Slashdot Mirror

From here Volt Definition first link returned on google.

This is a mathematically proven un-solvable thing
First off, with the math. I don't know what trade school you went to where they taught you that computers have 'infinite' states, but they don't. Even though there are millions of transistors, they can each be in only one of two states. It is nowhere near 'mathematically proven' that you cannot account for each one of them.

you can never account for every situation
If, by this statement, you mean situations whereby asteroids fall from the sky or the computer malfunctions in some way, then, yes... shit happens. No one expects a programmer to compensate for these things. Writing software that is 'perfect', however, is entirely possible irregardless of the imperfections of the computer (or OS) on which it runs.

You can't write a finite-state machine that can detect or correct an infinite number of states.
Again, with the math. There aren't an 'infinite number' of states. You can write a finite state machine that will check every bit of your code for logical errors. It is expensive and time consuming, so lazy programmers and fly-by-night companies don't do it.

calculating the "best" route from...
I think you've seen the problem with this one, so I won't harp on it. Suffice it to say that maybe you should find a 'CSci' major to explain it to you.

Here it is, folks, the icing on the cake:
As revolting as it may sound to the hacker-coders out there, great programmers, software engineering, business processes, ... synergy, a business-plan, manager-speak, and other bullshit are NOT key components of successful software...

Great programmers are, preferably some who paid attention in algebra. The OSS movement is the proof of this, producing better software than any of that other crap ever has. Maybe you would know that if you had paid attention to their quality, bug-free code instead of subscribing to the Microsoft "Bugs are inevitable, we must add features at all cost" programming model.

You don't seem to under the real meaning of "reverse engineering". :) Sorry. There's really two different classes of reverse engineering: clean room and non-clean room (WhatIs).

The former is the only type of reverse engineering that has in court cases been upheld as a legal form (of course, this is prior to the DMCA). Realistically, the latter form, involving any and all means to understand the way in which something works is what's normally done when it's seen as unlikely that a competitor has even a remote chance of prosecuting for not doing clean room reverse engineering. Why, you might ask? When you want to see how your competitor's product works, the fastest way is to test some inputs first, then disassemble the parts you don't automatically understand. When time to market matters, and it always does to some extent, shortcuts are the prefered way.

But what does that mean? In the physical world, reverse engineering is so likely that patents are the norm for virtually anything produced. It's understood that competition would otherwise make void all the research needed in making a new product. In the software world, even with patents, clones abound (voris vs mp3, png vs gif, etc). The culture of at least the ideal hacker has resulted in patents for the most part being abhored and circumvent by one means or another (make a clone, offer that gif module off-shore where the patent doesn't apply but people can still get it, publish a long document on all sorts of features you discover). Of course, anything not patented in the physical world is cloned as well and almost never is there a legal fight over it--saying you can't make and sell your own lemonade after finding out what the competitor's lemonade is made of would be scoffed at, assuming it wasn't patented.

But, with the DMCA, copyrighted works have more or less gained the same level of protection as patented works, which is ironic since those companies most likely to invoke the DMCA use it against copyrighted works which are encrypted, something entirely opposite to the openness of patented works. Reverse engineering becomes virtually impossible, except through tedious clean room methods and even then so long as it doesn't happen to circumvent a copy protection mechanism. It seems the DMCA was written without the realization that copyright law is designed to promote the arts and sciences. By this I mean, it gives authors the ability to simutaneously profit from the works they've made while preventing others from directly profiting as well. And society profits as well, by viewing the author's work they benefit as a whole from the work itself possibly, but they also benefit from the extensions others make. If we were to believe the principle ideas of the DMCA and the very narrow scope as defined by fair use in quoting a work, we'd have had to wait the lifetime + 90 years of an author for another competitive work to include an original idea presented, something resulting in a massive stagnation of arts and sciences.

And realistically, this has not happened. Fair use is not needed to quote why ideas might be read and reused by another in even a few months after a best selling novel (fair use wouldn't be a valid exception anyways). The result is laws which in words prevent much more than what the spirit of the courts have shown as accepted behavior. However, when it comes to things in the technical field, an almost magical spell exists where the letter of law is so closely followed like it were a new fronteer where new laws need written to protect what is already protected.

But I digress. The DMCA is a means of creating a new law to prevent another law from being broken. Because of its vague wording (and mostly because the spirit of the law hasn't been established well in this new fronteer), various companies have invoked it to stop "legal" and non-"legal" reverse engineering. For the most part, it has been demo

Here you go, smart ass (you really should know better than to put an obvious challenge up like that on /.)

Some Quick Finds from Google:

Your hello world:

http://www.roesler-ac.de/wolfram/hello.htm

And Another with MVS JCL:

http://www2.latech.edu/~acm/helloworld/asm370.html

And Some Miscellaneous Links for Main frame coding:

http://search390.techtarget.com/home/0,289692,sid1 0,00.html (Looks to be s/390 specific articles).

http://www.texasrock.com/ (Nice collection of links)

College is fine and dandy, but that's not the only way to learn something.

http://216.239.53.100/search?q=cache:Dmq6W8su71gC: www.cs.columbia.edu/~angelos/teaching/COMS4180/lec ture10.ps+Biometrics+Password+Timing&hl=en&ie=UTF- 8

http://ctl.ncsc.dni.us/biomet%20web/BMKeystroke.ht ml

http://www.giac.org/practical/GSEC/Patricia_Wittic h_GSEC.pdf

http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/originalConte nt/0,289142,sid14_gci801112,00.html

Here's a helpful link, in case anyone else out there is also innumerate.

Gee, really going way out of your way to change the subject, huh? Wonder why that is? Got something to defend there? Chatting, irc, etc are way close enough to be referred to as a sort of P2P.

Change what subject? I'm responding to what you said.

I can discuss with people, just don't "do" insults, which I certainbly didn't start,so if you or anyone else want to talk to me, do it without insults or get ignored from here on out.

The original poster who corrected you didn't insult you at all. Go back and read it, I'll wait.

I just don't like picky crap like this, it's a waste of time. If you can't figure out what my basic thoughts were,

Lets just stick to the language we've all (except you) have agreed upon, ok? Stop inventing words, or misusing them and we'll be fine.

And last I knew, there isn't any official P2P overlord who has got the one and true legal definition of P2P

Well, I'll inform you that

there is.

BUT, we'll let uyou "win" that one, only the way you describe it is the one true "official" definition. All hail the official P2P uberdictator!

You are just making an ass out of yourself. Don't worry, I'm not going to stop you.

Gee, really going way out of your way to change the subject, huh? Wonder why that is? Got something to defend there? Chatting, irc, etc are way close enough to be referred to as a sort of P2P.

Change what subject? I'm responding to what you said.

I can discuss with people, just don't "do" insults, which I certainbly didn't start,so if you or anyone else want to talk to me, do it without insults or get ignored from here on out.

The original poster who corrected you didn't insult you at all. Go back and read it, I'll wait.

I just don't like picky crap like this, it's a waste of time. If you can't figure out what my basic thoughts were,

Lets just stick to the language we've all (except you) have agreed upon, ok? Stop inventing words, or misusing them and we'll be fine.

And last I knew, there isn't any official P2P overlord who has got the one and true legal definition of P2P

Well, I'll inform you that

there is.

BUT, we'll let uyou "win" that one, only the way you describe it is the one true "official" definition. All hail the official P2P uberdictator!

You are just making an ass out of yourself. Don't worry, I'm not going to stop you.

One way for this to happen would be to bounce the signal off the moon. Earth-Moon-Earth is a proven technology that Amateur Radio folks (de KD4BTC) have been doing for years. Check out this article.

The definition of reverse engineering is to figure out how something works in order to reimplement it.

That, and van Eck phreaking

Expect your wife to receive hard copies of that 'questionable' pornography you enjoy so much from the van Eck'ing P.I. she hired (he looks like Tom Selleck :-)

Paranoia Strikes Deep
-boi

Speaker did not 'bow' to lobbyists

"In his May 2 opinion piece, Ken Barber accused me of killing legislation regarding open-source software (House Bill 2892) "after powerful out-of-state corporate interests showed up at the Oregon Capitol, seeking to make the bill go away."

How could DRM on Linux impact admins?

Linux e-mail set-up slashes costs to £8 per user

Mozilla backs down on browser name

BTW with the iLoo coming out. If it fails will it be Microsoft's Water-iLoo?

Search enterprise linux.com has a four part series on open source support that might help.

For well known software just call it "industry standard software". This would include things like EMACS, CVS, GNUmake, gcc, Apache. Tell the management you would suggest using the Industry Standard Apache web server, or the Industry standard revision control tool CVS.

You could list examples of companies that use these tools already. You can get some examples of current corporate users at the home pages, or by e-mailing the support team. Concentrate on listing Fortune 500 companies, your company's competitors, and well regarded high tech companies.

Good Luck in your effort!

Chess playing software is an example of an expert system, not a true AI system.

Just this morning I saw an ad on the /. homepage for an IDS. I don't quite remember but i think it said something about the maker of snort

And now this news story on /. I kinda wish there was some kind of article moderation implemented here on... Wait! No! Waaiit! Ahh...****

<a href="http://www.interesting-site.com/featured-sla shdot-content.html">words related to content</a>

They're losing their Whack-A-Mole game with the true pirates. As a result, they're getting frustrated. They are bound and determined to take their frustrations out on the little guy and want to extend legislation.

This is more of a complaint about a common practice on Slashdot, rather than this particular story.

When posting stories, the original poster often puts in too many links. For example, the above story has a link to Game Girl Advance even though it has the link to the story itself, making the first link redundant.

Enough with the promiscuous linking!

This was an interesting story today.

"Hacker hiring session morphs into Mitnick melee"

Should we hire "hackers" in enterprise?
I like the the qoute ""It's really easy to hack computers. It's the lazy thing to do," Winkler said. By contrast, developing legitimate computer skills is much harder."

The sequence originally went:

Kilobit = 1024 bits
Megabit = 1024 kilobits (1,048,576 bits)
Gigabit = 1024 megabits (1,073,741,824 bits)

In 1998, the International Electrotechnical Commission proposed changing these amounts to "kibi", "mebi" and "gibi", short for "kilo-binary", etc. They were worried about the confusion that could result from "kilo", "mega" and "giga"'s existing use as the SI prefixes for one thousand, one million and one trillion times larger.

If you look around, you'll see the name "gibibits" used in a few places, mainly in communications rather than higher-level areas: for example, "ifconfig" gives throughput in gibibits. The measurements are not in everyday use even now: searching for "gibibit" on Google still gets you asked whether you mean "gibbet".

PD's suggestion is a good one if you can re-engineer your existing database. If that's not an option (too much legacy code) then you do indeed need some kind of compatibility layer. But you should be searching for PL/B compatibility layers, 'cause that's the system that defines the file format. Here's one I found by Googling "PL/B ISAM". There are probably others.

Or you could write your own JDBC driver for PL/B ISAM. That's assuming you have the time, the expertise, and feel up to investigating the PL/B standard. Oh, and also assuming the standard explicitly defines ISAM file format, and doesn't leave it up to the vendor. You'll have to buy a copy of the standard (that's how standard comitttees support themselves) to find out.

I do thank GamerGeek for asking this question. PL/B seems to have been around for about 30 years without my ever running across it. More trivia to clog up my brain...

what is cat 5?

Anyone seen this article? This company has had to install over 37,000 Windows patches in the past 6 months or so.

According to this page, the first result from the Google query maximum bler "red book", "The Red Book specifies a BLER of 220 as the maximum allowed." (Other results from the same query corroborate this source.) A copy prevention scheme that inserts intentional block errors may in some cases push the disc's block error rate (BLER for short) over the limit, breaking conformance with the specification.

I admit that I was guessing at the consistency constraints, but I'd assume that those who wrote the Philips specifications (such as the second orange book, which defines multisession recordable CDs, and the blue book, which defines "CD Plus"/"CD Extra" stamped multisession CDs; see also cdpage.com) would have been smart enough to insert them.

That Ace's Hardware link everybody connects to is a good overview of the IBM architecture and components, but frankly there are plenty of other machines that to my mind are mainframes as well.

Here is a definition that is as good as any, just keep in mind that there are plenty of other mainframes that do not have the IBM label on it.

Since everyone around here loves TCO arguments, here is the mainframe bid for cost-effective computing.

A general mainframe nerd site, with great links and how-tos.

Another good link site.

The dino web ring, a master compendium of 390-related sites.

Official IBMese for mainframes, with more sales power then you can shake an MS manager at.

The granddaddy of all user groups, SHARE kicks butt, defines system requirements to IBM, opposes UCITA, and changes your world more then any 5 computer gatherings you can mention. The members of this organization RUN your bank, credit card, hospital, government and corporate systems. Join the club.

And finally, you can run a mainframe on Linux or a Mac. Warning, IBM has very strict rules about their OS licensing, you are going into uncharted territory if you do ANYTHING remotely work-related with this. But you CAN run a mainframe emulator.

This will seem offtopic at first, but I have a point. I'll get there.

When I worked with a certain company's MIS department a few years ago, I had one boss who was somewhat unstable and not terribly well-qualified. He'd frequently become overwhelmed by minor problems and setbacks, and he'd take his frustrations out on everyone by implementing ridiculous policies across the network--for instance, someone exceeded his disk quota one day and he took down the whole file server for a day. Kind of like what Ashcroft and company are doing with the Justice Department.

They're clearly overwhelmed by the problems facing them, and are too frantic about the situation to take a step back and notice the long-term effects that their actions will surely have upon the lives of everyone in America. Such knee-jerk reactions don't even benefit the offenders: my boss was eventually fired for his antics, and Ashcroft's days as a credible, respected political figure (heh) are numbered.

My guess is that the transisters are in the black areas between the lighted parts. But that's just speculation. Before today, I thought they were transparent.

Follow me here. In Africa, they have a disease called malaria, which has lead to the sickle cell trait being passed down and becoming common among populations in Africa. Sickle-cell blood is unhealthy blood which causes all kinds of health problems, and can lead to death, but which is unpalatable to the malaria disease. So while a person with sickle cells is more likely to survive to produce children, a person with sickle cells is not really healthy.

At some point, people discoved that the bark of a Cinchona tree could cure malaria. If the population that eventually developed the sickle cell trait as a common trait had had access to quinine, most of those people would now have healthy blood, instead of suffering the ravages of sickle cell anemia.

So, the idea that letting people die natually of disease is somehow "culling the herd" is a false one. If you believe that a trait leads to fitness, nature might not decide to back you up. The people who had access to medicine were less likely in the above example to transmit unpleasant traits to their offspring.

Evolution is a kludge.

... but I don't see nowhere that they are reevaluation their relationship with UnitedLinux. Maybe will be more helpful this interview to the SuSE CEO where he talks about United Linux, the SCO suit, and the company, and don't say nothing about dropping UnitedLinux neither.

The system were manual but the "rules" were when you heard someone else talk you had to shut up. Both parties. Then there were stocastic rules for how long you had to wait before you re-try. The stocastic manual system minimized repeated collisions. Aloha

Sweet! Someone is actually avoiding confusion (okay, not really true... a lot of people don't know those terms...). Someone is being explicit with what they mean in terms of amounts of data. I am so sick of Hard Drive manufacturers' (and everyone else that should be knowledgable on this kind of thing) lack of knowledge on this. And, yeah. In case you don't know what that guy was spouting with all those mebibytes and gibibytes, see here for a simple definition.

Should /. pay the bill for the /. effect?

-Peace

We'll bet on how long it'll take before AOL has stopped a googol of spam, total. I bet two and a half years; three tops.

Thus, only downloading 0day releases within a few days of their release is only when BitTorrent works well.

True (from my limited experience), but it still is p2p, even if it is specialized.

Also, you can't search on BitTorrent. You have to find websites to download from. If the website gets shut down, so does the ability to get the files.

Yes, but again, BT is a specialized p2p tool, not flawed. It cannot (and probably never wanted to) replace protocols like those used with Freenet or Gnutella.

The design goal was to make big files available to a relatively large number of people who know exactly what they want, with everyone participating in sharing the load.

But you made me think about a definition of p2p. I would probably come up with something very general.

A slide I found suggests that there is no consensus on the term. searchNetworking has a more precise definition. Hm, I'll do some reading...

Elbereth - your tirade does not become you. If you don't grok unix/linux/bsd, or don't care for our inside jokes, kindly keep it to yourself.

Xerithane - Linux is Posix compliant, just as BSD and the original AT&T System V. Per http://www.cs.buffalo.edu/~smgallo/SEpaper/node14. html: "In 1968, AT&T's Bell Labs began development on the Unix operating system. Shortly thereafter, many hardware vendors had developed their own flavor of Unix for their particular machines, which made porting software between platforms difficult. Recognizing the need for a standard to make porting applications between operating systems simpler, the IEEE developed POSIX in 1988 and in 1990 it became International Standard ISO/IEC 9945-1:1990 [14]. The United States Government has adopted POSIX as a Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS 151) inspiring system vendors to do the same. The list of vendors that have announced support for POSIX includes AT&T, Control Data Corporation, Digital Equipment Corporation, Grumman Data Systems, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, IBM, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems.

POSIX defines a standard way for an application program to obtain basic services from the operating system. It describes a set of functions derived from AT&T UNIX (System V) and Berkeley Standard Distribution UNIX (BSD). All POSIX-conforming systems must implement these functions, and programs that follow the POSIX standard use only these functions to obtain services from the operating system and the underlying hardware [14].

Although POSIX is based on AT&T and BSD UNIX, it is not an operating system itself. It simply defines an interface between software and their libraries. This allows non-UNIX operating systems to conform to the POSIX standard."

And from http://search390.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid 10_gci214309,00.html more details: "Informally, each standard in the POSIX set is defined by a decimal following the POSIX. Thus, POSIX.1 is the standard for an application program interface in the C language. POSIX.2 is the standard shell and utility interface (that is to say, the user's command interface with the operating system). These are the main two interfaces, but additional interfaces, such as POSIX.4 for thread management, have been developed or are being developed. The POSIX interfaces were developed under the auspices of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

POSIX.1 and POSIX.2 interfaces are included in a somewhat larger interface known as the X/Open Programming Guide 4.2 (also known as the "Single UNIX Specification" and "UNIX 95"). The Open Group, an industry standards group, owns the UNIX trademark and can thus "brand" operating systems that conform to the interface as "UNIX" systems. IBM's OS/390 is an example of an operating system that includes a branded UNIX interface."

So, you are showing your ignorance by grousing over nil null's comment.

Another non-CS comment here. Machine code (ones and zeros) is considered to be a first generation language, whereas assembler opcodes are a 2GL. 3GLs are historically common; C, Pascal and Basic being typical examples used.

I don't quite agree with this, personally I would consider 'English' (SQL, COBOL) as well as other 'do more in less' (Delphi [components], Perl [regex]) to all be 4th generation. This is because 5GL has been considered to be real AI (as in "tell me if anything worthwhile has been posted on slashdot").

In an earlier incarnation I used to work for the government doing military research. We had to burn all disc containing classified material. The reason given, since substantiated by a guy at the swedish equiv of NSA, was that a SQUID (Super-conducting Quantum Interference Device) could manage at least 25 overwrites, possibly many more. Our security officer built a large bonfire every spring of used hard drives and ignited them with thermite. T'was a grand sight!

Why not start off with whitelisting? Add some extension to SMTP that would sign outgoing mail with a domain certificate. Old, noncompliant software could ignore the extension. Newer versions could verify the signature and bypass the spam (message content) filters, but check the domain name against a domain blacklist. Once a domain was found to be a source of spam, it could be added to a domain blacklist (or better yet, request that they get put on the CRL!). Eventually, you'd get to the point where you (the mail server admin) would feel comfortable requiring all domains to sign their mail to you.

How about it, guys? (I looked, and this was the closest thing I could find.)

You can encrypt your SAM file with SYSKEY and selecting the option to store the encrypted key on a floppy disk. Keep in mind that the floppy disk will be required during the system boot phase. Storing the encrypted key on the local drive is not as secure, since there are utilities available to manipulate the password hash. Make a backup of the floppy disk and store in a safe, in case your original floppy disk gets damaged.

Equally important to protecting your SAM file, is having an understanding of the services you are running. Make sure that you disable unnecessary services for security reasons and to free up system resources. I've included below some of the services that I would disable by default. Keep a configuration file or maintenance log of the changes made to each host in your peer-to-peer network.

NOTE: Make sure you make a full backup of your system before making changes.

Services to disable:

• Application Layer Gateway Service ? if not using Internet Sharing
• Automatic Updates ? this can work for you or against you; at some point, someone will hack this process to propagate an attack on your system
• Background Intelligent Transfer Service ? used by Windows Update
• Error Reporting Service ? self explanatory
• Internet Connection Firewall ? unless you are sharing Internet
• NetMeeting Remote Desktop Sharing ? enable when you need it
• Remote Access Auto Connection Manager ? unless sharing Internet
• Remote Desktop Help Session Manager ? enable when you need it
• Remote Access Connection Manager ? unless sharing Internet
• Routing and Remote Access ? unless sharing Internet
• TCP NetBIOS Helper Service ? used for WINS
• Terminal Services ? enable when you need it
• Upload Manager
• WebClient

Storage Area Network!


http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/sDefinition/ 0, ,sid5_gci212937,00.html


It is basically a fast and tight network to connect computers with storage devices. It does exactly what your IDE or SCSI cable does, except over a network.

We call the Slashdot Effect.

You learn something new every day.

You dumbass. Try to correct somebody and you fuck it up worse. Million, not billion, before you open your mouth correcting other people know what your talking about. This is from
whatis.techtarget.com
It says:
megahertz

A megahertz (MHz or sometimes Mhz) is a million cycles of electromagnetic currency alternation per second and is used as a unit of measure for the "clock speed" of computer microprocessor. In designing computer bus architectures, the microprocessor speed is considered together with the potential speed or amount of data that can come into the computer from I/O devices in order to optimize overall computer performance.
The hertz as a unit of measure is named after Heinrich Hertz, German physicist.

Dumbass.

H.323 is more complicated than other protocols because it uses two tcp connections and several UDP sessions from a single "call".Only one of the tcp connections goes to a well known port; all the other ports are negotiated and thus temporary. Furthermore the content of the streams is far more difficult for firewall to understand than existing protocols, becuase h.323 encodes packets using Abstract Syntax Notation (ASN.1)

Creating SuiteRunner was a huge amount of work. Despite my frustrations with JUnit, it would have been orders of magnitude easier to decipher JUnit's source code than to create a brand new testing toolkit.

Grace Hopper, indeed! Where would we be without her creation of the first compiler, or better yet, her moth-infested Mark II relay?

Not to be politically correct, but I think Rear Admiral Grace Hopper should definitly be on the list. After all she wrote the first compiler, A-O, then the successor FLOW-Matic, which then lead to COBOL. You can get a really good idea of all of her contributions to programming here.

Double Density CD. A purple book standard (by Philips and Sony). It holds 1.3gb of data and there is recordable media available, but I have no idea what is required to write to it. According to this little blurb, it was a mid-90s "midway" point between CDs and DVDs. I'm guessing it wasn't used by too many people.

From Sony's website: CD EXTRA combines the worlds of Music and Multimedia. A traditional audio CD when placed in an audio CD player, CD EXTRA offers a free interactive multimedia experience when played in a computer's CD-ROM drive *. CD EXTRA offers the music fan a closer look at their favorite artists, with many CD EXTRAs containing exclusive content. Other CD EXTRAs contain Internet Service Provider Software which allows you to connect to the Internet.

It's not DRM, AFAIK. I've got several Sony CD EXTRA CD's that are nothing more than multisession CD's that some audio CD players simply cannot handle. However, I don't think you can get the same CD offered in both CD EXTRA and non-CD EXTRA formats, so you may be out of luck when trying to play those particular discs in those particular audio CD players; in fact, some older CD-ROM drives can't even handle 'em.

Thanks to Boatboy for the explanation of buffer overflows, but what I've never understood about buffer overflows is how it allows you to execute arbitrary code? Can anyone explain?