3) Get my userContent.css for Mozilla here: http://dion.swamp.dk/stuff/ when installed it will autmagically and quickly remove all ads in pages, including all flash except where you really want it.
It's already possible, simply install a user stylesheet that turns off flash by default and turn it on for those(that?) page you want to use flash on, I use this one: http://dion.swamp.dk/dl/userContent.css
Read a bit about it here: http://dion.swamp.dk/stuff.html
Yes, SAP DB is very cool, it is as "Enterprise" as any other database on the planet, it doesn't have some of the bloaty features that Oracle or MSSQL have like full text indexing or function based indexes, but it is a real database and it implements all the database functionality in a very robust manner.
A datapoint is that SAP use it to run SAP R/3 on, that system has over 16000 tables and 2GB of data in a newly installed database.
Performance wise it's nice as well, SAP said that in their benchmarks all the databases they support (including DB2, MSSQL, Oracle and SAP DB) the difference between the fastest and slowest was less than 5%.
Here we use it to back a webapplication that has 134 tables in the database and a little over 120MB in the database and it's quite happy.
We have crashed machines with SAP DB many times, either due to bad drivers, crazy software or poweroutages and we have never lost any data that was committed.
SAP DB doesn't need to use the filesystem like those "little" databases, like the other big DBMSs it can use raw devices directly and it will distribute data on the devices for better performance, it can even execute one query on more than one cpu for better performance.
The base problem with spam is that it shifts the cost to the victim, the only technical solution is to shift that cost back to the sender so all (or most) costs are transfered to the sender of the mail rather than letting the receiver bear the cost of storage
Around here that's considered a failiure or good for your first try.
This easter the worlds largest lan party will be
The Gathering
with 5100 guests. Free tickets are still available if you are coming from outside Europe and normally priced tickets are available for people from Europe, but outside Norway.
I know because we sold the first 4300 tickets in 6 hours via PTN and there are over 1000 people on the waiting list for the rest of the tickets.
The worlds second largest party is DreamHack in sweden with around 5000 guests.
Assembly in Finland is also quite large with over 3000 guests.
Due to general anti-piracy hysteria in Denmark The Party (the worlds first large party) had less than 1000 guests this year, down from over 3000 a few years ago.
Yes, you are right, however, Laserdisken does allow you to buy region 1 disks directly through the normal channels (I just got the last DVD in the Serial Experiments Lain series that I was missing).
Brian (the minister of culture) has stated that the government was actually aginst the import clause of the law, but that they were powerless against the EU (an exelent example of why a lot of the entire EU concept sucks).
This site links to three very nice pieces of "howto interpret the new law" from the ministry:
digital forbruger article
The bottom line is that you are always allowed to circumvent the copy-prevention if you do it to exersise your fair use rights (so playing dvds on Linux is still ok).
Software is not covered by the law at all (so breaking copy-prevention on software is ok).
You are still allowed to borrow original media from your friends (and the liberary) AND make copies AND keep the copies (you are not allowed to disitrbute copies or make copies of copies, though).
DVD-jon would have gotten off under the current danish laws according to the minitry, so that's ok as well.
The only impact on fair use is that you are not allowed to break the copy-prevention to make a copy, not even for yourself (it doesn't say what to do if you don't notice the "protection" at all).
So we are still not as bad off as those poor americans:)
The most important thing about voting is that it's auditable, not having the source available would make it impossible to audit.
Yes, demanding Open Source for an application like this is not a matter of being an activist, nothing is gained for Open Source as a whole by having a government use OSS for voting, it is a simple matter of ensuring that the entire system is auditable and thereby secure.
Yes, you can track how people vote now, but it is hard and there are many people involved in the act of voting so it would be very hard to do it on a large scale without getting caught, if you are voting online then it is very simple to sneak some software in there to tie the vote to the voter.
I can see a way around this, though:
Split the voting between many different servers and keep them in different physical locations.
All software must be OpenSource and the different servers must run different versions of the OS.
The amount of custom code must be kept down to a minimum to make it easier to audit.
Everyone must be given a chance to examine all the server data (an image of the disk must be provided for download before and after the voting is done.)
Members of the public (selected at random from a group of volunteers) and official techs must verify that the downloadable images are indeed correct.
When someone votes s?he must choose a vote-password (remember fidonet voting?), that means that everyone can check his vote afterwards when all votes are published along with the votepasswords, this means that you cannot change peoples votes without them noticing it (on a large scale anyway)
The only problem is that we cannot allow people to use their own machines to vote from because of the lack of security (anyone could have backdoored the machine), so the voting clients would need to written to CDs so people can boot from them and vote from a clean and auditable setup.
Uhm, not to nitpick, but theobromide isn't added to chocolate, it is a natural component, caffeine on the other hand is sometimes added (and at other times mistaken for theobromide, as the two chemicals look very alike: http://www.mrkland.com/fun/xocoatl/caffeine.htm
> It's tough to burn CD's at a decent speed unless you have a 1Ghz+ (Intel speeds) CPU
Uh? I guess that's true if you are running an OS with horrible latencies, but I have yet to make a coaster under Linux (yes it has/had latency issues, but not as bad as other OSs).
A long time ago, when burning at 2x was not-horrible, I started burning a disk and then started Quake 2 on my old P166 with a 3dfx voodoo card and too little RAM, I ran around a few levels while the sound went choppy and the framerate sucked, but the buffer fill on the burner never went below 89%.
Think about it, burning at 2x means having the CPU move 352800 bytes pr. second, any CPU ought to handle that, burning at 50x means moving 8613 KB/s, not exactly high-throughput in todays world, so it all comes down to one thing: "Scheduling Latency", it doesn't matter much how fast your CPU is if your OS is crappy about the latency.
Well, if you add: P3P: CP="IE You suck ass and so do your users!" or something similarly content-free, then you are not really using P3P, you are only working around a misfeature in IE.
Personally I find it annoying that IE has started to demand a P3P header just to work normally.
I can only agree, p3p is only useful for the paranoids that don't know what they are doing.
P3P is useless as the untrustworthy sites will simply lie about what they do with the info, so it buys us nothing.
IE+P3P+Hotmail is an annoying combo, because if you send people a link in mail to a hotmail account M$ think they need trap people in a frameset, neatly displaying "we ownz y00" and keeping people from bookmarking the site they are visting, however the most annoying effect is that it is impossible to get a cookie set in the framed site (so logging in just doesn't work on most sites), without a compact P3P header.
Luckyly you can just add some garbage P3P header: P3P: CP="CAO ADM OUR IND PHY ONL PUR NAV DEM STA" and IE will allow the framed site to work normally, it did take a lot of angry users to find that particular IE+hotmail-misfeature.
In closing: death to IE and hotmail, may they both be taken behind the barn and shot through the head ASAP!
The only problem with running an engine on alcohol is that you need to refine that alcohol first, that is something that takes a huge amount of energy and unless you have a "green" way of doing that you are just as screwed as when you use petrol.
Yes, it's cool that you can keep flying after the oil reserves dry out, but it's not going to do anything for the greenhouse effect, it might even make it worse with all the water you need to evaporate during destilation.
Yeah, Interbase is cool, as long as you do little stuff, where the database is very small and there isn't a lot of concurrency.
I've gone through a lot of databases as "my database" (Interbase, MSSQL (shudder), sybase, Interbase (again), postgresql and now SAP DB and it really does do all the things that the others lack.
SAP DB is a VERY good DBMS with a very good team behind it, but it has a very unfriendly interface for the administrator (the developer sees ODBC, so that's cool enough).
That the administrators end of things is sort of user-hostile isn't really a big deal, because the annoying UI's are easily hidden by a few site-specific scripts and once it's running you usually don't need to mess with it as it pretty much minds itself.
Bottom line is that once it runs it's just wonderful to work with and it does exactly what I'd want a database to do (ACID: yes, Application server / OS: no)
The second easiest answer is: Because it's not what I'm using now.
Seriously, Ruby has some nice features, but most of them are 100% sugar and *really* weird to someone who expects it to be "perl, only clean and logical"...
Uhm, yes, M$ is making money on software, but their software based income has been dropping for months to the point where they are actually making more money on their investments than on software.
IOW: M$ is not primarily a software house any more, so hopefully thei will stick with doing investments, that's what they seem to be good at:)
Absolute Shitty Pages are not the way to go, EVER!
If for no other reason then because it makes people think that your server is running M$ software and we can't have that now, can we?
No really, ASP may be usable with Perl, but so is a lot of other embed-Perl-in-HTML stuff, so there isn't really any reason for using ASP unless you have lots of legacy code that uses it and developers that like it.
HTML::Mason is available from CPAN, that and the fact that I like mason, is pretty much all the reason I need to choose it over everything else.
You just started with java didn't you and you are all into the bondage and diciplin that comes with it, right?`
The way I see it Java is a nice toy when you have to support platforms you have no control over (like desktops or many different customers), but other than that it's just a pain in the ass (B&D languages like Java and pascal have never been high on my list)
Everything is text or is quickly becoming it, have you ever heard of XML?
The way I see it:
M$-doze will die along with OS X, yes there will be holdouts, but they will be of the same nature as the ones that run OS/2 today.
Slowaris is nice if you have more than 8 CPUs in a single box, for something like a big database application, but it doesn't stand a chance in the low end.
Linux is shaping up nicely, I expect it will be a while before it will be ready to eat the windows desktop market on its own.
But with OEMs defecting to non-M$ OSs (how many are there really, besides Linux) and their lame copy-prevention scams Linux will be pushed into use even though it isn't ready, once there someone will see a market to fix the novice-administrator problem that it currently has.
Linux is arguable *briliant* for the experienced administrator as well as any user, but it is still very hard on inexperinced administrators (read: home users).
Interbase doesn't lock anything, it simply makes a new version of the row that becomes the current when the transaction is comitted.
MySQL is, IMHO, a piece of crud compared to ANY real DBMS, as it doesn't have any of the features that are needed in a database (like foreign key constraints or transactions)
That said, if you don't compare MySQL to flat files it does come out on top, it's pretty neat as a structured storage, but it sucks so badly when you have more than one table that needs to be in a consistent state.
InterBase is *VERY* nice and pretty fast, but it has rusted quite a bit from v4 to v6 and it's DBD was completely useless until quite resently, after lots of hacking it rarely deadlocks now, but it (IB) is quickly on it's way out of our setup.
For a REAL database that scales the pants off anything that is Free software today (it can support SAP R/3 with it's 16000 tables) check out SAPDB:
http://www.sap-ag.de/solutions/technology/sapdb/ index.htm
I's set to come out under GPL(!) in April next year, but I've been using it for a while now and it seems to be a *really* nice DBMS.
Binary drivers are totally worthless (Just take one look at SoundBastard Live) so why would anyone want to create a format that only serves to allow binary drivers?
IMHO UDI is evil and must be defeated, it would allow hardware makers to excuse the lack of proper documentation by pointing to their binary dog-piles.
"Look, just give us the specs on the hardware and we'll write the drivers on our own."
Slashdot Mirror
There are 3 things you need to do:
1) Use Mozilla.
2) Disable unrequested pop ups.
3) Get my userContent.css for Mozilla here:
http://dion.swamp.dk/stuff/ when installed it will autmagically and quickly remove all ads in pages, including all flash except where you really want it.
It's already possible, simply install a user stylesheet that turns off flash by default and turn it on for those(that?) page you want to use flash on, I use this one:
http://dion.swamp.dk/dl/userContent.css
Read a bit about it here:
http://dion.swamp.dk/stuff.html
But, if spam is illegal only criminals will have spam.
Yes, SAP DB is very cool, it is as "Enterprise" as any other database on the planet, it doesn't have some of the bloaty features that Oracle or MSSQL have like full text indexing or function based indexes, but it is a real database and it implements all the database functionality in a very robust manner.
A datapoint is that SAP use it to run SAP R/3 on, that system has over 16000 tables and 2GB of data in a newly installed database.
Performance wise it's nice as well, SAP said that in their benchmarks all the databases they support (including DB2, MSSQL, Oracle and SAP DB) the difference between the fastest and slowest was less than 5%.
Here we use it to back a webapplication that has 134 tables in the database and a little over 120MB in the database and it's quite happy.
We have crashed machines with SAP DB many times, either due to bad drivers, crazy software or poweroutages and we have never lost any data that was committed.
SAP DB doesn't need to use the filesystem like those "little" databases, like the other big DBMSs it can use raw devices directly and it will distribute data on the devices for better performance, it can even execute one query on more than one cpu for better performance.
SAP DB is simply better as well as GPL.
The base problem with spam is that it shifts the cost to the victim, the only technical solution is to shift that cost back to the sender so all (or most) costs are transfered to the sender of the mail rather than letting the receiver bear the cost of storage
An exelent proposal is IM2000.
1100 guests??? bah!
Around here that's considered a failiure or good for your first try.
This easter the worlds largest lan party will be The Gathering with 5100 guests. Free tickets are still available if you are coming from outside Europe and normally priced tickets are available for people from Europe, but outside Norway.
I know because we sold the first 4300 tickets in 6 hours via PTN and there are over 1000 people on the waiting list for the rest of the tickets.
The worlds second largest party is DreamHack in sweden with around 5000 guests.
Assembly in Finland is also quite large with over 3000 guests.
Due to general anti-piracy hysteria in Denmark The Party (the worlds first large party) had less than 1000 guests this year, down from over 3000 a few years ago.
Yes, you are right, however, Laserdisken does allow you to buy region 1 disks directly through the normal channels (I just got the last DVD in the Serial Experiments Lain series that I was missing).
Brian (the minister of culture) has stated that the government was actually aginst the import clause of the law, but that they were powerless against the EU (an exelent example of why a lot of the entire EU concept sucks).
This site links to three very nice pieces of "howto interpret the new law" from the ministry: digital forbruger article
The bottom line is that you are always allowed to circumvent the copy-prevention if you do it to exersise your fair use rights (so playing dvds on Linux is still ok). Software is not covered by the law at all (so breaking copy-prevention on software is ok). You are still allowed to borrow original media from your friends (and the liberary) AND make copies AND keep the copies (you are not allowed to disitrbute copies or make copies of copies, though). DVD-jon would have gotten off under the current danish laws according to the minitry, so that's ok as well.
The only impact on fair use is that you are not allowed to break the copy-prevention to make a copy, not even for yourself (it doesn't say what to do if you don't notice the "protection" at all).
So we are still not as bad off as those poor americans:)
Come on, did you read the comment at all?
The most important thing about voting is that it's auditable, not having the source available would make it impossible to audit.
Yes, demanding Open Source for an application like this is not a matter of being an activist, nothing is gained for Open Source as a whole by having a government use OSS for voting, it is a simple matter of ensuring that the entire system is auditable and thereby secure.
Yes, you can track how people vote now, but it is hard and there are many people involved in the act of voting so it would be very hard to do it on a large scale without getting caught, if you are voting online then it is very simple to sneak some software in there to tie the vote to the voter.
I can see a way around this, though:
The only problem is that we cannot allow people to use their own machines to vote from because of the lack of security (anyone could have backdoored the machine), so the voting clients would need to written to CDs so people can boot from them and vote from a clean and auditable setup.
Uhm, not to nitpick, but theobromide isn't added to chocolate, it is a natural component, caffeine on the other hand is sometimes added (and at other times mistaken for theobromide, as the two chemicals look very alike: http://www.mrkland.com/fun/xocoatl/caffeine.htm
> It's tough to burn CD's at a decent speed unless you have a 1Ghz+ (Intel speeds) CPU
Uh? I guess that's true if you are running an OS with horrible latencies, but I have yet to make a coaster under Linux (yes it has/had latency issues, but not as bad as other OSs).
A long time ago, when burning at 2x was not-horrible, I started burning a disk and then started Quake 2 on my old P166 with a 3dfx voodoo card and too little RAM, I ran around a few levels while the sound went choppy and the framerate sucked, but the buffer fill on the burner never went below 89%.
Think about it, burning at 2x means having the CPU move 352800 bytes pr. second, any CPU ought to handle that, burning at 50x means moving 8613 KB/s, not exactly high-throughput in todays world, so it all comes down to one thing: "Scheduling Latency", it doesn't matter much how fast your CPU is if your OS is crappy about the latency.
Well, if you add:
P3P: CP="IE You suck ass and so do your users!"
or something similarly content-free, then you are not really using P3P, you are only working around a misfeature in IE.
Personally I find it annoying that IE has started to demand a P3P header just to work normally.
I can only agree, p3p is only useful for the paranoids that don't know what they are doing.
P3P is useless as the untrustworthy sites will simply lie about what they do with the info, so it buys us nothing.
IE+P3P+Hotmail is an annoying combo, because if you send people a link in mail to a hotmail account M$ think they need trap people in a frameset, neatly displaying "we ownz y00" and keeping people from bookmarking the site they are visting, however the most annoying effect is that it is impossible to get a cookie set in the framed site (so logging in just doesn't work on most sites), without a compact P3P header.
Luckyly you can just add some garbage P3P header:
P3P: CP="CAO ADM OUR IND PHY ONL PUR NAV DEM STA"
and IE will allow the framed site to work normally, it did take a lot of angry users to find that particular IE+hotmail-misfeature.
In closing: death to IE and hotmail, may they both be taken behind the barn and shot through the head ASAP!
The only problem with running an engine on alcohol is that you need to refine that alcohol first, that is something that takes a huge amount of energy and unless you have a "green" way of doing that you are just as screwed as when you use petrol.
Yes, it's cool that you can keep flying after the oil reserves dry out, but it's not going to do anything for the greenhouse effect, it might even make it worse with all the water you need to evaporate during destilation.
Yeah, Interbase is cool, as long as you do little stuff, where the database is very small and there isn't a lot of concurrency.
I've gone through a lot of databases as "my database" (Interbase, MSSQL (shudder), sybase, Interbase (again), postgresql and now SAP DB and it really does do all the things that the others lack.
SAP DB is a VERY good DBMS with a very good team behind it, but it has a very unfriendly interface for the administrator (the developer sees ODBC, so that's cool enough).
That the administrators end of things is sort of user-hostile isn't really a big deal, because the annoying UI's are easily hidden by a few site-specific scripts and once it's running you usually don't need to mess with it as it pretty much minds itself.
Bottom line is that once it runs it's just wonderful to work with and it does exactly what I'd want a database to do (ACID: yes, Application server / OS: no)
The easiest answer is: Because it's not Perl.
The second easiest answer is: Because it's not what I'm using now.
Seriously, Ruby has some nice features, but most of them are 100% sugar and *really* weird to someone who expects it to be "perl, only clean and logical"...
I'll stick with my dirty Perl, thank you.
Uhm, yes, M$ is making money on software, but their software based income has been dropping for months to the point where they are actually making more money on their investments than on software.
IOW: M$ is not primarily a software house any more, so hopefully thei will stick with doing investments, that's what they seem to be good at:)
No, it was dead many years ago;)
Absolute Shitty Pages are not the way to go, EVER!
If for no other reason then because it makes people think that your server is running M$ software and we can't have that now, can we?
No really, ASP may be usable with Perl, but so is a lot of other embed-Perl-in-HTML stuff, so there isn't really any reason for using ASP unless you have lots of legacy code that uses it and developers that like it.
HTML::Mason is available from CPAN, that and the fact that I like mason, is pretty much all the reason I need to choose it over everything else.
You just started with java didn't you and you are all into the bondage and diciplin that comes with it, right?`
The way I see it Java is a nice toy when you have to support platforms you have no control over (like desktops or many different customers), but other than that it's just a pain in the ass (B&D languages like Java and pascal have never been high on my list)
Everything is text or is quickly becoming it, have you ever heard of XML?
The way I see it:
M$-doze will die along with OS X, yes there will be holdouts, but they will be of the same nature as the ones that run OS/2 today.
Slowaris is nice if you have more than 8 CPUs in a single box, for something like a big database application, but it doesn't stand a chance in the low end.
Linux is shaping up nicely, I expect it will be a while before it will be ready to eat the windows desktop market on its own.
But with OEMs defecting to non-M$ OSs (how many are there really, besides Linux) and their lame copy-prevention scams Linux will be pushed into use even though it isn't ready, once there someone will see a market to fix the novice-administrator problem that it currently has.
Linux is arguable *briliant* for the experienced administrator as well as any user, but it is still very hard on inexperinced administrators (read: home users).
er? "end up"?
Why lock AT ALL when you can use InterBase?
/ index.htm
Interbase doesn't lock anything, it simply makes a new version of the row that becomes the current when the transaction is comitted.
MySQL is, IMHO, a piece of crud compared to ANY real DBMS, as it doesn't have any of the features that are needed in a database (like foreign key constraints or transactions)
That said, if you don't compare MySQL to flat files it does come out on top, it's pretty neat as a structured storage, but it sucks so badly when you have more than one table that needs to be in a consistent state.
InterBase is *VERY* nice and pretty fast, but it has rusted quite a bit from v4 to v6 and it's DBD was completely useless until quite resently, after lots of hacking it rarely deadlocks now, but it (IB) is quickly on it's way out of our setup.
For a REAL database that scales the pants off anything that is Free software today (it can support SAP R/3 with it's 16000 tables) check out SAPDB:
http://www.sap-ag.de/solutions/technology/sapdb
I's set to come out under GPL(!) in April next year, but I've been using it for a while now and it seems to be a *really* nice DBMS.
please, pdf is just a fancy postscript file...
Binary drivers are totally worthless (Just take one look at SoundBastard Live) so why would anyone want to create a format that only serves to allow binary drivers?
IMHO UDI is evil and must be defeated, it would allow hardware makers to excuse the lack of proper documentation by pointing to their binary dog-piles.
"Look, just give us the specs on the hardware and we'll write the drivers on our own."
>However, if someone writes something positive
/. NT stands for NiceTry...
>about NT, it's instantly labelled as "FUD" or
>"flamebait".
Understand this: Nothing is absolute.
There is no right and wrong, only popular opinion.
On