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Boring,

I am not a virus writer, but some 5 years ago there were ideas much more advanced than this (except for P2P bit). If in doubt, search for polymorphic multi-partite self-encrypting virus engines.

What really happened to all that was Outlook email and Visual Basic. It suddenly became so easy to write a basic virus that the next stage of the evolution got lost in all the noise.

Think the September that never ended for the advanced virus writers.

Of course now with the lure of money from phishing and like, this may all be coming back. That would suck.

I know he seems to have fallen out of favor a bit since the .boom but ESR's Magic Cauldron is still a compelling piece of writing.
I think IBM is trying to build a cauldron.

Actually, it's "Ain't" if you're on the Moon (a Harsh Mistress, as we all know), or if you're a computer geek:

TANSTAAFL:
http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/T/TANSTAAFL.html
http://jargon.net/jargonfile/t/TANSTAAFL.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanstaafl

You must be new here:
when referencing to the movie which made it famous, you could say fubar,
but in programming, and that's what this article is about, one uses foo bar

I have seen a problem similar to that with the Acrobat Reader plugin. However, that doesn't mean it's related to yours at all. So here's a start:

-What plugins?
-How many windows and tabs open?
-How big of a page does it take for a 94% spike, and how long is the spike? (the example page you gave takes around 6 seconds to render on my 1.6 gig P4 on a freshly started copy)
-Have you started with a clean profile?
-What extensions?
-What OS?
-Do you have any 'internet security' software running?

There are lots of details to even get close to trying to isolate some problem as nebulous as this. If you want to get involved, spend money or time to do it. If not, many people (including myself) would believe that you don't have a right to complain.

Also, read this. Yeah, I know ESR is socially stunted, but that document really does tell you how to ask a quality question.

I believe the point the parent was trying to make is that eight bits aren't always a byte. (This is why so many standards use "octet stream".)

A byte *typically* (indeed, virtually universally now) consists of eight bits, but there have been architectures with different values.

See http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/B/byte.html for more information.

Sure, here: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/dancing.html

in addition to posters above: link. Scroll to "1. Sage summarized(d)" section. I dare you.

I believe millions of crimes are deterred annually with a weapon drawn. More guns, less crime.

/* you are not expected to understand this */

"COME FROM" http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/C/COME-FROM.html

One salient thing to mention is that in the essay he does not specify that the eyes have to find bugs. They simply have to ask the questions that lead the primary programmers, who are often so close to the code as to lack perspective, to examine the relevant code. The e.g. he uses is a tester who asks the developer, "Where are you zeroing that buffer?"

You might wanna check out his home page then

• ion | ratpoision; Pane-based (v. window-based) window managers. Little to no wasted screen real estate. Significantly reduced mouse usage.
• emacs: Wickedly powerful text editor/operating environment.
  • WhizzyTeX: Updates DVI in another window as you edit TeX/LaTeX.
  • AUCTeX: Very powerful emacs extensions for TeX/LaTeX.
• fetchmail + procmail + mutt + spamassassin + msmtp: No-nonsense mail reading and sending.
• bash completions: Quasi-telepathic tab completion.
• Firefox
  • Adblock: Saves an astonishing amount of screen real estate.
• screen: Among many other abilities, screen+ssh can provide VNC-like capabilities for your terminal sessions.

Every input peripheral attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those peripherals which do so expand, however, are ignored in favour of ones which still have a clue.

Are you invoking Formosa's Law? Probably a good idea.

Here is what I found so far...

http://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/
http://archive.corporatewatch.org/profiles/microso ft/microsoft.pdf
http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/03/dis liking_micro.html
http://www.salon.com/tech/special/microsoft/
http://www.reference.com/browse/wiki/Microsoft
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft#1995.E2.80. 9399:_foray_into_the_Internet_and_other_venues
http://uk-linux.news-view.co.uk/topic-6268.html

Unfortunately, I didn't find a comprehensive timeline of Microsoft's misdeeds.

Actually, no.

Master Foo Discourses on the Graphical User Interface

One evening, Master Foo and Nubi attended a gathering of programmers who had met to learn from each other. One of the programmers asked Nubi to what school he and his master belonged. Upon being told they were followers of the Great Way of Unix, the programmer grew scornful.

"The command-line tools of Unix are crude and backward," he scoffed. "Modern, properly designed operating systems do everything through a graphical user interface."

Master Foo said nothing, but pointed at the moon. A nearby dog began to bark at the master's hand.

"I don't understand you!" said the programmer.

Master Foo remained silent, and pointed at an image of the Buddha. Then he pointed at a window.

"What are you trying to tell me?" asked the programmer.

Master Foo pointed at the programmer's head. Then he pointed at a rock.

"Why can't you make yourself clear?" demanded the programmer.

Master Foo frowned thoughtfully, tapped the programmer twice on the nose, and dropped him in a nearby trashcan.

As the programmer was attempting to extricate himself from the garbage, the dog wandered over and piddled on him.

At that moment, the programmer achieved enlightenment.

Courtesy of the Rootless Root

Agreed. Just run IMAP on the server, leave all your mail on the server, and make sure the server gets backed up.

That's what I do with my personal e-mail, but what if the poster doesn't have control of the mail server? If your e-mail comes through an ISP and they don't offer IMAP, or you don't trust them to keep your e-mail (and for whatever reason can't change ISPs), then there might a reason to want to do this.

One nice solution would be to run an IMAP server on the desktop machine, and use fetchmail to automatically pull mail from the ISP and deliver it to the IMAP server. Then you can just configure your mail clients to point at that personal IMAP server.

I do something like that, actually. I work for IBM, so I'm supposed to use Lotus Notes for my e-mail. I hate Lotus Notes. Even worse, it's a pain to use on my Linux-only computers (including my company laptop). Sure, it runs under WINE, but not perfectly, and my Notes under WINE config seemed to break every few months. PITA.

Some kind and enterprising soul in IBM hacked together a library that provides access to Notes databases, and someone else built a fetchmail-like tool for Notes called, obviously enough, fetchnotes. So, I have a cron job that downloads my Notes mail every minute and delivers it to a courier IMAP server, and I use KMail to get mail from there. On the rare cases I don't have my laptop, or can't find a way to connect it, there's also a sqwebmail instance on the server, so I can get my Notes through a browser.

It works very well. I don't know what the options might be for setting up a similar fetchmail/IMAP system if you're on Windows, but I imagine there must be something similar.

My shadow file & customer db are read protected.

Here's some good reading that you'd take some benefit from.

No, it isn't. A backdoor is by definition something that allows access to a system. That's the "door" part. Otherwise, "attrib +h" would be a backdoor.

Wikipedia
Jargon File

I know he's considered as a bit of a prick, but ESR explains exactly why this would be one of the worst things that could happen here.

Make of it what you will.

I can't belive this hasn't been posted yet, but discussions like these always take me back to the story of Mel.

I smile every time I read it.

The Jargon File explains many of these terms, has some interesting notes on hacker culture, and is sometimes plain funny.

*Giggle* Do we really have to explain this one?
"After all, people in authority will always be inconvenienced by schoolchildren or workers or citizens who are prickly, intelligent individualists -- thus, any social system that depends on authority relationships will tend to helpfully ostracize and therapize and drug such 'abnormal' people until they are properly docile and stupid and 'well-socialized'."
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/weaknesses.ht ml

See, smart people don't go along with every war. They don't pacifically accept their cell-phone billing plan. They install Linux and hack it for free. They do their own mechanic work. Ever been hired and discovered quickly that you were the smartest person on your team? If so, you know your ass is grass at that point, because everybody from the janitor to the CEO will fear you, believing that you're going to take their job.

Smart people. are. intimidating. People recoil from you like you had the head of Cthulhu. "God, what if s/he gets mad at us?" Now look at the media stereotypes. Do you ever see a buff, handsome villian with a highschool-yearbook smile and a room-temp IQ up against a smart, quiet hero who works in a laboratory? Nope, always the maniacal genius whose plans for world conquest are foiled by the tough guy shooting his gun. No, I'm not laying the whole blame for smarty-stigma on Mad-Scientist stereotypes. The opposite is true.

I have a secret I'll share now: once during a string of odd jobs, I took a job that I knew would be temporary, and I tried an experiment: I acted almost medicatedly stupid. Think Forest Gump and post-lobotomy Jack Nicholson from "One Flew Over The Cookoo's Nest". I was just real mellow, didn't talk much, carefully spoke only in words of six letters or less (and very slowly), and peacefully went to do whatever I was told, even if it was stupid. I even messed up things on purpose, and was instantly forgiven! I wish I'd never done that experiment, because I learned things about human nature I wish I'd never known. It was the only time in my life when I was just accepted as a regular person. Everybody I met, I felt just INSTANT LOVE! For the first time (except for the blessed few in my life who've understood me), I was not feared. For God's sake, I even had women hitting on me who ordinarily wouldn't have come near me!

Ah, yes, the September that never ended.

Get AOL to foll Rogers' lead, and maybe September will finally come to an end!

Where do I sign up for 'disability' payments?

LOLWTF?!?

Actually, I'd file this under "ha ha only serious". The thing is, if a chronic, life-disrupting level of game-playing is occurring, despite earnest effort on the player's part to stop, how is that not an addiction?

And if it's an addiction (and is officially and clinically recognized as such) then of course you qualify for disability, treatment, and etc etc. Now, most workplace addiction policies call out addiction as substance abuse. But insurance covering psychological conditions are an area I'm not certain of. Of course, that also means that if it's covered, then I'm covering you're gaming problem (or vice versa, since I've been hitting the warcrack a bit too much lately).

So while your point is funny, behind it is a nest of thorny social, economic and legal questions surrounding treatment for behavioral disorders. I'm not certain what the right answer is, but it's an interesting problem.

You know, it might make a difference.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

some special dial core

Dial core? Does it go to 11?

To be honest I am more concerned that they reckon that having two cores each on a separate die makes them two dice instead of two dies.
When they said
Once both X plates have been removed, you can turn the motherboard over and simply pull the heatsinks off to reveal the GPUs (two dice on the chip) and CPUs (single die, 3 cores on the chip).
I looked at the damn photo to see if there was a picture of a pair of d6 dice. It honestly took over a minute to figure out what the heck they meant.

I was prepared later for this quote:
The 332 million transistor GPU is split into two separate dice, the larger of which looks like a conventional GPU, and then a smaller die
I did not look for a d20 and a d6. I might send them a link to http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/ in the hope that if they must use jargon they might at least use sensible jargon.

After creating a list of all the traits of a Type Manager I was able to define exactly what a file manager should be

So you just look at all the software that fit category XYZ, take the union of their feature sets, and voila, you've defined the perfect XYZ application? Riiiiiight. Software design is just that easy.

You know what, I've created a list of all the bridges I'd like to sell you...

(Of course, 90% of everything is crap. Be it RPGs, text adventures, novels, music, blogs, and the like. I'm willing to trade more crap being generated in exchange for more good stuff being generated. The system will find ways of filtering the crap. In the case of IF the IFComp works pretty well. Word of mouth has succesfully lead me to a number of very small, non-local bands. I suspect the homebrew RPG community has working filtering mechanisms.)

I'm less convinced that the IF community has a "retrogaming" focus. Traditional sprite based RPGs have been replaced with shiny 3D RPGs. Everything you can do in a sprite based RPG can be done in a 3D-engine. In the case of IF, there isn't anything that's obviously better. Graphic adventures can't yet capture the flexibility of a text adventure. They'll never capture the particular feeling of the written word any more than movies replaced novels.

(Indeed, so an extent I wonder how many of the RPG Maker fans are really interested in the retrogaming aspect compared to how many use it because it's what they have? Little sprites are easy, big sprites are harder, 3d models and animation are harder yet. As the tools make things easier I'd expect 3D to be the default for future would be game creators, perhaps thanks to Super Ultra RPG Maker 3D.)

That's why I always find language performance debates entertaining. C/C++ programmers will freak out if you tell them language X is very productive, but is maybe two-thirds as fast as C (something that is true of a number of high-level, but compiled, languages). Meanwhile, they will write code that runs at maybe 1/3 of what the machine is capable of, because they spend so much time writing the code they have little time to optimize it.

You don't get it, do you? It's a joke. If you're looking for an algorithm that can factor large prime numbers, grandparent has a constant time algorithm. It's up to you to keep your end of the bargain and run the algorithm only on prime numbers. Otherwise, well, Garbage In Garbage Out. ;-)

By the way, the time to check whether a number is prime is known to be polynomial in the logarithm of the number. The hard part is finding the factors when you know the number isn't prime.

With that recall, the Pruis joined the ranks of the buggy computer -- a club that began in 1947 when engineers found a moth in Panel F, Relay #70 of the Harvard Mark 1 system. The computer was running a test of its multiplier and adder when the engineers noticed something was wrong. The moth was trapped, removed and taped into the computer's logbook with the words: "first actual case of a bug being found."

I hate to be pedantic (well no, I love it), but according to the Jargon file's entry on "bug":

Indeed, the use of bug to mean an industrial defect was already established in Thomas Edison's time, and a more specific and rather modern use can be found in an electrical handbook from 1896 (Hawkin's New Catechism of Electricity, Theo. Audel & Co.) which says: "The term 'bug' is used to a limited extent to designate any fault or trouble in the connections or working of electric apparatus." It further notes that the term is "said to have originated in quadruplex telegraphy and have been transferred to all electric apparatus." ...

Actually, use of bug in the general sense of a disruptive event goes back to Shakespeare! (Henry VI, part III - Act V, Scene II: King Edward: "So, lie thou there. Die thou; and die our fear; For Warwick was a bug that fear'd us all.") In the first edition of Samuel Johnson's dictionary one meaning of bug is "A frightful object; a walking spectre"; this is traced to 'bugbear', a Welsh term for a variety of mythological monster which (to complete the circle) has recently been reintroduced into the popular lexicon through fantasy role-playing games.

But then again, why expect more from Wired.

The moth was trapped, removed and taped into the computer's logbook with the words: "first actual case of a bug being found."

Why would they say that, if the term "bug" didn't exist? I mean, you wouldn't find a rat in your car and say "First actual case of a car 'rat' being found" if you didn't use it as a term to indicate something. You'd just say "this bug caused computing errors". I smell a car rat.

That's right, the term bug has been used before the first literal case of one being found in a computer. That famous anecdote is just a case of people being excited about a pun coming true. Wikipedia has some information on the etymology of the word, as does the Jargon file.

But Aunt Tillie doesn't want "control". She wants to do simple things in a simple way, and frankly as an engineer, so do I. Eric Raymond wrote about this problem compellingly in an old Slashdot referenced story, http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html .

One needs to realize that, currently OSS (specifically, GNU/Linux) is not targeted towards the typical computer user. If the government were to write their own open source operating system (presumably targeted towards the typical user), it would have a different audience, hence it would be a fundamentally different product. This could change Linux in ways I would not like to see.

Also, on a somewhat different note, this guy really doesn't know that much about software development. From my limited experience, Eric Raymond's distinction between The Cathedral and The Bazaar styles of software development hold true. If the government were to begin writing OSS, they would be producing a product written using the "Cathedral" style, which, again, would result in a fundamentally different product. Again, this is not something I would like to see.

On the plus side, I am guessing many avid Linux users and developers would agree with me, and Linux distributions targeted to more advanced users would still be around.

Anyway, what I see is that AJAX will allow me to push all of the controller (MVC) logic onto the server. And I can hide script logic as needed (though can be done with jsp's or servlets/JSF). Aside from making remote scripting easier (i.e. don't need to rewrite functions), it will allow me to write code that looks more procedural and manageable than straight HTML. So it's another tool to add to the arsenal--hence the article sounds like more hype than new tech.

The weird thing is ESR thinks that more javascript than html-content is a train wreck waiting to happen. I would disagree here with something like AJAX in the mix.

Then again, AJAX is old tech and DHTML will likely have a greater impact.

For some reason, some people still seem to have the idea that open-source development is free.

Gosh, I wonder where they could have gotten such a strange idea!

I'm glad that the Wired article uses the term "hacker" appropriately...

IIRC, the name "rootkit" came from the fact that you had to get root access to be able to install it. The rootkit itself was used to conceal the fact that the system was compromised, but the compromise had to happen first.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/R/rootkit.htm l

Apparently "rootkit" will be the next malware term to be misused after crossing over to the Windows world.

Moderators, you should re-read the troll definition.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/F/FUD.html

Old hacker? heck I started on Linux with Yggdrasil ... I've been running Linux ever since!

I figured there would be some chest-puffing in this thread ("Well, I started with Linux in nineteen-ought-three..."). Lots of people started with Yggdrasil: it was available on CD-ROM at computer shows when dial-up ruled the land. You are not a unique snowflake.

You seem to have a problem with the "old hacker" as mentioned in the article. Here is a hint: the definition of "hacker" != "Linux user". Yes, there are hackers that run Linux; not all Linux users are hackers. There are also plenty of old hackers who have never touched Linux. You should read this.

As an aside, here is a link to the printer-friendly version of the article.

Ah yes
ISO 9945-1 Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) -- Part 1: Base Definitions
"The Ugly Red Book That Won't Fit On The Shelf"
This one was not mentioned in the TinyURL Recommended reading. But there are many of these entries in the Jargon File.

Geeks of course please check http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/A/all-your-ba se-are-belong-to-us.html
and then please renew your geek id card

Here's an Arstechnica article that's fairly accessible, which discusses this lightly, and goes on to predict the maximum possible computational power if all the mass of a laptop were converted to energy (e=mc^2)... and how long it'll take to get there if Moore's law keeps up.

Kinda makes me wonder if Gates's law will also keep up?

But even those no mechanical work is being done, on a macroscopic mechanical engineering perspective, according to quantum theory, logical states are transitioning and there is a minimum theoretical energy associated with their rate of transition, and thus a minimum theoretical power consumption. Of course, to compute this and relate it to a computational task (even just one instuction or even one stage of a pipeline) requires knowing the number of 0 to 1 and 1 to 0 transitions, and possibly considering if those transitions are indeed the minimal approach to implement that particular higher level operation if you don't consider the processor's specific circuit design to be the same as the minimum possible to accompilish the task.

So the efficiency, specifically the ratio of this minimum possible power consumption to the actual power dissipated by today's CPUs, is likely a very, very small number. But according to quantum theory, it is not zero, even though no "mechanical" work appears to be done.