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Here's the grandmaster video in standard mpg

One of the goals of Perl 6 is to make non-trivial projects possible. That's good. The way it's being done is bad. Perl was once a lightweight, extremely flexible language. Now it's become a huge ugly monster. People wanted OO, so a nasty hack was bolted on top to allow some semblance of it. Now this nasty hack is being expanded. Sure, the code's different, but the basic form is the same. Kludge upon kludge upon kludge; I'd much rather have a nice, clean, pure language (and not one with loads of irritating whitespace thank you very much).

The same goes for the syntax. All the switching between $, @ and % is really irritating (ask a newbie how to get at the length of the keys array of a hash inside a hash, for example), and the changes proposed for 6 are just making this worse -- it seems that Larry, in his infinite wisdom, wants to prefix every data type with a different hard-to-type character. Perl was only designed for the three data types, and adding more is a mess.

Perl 6 is a complete rewrite, but it keeps all the mess which has accumulated over the previous versions. This is not good. Sure, my const int $var = 27; may look neat (in the same way that, say, Pascal does), but $var isn't entirely constant, or entirely an integer, it's just a hack which makes it sort of behave like one. The whole thing is an exercise in pseudo-computer science masturbation with little real purpose except to please the managers who dislike the one thing that makes Perl special.

On a similar note is regexes. I'm an avid fan of regular expressions simply because a nondeterministic finite automata is far more flexible than linear code. However, Larry must have been smoking that cheap $2 crack when he wrote this. Does he want Perl 6 to be flex or something?

I won't be going on to use 6. It's a nice idea, but it's completely unnecessary. It won't make large projects any easier to manage (the language is still, at heart, an almighty hack -- an impressive one, but still a hack). It won't make OO any cleaner. It won't make development any faster. To put it bluntly, Perl scripts will still look less beautiful than our friend Mr Goat.cx. I'd prefer to use a language which has always been pure synthesis of science and engineering, not some half-baked imposter.

Perl 6 will be nice, but I'm guessing it will be the end of Perl. It can't do what it wants to do whilst still being based upon a nasty mess. There are now other options, which provide all of Perl's power and none of the mess. Sorry, but *BSD^H^H^H^H Perl is dying. Larry is buggering it up the ass without lubricants, just like Shoeboy is doing to Larry's daughter.

as described in the excellent work by Bruce Sterling, "The Hacker Crackdown" (which everyone probably read): the blackout of the AT&T telephone switching system in 1990 also occured because of a software error.
What happened then (accusing of hackers as being responsible) is happening again: people pointing to external factors as being the cause for the culprit.

When do people start to learn from mistakes made and realize that instead of accusing people, they can better spend time in software audits?

Furry

this diagram shows what happened to Firefox.

Chessbrain is kind of a cool hack, and I would respect that, if they weren't filthy spammers. Here is a typical Chessbrain spam. Notice the spam body image is hosted off of chessbrain.net. (Filthy, filthy, incompetant, spammers.

6

If a function be advertised to return an error code in the event of difficulties, thou shalt check for that code, yea, even though the checks triple the size of thy code and produce aches in thy typing fingers, for if thou thinkest ``it cannot happen to me'', the gods shall surely punish thee for thy arrogance.

In Sweden there is an analogon to this service: Urkund. They offer the possibility to the student exclude your file from public access. Only your home school//college/university will have access (this is regulated by the law). They also mention that your copyright is not affected.

Well, I must admit that I welcome that my university has begun to use the service more frequently. For me, there is no excuse for cheating sutdents.

To the world outside, especially to someone who wants to hire you, a degree is a proof of your knowledge. So they don't have to check with you in person, whether you know anything at all (often, they don't have the knowledge themselves).

It's like certificates for commercial websites: Do you accept their pledge to be trustworthy, or do you want to see a valid certificate?

Well, in respondind to my own post:

Here's a do-it-yourself version...

A case that functions as a heat-sink is a brilliant idea. I do hope the idea if not the product takes off but for now I doubt any of us are reaching for our cheque books.

Personally, I gave up on the idea of swapping out noisy components for quieter, better-engineered replacements (expensive idea if you have multiple systems) and built my own box. The results are always better and you get way-kewl furniture as a bonus. 3/4-inch MDF is cheap, 3/4-inch birch isn't much more, and even if you double-wall the enclosure for a dead air layer (highly recommended), you'll shell out less than $100. The time? Skip tee vee for a night or two and pretend you're Norm -- plaid shirt required, of course.

Oh, and if you're living with rackmount equipment and need a solution, this centrifugal fan (read "bathroom) is probably the quietest in existence, moves lots of air, and works great either housed in a cabinet or installed in the ceiling of a small closet.

Here is the proper link

Can be found here. Personally I was quite impressed!

"Given that every single way to compromise security involves bad input, it's not surprising that it's in a security magazine."

What about program bugs that are not input related? If a program breaks when an internal timer overflows for example, or accessing a section of memory that has been deallocated. Such bugs can easily cause breaches in security as well as general system failure, all without any human intervention. It reminds me of the black out that Sterling mentions:

LPC is an interpreted language used for writing MUDs, and is very similar to C/C++ syntax.

Not true. I've had many hours of gameplay on linux. First off, many windows games work very well with Wine or Transgaming.

I've also played a lot of old nintendo games. I hooked up my box to the TV (using a nvidia card with TV-out) and then I inserted two Gravis Gamepads which only need one gameport. Kernel modules worked just fine, and this was some years ago. Grab the latest SNES9X-emulator and start gaming!

The WITAS Project (a coop project between the Linkoping University of Sweden, Stanford, and some other university I can't remember rigth now) has been doing this since at least 1997 - the've re-built an off-the-shelf electric mini helicopter into a fully autonomous UAV... I've seen it in action, and it can do a lot of very interesting stuff - it can do things like follow roads, separate objects like people or cars from the background, identify said cars, etc., and it navigates based on the landscape it sees and not just signals from GPS or radio beacons (it has GPS as a complement though). Really cool stuff :)

Have you heard of the new Swedish database "Liu." It is Open source and looks very promising. Some tests have shown it to be more than 3.6 times faster than MSSQL under heavy load. This and Linux show that Open source is very strong in Scandinavia.

Check out this screenshot.

There's a detailed diagram illustrating the flow of pirate goods from Asia into other parts of the world in swedish news archive liu.

It says exactly the same thing Nigel pointed out. Too big gaps between releases promotes piratism.

That's a tough question. Why not combine the two?

I am conducting an important survey on the sexuality of slashdot readers. Participating is very easy; I want you to look at this picture and report any feelings you may have. Afterwards, I want you to look at this picture and report the same.

Thank you.

Does this turn you on?

Does this turn you on?

Does this turn you on?

Does this turn you on?

How it's done is, roughly, for a few related tables:

1. Create tables using dia's UML's classes.
2. Join the tables using UML Association to establish foreign keys.
3. Set dia to autofit diagram into a number of pages.
4. Add comments, draw pictures, whatever dia can draw.
5. Save as an uncompressed XML file, chuck it into CVS. CVS likes text, so don't compress it.
6. Optional: Print out pretty diagrams to printer. Dia's autofit is nice.

1. Create a Makefile to convert .dia to .sql using tedia2sql, and .dia to .eps using dia. (Left as an excerise to the reader). Bonus: autogen .eps to .pdf.
2. Set up tedia2sql config to generate to your favourite rdbms. Or change Makefile to generate SQLs for each of Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL.
3. Type 'make'.

1. 5. Profit!

Congrats! You have have fully printable, documentated, usable SQLs, and have version control on the schemas too. (Missing step is "4. Debug")

P.S. tedia2sql is written in easily hackable perl.

Modeling on a whiteboard is all well and good -- we did it at my job (and still do it) for all of our initial design.

The problem is, that whiteboard eventually needs to be erased. And when new people come on board drawing the same damn picture on the board over and over is tedious, not to mention error prone and bloody difficult for anything but high level representations.

We copied the whiteboard drawings to paper and then did some basic modeling in Dia. While OSS and Free, it's really not very good for this kind of thing and can't auto-generate mappings or anything like that.

I don't really have an answer here, but a data modeling tool is pretty essential unless you expect all of your developers, QA, management, and support to be around forever. You can get away without it, but you'll burn $4K in man hours pretty fast doing it by hand. I know we've burned considerably more than that and our diagrams still suck and are rapidly outdated. (We're in the process of buying tools... but I'm not in the loop by my own choice, except for the C++ debugger).

An incident has occurred today near the Slashdot compound, and several people have already been reported missing or dead. Do not panic. We are currently assessing the situation, and believe the deaths were caused by one of Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda's genetic experiments when it escaped from its holding cell. As of yet no photographs have been obtained, but several eyewitnesses have given descriptions that lead to the creation of this sketch. If you see this creature, do not attempt to subdue it yourself, and contact the appropriate authorities immediately. Thank you.

An incident has occurred today near the Slashdot compound, and several people have already been reported missing or dead. Do not panic. We are currently assessing the situation, and believe the deaths were caused by one of Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda's genetic experiments when it escaped from its holding cell. As of yet no photographs have been obtained, but several eyewitnesses have given descriptions that lead to the creation of this sketch. If you see this creature, do not attempt to subdue it yourself, and contact the appropriate authorities immediately. Thank you.

the United Republic of Cali does have closed borders, right?

As a matter of fact, california does have "closed" borders. You drive in from Nevada or from Arizona -- can't say for certain about Oregon -- you'll stop and have to ask the agricultural inspectors if you're bringing in any fruits or vegetables. I imagine that they'll simply add a query about genetically modified pisceans. I imagine these zebrafish will probably simply become much like ferrets; "illegal" but no one pays much heed unless the owner is an asshat.

Of course, I'm of the opinion that we're not using nearly enough genetic manipulation unless I can have/become one of these ;3.

You are way, way, way oversimplifing. http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/c-faq/c-1.html

An incident has occurred today near the Slashdot compound, and several people have already been reported missing or dead. Do not panic. We are currently assessing the situation, and believe the deaths were caused by one of Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda's genetic experiments when it escaped from its holding cell. As of yet no photographs have been obtained, but several eyewitnesses have given descriptions that lead to the creation of this sketch. If you see this creature, do not attempt to subdue it yourself, and contact the appropriate authorities immediately. Thank you.

Great Papers in Computer Science edited by Phillip A. Laplante collects a lot of classic papers in one volume. Unfortunately, the book was put together a bit too quickly, with the result of many typos. (Laplante talks about that in the Amazon.com comments for the book.) However, I still find it to be a useful collection.

• Apple's hardware is some of the most proprietary locked down machinery in existance.
• Microsoft develops software that people are actually willing to put down hard-earned cash to buy. Now, compare that to the Linux people.
• The average Linux enthusiast's main concern is that the software they use is free of cost. When's the last time any of you Linux people actually bought a distribution and not copied it from someone else?
• The RIAA produces music that people love enough to *cough* steal. Yes I know it's not really stealing because the RIAA still has a copy of the music and nothing was taken away from them and you wouldn't have paid for the music anyways. Yeah, whatever cheapskate! Americans have so much disposable income I find it hard to believe that you couldn't spare a Benjamin for the hours you will spend listening to music. Now, we may not all like Britney Spears but there are hundreds of other artists to choose from. Somebody must like to listen to at least some of it, otherwise Kazaa would be dead. The RIAA is right in sending lawsuits out to people who are caught distributing their music. And no, you aren't fighting for the little guy when you steal RIAA's stuff, you are expanding the profitability of the broadband industry and reducing the profitability of selling music. Because the broadband industry's growth thrives on filesharing, the industry must ensure that there are more files to share to keep growing. Thus, megacorporations develop such that the broadband industry subsidizes music production in order to continue the profitabil

The IE exploit exe file should be posted to all the anti-virus companies, at least then some windoze lusers will be protected. Leif has left it on his website here.

You failed to click on the link that said documentation didn't you? Go there and you can see all the information this guy has been able to gather.

Nope - ofdoom.com runs FreeBSD 4.x / Roxen 3.4.94-cvs / Pike 7.4 release 28.

>Newer versions of OpenSSH don't support -c none. (The usual security zealot nonsense from the OpenBSD people from what I can tell. There *is* a place for -c none.)

Then try lsh! It's GNU software instead. Has fewer bugs, it seems, too. :-)

>Newer versions of OpenSSH don't support -c none. (The usual security zealot nonsense from the OpenBSD people from what I can tell. There *is* a place for -c none.)

Then try lsh! It's GNU software instead. Has fewer bugs, it seems, too. :-)

One of the goals of Perl 6 is to make non-trivial projects possible. That's good. The way it's being done is bad. Perl was once a lightweight, extremely flexible language. Now it's become a huge ugly monster. People wanted OO, so a nasty hack was bolted on top to allow some semblance of it. Now this nasty hack is being expanded. Sure, the code's different, but the basic form is the same. Kludge upon kludge upon kludge; I'd much rather have a nice, clean, pure language (and not one with loads of irritating whitespace thank you very much).

The same goes for the syntax. All the switching between $, @ and % is really irritating (ask a newbie how to get at the length of the keys array of a hash inside a hash, for example), and the changes proposed for 6 are just making this worse -- it seems that Larry, in his infinite wisdom, wants to prefix every data type with a different hard-to-type character. Perl was only designed for the three data types, and adding more is a mess.

Perl 6 is a complete rewrite, but it keeps all the mess which has accumulated over the previous versions. This is not good. Sure, my const int $var = 27; may look neat (in the same way that, say, Pascal does), but $var isn't entirely constant, or entirely an integer, it's just a hack which makes it sort of behave like one. The whole thing is an exercise in pseudo-computer science masturbation with little real purpose except to please the managers who dislike the one thing that makes Perl special.

On a similar note is regexes. I'm an avid fan of regular expressions simply because a nondeterministic finite automata is far more flexible than linear code. However, Larry must have been smoking that cheap $2 crack when he wrote this. Does he want Perl 6 to be flex or something?

I won't be going on to use 6. It's a nice idea, but it's completely unnecessary. It won't make large projects any easier to manage (the language is still, at heart, an almighty hack -- an impressive one, but still a hack). It won't make OO any cleaner. It won't make development any faster. To put it bluntly, Perl scripts will still look less beautiful than our friend Mr Goatse. I'd prefer to use a language which has always been pure synthesis of science and engineering, not some half-baked imposter.

Perl 6 will be nice, but I'm guessing it will be the end of Perl. It can't do what it wants to do whilst still being based upon a nasty mess. There are now other options, which provide all of Perl's power and none of the mess. Sorry, but *BSD^H^H^H^H Perl is dying. Larry is buggering it up the ass without lubricants, just like Shoeboy is doing to Larry's daughter.

Still works great, though the knocks and blue sparks inside when you put in a coin are exciting..

Galahad

For computer equipment, besides the arcade games (1981 and 1983) and the old Commodores (1983, etc.) I have a 5 1/4" floppy drive from the late 80s in one of my desktop machines. I use it to copy old video games I get on ebay in the format.

At least for me... Dia. What is especially nice was that I was using it to diagram a database I had designed, and I found a Perl script that would suck the schema out of a PostgreSQL database and make a Dia file out of it. I had to clean it up, but all the tables had been created and the links made.

Dia has a windows version. Like many (if not most) free software it's a little rough around the UI edges, but it works and it's free.

-Adam

I can't believe people don't know about this program. It's great for all kinds of diagrams. I mostly use it for UML diagrams and E/R database diagrams. Being a programmer, that's the type of stuff I do.

Get it here: http://www.lysator.liu.se/~alla/dia/

It works with windows or linux, you just needs the gtk. And if you use gaim for windows, then you've already got it.

http://gaim.sf.net IYDAK

Check out the gtk+ based Dia. You can find the Win32 version here.

Check out the gtk+ based Dia. You can find the Win32 version here.

Dia, a drawing program

A swedish scientist has been working on an alternative to USB 2.0 which will be fully backwards-compatible. check it out.

He feels that programmers fear design because it is a creative process rather than a logical one

What, and programming isn't?

Creating a program is not a mechanical, logical process (consult Turing for details).

Also, a well-crafted computer program is not just a set of instructions for a machine, it is a creative work that documents and explains a process.

It is as creative as a mathematical proof, or a poem. Duff's device is as creative and as beautiful as Basho's frog haiku. Any of these may be analyzed from a logical perspective, but their creation remains to some degree ineffable.

Cool idea, something like this, then?

ctrlaltdel.jpg