s an unnecessary pain in the butt.

Step 3- Packages. The vbox rebooted and brought up a functional CLI system. Arch uses pacman for installing and managing software. The arguments for pacman, as compared to yum or even slapt, are a little odd to me. For instance, pacman -S <package name> installs a package, while pacman -Ss <search string> searches the repository for that string. Thankfully the Arch Linux website has excellent documentation.

Sooo… what do I think about it? Well, it’s rather nice for a traditional distro. Low BS all the way around and decent package management with a horde of fresh packages. If you were looking to setup a bunch of identical, more or less single role workstations, you could easily build up one system just so and image it, with no clutter. Or, if you were looking to build up a server and had a specific vision for the packages it would run, also a good option.

Think Slackware with up to date packages, and a package manager built in. Plus honest to gHod documentation, instead of 4 year old crib notes on how OSS is the one true sound or somesuch.

If you’re just an old-school loonix nut, then you’re probably already using it and hating Ubuntu.

Christ man. I love when articles spin polls and comments completely out of scope.

Like this shit. Of course, we don’t know how many people or scientists were polled, or what they actually had to say. Just vague comments from a couple of dudes.

So, this thingy is pretty cool, but everyone is awfully ahead of themselves.

They like to act as though this hasn’t been possible for the last… uhh… 15 years. Let’s go with 15, though I suspect it’s much longer. Sure, components are lighter, electronics more advanced, and so on, but the actual mechanism isn’t complex.

So, do I have a grand conspiracy theory about how it’s repressed by the evil “thems” out there? Good lord no, I realized long ago that anything appearing to be a conspiracy is likely greed combined with horrible incompetence. No, the trick here is that you are diverted away from one massive limitation and one minor one.

Massive: Power. You think a dude takes a lot of energy to keep going, try a servo driven frame. Homie would either end up carrying around a diesel generator, which I hear is great, plugged into the transport he’s servicing, or a dense battery pack that’ll have to be changed out frequently and explode if it ever shorts. Regardless, this item alone takes what is being presented as a general purpose solution, and delivers a very specific, limited solution.

Minor: 200 pounds. Everything he did was a max of 200 pounds, so I can only assume that this is the reasonable limit for the frame as it currently is. This isn’t to say that this is bad or anything, but again we hit a limiting factor. So loading bombs or missiles will still take multiple people.

So, what is it exactly? It can’t lift enough to replace a forklift, is strongly tethered to either a real power tether or a supply line, and undoubtedly costs a mint to produce. In short, it’s one of the many ways to arrive at vaporware.

Will we see something like this one day? Sure, after this company has burned into the ground and someone picks it up for a song you’ll see some implementations of it.

Half of it’s just plain broken, the rest is embarrassed to exist, and at the center of it all is a chaotic black mass.

Oddly, this one feels more accurate-

So. Yeah. Let’s make this brief, ok?

If you get an email, say with an attachment called invoice.doc, you will know if it’s from someone, or someplace, that you are familiar with.

Unless you’re exceptionally retarded.

A couple of quick points. Quotes are from the linked article.

“400 individuals at financial institutions, with the e-mail addressed specifically to that individual and purporting to be a complaint from the U.S. Department of Justice.”

And? If an email has an attachment that you didn’t request, at this point you should know it’s junk. Beyond that, the DOJ or BBB isn’t going to email you, douchebag, despite your inflated sense of self importance.

” The Trojan horse that gets installed on a computer allows an attacker to have remote access to the machine”

So what? This is what all of those back orifice trojans do, and they’ve been around a VERY long time. If a machine is behind a router, this is a much more difficult proposition. A firewall of any merit and the chances of a machine being controlled remotely are even lower. Assuming someone did make a trojan or virus capable of something similar to, say, Hamachi, it’s still an email from someone you don’t know with an attachment.

“The attack spoofing the Justice Department contained an executable program within a zipped file with the extension .scr, typically used by screen savers.”

Yes, the DOJ sent you a screen saver. Congratulations.

“Such attacks are both harder to detect than mass phishing attacks, and more likely to be acted on given the fact they are customized to their recipients, including things such as their name and official title.”

No, not my name and title!

“One of the big reasons behind the increase is the availability of toolkits that enable criminals to essentially have a template for the attacks, wherein they need to fill in only the targeted information.

“A year or two ago you would have to be fairly technically sophisticated in order to create these attacks,” Wood said.”

What? It’s an email attack, you retard. 10 years ago you’d need to be technically sophisticated to spam viruses to the 8 people online who received email.

“Wood added that the rise of social networks like Facebook and professional networks such as Plaxo and LinkedIn are making it easier for attackers to do their homework on potential victims.”

Homework on potential victims? That seals it, this guy doesn’t understand any damned thing. First, it’s all blah blah template blah automated, now you have a personal stalker. The truth is that anyplace your information is visible, it will be scraped by a spam-bot and your name will be added to the hellmass of the universe.

Here’s the real problem- reading comprehension. If you can read a book longer than 200 pages and write an insightful summary, you won’t be taken in by scam email. Unless you’re just hopelessly naive.

Bibles don’t count, by the way, because we all know you just skim over it, and no normal person is going to double check anything you say, because it’s an awful read.

Only once or twice have I had to actually look at an email closely to determine if it’s junk missed by my junk filter(s). Here’s a couple of simple practices for suspicious emails.

Does it have an attachment? Yeah? Screw it then, it’s gone. If it just seems too damned important to not open, forward it to your boss. He makes more than you, let him get a virus by being stupid.

Are there links in the email, to something that looks legitimate? You do realize that text can say anything, but take you somewhere else, right? In most email clients you can hover the cursor over the link text, and the actual target is shown below. Usually you’ll see things like paypal.skrewz.ch which isn’t, I assure you, a paypal associate.

Does the email ask you for personal information? Yeah? WHY WOULD YOU REPLY TO THIS?

Grow up people, the internet should be old hat by now. People like this Wood guy are paid to make you afraid, so you’ll buy more security bullcrap that you don’t really need.

Not everything is “stupendous”, “fantastic”, or “superb”. Some stuff is absolute shit, and nobody is impressed with your lies.

Now, don’t get me wrong, when it comes to entertainment, there’s all kinds out there. What bothers me is when you find a review site, and every review on raves about the subject at hand. This should strike the reader with the thought “I do believe this site is trying to be the popular girl in school. Silly site, stop talking about putting out and get in the trenches.”.

Well, maybe not that exact thought, but you see what I’m saying.

Case in point, IGN. Another case, that is perhaps more widely accessible, is this horror movie review page, where every damned thing receives sloppy oral. Let’s do some compare and contrast.

28 Weeks Later- absolute filth with irritating music blaring constantly.

30 Days of Night- “Scared the bejeesus out of me”. What? It was boring, with some grisly deaths tossed in for tossers.

American Psycho- Has anyone actually watched this painfully amateurish film, or is this like all the people that go on about Atlas Shrugged, based solely on staring at the cover and hearing other asshats talk about it?

Remake of The Hills Have Eyes- Oh good, more weird torture/maim/kill-porn.

Everyone of these things starts with “I never expected to love…” or “When I hear sequel/remake” and assorted relatives of those phrases.

Drives me up the damned wall.

So, I was trying to blog on my Movable Type install, just trying it out some, and… the damned thing doesn’t work. The package is making invalid links. So, uh, screw that.

Movable Type = Waste of time. Use WordPress. The two are similar enough in the good places, and WP is much better designed everywhere else.

No special treatment.

If I screwed up this many times I’d be in prison.