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I have a couple friends who work for Video game companies. One's programmer and other artist, the programmer is still a programmer, the artist is now a producer. I have known them to work anywhere from 40 to 80 hours a week at times.

I wouldn't push anybody into programming when they may not like it, but if you want to see if they like to program there are a bunch of very simple languages out there to try. I know another friend has started one of his kids on http://www.alice.org/.

You have to remember there are more jobs in the Video game than just programming, find out what your child is interested in and see if applies to the industry.
Just one more thing here is a human interest story that happened about 6 years ago with a big company http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html

You clearly didn't look at the pages, did you? The iPhoneOS page has only six links for download. WebCore, JavaScriptCore, and things from the compiler toolchain, some of which they are required to post, like gcc and gdb. But there's no kernel.

I actually did look at that some time ago, darwin used to be there (or at the time I had thought that meant the Darwin source was there) - I'm not sure when that got taken out. Sorry for the misdirection there, I'll have to research when that was pulled.

Also there are more links in 3.1.1, but still none of them are Darwin.

Hmm... maybe I should create a new SELinux sandbox for Firefox for each web page I visit, and avoid tabs.

Facebook seems to have gotten big mainly by chance. like being the only bacteria in the pietry dish. The only savvy they had was realizing the peitre dish was available and rushing to get there first.

You're right, no one ever thought of social sites before Facebook.

There's experimental support for 'hotswitching' called 'PRIME' (for obvious reasons :) ).

See here: http://airlied.livejournal.com/71734.html

many people overlook the fact that the best thing we all can do for oss is to use it.

Not KDE. I have been contributing bug reports and triaging other people's bugs (well over 1000 bugs) for years at KDE, so there will be no mistake that I love that project.

However, KDE breaks compatibility between point-dot releases (4.2 and 4.4 had problems with 4.1 and 4.3 ~/.kde configurations, respectively), and they release "developer preview" (their own words) as dot-oh software: KDE 4.0, Kdevelop, Amarok, Koffice, the list goes on. KDE SC 4.4's Kaddressbook was missing critical features after a rewrite, and this will be the case for other KDE-PIM components in KDE SC 4.5.

And let's not forget that "Does KDE even need (certain) users":
http://troy-at-kde.livejournal.com/17753.html

I've used a Palm Pre, it's UI is slick, intuitive and a joy to use.

Then I tried to get an SSH client, there isn't one as far as I could tell.

There are two command line ones, DropBear and OpenSSH, in homebrew.

I thought "oh that's fine I'll use VNC web access" but then remembered it's implemented as a Java applet.

VNC clients are available, either via PalmOS emulation (they work fine) or via Linux framebuffer apps. Hopefully they'll work on getting X11, which is also available and works with remote X11 protocols, to cooperate with some VNC app soon for those who don't want to run one in "Classic", the emulator.

The browser sucked, Gmail got stuck in infinite reloading loops when it wasn't outright crashing the browser (to be fair it didn't crash the OS).

You were trying to view the desktop Gmail in a mobile browser?? That's bound to have usability issues on any phone. Besides, the email client supports Gmail. Use it. (Mutters about people using browsers for everything.)

I tried finding an application repository, no joy.

There is one major one, has over a thousand apps, patches, and themes. It's called PrewareIn addition, you can load beta apps for the app catalog using Preware or Appscoop, and other feeds you can put into Preware exist, mostly for testing, alternate kernels, and such.

I tried an h.264 video, no support. I looked at developing for it, then found I couldn't use programming languages, I was forced to cludge together "applications" with document mark up languages. I gave up.

You give up too easily. The PDK allows you to program in C/C++ for it with Linux frameworks - it's more Linuxy then than Android. Or you can develop using ordinary Linux apps Homebrew style, though for display you'll need to install X11 for SDL or program it to use SDL and/or OpenGLES if it's a game using the Homebrew toolkit or the official PDK. Even before they added SDL to the frameworks with firmware 1.3.5, WebOS is recognizably Linux in many ways that Android is not

Folks seem to be forgetting that a (mostly) open source alternative already exists - Live Journal.

Remember when people used to laugh when the subject of hardware infection came up?
Let's mark the dated - May 2010, now can we move on to securing our hardware [without draconian measures].
If we're able to get the HW manufacturers on board we might see something of a victory in the near future and be able to compute without interference.

This problem has never been taken seriously - and it's about time.

Subversionhack:

http://subversionhack.livejournal.com/

There's Tumblr, Jaiku, LiveJournal, 4chan...

Or alternatively, you could do your own research.

It's for spy satellites, among other things. Nuclear missles can get anywhere in two hours already.

Exactly. Nukes are a solved problem. But for about 10 years I've wondered what the real-world inspiration was for novelist Dale Brown's ficticious NIRTSats(Need It Right This Second Satellites). As soon as the X-37B revival PR hit the blogosphere last month, I had a hunch. I see I'm not alone in my guess; even the timing of the novels and the programme is about right.

I'd have preferred to see the VentureStar take flight (on account of I hate the idea of waiting for hours for an airplane to haul my tourist ass a mere few thousand miles when I know there exist much more elegant - albeit expensive - solutions) but I gotta admit that for this particular sort of mission, robots beat humans. Sweet technology.

ACTION REQUIRED - IMPORTANT: To opt-out from the settlement, simply write "I want to opt-out of the settlement" along with your name and address and mail it by May 13th to: P2P Congestion Settlement Claims Administrator; c/o Rust Consulting; P.O. Box 9454; Minneapolis, MN 55440-9454. Ask your friends to please do the same. If we want a meaningful settlement in this case and open Internet in our future, it's important to spread the word and send a strong message to Comcast and the industry.

the new tardis appears to be a labout of love for a guy who posts on livejournal

his name is douglas442 and he appears to have started work on the tardis around 18 months ago.

"The steampunk console project"

all kudos to him and it fucking shows how much hard dedicated work he has put in
tremendous job :)

http://douglas442.livejournal.com/

Here is a rather more intelligent take: http://iainjclark.livejournal.com/222121.html#cutid1

(for me: someone shoot Murray Gold and put a call into to Christophe Beck to write decent music)

Android has its own issues. For example, the game some Android phone makers play with modders, where every version change unroots phones, or actually bricks (as in permanently trashes w/o change to reflash) devices.

I actually miss Windows Mobile. To use the phone to its fullest capacity (yes, including capacity), I had to do no hacks, no low level patches. Just install the right program and go.

Palm's WebOS is like that, root out of the box (well, with the developer's mode code activated by typing from the keyboard, which Palm has pledged not to remove, and even if they did, you can always install ssh then and have a prompt to use.) and it has the ability to install apps both from the official "App catalog" and homebrew apps.

There's a thriving homebrew community, which makes unofficial apps, patches the OS without needing to flash a new ROM image (though no patches are needed for full access), and makes themes for WebOS. Palm's WebOS is also a lot more like Linux under the hood (Android of course shares the custom Android Linux kernel but that doesn't make a GNU/Linux system by itself) than Android. Palm has also released an official "PDK" in beta for native apps, but you can get or make homebrew native or JavaScript apps without the official PDK. (Linux games and emulators port easily, as it includes now SDL as well as OpenGLES.)

A lot of people sing the praises of Android's openness because it has the Linux kernel and some open source Android components, and Google has a reputation for being a "good" company, but really the Palm Pre and also Nokia's N900 (which is basically a Linux PC in a phone...) are much more open for hacking than Android.

Too bad Palm is in trouble and the N900 is a transitional device. Nokia is making some big changes to Maemo, going with their historic tendency to break backwards compatibility with new versions in both Maemo and Symbian, so people with N900s are getting the software rug pulled out from other them. Palm, as everyone knows who follows these things, is in deep financial trouble.

I'm happy I got my Pre though, it's really an excellent somewhat underrated device with a terrific operating system that in a lot of ways (multitasking managment ("swipe to close"), openness, large media-drive partition program installation for software like games instead of Android's limited RAM space) is superior to Android. The only thing that's missing is the large software library, though WebOS has over 2,000 programs available for it, so I've been surprised at what I can do with it anyway, including 3D games unavailable on Android and open software and tinkering that doesn't rely on you re-flashing the device unnecessarily or rooting it from an exploit that could be closed any day... If you want a modern operating system that is as open as Windows Mobile without its drawbacks, I'd recommend the Palm Pre or the Nokia N900, in spite of their drawbacks. I must admit though the new HTC Evo 4G on Sprint is making me wonder if my next phone will be Android. I do hope Palm will make it though.

There's also this entertaining reading, entitled "THE DAY MY ARSE DIED". Weird thing is, the guy looks just like me when I had a beard, and I ate a phall many, many years ago. It brought back some painful memories. :-)

Re: (Score:2, Troll)
by Khyber (864651) writes: Alter Relationship
"but there's not a lot we can do about it."
Bullshit - ditch the slacking fuckwits and build it yourself in-house.
-- Deep Water Culture Made Easy - http://ledkitsune.livejournal.com/
*
*
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
by Khyber (864651) writes: Alter Relationship
And before you point out "To change off it

Wow. Both troll and insightful. I think you hit the slashdot jackpot.

Exactly. That's the one big fact that always made me skeptical of the idea that goto was bad.
Of course, the point is that there are better structures that are often more elegant or appropriate, but I think a goto can be useful, even in high-level programming. I've found Bram Cohen's blog entry on the matter to be quite interesting: http://bramcohen.livejournal.com/66555.html

I should shake the hell out of it?

Make sure you turn it upside down first.

The desktop display of Red Star is almost identical to that of MS Windows.

This reporter is lousy... The way she describes it, it makes one believe that North Korea made a GUI from scratch trying to exactly copy Microsoft.
After finding some pictures of the GUI, I was like Helloooo? It is just a boring KDE!
http://pics.livejournal.com/ashen_rus/pic/0002whq4/g16

Also look at the browser "My Country":
http://pics.livejournal.com/ashen_rus/pic/0002yxfz/g16
Yes, it is just FIREFOX just RENAMED (or forked).

My expectation went from: "wooo, North Korean Cyberarmory" to "lame".

The desktop display of Red Star is almost identical to that of MS Windows.

This reporter is lousy... The way she describes it, it makes one believe that North Korea made a GUI from scratch trying to exactly copy Microsoft.
After finding some pictures of the GUI, I was like Helloooo? It is just a boring KDE!
http://pics.livejournal.com/ashen_rus/pic/0002whq4/g16

Also look at the browser "My Country":
http://pics.livejournal.com/ashen_rus/pic/0002yxfz/g16
Yes, it is just FIREFOX just RENAMED (or forked).

My expectation went from: "wooo, North Korean Cyberarmory" to "lame".

http://pics.livejournal.com/ashen_rus/gallery/0000gyzd

Some screen shots of the OS: http://rt.com/Top_News/2010-03-01/north-korea-cyber-weapon.html?fullstory & http://ashen-rus.livejournal.com/4300.html. I wonder where they get there computers from?

Hi!

"When it comes to Drizzle, you require the code to be under BSD; In practice this is a contributor agreement too."

We don't require contributions to be made under the BSD license, we do ask that new modules are, but that is all. From day one we have never mingled GPL and BSD headers in files. Derived work has always been derived work. We never have had as a goal for Drizzle to be embedded so copyright assignment is not required. Ask Kristian for the IRC conversation I once had with him on this topic where I explained my reasons for this (or... I'll just blog most of them up again: http://krow.livejournal.com/684329.html).

Richard's statements imply that a protocol is somehow wrapped up in licensing. In the US this is just not true (someone in another comment pointed out the Lotus Notes legal case where the FSF argued this itself ). Richard says all sort of things, but it doesn't make an ounce of them all true.

Bradley Kuhn has pointed out that while the FSF has done copyright assignment, it has promised to never assign its rights for commercial purposes. It also doesn't require sign over of all rights to a given body of code. It just asks for enough so that it can be a legal partner in the defense of the GPL should something come to court. That is very different in nature, to the code assignment that occurs when someone is assigning code to a commercial entity.

Cheers,
      -Brian

I have a nice little Tablet from Hitachi but no plans to trade in my underpowered aging tablet for a shiny new one that has 1/4 of the features.

http://tibman.livejournal.com/59574.html
Pictures of it and a few upgrades (wifi, ram, drive).

Might be rather hard to "clean up". Back in 2008 Mathew Garret wrote:

Google was going to be an interesting case of a large company hiring people both from the embedded world and also the existing Linux development community and then producing an embedded device that was intended to compete with the very best existing platforms. I had high hopes that this combination of factors would result in the Linux community as a whole having a better idea what the constraints and requirements for high-quality power management in the embedded world were, rather than us ending up with another pile of vendor code sitting on an FTP site somewhere in Taiwan that implements its power management by passing tokenised dead mice through a wormhole.

To a certain extent, my hopes were fulfilled. We got a git server in California.

Somehow I managed to forget Nokia for being more open than Apple - and arguably - Google. I guess because so few people use, or will likely ever use, their smartphones. :)

You also forgot Palm, who have WebOS, which is more "Linux like" than Android (No forking here!) Palm's WebOS is often thought of by Android fans as being so Apple-like that they immitated the closed source nature of Apple. Nothing is further from the truth.

By the way, Nokia's market is limited to Europe (and the third world, but they don't buy smartphones in India, Africa, and the Far East), but there, they are the Blackberry of Europe with regards to smartphones. In other words, there are arguably more N and E series Nokia owners in Europe than any other smartphone. (Those *are* smartphones, albeit some of the older Symbian ones are more on the Palm Treo type of Smartphone technology than iPhone, very capable devices but very old-fashioned interface. Though it should be noted that they had a mobile WebKit browser before Apple did on the iPhone for Symbian's "Nokia browser"!)

Recruit this person.

Damn fine job with Tolkien there.

I know how you feel about older tablets and recently put mine through some upgrades. I have a Hitachi VisionPlate.. basically one giant touch screen. It came with XPe on it and now runs Puppy and Gentoo. It currently has 512MB Ram, a 660MHz Crusoe proc (weird thing) with 3x 4GB MicroDrives for space. Upgraded the wireless from b to g.

I was very happy being able to upgrade the thing from cheap junk on ebay. I doubt Apple's tablet will sport that capability.

Pictures here: http://tibman.livejournal.com/59574.html

Palm not only has root available on all their WebOS phones,

Android is Open Source, part GPL and part Apache.

It's partially open source. Ever seen the source code for Android Google Maps or any of the other Google apps on Android?

WebOS is closed source, it uses the Linux Kernel but most of the OS is proprietary.

It has a lot of open source components. Not just the kernel. WebOS is a recognisably Linux in a way the Android isn't, it contains many of the elements of Linux besides the kernel. Heck, it even contains an ARM assembler on-board. (And mine contains gcc too, but that's because it has a Debian chroot installed. :) ) Even the closed-source stuff is mostly HTML5 and Javascript, is not obfuscated, and is easily modifiable.

I cannot customise nor install a custom version of WebOS on a Palm device.

You can customize WebOS quite a bit, and literally hundreds of patches and themes are available for it. Yes, few custom ROMs have been developed for WebOS, but since you don't need to do anything special to get root, or to customize WebOS, there's not much of a need to flash a new ROM.

That system already exists. It's called the Ransom Model, and one of my favorite authors, Greg Stolze, has been using it quite extensively. http://arcdream.livejournal.com/4645.html

An Attempt at a Hardware Executable:

I've notices like kinds of this type of programing in "dead" boot block areas in disks, spirals, grids, pseudo (IDE) worlds.
Got to run, check my nick for more:

http://slashdot.org/~not_hylas(+)/

A friends site:

http://subversionhack.livejournal.com/

May I remind you of Electronic Arts:

http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/

I worked there during that time, it's all true. The truism here is that too many young coders think that writing games is "cool", so they'll put up with bullshit to do it... while the company (correctly) figures that they can burn 'em out with no worries, as there's always more young talent eager to take their place.

That (plus plain old bureaucratic incompetence) was jwz's issue, at any rate.

Support in the open-source drivers is being written as fast as ATI can verify and declassify docs.

Personally, I've not been impressed with the 'correct' opensource effort when it comes to 3D acceleration support, see my blog entry for more details.

It's Funny Until ...

Subversionhack:

http://subversionhack.livejournal.com/

https://tagmeme.com/subhack/a/index.html

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1135787&cid=26950187

Subject: Every computer hackable by Radio Freq?
- a global conspiracy?

This lady claims to have found some strange things on her Windows PCs and Linux!

Subversionhack Archive
https://tagmeme.com/subhack/

So, with modern blackboxed hardware components, are all of our PCs hackable via radio frequency / ham packet radio type of blackbox voodoo?

Dig deep, I've found no other site like this. Are Linux/BSD varieties vulnerable?

http://www.invisiblethings.org/code.html
http://www.invisiblethings.org/papers.html

AND

This talk explores three possible methods that a hardware Trojan can use to leak secret information to the outside world: thermal, optical and radio.

In the thermal Trojan demo, we use an infrared camera to show how electronic components or exposed connector pins can be used to transmit illicit information thermally. In the optical Trojan demo, we use an optical-to-audio converter to show how a power-on LED can be used to transmit illicit information using signal frequencies undetectable by human eyes. Finally, in the radio Trojan demo, we use a radio receiver to show how an external connector can be used to transmit illicit information using AM radio transmission.

http://www.cvorg.ece.udel.edu/defcon-16/
https://www.defcon.org/html/defcon-16/dc-16-speakers.html#Kiamilev

fools laugh and cry tinfoil, others read and learn and decide for themselves

http://bluepillproject.org/

http://subversionhack.livejournal.com/1815.html

"I sincerely believe that Blue Pill technology will (very soon) allow for creating 100% undetectable malware, which is not based on obscurity of the concept. And I already stressed this in the description of my talk here (http://syscan.org/program.html) and here (http://blackhat.com/html/bh-usa-06/bh-usa-06-speakers.html#Rutkowska). The working prototype I have (and which I will be demonstrating at SyScan and Black Hat) implements the most important step towards creating such malware, namely it allows to move the underlying operating system, on the fly, into a secure virtual machine."
  - http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2006/07/blue-pill-hype.html

http://rayer.ic.cz/romos/romose.htm

"The ROMOS is a stand-alone x86 code allows you to load and run your own binary code or 3rd-party code. ROMOS rely on BIOS functions only so it can be executed directly without any operating system. The main purpose of ROMOS is to be placed in a ROM, from where it can load/run other software (e.g. bootmanager, HW diagnostics, special controlling software...) during POST (Power-On Self Test) while your PC is booting up. It can also load DOS-based operating systems (may be other OSes) such as FreeDOS stored in ROM together with ROMOS. This mean that any floppy/harddisk/CD-ROM drive is not needed. It may be very useful in various embedded diskless systems. Or simply as reserve OS for rescue use. Other applications are on you."

mark this offtopic while you browse for porn to satisfy one more rub-one-off session, despite it containing more than the OP.

Should anyone be curious, here's a link to a LiveJournal post where I ask my fellow members of one of LJ's more prominent IBD (inflammatory bowel disease, a collective term for Crohn's, colitis, and a couple other conditions) communities how they describe their Crohn's Disease to other people. I found the answers quite interesting:

http://community.livejournal.com/we_got_guts/569491.html

a) call it what it is: a netbook ... smartbook is a pointless re-naming of the device category. Stop it.
b) TI OMAP 3xxx CPU (the 1GHz one)
c) Slate Tablet or Convertible-Tablet Netbook format -- either way, 5 way dpad and "Android Buttons" next to the screen
d) PixelQi hybrid LCD/e-paper 9" or 10" touch screen, multi-touch, 1280x720, 1280x768, or 1280x800 native resolution
e) DVI-I out, supporting 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x600, 1024x768, 1280x720, 1280x768, 1280x800, and 1280x1024 resolutions (the non-HD/wide screen resolutions using letter boxing to show an HD/widescreen resolution of the same width; so, a 1280x1024 monitor would show the 1280x720/1280x768/1280x800 native resolution of the device, with the black bands at the top and bottom of the screen)
f) 2-4 USB Host/OTG ports (keyboard, mouse, storage, network, etc.)
g) 1 mini-USB for charging and data sync (it's ok to ALSO have a conventional charger, this is just for opportunistic charging at any USB port that's available)
h) 3.5mm headset (bi-directional, so you can use it with VOIP/Skype/Google-Voice)
i) 1GB - 2GB RAM
j) 2GB, 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, 32GB storage options
k) 1 or 2 full size SDHC slots
l) Android, with both the built-in Android browser, and the Chrome browser
m) The Android x86 and Acer port of Firefox for Android
n) Throw in a Fennec port to Android
o) 8+ hours battery life, even with Wifi and Bluetooth on
p) Wifi b/g/n
q) Full bluetooth stack (DUN, PAN, FTP, HID, BIP, A2DC, etc.)
r) PCI Express Mini card slot, for user-added 3G (or for carrier subsidized models)
s) fast-boot/splashtop optimizations for Android (perhaps some of ChromeOS'es ability to check the validity of the OS)
t) Android can easily/seamlessly hand-off to other OSes (UBuntu-ARM, Mer/Maemo, Windows CE, maybe ChromeOS if an ARM CPU is used; or Ubuntu, Windows, or any other available x86 OS (ChromeOS, etc.) if an x86 CPU is used)

The Aspire 1420P convertible tablet netbook might be a good start, if it was scaled down to 10", and changed to a ARM CPU with a PixelQi display.

I have more thoughts about it at: http://johnkzin.livejournal.com/55488.html

However it wouldn't surprise me if they actually were actually doing much worse than just killing people.

What, like making them watch BloodRayne?

You said you don't have anything at home to tunnel through. Assuming that VPN really isn't a viable option, you can use ssh with a hosting provider like dreamhost (or a buddy's state-side server) to run a SOCKS proxy. The downside is that whatever app you're running (afaik) needs to understand how to use a SOCKS proxy, which Firefox/Safari/IE all do, as well as several of the more well-known IM apps like GAIM.

from your local system: $ ssh -D1080 yourserver.dreamhost.com (or use PuTTY if you're on windows, and set up a dynamic port forward)

If you're in OS X, use your system>network settings to set up a global SOCKS proxy, which Safari will automagically use. If you're in Windows, use Firefox's proxy settings (Tools > Options > Advanced > Network > Settings > Manual Proxy Config)

your SOCKS host is localhost, and the port is 1080 (or whatever you pick when you're creating the tunnel).

There are a couple of tricks to this. One is that you can't connect to anything as long as your settings specify to use a SOCKS proxy and the tunnel isn't open. For the places that have the "welcome to our intarweb access" redirects, you'll want to disable the SOCKS proxy settings until you get through that finished. Otherwise, you won't be able to open the tunnel, and it will appear as if you can't connect to anything. Firefox has a QuickProxy addon which makes this easier.

The second is that you can make sure that the proxy is active by a) visiting a "check my IP address" site to make sure it is showing up as your hosting provider or b) killing the tunnel and all web traffic should stop working.

more info

Unfortunately, it doesn't solve the real problem, which is that Wikipedia's policies/procedures are designed around two major flaws:

#1 - Administrators are always assumed to be in the right, despite clear and frequent misbehavior on their part
#2 - The assumption is that consensus never changes, and the "consensus" of whatever group (or admin-protected individual) "owns" a particular page has a vested interest in driving away all new contributors one by one, lest enough show up that the consensus indeed changes.

For example, I'm reminded of Lie #2: "Nobody new ever comes to Wikipedia."

I'll quote the relevant part:
Interestingly enough, the BITE policy has a telling statement: nothing scares potentially valuable contributors away faster than hostility or elitism. Why is this interesting? Because this is precisely the goal of the abusive administrators.

The more people get away with treating newcomers as if they are plaguebearers, the more newcomers get driven off. Even established users are being treated this way more and more, and it's no surprise they give up as well. Combine hatred of newcomers with an outgoing flux of tired contributors who've simply had enough of the abusive "ruling class" administrators, and it's no surprise that they're in sharp decline.

No, this isn't the same bug. People confuse two issues. I wrote the mmap_min_addr protections to try to mitigate the effects of a certain class of common kernel bugs which exist because of design choices by Intel. That class of bugs can be summed up as NULL pointer usage. Every time someone finds a new NULL pointer usage bug we get the same story. RHEL (and any system with SELinux enabled) did not have protections for mapping the 0 page by local authenticated users, but did have protections for network facing daemons and the like. Other distros had protections for the local authenticated user but weaker protections for network facing daemons. The mmap_min_addr protections have since been enhanced in SELinux systems such that they have stronger protections, both for local authenticated users and for network facing daemons. My old comments from the first time this came up are at http://eparis.livejournal.com/

But the key to remember is that mmap_min_addr implementation is not the bug that allows elevation of privilege. In this case it was a very very old bug in the implementation of pipes. Previously Spender and friends have found bugs in performance counters (one which was actually much worse as it didn't fit into the very narrow class which might be mitigated by mmap_min_addr), in network sockets, and other places. These are the bugs which cause this to be a new story. Once he finds the real bugs he applies some of the same basic techniques (plus a whole lot of thought) to create an exploit. If the Linux kernel was bug free we wouldn't need mmap_min_addr. If mmap_min_addr was bug free (over the years Spender has found multiple problems with my work) this class of bugs would be just a bit less devastating.

Everyone in the kernel development community needs to think of invalid pointer bugs as a larger security threat then they currently do. The lesson here, keep your systems patched.

I'm quoting you on this in my journal.

I've got a few friends who'll appreciate this.

This is not a new slogan. "Join the 21st century" seems somewhat orthogonal to "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." I wrote this a year ago, based on much older posts and e-mail:
Why I don't like forums

========

Tracking

1. Tracking all the user-ids and passwords for all the various forums is a pain.
2. Many folks use a separate e-mail alias for each forum, so they know when one starts spamming, adding Yet Another bit of bit of data to track.
3. Many forums require or encourage the collection and distribution of additional data: birth date, location, Instant Messaging handles, web sites, etc. Some of this may be required to authenticate when you try to recover a password or otherwise get the attention of the administrators. It's Yet Even More data to track and update, in addition to any privacy concerns.

Display

1. The layout of each forum is completely different. You have to figure out or recall Yet Another scheme before you can figure out what is going on.
2. Most forums are laid out badly. None of them offers much real customization for end-users. Were it up to me, I'd be able to make every damned one of them look exactly the same when I visited.
3. Many forums use a layout or style that is pretty much illegible:
   • Tiny type.
   • Low contrast text. I'm not sure which is worse, gray on black or lime green on black. No, the worst was deep green on burgundy.
   • Many forums give way too much emphasis to avatars, signatures, animations, etc. It can actually be hard to find the posts sometimes.
   • Rigid layouts that make it impossible to resize the screen or browser and see more of the actual posts.

Delivery, Attention

1. Posts to a mailing list sit on my machine waiting for me. I don't have to remember to visit a forum or find some way to track multiple forums.
2. Posts from e-mail lists arrive asynchronously and are already delivered, filtered, and sorted by the time I want to read them. With a forum, I have to go get each post or page of posts from each forum I might choose to visit, and they have to be loaded at that time.
3. Posts that arrive in e-mail can be filtered or organized according to my criteria. Forum posts are organized by the admins and posters into "boards," "sub-boards," and "threads" that are frequently named oddly or just make no sense.
4. Many forums use some sort of "newness" filter and try to keep track of what is "new" for you -- and do so badly. The user interface to control this feature (if the feature exists, if the user interface exists) range from bad to worse.
5. Forums show quite a bit of extraneous information. Showing the poster's handle makes sense, but each post also shows: their avatar, the date they joined, their location, title, "status," role, post count, IM handles, login status, and so on. It shows this for EVERY poster in the thread. Then there is the information for EVERY thread: number of views, number of replies, rating, activity level, various status flags, original poster, last poster, time stamp, number of pages of posts, a page list, and so on. Then the information about EVERY post: reply number, a reply-and-quote button, reply button, report button, site tools and links. At the bottom is also the actual time it took to create the page, standards compliance, etc., etc... Where was the content again?
6. Following discussions in forums requires much more attention than in e-mail.
   Let me state this again: Reading posts on forums is much, much more work than reading posts from mailing lists.

   I am on numerous high and low volume mailing lists. The incoming posts are tagged and filtered into various mailboxes as messages are delivered. At some point during the day, I'll decide to "glance over" these mailboxes. I may have already filtered and marked certain posts with tag

No-one force people to use higher res or 3D capabilities just because it's there.

At various points during the PlayStation and PlayStation 2 eras, Sony Computer Entertainment America all but banned games with 2-dimensional sprite graphics.

SELinux has this capability: http://danwalsh.livejournal.com/28545.html

I'd link you directly to the blog post by Michael Geist on this issue, but his blog site appears to be down right now. Here's the rss feed through livejournal:

http://syndicated.livejournal.com/michaelgeistrss/505360.html

A couple of excerpts of his analysis/summary that will interest you:

"traffic management that degrades or prefers one application over another may warrant investigation under section 27(2) of the Act."

"Even for non-sensitive traffic, the CRTC has ruled that it is possible to slow down to an extent that it amounts to blocking or controlling the content, therefore requiring prior approval."

Default Ubuntu eats RAM like a rabbit in the carrot garden.

Not really, it's difficult to find new computers that come with less than 1GB of RAM these days and Ubuntu doesn't really eat that up at all.

a customized installation of any Linux is swapping less (without changing sysctl values).

I already mentioned when removing various things didn't seem to gain increased performance. I measure performance by how fast it takes to perform a task and when it takes several seconds extra to output pages in a PHP based CMS on a optimized setup running on ubuntu-server verses an OpenBSD where the configurations were replicated exactly, website content and databases and it loaded in 0.325s (according to fasterfox).

Any installation of OpenBSD should be compared with a customized installation as you with OpenBSD have only the base tools and then add what you need with pkg_add.

Which in my tests didn't make Ubuntu that much faster.

Fun fact: I hate OpenBSD's userland and would prefer Ubuntu's ease of use in it. I am also not very fond of certain related communities involved in OpenBSD so please do not consider me to be a OpenBSD zealot.

They use 8 damed decks for blackjack. Poker is a joke. The perpetually spinning roulette wheel is an abomination. Video slots are stupid. It does not pay to play at all.

There are two reasons to go. For the whores...oh wait Vegas can't stand the competition so you have to drive an hour north for that. So the only reason to go there is so you can say you've been there and paid 8 bucks for a V8.

A friends wife sums it up nicely:

"Vegas is like Monte Carlo as re-imagined by white trash." --blkkitty mzmadmike's wife
http://mzmadmike.livejournal.com/