Slashdot Mirror

Not a 2x performance increase but it does make a difference.

On DejaNews you can find a post on behalf of Paul Ginsparg commenting on some other posts, summarizing his views of online journals and such. (Paul is the maintainer of the LANL physics preprint archives, the premier online repository of physics research preprints.) If you search sci.math.research for posts by Greg Kuperberg, you can find his opinions on the math archives that he maintains.

Maybe a lot of slashdotters haven't personally suffered from spam from @Home, but those of us who have any familiarity with Usenet history are aware that a UDP is a last resort for dealing with companies that don't respond. So when we outside observers conclude that @Home doesn't respond to complaints, we are only assuming that the folks calling for the UDP aren't lying through their teeth.

As for whether they're fixing it: We'll see. Any company threatened with a UDP is going to claim that they're addressing the problem; but the proof is in the pudding. If the spam volume from @home's network goes down, the UDP will be called off. Otherwise, not. Don't tell me, by the way, that "five business days isn't enough time"; the complaints have been piling up for over a year, and @Home has had more than enough time to do something about it.

It dosn't matter that Pope John Paul III himself endorces the medium [...]; it's still about a single person trying to play Ebeneezer Scrooge and trying to determine what goes on.

Errr... what single person are you referring to? No single person is doing the UDP. It's a group effort. It would be meaningless without tens of thousands of sysadmins the world around. (And who the hell is John Paul III?)

For example one of the terminals has a version of MSIE 5 on it could someone tell me exactly how (considering a great deal of evil scooges may have disabled it in some way) access news from there.

Try www.deja.com.

Well, let's see. There's Deja & Remarq just for starters.

Yahoo also has a listing of public-access USENET sites. Sadly, spammers being who and what they are, most public-access sites that allow posting soon become abused right out of existence.

For those willing to pay a bit of extra money, there is also Yahoo's commercial news server category.

There are always choices for USENET service. Even if you already pay your ISP for its USENET, additional access elsewhere isn't really all that expensive. These are also viable options for people who use free dialin services like AltaVista or Blue Light that don't provide anything beyond bare-bones dialup access.

My apologies if this was addressed in the earlier discussion in the previous story . . .

My opinion of usenet is general is bad because there are no (hint here) easy to access methods for people using what I would term "public access terminals" where you cannot easily change things and add programs and such. Telnet usually could work but would generally suck.

What about deja.com? That's pretty much public access. Of course, you will miss out on a few posts with X-NoArchive set, but that's not usually too critical. (Ok, so you wouldn't get much from the monistary, but that's your loss . . .).

--Matt

How about a picture of beer cans and/or chicken bones?
/.

Well not only that, but if you read the FAQ then it explains in section 11 about "what about the legitimate users being cut off?". Section 8 also deals with those who 'hijack open servers'.

Basically, I see the UDP as saying "this site's users are toss-pots and the site admins aren't doing anything about it, block site, solve problem" and the existence legitimate users either forces the ISP to clean up its act, or they all go elsewhere - who'd want to subscribe to a lame ISP?

All in all, sounds like a good thing to me. Surprisingly enough, Deja notwithstanding, there are those of us who use news clients, subscribe to individual news groups, and read them as 'regulars'. We don't want no stinkin' @Home twerps on my newsgroups, for starters!

Please, read the proposal before posting responses like this. Otherwise you're just posting flamebait: ================================================== ============================= Date n/100 Source Total spam %spam KBytes ================================================== ============================= Total: 1366098 530072 51870913 ================================================== ============================= Average: 42 4479 1738 39 170069 ================================================== ============================= Note the averages (this is quoted from the original proposal linked to the UDP notice... http://www.deja.com/getdoc.xp?A N=570620876&fmt=text). I would argue that when 39% of all arcticles coming from a provider are spam a UDP is indeed warrented.

Of course! You should complain to @Home. Do so at length, and threaten to take your business elsewhere until @Home manages to fix the problem @Home has which is hurting @Home users.

If @Home doesn't fix the problem, you really should switch, if possible. If not, there are many other solutions. The cheapest and easiest would be to read newsgroups via Dejanews or Remarq. Better solutions would be to get a Unix shell account (these are available for free some places at least).

Of course, @Home may come around, hopefully before the UDP hits on the 18th. If so, you have no problems at all.

we have a business partner that charges for access to their news server. This is the personal newsreader service. You can point tin or trn or nutscrape at it and read news that way without ads. That's why they charge for it.

and if I thought we could get away with it, I'd kill the ads myself. but you're right, I don't have anything to do with that. And unfortunately we need the ads to pay my salary.

My 2(where'd the cents symbol go?),
Anonymous Coward

My 2(where'd the cents symbol go?),
Anonymous Coward

Adding "=dnc" gives you the much more readable 'DejaNews Classic' version.

http://www.deja.com/=dnc/getdoc.xp? AN=571636137

--

Use the URL:

http://www.deja.com/=dnc/home_ps.shtml to get to the old DejaNews PowerSearch form.

They appear to have re-enabled this feature over the past couple of months.

deja has a personal newsreader service (unfortunately it's a pay $ervice) where you can point tin at a news server. check out http://www.bcandid.deja.com/

You've been taken in by spammer FUD and BS. Net sites are the private property of their respective owner, free to reject traffic according to their own rules (though they may be liable if they selectively enforce the rules in a prejudicial manner).

Especially go after the smaller sites. They'll BUCKLE under the legal pressure as their bosses realize that they cannot afford a long expen$$$ive lawsuit.

@Home presumably hires reputable and competent lawyers, who do not wish to besmirch their recordss with frivolous-lawsuit sanctions. Their spammer customers are welcome to file such lawsuits, if any of them can find an attorney willing to accept chick en bones as a form of currency.
/.

The author of the slashdot story misread the original DEJA reference. The 12th is the date of the posting of the usenet message, not the UDP. The UDP is set for 17:00 (local) on the 18th (GMT 0100 on the 19th)

Surely Deja has the volume to absorb a slashdotting. Their servers seem to have ground to a halt.

The tech support boiler-room for Rogers.com (one of the @home resellers) was unaware of the UDP call. There is no response yet at Rogers.

The Deja page is an archive of a usenet news posting. If Deja falls over, you should be able to pick up the usenet posting from your NEWS: server.( Posted to: news.admin.net-abuse.usenet ; news.admin.net-abuse.policy ; news.admin.net-abuse.bulletins ; news.admin.announce )

The faq for UDP is
http://www.stopspam.org/usenet/faqs/udp.html

Here is a better link to the article in question: Keeps from /. 'ing one server.

I, too, am a proud owner of a ThinkPad 770 (no E/ED/X/Z) 9549-1AU. It does have the MWave modem, but I don't use it (using LinkSys CardBus 10/100 card).

Most of the items on your wish list are already availible. My 770 runs practically flawlessly. I have accelerated X (which works pretty well with a slightly modified XF86_SVGA server; more on that in a minute), fully functioning APM (suspend and even hibernate to disk), PCMCIA and CardBus, and sound.

I don't know which XF86 you're using (I'm on an older one, 3.3.3 I think; I'm not at the laptop right now), but I had trouble getting the SVGA server to run accelerated, even though it claimed that the Cyber9397 was supported (I'm using the first release to claim support for acceleration on the 9397). I did a little research, and found this post on comp.windows.x.i386unix which describes how to modify the Trident server source code to enable full acceleration. My understanding is that later versions of XFree86 do not require this modification, but I'm not sure since I haven't had to upgrade mine for a while, and so I consequently haven't bothered. Also, read the rest of the messages on that thread; after making these modifications, you will need to add the options "tgui_pci_read_on" and "tgui_pci_write_on" to your XF86Config otherwise the server will hang.

Also, I used to have problems with X and APM, such as when closing the lid or suspending the machine while in X, the screen would get really funky when waking it up. For some odd reason, these problems cleared up after I built myself a kernel with the VESA framebuffer console driver and then started using the console at 1024x768x16bit. Now X gives me no problems, but only as long as I'm using the VESA console. Perhaps the VESA console drivers do something to initialize the graphics chipset that the SVGA server fails to do? I don't know. Using the VESA console also fixed another problem I was having with the accelerated server: before using the VESA console driver, I was having trouble playing back sound (MP3) in the background while I was working on something else. The music would skip if I so much as moved a window. After doing some research I concluded that the Trident driver must have the "pci_retry" option permanently on by default. I could find no way to disable it. Strangely enough, the VESA console solved this problem too!

And finally, you might want to check out tpctl for Linux, which is a program similar to the PS2 program for DOS that comes preloaded on ThinkPads. It allows you to control various things in the ThinkPads with a SMAPI BIOS. And the latest version even comes with a patch to hdparm that allows one to hotswap their IDE devices in the UltraBay! I haven't had a chance to check it out yet myself, so I can't tell you how well it works, but I thought you might like to know. :-)

Feel free to e-mail me if you have any questions.

energy content of alcohol 23.4 x 106 J/Liter

from the same paper, for gasoline:

energy produced by combustion of 1.0 L gasoline 32 x 106 J

From the tech newsgroups, Tom Box states:

The composition of gasoline can vary significantly. Assuming for simplicity that it's pure normal octane, then 1,000,000 joules = 20.88 g. At room temperature and pressure, that's 29.7 cm^3. For the metrically challenged, that's about one fluid ounce.

75 kWh corresponds to 8.03 litres of octane, or just over 2 U.S. gallons.

And a word from the top fueler's on how tricky it is to get alcohol to burn like gasoline:

And here's a good discussion how alcohol performs in race cars and why it is used in them rather than by consumers.

The 11 dimensions thing is valid - it's a theory followed by Hawking and others when referring to string theory.

This deja.com thread has more info on it (doing a more rigorous search would probably get you even more information).

• On the one hand, it looks somewhat serious. Certainly compared to some of the genuine net.kooks that I've had the fortune/misfortune of encountering.
• On the other hand, the web site is using the same sort of vastly-over-fonted formatting that is characteristic of Tax Refusals and the likes.

The thesis of the Oh, No! The Japanese are bribing the US Patent Office Out of Existence site isn't terribly clear. When the argumentation isn't completely coherent, it can be tough to tell apart someone that's got a good idea, but can't quite spit it out right, and feels too strongly about the matter to be completely coherent, from someone that is a completely loony raving nutter.

"We are just using an entirely new way to represent the date that isn't more human readable, or more machine friendly, that just happens to look exactly like the standard 2 digit year format until the year 2000 occurs, at which point it still works exactly as planned."

It's clearly documented. Always has been. You were just guessing how localtime(3) behaved instead of looking it up and reading the precise behaviour. A library API is a contract. If you sign up to using that library without reading the fine print, then you cannot complain when that fine print bites you in the ass. Stop guessing, and read!

You are incorrect in your assumption that this is somehow peculiar to Perl. Whether it's peculiar in general is another question entirely. :-) I wrote about this in a letter to Dan Gillmor. Essentially, you need to understand a struct tm. Apparently the situation is even worse in Java Script, where it appears that different implementations behave differently.

If you're on the cutting edge of Perl technology, please pay special attention to the new -DPERL_Y2KWARN configuration option. It produces an effect like this:

% perl -we 'printf "Year is 19%d\n", (localtime)[5]'
Possible Y2K bug: %d format string following '19' at -e line 1.
Year is 19100

The following information about Perl and the year 2000 is a modified version of the information that can be found in the Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) documents.

Does Perl have a year 2000 problem? Is Perl Y2K compliant?

Short answer: No, Perl does not have a year 2000 problem. Yes, Perl is Y2K compliant (whatever that means). The programmers you've hired to use it, however, probably are not. If you want perl to complain when your programmers create programs with certain types of possible year 2000 problems, a build option allows you to turn on warnings.

Long answer: The question belies a true understanding of the issue. Perl is just as Y2K compliant as your pencil --no more, and no less. Can you use your pencil to write a non-Y2K-compliant memo? Of course you can. Is that the pencil's fault? Of course it isn't.

The date and time functions supplied with perl (gmtime and localtime) supply adequate information to determine the year well beyond 2000 (2038 is when trouble strikes for 32-bit machines). The year returned by these functions when used in an array context is the year minus 1900. For years between 1910 and 1999 this happens to be a 2-digit decimal number. To avoid the year 2000 problem simply do not treat the year as a 2-digit number. It isn't. When gmtime() and localtime() are used in scalar context they return a timestamp string that contains a fully- expanded year. For example, $timestamp = gmtime(1005613200) sets $timestamp to "Tue Nov 13 01:00:00 2001". There's no year 2000 problem here.

That doesn't mean that Perl can't be used to create non- Y2K compliant programs. It can. But so can your pencil. It's the fault of the user, not the language. At the risk of inflaming the NRA: ``Perl doesn't break Y2K, people do.'' See http://language.perl.com/news/y2k.html for a longer exposition.

If you want perl to warn you when it sees a program which catenates a number with the string "19" -- a common indication of a year 2000 problem -- build perl using the Configure option "-Accflags=-DPERL_Y2KWARN". (See the file INSTALL for more information about building perl.)

See this Usenet article if interested: http://x41.deja.com/[ST_rn=ap]/getdoc.xp?AN=560111 606&CONTEXT=947028952.400556062& hitnum=2

For a search of Linux, as an example, see how this clean little hack works compared to this usual dejanews search.

For a search of Linux, as an example, see how this clean little hack works compared to this usual dejanews search.

I don't think so. Visual J++ was rightfully listed as the worst Java environment on Deja.com. Now it seems they've move J++ from a Java environment to Windows development environments which is more appropriate, at it is second to last there. The Borland/Inprise environments are listed as the best. Even MS C++ is rated very low (I would agree after reading benchmarks in a recent Linux Journal). So, I doubt is MS is flooding Deja.com pools with good comments!

Is it just me, or does there seem to be a lack of Linux interest on Deja in general. If you go to Home >> Computing&Tech >> Software >> Operating Systems >> Discussions there seems to be a zillion MS windows forums but hardly any Linux ones!

I don't use deja, so mabye I'm just doing something wrong...

According to Deja.Com pool Microsoft NT Server is the best Network Operating System Linux is the worst. This is in sharp contrast with pool for the Operating System, where Linux ranks best and all Microsoft product lags at the tail. I don't think that both pools can be honest. Looks like BSD script kiddie rather than Redmondians.

According to Deja.Com pool Microsoft NT Server is the best Network Operating System Linux is the worst. This is in sharp contrast with pool for the Operating System, where Linux ranks best and all Microsoft product lags at the tail. I don't think that both pools can be honest. Looks like BSD script kiddie rather than Redmondians.

Hi, my name is Jeld The Dark Elf
1. Go to www.deja.com
2. Go to advanced search
3. Search for jeld
4. Alternatively skip 1-3 and go here
5. Follow my example

To explain how to do part 5

1. Go to alt.linux.com
2. Find messages with = 3 replies in the thread
3. Answer the question if you can
4. While doing part 3 do not tell people to RTFM
5. If you break rule 4 include url for the documentation mentioned
6. Always post to both group and author's e-mail
7. If possible include your own e-mail and encourage people to mail you directly with questions
8. Repeat steps 2-8

Thankl you for your attention

Here is a Usenet post from someone who called up the police department and pharmacy trying to get information about this case.

This is how I found out about it. I even verified it myself by telnetting to the box... maybe I telnetted to port 80, but I think that it was 23. See this article at deja.com for a fairly accurate record.

We haven't called this a beta release. We have called this a technology preview. If you read the original announcement on Deja by me, you will see that.

I knew about the problems before Chaney did pay for the domain (it was the early evening of Dec. 24 for me too, but over here, that is 6 hours in advance), I thought about making lots of money by claiming the name.

I didn't: I don't need the money, I like it that people think I'm honest. An article on news.admin.net-abuse.email mentioned the problem. It was canceled by HipCrime, a repost is still available at deja.com.

I could have helped micros~1, I didn't. That was just a brain block, my fault. Kudos for Michael for his creative solution.

I do think it shows that Linux users and spam fighters have higher moral standards than the "Evil Empire". Bill Gates would take any legal opportunity to increase his wealth by 1%. A lot of people could have made a lot of money; none of then did, because they like their reputation more than their wallet.

www.deja.com/getdoc.xp?AN=547600297

This issue was hashed out soon after the intro of the "G3" Power Macs. Macintouch posted a discussion with a Somerset (PPC) engineer about 603e/750 support for SMP. They will support SMP, just not always efficiently, since they don't implement all the necessary cache coherency protocols.

The article contends that Linux is not as sophisticated as BSD. While I agree that certain features of BSD might be more advanced (e.g. from a brief chat with one of the NetBSD folks, the UVM sounds cool), Linux is braving uncharted water in a number of previously shunned areas (I was stunned to find, for example, that I can choose to enable a kernel-based static http server in my Linux kernel as of 2.3.x). This willingness to break with UNIX tradition is what sets Linux apart, and frankly is the reason that many of us like it.

I also like BSD (I was a huge fan of 4.2, back when Ultrix was 4.2 with the serial numbers filed off). BSD has a tradition of stability and innovation that is hard to match, and look forward to a world where BSD and Linux are equal participants in the operating system development community. But can we stop pretending that one OS is "better" than another, and focus on which OS is right for a given task/environment?

A recent reposted article in alt.humor.best-of-usenet mentioned:

A moment of silence for our favourite weaponsmith please, and then we blow up a BMW.

The link is here.

He shall be missed. I recommend seeing The World Is Not Enough again just for his exit scene. Chear loudly, and then leave to see some better movie.

so warez puppies like yourself, who will whine about anything that halts the flow of warez -- like a cd key system that actually works -- do not have a foul attitude? interesting

Actually I've been known to send people on snipe hunts when they ask about getting their free copy of Q2. It's been a while since I was active on alt.games.quake2 however I don't *think* I have become any more of a warez puppy in that time. Sorry if you misunderstood my question. Basically I was stating that there are those who *will* try like hell to get around any copy protection, and that the CD-Key thing may well be dropped, like Q2 after version 3.14 no longer required the CD to be in the drive to play period.

I can't think of any reason why Id would not require it any longer, other than the fact that it was no longer the most sought-after game ever at that point. I also don't think removing that requirement made that much of a dent in their sales. About the only thing I did to piss off ID was to actually get ahold of a copy of the leaked IHV test(Sorry John!), which I later deleted for HD space. I'm still buying the final product though, as soon as I can get a copy (for Linux) in my local Best Buy...

If that's what you were upset about before, then sorry that's what you thought. I'll try to be more clear next time.


mcrandello@my-deja.com
rschaar{at}pegasus.cc.ucf.edu if it's important.

Did anybody actually go and check out his stuff on Deja? The people aren't saying he's a fruitcake. I searched using 'Randall Mills Blacklight', 'Mills Black light' and 'Randall Mills' and came up with four (4) articles having to do anything with this whole debacle (although threads did have other information on related experiments by others, which apparently started discussion about Mr. Mills). In any case, the four articles basically state that

a) Mills has posted a couple of articles to ANs for peer review, although they haven't been given much attention.

b) On the surface, it passes pseudoscience but people aren't holding their breath.

This doesn't read as crackpot. Personally, yes, I think the experiments will fail to pan out, mostly because this guy is an capitalist, not a scientist or mathematician and he's probably overlooking something himself that's giving him these strange new results. Stranger things have happened. This may turn out to be the 2000 version of the patent clerk coming out of nowhere with a brand new theory that explains far more than we knew before.

Of course, this time he's going to the patent clerk. How ironic.

Deja search link (turns up those four articles):
ht tp://www.deja.com/qs.xp?OP=dnquery.xp&ST=MS&DBS=2& QRY=Randall+Mills+Blacklight

Ever since DVD has come out, some "person in the know" on USENET has popped up and said "Star Wars in three months!" Then they go on and on about "a warehouse full of boxes" or "their dear, dear friend at Skywalker Ranch said it was so" or some other bunk.

Every time they have said it, it ain't true. I will bet all 51 of my karma points that it ain't true this time either.

Ever since DVD has come out, some "person in the know" on USENET has popped up and said "Star Wars in three months!" Then they go on and on about "a warehouse full of boxes" or "their dear, dear friend at Skywalker Ranch said it was so" or some other bunk.

Every time they have said it, it ain't true. I will bet all 51 of my karma points that it ain't true this time either.

Read this post to netscape.public.mozilla.wishlist to see how you could do it in the M8 milestone.

Not a troll. I had no idea people had problems getting a monitor to work either. In my case, I found an easy was to find information by scanning dejanews for each monitor I set up. Setting up the maximum resolution and refresh rate is easy if you know how to use a search engine.

Here is the setup I use for 1600x1200 on my V775 monitor. ...oh, there's a little hack in that search query on deja to rid most of the advertising crap.

Else, break out the calculator and look at the XFree86-Video-Timing s-HOWTO and customize your own (and possibly exceed the performance limits of your monitor!) If you go beyond specs, the driver circuits can consume too much current and overheat. Not cool.

I'm not aware of a dedicated keyboard site, but alt.comp.periphs.keyboard might be a good place to start. I found it at deja.com, but your ISP may carry it as well on your local newsserver. I believe deja.com will also let you set up your own discussion on a topic.

There was also a great discussion of keyboards and keyboard features in the recent Slashdot poll "Most Important Part of a Keyboard", but most of the past polls are missing all of the comments. Does anyone know if this is a normal thing? I seem to remember past polls keeping the comments at one point in time.

You make a very, very good point. Isn't there a way the Linux and *BSD kernel could be patched to disallow execution from a stack? I know there's plenty of memory protection and such in there, so can't we put in one more layer of protection?

So, let's just change chips. :-) Of course, that's hardly enough. Can't we clear up a lot of these exploits by fixing the stack? The answer is yes, we could clear up a lot of them. But that sadly, it's not going to cure the class of problem completely.

Why should stack and data pages be executable? Why are any pages that are executable also writable? Well, there are a couple reasons for that. Certainly it hasn't always been that way. But the signal trampoline code from gcc(1) makes this very attractive, and it's a bit annoying to change. You still have to deal with issues of mmap(2), which can ask for pages with any access bits it cares for.

And let's not pretend please that C is the issue here. It's not. You're diddling the instruction set. I don't care if you used a Pascal compiler. You could still diddle it. Then again, there's something to be said for having a cleaner library. See the end of this missive for a simple, elegant, and effective approach to one class of these problems in C by someone famously inclined toward the simple and elegant.

What I strongly suggest that anyone interested in this do is read existing literature on this. Yes, it's work, but it's really, really good for you. Start with the paper StackGuard: Automatic Adaptive Detection and Prevention of Buffer-Overflow Attacks. And yes, the buffer overrun in the version of Perl referenced by this paper has long since been fixed. But then read about how to defeat this. You can also check out disabling an executable stack on Solaris, and why this isn't a cure-all.

Even with a non-executable stack, you can still be bitten. Several such exploits have appeared on bugtrak. Here's one. The short explanation for why this isn't a panacea is that if I push a pointer to "/bin/sh" and a (char *)0 on the stack in a place right before an system(3) (well, or or execl(3) or execve(2) or whatever) then it'll still suck to be you. Notice I haven't executed any code that I put on the stack. I just managed to change some of the arguments to existing calls.

Let me put up a copy of some mail from Ted T'so, who said it well:

Well with a non-executable stack most security conscious system administrators will sleep better :) I can guarantee that. (Not too much better as holes always exist but quite a lot).

The advantage of the patch is that it will stop the current set of attacks that take the form of "find buffer overrun in a program", followed by "apply standard toolkit to exploit buffer overrun by putting executable code on the stack".

The disadvantage of the patch is that after we apply, within a few months we will see a new toolkit of the form "corrupt the stack to point the return address into someplace entertaining in libc --- like right before an an execl call in the implementation of popen()."

The danger is people thinking that with this patch, they don't need to worry about finding and fixing buffer overrun bugs in their code....

Here's the promised gem of insight from Dennis:

> ..... If most implementers will ship gets() anyway,
> there's little practical effect to eliminating it from the Standard.

On the other hand, we removed it from our library about a week after the Internet worm. Of course, some couldn't afford to do that.

Dennis

tchrist appears to like python. interesting. he wrote this this and this about it.

tchrist appears to like python. interesting. he wrote this this and this about it.