Re: Hackers vs. Crackers (long reply)

Article: 8891 of alt.hackers
From: natew@coho.halcyon.com (Nathan Waddoups)
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: Re: Hackers vs. Crackers (long reply)
Date: 19 Oct 1995 00:02:20 GMT
Organization: Northwest Nexus Inc.
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Approved: see 'certified'
Message-ID: 4644ic$t5v@news1.halcyon.com
NNTP-Posting-Host: coho.halcyon.com
Status: RO

Purna=Murthy%IM%NA=Hou@bangate.compaq.com (Purna Murthy) writes:

>Or, how about the astronauts and engineers of the Apollo 13
mission? Weren't
>they "just hacking" (no disrespect meant)?

Absolutely.  I walked out of the theater thinking "holy cow what brillian
string of hacks" and having the utmost respect for all hacking persons
involved in saving the astronauts' lives.

Like Purna said, it's all about problem solving.

A few months ago, at my girlfriend's place, I found myself standing at a
kitcken counter with a spoon covered in spaghetti sauce (don't get any
ideas)...  Not wanting to leave a big splat on an otherwise clean
countertop, I found a way to balance the spoon on the edge of a glass
(pulled from the sink), held in place with another glass atop the spoon.

My girlfriend saw what I was doing and why, said "hey, no big deal, I have
paper towels..."  But that wasn't the POINT!  I said "yeah, but
this is so
much more interesting, you know?"

She later hung a calendar in my office using a paper clip/clamp thing,
twistie-tie, and a bookshelf.  She clamped the paper clip thing to the
side of the bookshelf (which was made of metal), and looped the twist-tie
through it and through the loop at the top of the calendar.  Hey, I have
push-pins all over the place in here;  So I guess she does know.

And now a couple of computer-related hacks from earlier this week...  Our
mail server quit accepting connections.  I poked and prodded, and found
that the FTP server demon was still alive.  I ftp'ed my mail spool to my
PC, and was the only guy in the building to read mail on Monday.

Then they installed a second mail server, for my building.  Trouble is,
mail kept piling up at the old server, because it took them a while to
change the mail routing.  Solutions: ftp the spool again and concatenate
the files, and create a .forward on the old mail server, using ftp of
course since telnet is still flakey.

Nothing groundbreaking, but it kept me current without having to bother
our network tech crew, who are already way too busy...



--
--natew@halcyon.com---------------------------------------------------------

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