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"Waiting for the port."

Stop waiting and patch your server you insensitive clod!

OK, maybe not tonight-at-eleven news, but this is a totally clever hack, which is exactly what many people on Slashdot live for.

On a related note, I came up with a roundabout way to do something similar to help a friend who was having trouble moving large files. On the remote end, split the file into small chunks. Then md5 them all and save those results into a text file. Then, ftp them, and when they arrive, md5 them all again and compare your values to what's in the text file. If any don't match, re-download them; else cat them all together and you should be good.

I don't think this wouldn't have worked for the submitter, even if he knew someone with a known-good copy of the file, because I imagine these things work linearly, so if the bad part of the file was at the halfway mark, every chunk after that would have the wrong checksum. His method was very, very clever.

OK, maybe not tonight-at-eleven news, but this is a totally clever hack, which is exactly what many people on Slashdot live for.

On a related note, I came up with a roundabout way to do something similar to help a friend who was having trouble moving large files. On the remote end, split the file into small chunks. Then md5 them all and save those results into a text file. Then, ftp them, and when they arrive, md5 them all again and compare your values to what's in the text file. If any don't match, re-download them; else cat them all together and you should be good.

I don't think this wouldn't have worked for the submitter, even if he knew someone with a known-good copy of the file, because I imagine these things work linearly, so if the bad part of the file was at the halfway mark, every chunk after that would have the wrong checksum. His method was very, very clever.

OK, maybe not tonight-at-eleven news, but this is a totally clever hack, which is exactly what many people on Slashdot live for.

On a related note, I came up with a roundabout way to do something similar to help a friend who was having trouble moving large files. On the remote end, split the file into small chunks. Then md5 them all and save those results into a text file. Then, ftp them, and when they arrive, md5 them all again and compare your values to what's in the text file. If any don't match, re-download them; else cat them all together and you should be good.

I don't think this wouldn't have worked for the submitter, even if he knew someone with a known-good copy of the file, because I imagine these things work linearly, so if the bad part of the file was at the halfway mark, every chunk after that would have the wrong checksum. His method was very, very clever.

The first thing I found that really aggravated me was how hard it was to set up a simple FTP server

Problem is: to make a easy ftp setup, the project needs to make it easy to set up the server securely, otherwise people who use the easy tool will just be screwing themselves. It won't be very easy if your box is rooted.

I still don't even know what the last two 0's on /etc/fstab lines are supposed to mean.

They are both optional. The first one indicates if you want to backup with dump. The second one indicates whether you want the filesystem fscked at boot (0=no check), the fs is the root filesystem to be checked (a 1), or it is a non root filesystem to be checked (listed as 2). It's all in the man page for fstab. Problem is, the GUI tool to look up man pages (xman) sucks ass--you can't type in the command/file to look up and you have to select it from a HUGE list. Maybe there is a better one out there, but I haven't seen it...

I'm thinking maybe a repository of XML based configuration frontends loaded up by a single dynamic configuration program would be a good start...

If you want to get rid of the somewhat human readable text files, then at least you should go for a more machine readable format. Yeah, you can't edit binary files with a text editor, but it would save programming effort, complexity and CPU time. Why should we be afraid to use hex editors when needed anyway? ;-=)

Did you try nice?

What is a .rm file? A list of files to delete?

I would like all programs to just be able to save their state. Then I wouldn't even be thinking about using hibernate. Like Mozilla and Firefox for example. You can bookmark a group of tabs, but the browser insists upon trying to load them off the network even if I am not connected and they are already cached. I just want to be able to read crap offline without a big hassle even after a reboot. This doesn't work, so lots of times I end up just leaving my computer on.

I think X Session Manager is supposed to do this, but I haven't had time to learn how it works, and most apps don't seem to have it working anyway...

Because implementing network awareness at "open this file for reading" level is not the responsibility of the high reaches of the app layer. That's the operating system's job.

Kioslaves are usable everywhere in KDE, the main GUI. That is part of the OS, depending on your definition of OS.

If you mean back down to the non-GUI level, then you need to use the correct tool for the job. Interpreting every protocol known to man is NOT the job of the kernel, it is a user-land exercise. So, when you ask to do "cat http://slashdot.org/" you really need to just do "curl -O http://slashdot.org/ | cat". Or more likely "curl -O - http://slashdot.org/", but I can't remember the curl syntax off the top of my head.

Feel free to do "curl -O - http:///{slashdot,pbs,npr}.org" to get them all at once.

The man page would be a good start, because curl is one of the most powerful command-line network tools there is for file manipulation.

And I'll second his complaint about not being able to type a URI directly in the dialog box. Having to fucking point, click, point, click, point, click, ad infinitum to get to a deeply nested folder was the last straw for me and Gnome.

Having a GUI that is friendly to noobs is fine, but making it actively hostile to power users is bone-headed. Those two things are NOT mutually exclusive, but Gnome seems to think so.

  Charles

I'm not talking about "problems" as in bugs. I'm not talking about UI effects. I'm talking about missing features. I got a new laptop from work a few weeks back. I rebooted my old laptop into firewire mode, plugged in a cable and turned on the new laptop. It asked me if I wanted to install from the old one and I clicked "yes." Then I walked down to the coffee shop, grabbed a bite and a drink. That was it. All my configurations, settings, files, programs, security certs, user accounts, and everything else was sucked across the firewire cable. With a straight Linux machine it takes me days of configuration to get all those configurations back on new hardware.

man rsync

My personal favourite, on the same page, is the guy who thought using pow() was a good way to do bitshifts.

DRM can be open

Define "open". Given DRM that permits viewing but prohibits copying, it's impossible to implement such DRM in free software as defined by the Free Software Foundation or by the Debian project because an attacker can edit the source code to tee(1) the work to a file, build the program, run the program, and make an unencumbered copy.

Encrypting a message is DRM, SSL is DRM, anything that prevents others from seeing or doing what they want with some digital data is DRM.

Encrypting a message is privacy: only the holder of the intended recipient's private key can view or reproduce it. Encrypting the digest of a message is authentication: the message came from somebody with the sender's private key. SSL is privacy with a bit of authentication added to exchange keys past a man in the middle. The term "digital restrictions management", on the other hand, is most commonly understood to refer to technical measures that authorize the owner of a lawfully made copy or phonorecord[1] of a work to view but not reproduce or modify the work, even where the law otherwise permits such reproduction or modification (such as the copyright exemptions of 17 USC 107 through 122). What are the honorable uses of such DRM?

[1] US copyright law defines "phonorecord" as any physical medium in which a sound recording is fixed, and "copy" as any physical medium in which any other work is fixed.

You shouldn't take this as an authoritative answer, but I believe the answer is no.

On a FileVault-enabled system, the only things which are encrypted are the user's home folder. The default location for swap space is not in the user's folder, ergo it's not encrypted. At least via FileVault, and I can't imagine it would just be encrypted by default using some other means, because that would necessitate a big performance penalty which a lot of users wouldn't be interested in.

The way filevault works is, when you enable it, a variable-sized, encrypted disk image is created at "/Users/.(username)/(username).sparseimage". Then, on login, this image is mounted to "/Users/(username)/". On logout, it's unmounted and compacted. This is all accomplished using the hdiutil program.

The rest of the filesystem is not encrypted, so I don't imagine that swap would be.

There's an easy way to answer that question... just look at his "signature"! In a shell:
man rsync
man samba

(or check out an equivalent webpage on rsync, or samba)

In the "Author" section he always writes it:
Andrew Tridgell (that's the name used in the wikipedia entry, too).

In the examples section of rsync, however, he writes:
rsync -az -e ssh --delete ~ftp/pub/samba/ nim-bus:"~ftp/pub/tridge/samba"

So I guess he uses "tridge" as a nickname for himself.

I take care of about 500 macs (~450 laptop, ~50 desktop). We stick mainly with Apple's Imaging Services (especially with Mike Bombich's frontends) to install fresh machines.

I agree with other posters that just about any hard drive will do in this situation, especially given that everyone has an axe to grind about a particular manufacturer. FWIW, we've been having good luck with the LaCie drives of late (triple interface USB2/FW400/FW800), and they come in a variety of sizes, form factors, and speeds. We've had mixed results with Maxtor drives; the older revision all died with the click of death, though the newer ones are still going strong.

For on-the-go repairs, I like the bus-powered 2 1/2" drives. They're easy to carry, and don't require a power brick to go with them. Yeah, they're only 5400 RPM, but that's plenty fine for us. If you used compressed disk images and ASR (or Mike Bombich's NetRestore frontend), you get even better throughput since the computer will decompress on the fly. In this case, portability may be better than the increased spindle speed.

Also, if money really is no object, look into getting yourself a NetBoot server. If you do that, you don't even need a drive at all! Just hold down the "n" key on boot, and the machine will netboot to your restore image. From there, you can nuke & pave with the click of a button, and get back to doing real work (the machine will reboot itself when done). We use one here to image our lab machines, desktops, and laptops, and it really works great. Huge time-saver at the beginning of the year when we get new equipment. Obviously, this requires a decent core network if you don't want to slag the entire LAN, but if you've got a decent switched network this can work very well.

http://www.versiontracker.com/macos/cat/mathscient ific

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/math_science /

http://www.apple.com/science/

http://www.hmug.org/Sci.php

>We have most of the source, but no clue of how to approach a task of this magnitude.

Reverse engineering is generally thought of as a "cleanroom" technique that involves having the binary and/or specification but not the source. If you have the source, then you're just reading/rewriting it (or perhaps just copying it and doing s/Old Name/Our Cool New Game That's Nothing Like Old Name/).

>Anyone have suggestions of programs, or techniques we could use to understand the structure of the game?

If it's mostly C, then you definitely need to get cscope, but that won't tell you where to start reading because it cannot resolve calls to function pointers. To get that information, you might also try running gprof.

Another neat trick is to compile the program and use nm to help map out object file dependencies. You'll want to use perl or something to create a database of where the symbols are defined and where they're imported. This can help you establish which files are the meat and which ones are the potatoes.

"Most compilers translate source code written in a high level language to object code or machine language that may be directly executed by a computer or a virtual machine."

javac - Java compiler

Here, pasting the results next to the columns it's logically related to. Trust me, Unix has assloads of text processing abilities. Use the shell for a while and you learn lots of nice little tricks and commands.

ability to have files in more than one folder simultaneously symlinks, Smart Folders

By default, ln makes hard links. A hard link to a file is indistinguish- able from the original directory entry; any changes to a file are effec- tively independent of the name used to reference the file. Hard links may not normally refer to directories and may not span file systems.

Until 10.2-ish, OS X included the man page for bad144(8). I don't think the binary was there, though; too bad, as I would like to attach an RP06 to an iBook.

chflags uchg /etc/smb.conf

chflags nouchg /etc/smb.conf

On a Mac there is something that lets you cut and paste from a GUI context. These commands are pbcopy and pbpaste. Please see this man page. Also, I've discussed these commands in a previous reply.

I cant get any software to read her files.

Use sudo and this will never be a problem.

Never log in as root!

macosxlabs.org has articles and whatnot about this, i believe

These routines convert 16 and 32 bit quantities between network byte order and host byte order. On machines which have a byte order which is the same as the network order, routines are defined as null macros.

Blockquoth Hes Nikke:

because the file doesn't get removed until Mac OS 9 has had a clean shut down.

Do I have to go through this again?

1. OS X has a dirty shutdown.
2. OS 9 will pop up Disk First Aid at next OS 9 boot, UNLESS
3. I run fsck manually in OS X.

OS X can make OS 9 think that the filesystem is dirty, and that the filesystem is clean. I don't see how this in any way suggests that OS X uses a different method than OS 9 for determining whether the filesystem is clean. This leads to the conclusion that there is no boot-time fsck in OS X.

Truth is, looking at the man page for autodiskmount, which uses hfs.util to handle fscking, it looks like things got a little complicated and somewhere along the line, fscking stopped happening.

Green? (also, given all that, I would recommend running fsck after a dirty shutdown yourself and seeing whether fsck thinks OS X already fixed all the problems :-)

Blockquoth Hes Nikke:

because the file doesn't get removed until Mac OS 9 has had a clean shut down.

Do I have to go through this again?

1. OS X has a dirty shutdown.
2. OS 9 will pop up Disk First Aid at next OS 9 boot, UNLESS
3. I run fsck manually in OS X.

OS X can make OS 9 think that the filesystem is dirty, and that the filesystem is clean. I don't see how this in any way suggests that OS X uses a different method than OS 9 for determining whether the filesystem is clean. This leads to the conclusion that there is no boot-time fsck in OS X.

Truth is, looking at the man page for autodiskmount, which uses hfs.util to handle fscking, it looks like things got a little complicated and somewhere along the line, fscking stopped happening.

Green? (also, given all that, I would recommend running fsck after a dirty shutdown yourself and seeing whether fsck thinks OS X already fixed all the problems :-)