Slashdot Mirror

Interestingly, the Perl 6 community has had a similar proposal since I wrote this article. The objective there is to get capable programmers familiar with Perl internals. It's possible to help out beginning programmers, too, but someone who already knows how to code fairly well could get into the guts of the regex engine or optimize pp_hot.c better with guidance from someone who's already been there.

(OT Sig comment: If I could pick a guitar mentor, it would be Michael Roe.)

--

Here is the original posting from the Mandrake cooker mailing list regarding this issue.

Perhaps in this it is a reflection of the Eastern European experience of the communist regime of the period?

This is the most common cliche when American reviewers write about East European science fiction. Does every West European sci-fi book tell about capitalism? We had a long thread about Solaris on our mailing list just recently. The biggest debate was about the ending of the Tarkovsky's film when compared to the ending in the book. To begin, surf to the first message on the subject (in the archive of our mailing list Commie).

Ancient Greeks had coin operated vending machines in year 25 bc -- her e is a page describing that. A vending machine has states,just like a Turing machine. A Turing machine can do anything a digital computer can do.
On the other hand the question should be who created the first digital computer with an electronically stored program, and then the answer would probably be the English, because unlike Colossus other machines of that time did not have stored programs.

Developers mailing list archive - http://www.mail-archive.com/openssl-dev@openssl.or g/
SSLeay doco - http://www.columbia.edu/~ariel/ssleay/
SSLeay FAQ - http://www2.psy.uq.edu.au/~ftp/Crypto/
Dr Stephen Henson's home page - http://www.drh-consultancy.demon.co.uk/ Agreed, some of it's pretty sparse. Join the developer mailing list and ask a few questions - www.openssl.org

"Could I have a source for the Giuliani comment?"

A quick Google search on Giuliani DNA turns up a lot of hits. The comment seems to have been reported in the New York Times in December 1998, for which no free online record exists, but, the New York Civil Liberties Union mentions it in a very dry paper about DNA, if that's reputable enough for you:

"The rounding up of a whole class of people, the collection of physical samples, and the extraction of DNA information from those samples are illegal in the United States of America. Or so we had thought.

"New York Governor George Pataki wants to expand the state DNA databank from violent felons to all felons. New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani wants to include all newborn children. Meanwhile, the New York City Police Department has been collecting DNA samples from suspects without their consent or their knowledge, and without the benefit of court orders."

This news report references thi s 404 NYT page.

And this message-board post gives a specific date in the NYT, which is as close as I could get in five minutes:

"When asked whether all children should have DNA tests at birth, the Mayor said: "...I would have no problem with that, or fingerprinting all children...There is absolutely no reason why people should be afraid of being identified..." It's not invasive," the Mayor said. "It doesn't invade any right of privacy. You don't have a right not to be identified. I don't remember a constitutional amendment that gives you the right not to be identified."-N.Y. Times 12/17/98 "Giuliani Backs DNA Testing of Newborns for Identification"

Finally, check out more of Robert Lederman's comments. As someone who's been falsely arrested over 40 times for painting unflattering portraits of Giuliani, he has a special interest in DNA fingerprinting.

Jamie McCarthy

While it's probably true that Linux 2.4 is significantly better than NT at several tasks, there are definitely situations where NT beats Linux 2.2.

The above seems to imply an expectation that 2.4 will be faster than 2.2. That's unlikely. The VFS layer has been essentially rewritten for 2.4, and a lot of filesystem code has had to change with it. This is some of the most performance-critical code in the kernel. The really sad part is that, to date, no serious performance measurement activity has been undertaken by the VFS developers, so we don't really know the performance implications yet. Anecdotal evidence from linux-fsdevel (e.g. this message) suggests that reads may be 10-20% slower in 2.4 than in 2.2, while multi-stream writes may be "much faster". I have tried to get more information from the people making such claims - such as descriptions of configurations, tests used, a more concrete definition of "much faster", etc. - but have so far received no reply. I think they're embarrassed, and from what I've seen (see my essay on 2.4 Linux VFS for more) they should be.

IBM recognized that AFS had some deficiencies and pushed forward with DCE/DFS. At first, they gave an (official, I think) EOL on AFS along with the migration path to DCE/DFS. Once AFS customers figured out what they needed to do with DCE/DFS to make it work as well as AFS already worked, they cried foul and encouraged IBM to alter its product plans.

IBM changed their tune, saying that AFS would be supported in the future, and AFS 3.5 came out on short order. It improved file server performance by over 3 times! Meanwhile, DCE has been open sourced (or something similar, I forget) by the OSF and IBM seems to have forgotten about DFS after their big '96 olympics web site replication with DFS was met with a big "so?".

As of late, though, IBM has determined that there is not money in distributed file systems. They have shifted their "development" to India, and declared AFS to be in "maintenance only mode". [Thread 1] [Thread 2]

As such, AFS currently uses Kerberos IV. Pretty much every site that is serious about AFS has licensed the source and patched it for Kerberos V. This patch has been going around for at least 5 years, yet IBM has been unable to integrate it. Even worse yet, look how they have approached security bugs in Linux 2.2.14.

It would make a lot of sense for AFS to be open sourced, but they are making no moves in that direction. I suspect that a similar fate awaits NDS, should IBM get their hands on it. Then again, maybe the leftovers from Transarc and Novell could get together and come up with a Kerberos V implementation for both products.

IBM recognized that AFS had some deficiencies and pushed forward with DCE/DFS. At first, they gave an (official, I think) EOL on AFS along with the migration path to DCE/DFS. Once AFS customers figured out what they needed to do with DCE/DFS to make it work as well as AFS already worked, they cried foul and encouraged IBM to alter its product plans.

IBM changed their tune, saying that AFS would be supported in the future, and AFS 3.5 came out on short order. It improved file server performance by over 3 times! Meanwhile, DCE has been open sourced (or something similar, I forget) by the OSF and IBM seems to have forgotten about DFS after their big '96 olympics web site replication with DFS was met with a big "so?".

As of late, though, IBM has determined that there is not money in distributed file systems. They have shifted their "development" to India, and declared AFS to be in "maintenance only mode". [Thread 1] [Thread 2]

As such, AFS currently uses Kerberos IV. Pretty much every site that is serious about AFS has licensed the source and patched it for Kerberos V. This patch has been going around for at least 5 years, yet IBM has been unable to integrate it. Even worse yet, look how they have approached security bugs in Linux 2.2.14.

It would make a lot of sense for AFS to be open sourced, but they are making no moves in that direction. I suspect that a similar fate awaits NDS, should IBM get their hands on it. Then again, maybe the leftovers from Transarc and Novell could get together and come up with a Kerberos V implementation for both products.

IBM recognized that AFS had some deficiencies and pushed forward with DCE/DFS. At first, they gave an (official, I think) EOL on AFS along with the migration path to DCE/DFS. Once AFS customers figured out what they needed to do with DCE/DFS to make it work as well as AFS already worked, they cried foul and encouraged IBM to alter its product plans.

IBM changed their tune, saying that AFS would be supported in the future, and AFS 3.5 came out on short order. It improved file server performance by over 3 times! Meanwhile, DCE has been open sourced (or something similar, I forget) by the OSF and IBM seems to have forgotten about DFS after their big '96 olympics web site replication with DFS was met with a big "so?".

As of late, though, IBM has determined that there is not money in distributed file systems. They have shifted their "development" to India, and declared AFS to be in "maintenance only mode". [Thread 1] [Thread 2]

As such, AFS currently uses Kerberos IV. Pretty much every site that is serious about AFS has licensed the source and patched it for Kerberos V. This patch has been going around for at least 5 years, yet IBM has been unable to integrate it. Even worse yet, look how they have approached security bugs in Linux 2.2.14.

It would make a lot of sense for AFS to be open sourced, but they are making no moves in that direction. I suspect that a similar fate awaits NDS, should IBM get their hands on it. Then again, maybe the leftovers from Transarc and Novell could get together and come up with a Kerberos V implementation for both products.

I can say it, I cannot do it.

Originally Blowfish was designed without the initial and final XOR-ing, so in 16-round Blowfish there were 14 entries in the P-box, totaling 56 bytes. Naturally. this was the limit for key length, and it was this number that went into the paper.

Later on, the size of the P-box was increased by 4 entries, so that now the total size of the P-box is 72 bytes, but the paper was not revised.

So the 56-byte limit may be regarded as an uncorrected typo, the extra 16 bytes are mixed with the same thoroughness as the rest of the crowd, and are in no sense easier to attack.

So the total maximum length of Blowfish key is 72 bytes (576 bits). Period, end of story.

;^)

Most mailing lists I'm interested in are listed at the Mailing list ARChives or at The Mail Archive (no relation!).

I'd be interested in learning of some other (non-Geocrawler) sites as well. Geocrawler is too slow and cluttered.

First, I'd like to say that DBI itself is very cool, and I find it really useful.

I read the book as soon as it came out several weeks ago; I was anticipating its release very much. I skimmed most of it, though, as it's kinda lightweight. The first 50 pages deal with flatfiles.. blah. Out of 330 pages, the last 140 of them are appendix -- which is the perldoc pages that you can get a more up-to-date version (and quicker access) of online.

Also, I think it's weird that they'd spend 50 pages on (non-DBI) flatfiles, then only like 125 (excluding appendix) on DBI.

• Interview with the authors
• DBI-users archive
• Old DBI-users archive, but w/index
• Positive review by perl.org (duh..)

we didn't announce to flood the ftp server.

And now it's probably too late.
--

I mailed the grub list. Here is the response:
(slightly edited for context)

From: Christopher Kailden
Subject: Information on GRUB
Date: Thu, 27 Apr 2000 12:35:22 -0700 (PDT)

> What is keeping GRUB in alpha?

Please take a look at my past mail in the archive:

here

> Recently the Slashdot community was debating the advantages and
> disadvantages of LILO, and GRUB was recommended as a
> viable alternative. I am wondering what GRUB is still
> trying to accomplish before going public.

There are also some remaining problems, which may affect
beginners. For example, Gordon who is the chief maintainer of this
project is considering if the LBA support bitmap check should be
disabled by default. LBA is one of the nightmares in PC, so we need
more time to determine what is the Right Thing.

The very thing that you should take into account is, however, that
GRUB is not only a replacement with LILO. I know some Linux-side
people presume that GRUB is a Linux loader which is maybe better than
LILO, but GRUB has many other aspects. For most of us, it is very
important how useful GRUB is for OS development. If you read the
document carefully, you can see how many features GRUB has and then
that most of the features are not very useful for "ordinary" users.

Okuji

*do NOT* buy a BP6 for a server. the BP6 has more problems than any other motherboard out there.
ABIT SUCKS...even though there have been good reviews..this board is bad bad bad.
want proof ?
here's some
lock ups
filesystem corruption

i've got 4 abit's and those are the last abit's im going to buy..all non overclocked with clean PSU's, 500Mhz celerons and APM off/ACPI off/noapic options and i get lockups with ALL OF THEM.

*do NOT* buy a BP6 for a server. the BP6 has more problems than any other motherboard out there.
ABIT SUCKS...even though there have been good reviews..this board is bad bad bad.
want proof ?
here's some
lock ups
filesystem corruption

i've got 4 abit's and those are the last abit's im going to buy..all non overclocked with clean PSU's, 500Mhz celerons and APM off/ACPI off/noapic options and i get lockups with ALL OF THEM.

*do NOT* buy a BP6 for a server. the BP6 has more problems than any other motherboard out there.
ABIT SUCKS...even though there have been good reviews..this board is bad bad bad.
want proof ?
here's some
lock ups
filesystem corruption

i've got 4 abit's and those are the last abit's im going to buy..all non overclocked with clean PSU's, 500Mhz celerons and APM off/ACPI off/noapic options and i get lockups with ALL OF THEM.

There has been some interest on the LyX mailing list regarding extending that software with a symbolic math-package. I am happy to coordinate this project and can personally work on QC simulation code (mostly linear algebra). (The reason we need yet another QC simulator is a topic for another day!) If you are interested in this idea please Email me! Be sure to try out LyX if you are not already familiar with it. Math-package(s) will be selected based on their ease of interface with LyX and selfishly if they have the operations I need. Obviously people who can code or test are very important but at this stage Email from any potential user will be helfpful in convincing the LyX team this is a project they should support.

A flood of thoughtful email would be great-- I think it's pathetic that universities around the world are pouring millions into proprietary closed-source "Scientific Workplace" type solutions when they could be using that money to support an open-source effort instead!

--Alexander (Sasha) Wait

I have an abit bp6 motherboard, and can't get a month of uptime, despite a massive amount of attention. (Custom kernels, noapic kernel parameters, bios updates, switching to ATA33, Hedrick's IDE patch) More importantly, it's not just me. Look at linux-abit and you'll see that basically nobody can get a month of uptime off of that motherboard, under either moderate or high load. I'm willing to go so far as to say that the BP6 is not stable under linux. I'm suspecting it's not stable, period. I would love to be proven wrong, and find out what sort of witch's brew abit recommends for that board.

Maybe it's possible to fight with a kind of Randall Schwartz's mod_perl-trick.

DinX is an experimental windowing system that performs clipping and drawing inside Linux kernel modules. This eliminates much context switching between clients and the server, and makes the code small, simple and fast. It is aimed at small systems like Linux handhelds.

There's an enlightening discussion of JPEG2000 in the gimp-devel archives. See the or iginal question posted 9 Dec 1999, as well as the followup, particularly th is reply by Nick Lamb.

There's an enlightening discussion of JPEG2000 in the gimp-devel archives. See the or iginal question posted 9 Dec 1999, as well as the followup, particularly th is reply by Nick Lamb.

RSA Security, Inc. vehemently denies the legality of using RSAREF for even non-commercial use (see http://www.mail -archive.com/openssl-users@openssl.org/msg03870.ht ml for a particularly amusing account of one encounter). There is sufficient room for legal wrangling around the term "revenue-generating" in the RSAREF 2.0 license to cause concern for corporate lawyers, it seems.

Our needs included:

portability - the application must be able to run on Windows, Mac, and Linux (if we get other *nixes as a bonus then that's even better)

consistency - the interface must be as consistent as possible across platforms

gui flexibility - the interface must be as customizable as possible

html/XML support - the language or its libraries/runtime must support HTML content, and at least be pledging future support for XML.

After doing our research, and delving into Sun's commitment to Linux, as well as its seeming support for Open Source we decided that Java was likely our best choice. The Swing components seemed to provide the desired customizability and consistency, Java supported HTML and was on its way to XML support, and the Linux support promised would guarantee us a presence on what we deemed the important platforms.

So now it's a year later. The product is designed, mostly written, and really beginning to take shape. We are trying to put together our package to show to potential underwriters but have been plagued by a serious Java issue:

The Windows and Solaris JDK/JRE packages, while still a bit slow and memory-intensive, provide most of the features we need to produce a stable and slick application which can usefully present our content. What bugs there are appear to be hot items ready for fixing in the next release. However, the Linux JDK/JRE packages are not stable, not well-supported, and not even at the same release level as the Windows and Solaris versions.

Month after month we have watched the progress of JDK development (as supposedly supported by Sun) for Linux crawl forward. We have been programming steadily, working around bugs, redesigning interface features to not rely upon features which are not yet present in Linux. Generally acting as if Java2 for Linux is not coming any time soon.

As we watch we have gotten the feeling that, despite press releases to the contrary, Sun could care less whether the Linux JDK ever gets finished, and doesn't appear to be devoting its resources at all towards the platform. Indeed, it seems as if they would prefer people forgot about Linux and its Java port altogether. Here's an example. java.sun.com is Sun's main website devoted to the Java language. Trying to actually find the Linux port from this page takes the patience of Job. Want some help? I'll locate you a few pages down in the right direction. See if you can find it from here. It doesn't help matters that Sun "reorganizes" their Java site periodically, essentially scrambling the links on the page -- reminiscent of the supermarket technique of seemingly random placement of necessities to make one wander through the store, hopefully buying non-necessities (or, similarly, the legendary placement of keys on the QWERTY keyboard to slow down the typist).

"Bad site design" aside, after looking in more desperation for help we noticed other symptoms of "Sun support gone wrong.":

Cryptic messages on Sun's message board about the availabili ty of Linux Java tools

Rumblings on the Blackdown Java port mailing list about lack of progress, with occasional hints that Blackdown is fixing bugs in Sun's code which are getting folded in for later release. While that's great (they should report bugs and the bugs should be fixed in later releases), this forces us to ask the question, "What form is the press-released 'Sun support' taking?" Evidently it's not in the form of programming resources or even $ to support developers.

Additionally, Blackdown appears to be in the lead as far as releases of the JDK go, with IBM purportedly not close to a Java2 JDK, and the other viable options being "for profit" and likely Closed Source. So, this is the net effect of Sun's much publicised "support for Java on Linux"?

This interview, to me, gives me additional reason to doubt Sun's corporate motives. While there are (even discussed on the Linux/Java developers lists) difficulties in porting Solaris thread code to Linux, and difficulties testing graphical components under the numerous X environments available to the Linux end user, if Sun were truly "supporting" the port of Java to Linux this would not really be an issue. Sun could at least provide a more portable reference implementation if nothing else. Gosling is as aware of this as anyone, but uses this as his "out" ("Sun FUD" if you will).

Similarly he straddles the fence by parroting the Sun party line -- why not truly Open Source Java (e.g., GPL it or release it under one of the BSD licenses?)? Well, it really is Open Source, but we have our own proprietary license because we want to maintain platform independence. But, ironically, the fact that Java is not truly Open Source is one of the reasons (determined from hours of sifting through user and developer mailing lists) why it isn't being ported more quickly to Linux. So, the Sun license is guaranteeing (at least for the moment) that Java is NOT platform independent.

Take this together with some reconsideration of the recent StarOffice purchase, and one begins to wonder whether Linux support is, in Sun's eyes, great PR but bad business.

Our needs included:

portability - the application must be able to run on Windows, Mac, and Linux (if we get other *nixes as a bonus then that's even better)

consistency - the interface must be as consistent as possible across platforms

gui flexibility - the interface must be as customizable as possible

html/XML support - the language or its libraries/runtime must support HTML content, and at least be pledging future support for XML.

After doing our research, and delving into Sun's commitment to Linux, as well as its seeming support for Open Source we decided that Java was likely our best choice. The Swing components seemed to provide the desired customizability and consistency, Java supported HTML and was on its way to XML support, and the Linux support promised would guarantee us a presence on what we deemed the important platforms.

So now it's a year later. The product is designed, mostly written, and really beginning to take shape. We are trying to put together our package to show to potential underwriters but have been plagued by a serious Java issue:

The Windows and Solaris JDK/JRE packages, while still a bit slow and memory-intensive, provide most of the features we need to produce a stable and slick application which can usefully present our content. What bugs there are appear to be hot items ready for fixing in the next release. However, the Linux JDK/JRE packages are not stable, not well-supported, and not even at the same release level as the Windows and Solaris versions.

Month after month we have watched the progress of JDK development (as supposedly supported by Sun) for Linux crawl forward. We have been programming steadily, working around bugs, redesigning interface features to not rely upon features which are not yet present in Linux. Generally acting as if Java2 for Linux is not coming any time soon.

As we watch we have gotten the feeling that, despite press releases to the contrary, Sun could care less whether the Linux JDK ever gets finished, and doesn't appear to be devoting its resources at all towards the platform. Indeed, it seems as if they would prefer people forgot about Linux and its Java port altogether. Here's an example. java.sun.com is Sun's main website devoted to the Java language. Trying to actually find the Linux port from this page takes the patience of Job. Want some help? I'll locate you a few pages down in the right direction. See if you can find it from here. It doesn't help matters that Sun "reorganizes" their Java site periodically, essentially scrambling the links on the page -- reminiscent of the supermarket technique of seemingly random placement of necessities to make one wander through the store, hopefully buying non-necessities (or, similarly, the legendary placement of keys on the QWERTY keyboard to slow down the typist).

"Bad site design" aside, after looking in more desperation for help we noticed other symptoms of "Sun support gone wrong.":

Cryptic messages on Sun's message board about the availabili ty of Linux Java tools

Rumblings on the Blackdown Java port mailing list about lack of progress, with occasional hints that Blackdown is fixing bugs in Sun's code which are getting folded in for later release. While that's great (they should report bugs and the bugs should be fixed in later releases), this forces us to ask the question, "What form is the press-released 'Sun support' taking?" Evidently it's not in the form of programming resources or even $ to support developers.

Additionally, Blackdown appears to be in the lead as far as releases of the JDK go, with IBM purportedly not close to a Java2 JDK, and the other viable options being "for profit" and likely Closed Source. So, this is the net effect of Sun's much publicised "support for Java on Linux"?

This interview, to me, gives me additional reason to doubt Sun's corporate motives. While there are (even discussed on the Linux/Java developers lists) difficulties in porting Solaris thread code to Linux, and difficulties testing graphical components under the numerous X environments available to the Linux end user, if Sun were truly "supporting" the port of Java to Linux this would not really be an issue. Sun could at least provide a more portable reference implementation if nothing else. Gosling is as aware of this as anyone, but uses this as his "out" ("Sun FUD" if you will).

Similarly he straddles the fence by parroting the Sun party line -- why not truly Open Source Java (e.g., GPL it or release it under one of the BSD licenses?)? Well, it really is Open Source, but we have our own proprietary license because we want to maintain platform independence. But, ironically, the fact that Java is not truly Open Source is one of the reasons (determined from hours of sifting through user and developer mailing lists) why it isn't being ported more quickly to Linux. So, the Sun license is guaranteeing (at least for the moment) that Java is NOT platform independent.

Take this together with some reconsideration of the recent StarOffice purchase, and one begins to wonder whether Linux support is, in Sun's eyes, great PR but bad business.

Interesting, in my experience, I have found CVS to be quite stable. Far better than some of the commercial VC's I've used.

That may well be. As I said, cvs is the only tool like this I've used. Mostly I've noticed a problem with zombie locks on cvs.on.openprojects.net...see all the complaints on the mesa-dev list.

Personally I found the admin setup and getting a secure version very straightforward and simple

Perhaps you'd consider writing a how-to (or patching the manual) with some of the tricks for doing this? I found the documentation a bit scattered on the subject of security, especially with anonymous access. Perhaps I'm just dumb, but I think some step-by-step instructions, or a list of what needs what permissions would help a lot.

Which you can remove directories from the tree -- not intuitively, but that is why getting directory handling better is on the todo list.

Hmm, is there a way to do it while still being able to access the structure under the old revision numbers?

So all in all, I would agree cvs has some issues (mine actually aren't any of those listed, has to do with the cvs edit feature). Of course the issues I am concerned about I am writing patcheds to fix :).

More than I can say! Hmm, is cvs in cvs anywhere? Hopefully SourceGear will set up a more open up the development infrastructure.

For people interested in how linux cope with realtime stuff (here realtime sound synthesis, I found this discussion on the alsa-project mailing list interesting:

alsa-devel @alsa-project.org mailing liste archive

measurement copyright Paul Barton-Davis (used without permission ;)

For people interested in how linux cope with realtime stuff (here realtime sound synthesis, I found this discussion on the alsa-project mailing list interesting:

alsa-devel @alsa-project.org mailing liste archive

measurement copyright Paul Barton-Davis (used without permission ;)

In what way is ext2 unusable? I am currently using ext2 for this particular situation, and it seems to work ok. For example, here is a link that takes you to a file stored in a 60,000+ file directory. What am I missing here?

jeff@jab.org