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Gmane.org provides an NNTP interface (and a web one) to many mailing lists, and also a search function.

We certainly don't need politicians for that. Metagovernment doesn't seek to replace non-democratic institutions such as militaries or emergency response teams. But in most cases, I still think a group can make a better decision than one person. Often a leader makes the wrong decision, after all. But if there really is a need for a decision to be made by a single person, a leader can emerge without having to rely on a politician.

There is a discussion of this point in the FAQ discussion and on the list archives.

Further, Metagovernment does seek to spread the concept of community beyond normal geographic boundaries, so eventually physical attacks would be difficult when communities are intermingled. And note that this project isn't targeted at the U.S. government, but rather at very small communities, then scaling up to larger and larger communities from there. Its membership is entirely global, and not concerned with any single particular nation.

but I think that people who dwelve onto the *BSD realm must be braced for such coups

Nonsense. Mabye in OpenBSD land, but here in FreeBSD world, we dont flame people to death. The people I encounter in my travels are never hostile, always helpful, and very non-religious (i.e. you dont have to apologize for the fact you are sending in a patch via Outlook and your favorite windows text editor).

That said, only would the OpenBSD flame this guy to a well deserved, and hilarious, crisp.

but I think that people who dwelve onto the *BSD realm must be braced for such coups

Nonsense. Mabye in OpenBSD land, but here in FreeBSD world, we dont flame people to death. The people I encounter in my travels are never hostile, always helpful, and very non-religious (i.e. you dont have to apologize for the fact you are sending in a patch via Outlook and your favorite windows text editor).

That said, only would the OpenBSD flame this guy to a well deserved, and hilarious, crisp.

It seems quite likely that OLPC will largely replace jffs2 with UBI for the internal nand on the XO. Good news. Maybe this will apply to the Asus eee as and other solid-state drives as well.

Much of the spam's gone away since Usenet became a backwater. This accelerated after Google removed the "Groups" link from their front page.

As well, Gmane gateways mailing lists to newsgroups, allowing both reading and posting with a nice interface, without the need to download every message.

... But it has to be asked.

OpenBSD's developers (including OpenBSD 'benevolent dictator' Theo DeRaadt) have praised VIA Padlock functions in the past.

As a user of both OpenBSD and Gnu/Linux, I'd like to know if you share Linus Torvalds infamous appreciation of OpenBSD developpers? Or do you have good relations with all open source projects?

You really have to wonder what kind of person a "Stallman Fan" would be. My guess is ignorant. Richard is a world class prick who cares about one single thing only, free software. What's ironic about that, is that while his movement is for people, he's actually against people. People living out their day to day lives and enjoying the simple things.

To quote the hobo directly:

"It doesn't take special talents to reproduce-even plants can do it. On the other hand, contributing to a program like Emacs takes real skill. That is really something to be proud of.

It helps more people, too."

This is the kind of guy who needs to be dragged out and have his ass beat a few times, maybe he'd wise up. Instead, many are early to engage him, give him money, funding, and attention. Spanish speaking computer geeks in particular, who are entranced by the fact he can speak their language, but don't understand enough English in return to study his assholish history.

Hm something went wrong with TinyURL. Here's the correct URL: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.autopackage.devel/6831

In addition to the metasploit module published yesterday, another exploit has just been posted to dailydave...

Some partial fixes are possible and were discussed a while ago.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.encryption.general/11528

Read this post to get some perspective:

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/707044

Linus is being blunt, as usual, and he's telling everybody what his personal policy is towards disclosure. If he finds a bug, he fixes it, and he doesn't rate security bugs as more or less important than other bugs because he's a kernel hacker, and therefore security bugs are not his sole focus in life. He doesn't use any special language to highlight or obscure security fixes in the changelog, he just describes the fix, which is what people are claiming is "security by obscurity".

From that, people looking for something to bitch about have created this kerfuffle; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of storm and fury, and signifying... nothing.(from Macbeth, 5.5)

"Shakespeare really kicks the cap off" -- James Hovenac

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/706950

I think the OpenBSD crowd is a bunch of masturbating monkeys, in
that they make such a big deal about concentrating on security to the
point where they pretty much admit that nothing else matters to them.

http://img136.imageshack.us/img136/7451/poster68251050mx9.jpg

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/706950

I think the OpenBSD crowd is a bunch of masturbating monkeys, in
that they make such a big deal about concentrating on security to the
point where they pretty much admit that nothing else matters to them.

Have a look at this post, and tell me who wins the flamebait pissing context.

Silly, didn't you know that MakeMaker is DOOMED?

http://gmane.org/

Exactly the sort of thing that Qt will handle for you, and as an application developer I never have to worry about.

Qt's memory management is not adequate; an application requires many hacks and tricks even in the presence of Qt. Suppose you have a model-view-controller architecture, i.e. a big data model and a big UI hierarchy that reflects the data model. With Qt 3 (I have no knowledge of Qt 4), you have to write adaptor classes that monitor the data model and affect the UI and vice versa, because Qt 3 does not support the MVC pattern.

So how should the adaptor lifetime classes be managed? The data model does not inherit QObject, it uses reference counting, because the objects of the data model are referenced from multiple sites. But the adaptor classes need to live as long as the UI lives, and therefore they can be QObjects. When the UI objects are deleted, the adaptors are deleted as well, and therefore the data model must contain weak ptrs to them.

This is quite complicated and tricky to use, and it contains many gotchas. With garbage collection, there would not be such issues.

Assuming your calculation is correct on overhead, you're still missing the second part of the calculation. What's the overhead of the garbage collector? Both in terms of memory, CPU usage, and unpredictability. I highly doubt it will be less than the few bytes you're using to keep track of your objects.

Until you make a huge leap to the conclusion where it all falls apart. System responsiveness is a massively complex issue, and you can't even begin to guess the tradeoff between reference counting and garbage collection without some real testing.

Boehm's GC does not work well for two reasons:

1) it does not work well with dlls. I tried it (look here: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.programming.garbage-collection.boehmgc/2016/focus=2027).

2) it provides a great opportunity for DoS attacks, as another poster says.

GMane is a *far* easier interface to read than whatever nanog's official archive uses:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.operators.nanog/54752

C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it. Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do *nothing* but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C.

...

C++ leads to really really bad design choices. You invariably start using the "nice" library features of the language like STL and Boost and other total and utter crap, that may "help" you program, but causes:

• infinite amounts of pain when they don't work (and anybody who tells me that STL and especially Boost are stable and portable is just so full of BS that it's not even funny)
• inefficient abstracted programming models where two years down the road you notice that some abstraction wasn't very efficient, but now all your code depends on all the nice object models around it, and you cannot fix it without rewriting your app.

In other words, the only way to do good, efficient, and system-level and portable C++ ends up to limit yourself to all the things that are basically available in C. And limiting your project to C means that people don't screw that up, and also means that you get a lot of programmers that do actually understand low-level issues and don't screw things up with any idiotic "object model" crap.

For the record, I'm inclined to agree with Torvalds. The main problem with C++ is its insane levels of complexity and its unerring eye for adding subtle and difficult-to-diagnose problems once things like multiple inheritance get factored in.

Exactly. What Samsung does is offer a binary which has root exploit problems, and which only works under specific distros. Really, you have to muck with it. http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.general/290309

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/650739

Summary is missing a HUGE portion of what actually happened. The discussion continued. After the discussion, Linus applied a patch to ALLOW access to GPL_ONLY symbols (for those who care, it's git commit 9b37ccfc637be27d9a652fcedc35e6e782c3aa78).

This is yet another attack that the developer of loop-AES thought about while typically every other disk encryption tool out there is vulnerable. Loop-AES is the 3rd most popular disk encryption tool in Linux. See the KEYSCRUB=y option in its README file:

If you want to enable AES encryption key scrubbing, specify KEYSCRUB=y on make command line. Loop encryption key scrubbing moves and inverts key bits in kernel RAM so that the thin oxide which forms the storage capacitor dielectric of DRAM cells is not permitted to develop detectable property. For more info, see Peter Gutmann's paper.

I have used loop-AES as a full disk encryption tool on my laptop for 2+ years. I am glad I took the time to carefully research which tool would the most secure before deploying it ! For example even TrueCrypt and dm-crypt are vulnerable to other (arguably minor) security issues that loop-AES is impervious to: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.cryptography/2321

Surprisingly, the research paper TFA talks about doesn't even directly mention loop-AES (its name only happens to be in the title of a webpage in the reference section describing a safe suspend/resume setup when using disk encryption).

On the other hand though this is the beauty of open source. The problem is now known so I'm sure a fix is already on the way.

that's eloquently stated.

as ever, the amount of tangents in the slashdot discussion is both interesting and distressing. for the subject at hand, it would be interesting to hear about some authoritative responses from the gentoo officials, but i see nary a trace of that - no official responses in gentoo-devel or gentoo-user, and the single focused response included on planet gentoo makes no claim to authority (and would be more compelling if the logic or even grammar were more polished).

maybe it's too soon - but i sure am curious about how this is going to shape up. i'm not unhappy with gentoo - the bottom line, for me, is that it's presented fewer maintenance roadblocks than any of the distributions i've tried, over the years, including slackware, redhat, fedora, a little ubuntu, and a little less plain debian. turbulence and churn upgrading has felt difficult in the last year, however. i would be sad to lose gentoo - and i think that lack of effective, constructive response to the challenge that robbins has identified would mean losing it.

that's eloquently stated.

as ever, the amount of tangents in the slashdot discussion is both interesting and distressing. for the subject at hand, it would be interesting to hear about some authoritative responses from the gentoo officials, but i see nary a trace of that - no official responses in gentoo-devel or gentoo-user, and the single focused response included on planet gentoo makes no claim to authority (and would be more compelling if the logic or even grammar were more polished).

maybe it's too soon - but i sure am curious about how this is going to shape up. i'm not unhappy with gentoo - the bottom line, for me, is that it's presented fewer maintenance roadblocks than any of the distributions i've tried, over the years, including slackware, redhat, fedora, a little ubuntu, and a little less plain debian. turbulence and churn upgrading has felt difficult in the last year, however. i would be sad to lose gentoo - and i think that lack of effective, constructive response to the challenge that robbins has identified would mean losing it.

According to one of DJB's slides it might happen this month that qmail will be placed into public domain. I hope this will become true as it might help qmail to get rid of its obsolescence.

Below is the work theory of our "grub fast resume" patch
The normal swsusp2 resume process is:
"grub" -> "kernel" -> "initrd" -> "resume from the hibernate"
Our "grub fast resume patch" can work as below:
"grub" -> "resume from hibernate"

Our "grub fast resume" patch can resume the saved hibernation image from
grub directly that will save much time to load and run kernel and
initrd. The patch does not change any kernel code.

• GPLv2 only
• GPLv2 or any later version
• GPLv3

Actually, you're all bleedin' wrong, as was I last week. Reyk Floeter's code is under the ISC licence, not the BSD and certainly not the GPL. If you need proof, hop over to the "discussion" that happened over the bcw driver nearly six months ago where Reyk nailed his colours to the mast quite firmly.

Don't worry, I made the same mistake myself. As soon as I heard "Atheros" I immediately thought "Sam Leffler" who does dual license his code specifically to allow Linux people to use it. This, however, is not the case with ar5k/OpenHAL. It's Reyk's code and it has only the equivalent of a two clause BSD licence (the ISC licence).

Of course, the fact that some people decided to be knobs (whereas Marcus, who was actually the one who made the mistake of committing GPL code was trying to be conciliatory) in that same discussion meant I probably closed the thing before I had read Reyk's comments, which are near the end of the thread, as I guess a lot of you did.

That episode was wrong, but two wrongs do not make a right. By that I mean Michael posted publicly instead of a quiet e-mail to Marcus first, which sent Theo up into the air in a self-righteous, um, flurry of e-mails (also in public). Now the shoe is on the other foot? I'll leave you to be the judge of that. Hurrah for cooperation in free software.

Linus T. made some very bad comments about C++ this week.

Things like this show just how out of touch these people can be.

A way to recover gracefully from a misconfigured X is highly overdue. On the other hand, these days it would be simpler to just not specify any resolutions at all, and let the autodetect handle it.

I've just been reading a thread on the Fedora devel list about this. Seems that the basis for the new Ubuntu tool may not be as bulletproof as they were hoping. They appear to be using code from RHEL which is now being abandoned as it caused more problems than it solved.

Other GNU Classpath developers working for Red Hat were very quick to produce a version of OpenJDK using pieces of Classpath to fill the wholes of "encumbered" components that havent been open sourced (like the font, graphics and sound engines that were licensed by Sun by 3rd parties). This is called IceTea.
since it took me a while to find this (it didn't help that you got the name wrong) i'll post a link here, hopefully the site can handle /.

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.java.openjdk.d istro-packaging.devel/5

I'm sorry, but his arguments are CRAP.

First of all, Con Kolivas was more than willing to maintain his code (see answers to Linus's post).

Second, CFS is SLOWER THAN THE OLD SCHEDULER on some workloads. It's quite noticeable on gaming workloads. Or non gaming, see http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/561735 - 80% regression on one benchmark.

No scheduler is going to be ideal. That's the fact.

But Con Kolivas also had pluggable scheduler architecture which would have allowed to use the most fitting scheduler for some workloads.

Guess what? Ingo+Linus rejected it, because it gives too much freedom of choice.

Someone would have noticed if 80% of emails with attachments were not delivered!

And some people noticed that something is wrong with hotmail.

Email servers should not drop messages. Messages must land in some mailbox or they must bounce back to sender.

The only serious objection Linus has is over TiVo-ization. He thinks it should be OK.
He says he is angry that FSF is claiming to protect freedom while taking away a certain freedom from companies like TiVo.

But the freedom that FSF is taking away is the freedom to take away freedom from users of the software. Thanks you Linus, great protector of ... wha??

But keep in mind the politics that Linus has to deal with. There are many developers who would have to sign off on GPLv3. One of the biggies is Greg Kroah Hartmann of Novel, who owns the USB subsystem. Novel no doubt takes GPLv3 personally. Greg has actively tried to discourage even the "or any later version" clause from being included in kernel patches.

On top of that, even if everyone wanted to go GPLv3, they would have to track down hundreds of developers. So it's just easier for Linus to say no to GPLv3 in any case.

I'm also not expecting them to share the new front end they wrote for the BSD-licensed LLVM.

The difference is, I'm not *expecting* them to open source their efforts, because I *know* they already open sourced it the day before yesterday, whereas you don't expect them to do it because you seem to have bought into the ridiculous meme that Apple is somehow against opening their source despite the massive amounts of time money and code they've donated to open source projects over the years when under no license requirement to do so.

GPL zealots are always quick to claim that anyone opposing their draconian license requirements dictating everything from hardware design to patent liability to derivative works must be selfishly hoarding their knowledge. I say it's the exact opposite, the GPL is a tool for hoarding knowledge in a community pool, where the pool's administrators at the FSF can use it for political power by interpreting and revising the GPL. Plenty of people (including corporations), are quite willing to openly share their code under truly free BSD-like terms, but consider subjecting themselves to the whims of the ideologues and lawyers of the FSF an increasingly unacceptable risk.

drobbins left because some people ill treated and were hostile to him. With this kind of environment it will be impossible for anybody to stay on. Being polite, drobbins left the project instead of creating an issue about that.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.devel/4 6478/

This post brought to you by these two patches, against 2.6.22-rc2:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.wireles s.general/2368
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.wireles s.general/2369
The little WG11v2 is a happy interface. Figure I'll need to stockpile a couple them critters.
Now, how is it that I'm off the hook for managing any of that bad, bad firmware with this wee beastie?
Ivo or Michael, though I'm nowhere near as cool as you dudes, I'll buy you a beverage if I see you in Ottawa next month.
Dunno if GKH's driver program actually helped in this matter, but the general trend in hardware is positive, and I feel Realtek and Netgear deserve a free shill.
Best,
Chris

This post brought to you by these two patches, against 2.6.22-rc2:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.wireles s.general/2368
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.wireles s.general/2369
The little WG11v2 is a happy interface. Figure I'll need to stockpile a couple them critters.
Now, how is it that I'm off the hook for managing any of that bad, bad firmware with this wee beastie?
Ivo or Michael, though I'm nowhere near as cool as you dudes, I'll buy you a beverage if I see you in Ottawa next month.
Dunno if GKH's driver program actually helped in this matter, but the general trend in hardware is positive, and I feel Realtek and Netgear deserve a free shill.
Best,
Chris