That's not really surprising: 90% of the population of the world has never seen a PC.
Not true. The US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Netherlands, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Sweeden, Norway, Finland, Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong together constitute 14% of the world's population; I would be quite surprised if any of those countries had seen-a-PC rates below 95%, let alone 70%. Then, of course, there are all the people in countries like India -- sure, many of them will have never seen a PC, but many will.
It is possible that a majority of the world's population has never seen a PC, but the rate is certainly nowhere near 90%.
True, but perception might be important here. We're dealing with someone who was awake for 24 hours here -- I'm not sure about this, but I can imagine that it might be easier to stay awake if you *feel* warmer, even if you're actually colder.
Also (and I might be completely wrong here, since I don't drink) doesn't brandy typically contain a significant amount of sugar?
Why did they have a five foot slide rule? Such an item would be utterly pointless.
The only advantage that slide rules have over log tables is the speed with which they can be used, but a five foot slide rule would be far too cumbersome for easy use anyway.
Based on the fact that privilege separation fixes this, it's reasonable to suppose that the flaw is in the authentication code, and allows users to execute arbitrary code.
A cable is probably fine if the stations aren't moving, but that is not necessarily the case. One can easily imagine robots which will be moving around within a single room; even though the range would be sufficient, any cable could very easily get tied into knots.
The Top500 rankings are based on LinPack-- a software package for solving dense systems of linear equations
Almost, but not quite. The Top500 rankings are based on solving the dense system of linear equations generated by the LinPack benchmark driver. Using LinPack is optional. For that matter, using Gaussian elimination with partial pivoting is optional, as long as you meet the error bound of O(n \epsilon).
Oddly, we managed to live through a lot of these events before, and have survived a few thousands of years of recorded history without a problem.
There's a slight difference between the present and when such events occured in the past: A thousand years ago, nobody in Europe would have noticed if half of North America was flattened by an asteroid.
The probability of an asteroid wiping out the human race is miniscule. The probability of an asteroid killing large numbers of people is not.
Given that slashdot routinely labels New York Times links with "(free subscription required)", how about space.com get labelled with "(warning, popup hell ahead)"?
A single popup ad is bad enough, but when the story spawns three extra windows, it's just dumb.
The submitter states that he never gave the Internet Archive permission to replicate his work. He is wrong.
By placing material on the web, one is implicitly granting permission for it to be read. If I put a poster up in my window, I lose the right to complain if someone walking by on the street reads it.
Equally, I lose the right to complain if someone walks by and takes a photograph of the front of my house, including the poster. The fact that someone might then be able to read the poster ten years from now is irrelevant.
If the Internet Archive were required to seek permission before archiving freely and publicly available material, then the same argument would require libraries to seek permission prior to archiving (free) newspapers.
Timeshifting is fair use, and it applies to web pages just as well as TV signals.
"Deeper" is usually taken to mean "able to see fainter objects", whereas the longer baselines ("wider dispersion") will actually be allowing the VLA to see finer details instead.
In the context of athmospheric interference, isn't the real benefit of VLA that it becomes possible to see the equally fine details on longer wavelengths? Normally the frequency and resolution are inversely proportional, but I'd expect the athmosphere to impose a limit on the resolution independant of wavelength.
Of course I might be completely wrong here, since I'm neither an astronomer nor an optical engineer, and it's 8AM right now.
If the operating system *mattered* for animation, this would be a big deal... but it doesn't. They're using Linux because it's cheaper, and because any (half-decent) operating system would function just as well for this sort of task.
After all, if a hobbyist releases a tool he wrote for his own use that others may find useful, yet doesnt charge for it, he should not be liable for his free tool causing prolems with something company X used it for.
I disagree. If anyone -- be it a hobbyist, or a company like Microsoft -- releases software with a disclaimer to the effect of "this is a piece of junk, don't trust it with anything important", then they shouldn't be held liable. Of course, that might significantly impair Microsoft's ability to sell their product.
Conversely, if someone releases or distributes software while giving the impression that it will work, it should work. If I install qmail, someone finds a security hole, and I suffer damage as a result, djb should be liable -- not just because he distributed subjuctively insecure code, but because he distributed subjunctively insecure code while making statements which lead me to believe that it was secure.
Delivered-To: freebsd-announce@freebsd.org To: freebsd-announce@FreeBSD.ORG Cc: bmah@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: FreeBSD 4.6-RELEASE is now available From: bmah@FreeBSD.ORG (Bruce A. Mah) Date: Sat, 15 Jun 2002 16:34:26 -0700 Sender: owner-freebsd-announce@FreeBSD.ORG
I am happy to announce the availability of FreeBSD 4.6-RELEASE, the very latest release on the FreeBSD -STABLE development branch. Since FreeBSD 4.5-RELEASE in January 2002, we have made hundreds of fixes, updated many system components, and addressed a wide variety of security issues.
One of the most significant changes in FreeBSD 4.6 is the adoption of XFree86 4.2.0 as the default version of the X Windows System. We encourage users (particularly those upgrading from older installations of XFree86) to consult the relevant section of the FreeBSD Handbook for information on installing and configuring XFree86 4.2.0. This information can be found on-line at:
http://www.FreeBSD.org/handbook/x11.html
On systems with the doc distribution installed, it can also be found at:
It is also useful to peruse the errata file, as it contains late-breaking news about the release:
http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/4.6R/errata.html For more information about FreeBSD release engineering activities (including a schedule of upcoming releases), please see:
http://www.FreeBSD.org/releng/
Availability ------------
FreeBSD 4.6-RELEASE supports the i386 and alpha architectures and can be installed directly over the net using the boot floppies or copied to a local NFS/FTP server. Distributions for the i386 are available now. Final builds for the alpha architecture are in progress and will be made available shortly.
We can't promise that all the mirror sites will carry the larger ISO images, but they will at least be available from:
If you can't afford FreeBSD on media, are impatient, or just want to use it for evangelism purposes, then by all means download the ISO images, otherwise please continue to support the FreeBSD Project by purchasing media from one of our supporting vendors. The following companies have contributed substantially to the development of FreeBSD:
Each CD or DVD set contains the FreeBSD installation and application package bits for the i386 ("PC") architecture. For a set of distfiles used to build ports in the ports collection, please see the FreeBSD Toolkit, a 6 CD set containing extra bits which no longer fit on the 4 CD set, or the DVD distribution from FreeBSD Services Ltd.
FreeBSD is also available via anonymous FTP from mirror sites in the following countries: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Korea, Lithuania, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, Trantor, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom.
Before trying the central FTP site, please check your regional mirror(s) first by going to:
ftp://ftp..FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD
Any additional mirror sites will be labeled ftp2, ftp3 and so on.
More information about FreeBSD mirror sites can be found at:
http://www.FreeBSD.org/handbook/mirrors-ftp.html For instructions on installing FreeBSD, please see Chapter 2 of The FreeBSD Handbook. It provides a complete installation walk-through for users new to FreeBSD, and can be found online at:
http://www.FreeBSD.org/handbook/install.html
Acknowledgments ---------------
Many companies donated equipment, network access, or man-hours to finance the release engineering activities for FreeBSD 4.6, including Compaq, Yahoo!, and The FreeBSD Mall.
In addition to myself, the release engineering team for 4.6-RELEASE includes:
Murray Stokely : Release Engineering Lead, i386 Builds
Robert Watson : Release Engineering
John Baldwin : Release Engineering, alpha Builds
Brian Somers : Release Engineering
Steve Price : Package Splits
Will Andrews : Package Splits
Kris Kennaway : Package Building
David O'Brien : XFree86 Integration
Please join me in thanking them for all the hard work which went into making this release. Many thanks are also due to the FreeBSD committers , without whom there would be nothing to release, and thousands of FreeBSD users world-wide who have contributed bug fixes, features, and suggestions.
Enjoy!
Bruce A. Mah (For the FreeBSD Release Engineering Team)
Written exams are fine for computer science; Coding exams are dumb.
Remember, computer science is about methods and algorithms, not about learning syntax. If you forget a semicolon when you're writing a program, you'll remember about it as soon as you try to compile it; if you code a bubblesort where a quicksort would be more appropriate, you're going to be stuck with a slow program until someone more clued fixes it.
How much would it be worth to have a few hundred bytes which would allow you to create certificates which would be trusted by almost everyone on the internet?
Linus is alleged to have stated that "Making Linux GPL'd was definitely the best thing I ever did".
From the point of view of Linus' ambivalence towards ideology, and his principle goal of "producing a kick-ass operating system", do you agree with that statement?
Re:Taking currency out of the consumers hands
on
Hong Kong's Octopus
·
· Score: 1
Um... we're in 2002 now, in case you hadn't noticed. That means Y2K was two years ago, not last year.
This reinforces a fundamental fact of human behaviour: People generally ignore laws. If there is a policeman standing at their elbow, they'll obey the law, but as soon as the policeman is not obviously present, they'll go back to doing whatever they feel is "right".
When it comes to mp3 trading, usage of illicit drugs, or discussing Chinese politics, there are three simple options in the hands of the government: 1. Allow them, 2. Put police everywhere (think 1984), or 3. Change how people think about such activities (public anti-drinking-and-driving campaigns are a good example of this).
The Great Firewall of China might help the government identify (and eliminate) any rebellious leaders, but it won't stop the spread of ideas and ideals.
The sad thing is, so much stuff doesn't work on NT/2000/XP if you're not a local admin.
Really? I've been using W2K since beta 3 came out, and the only thing I haven't been able to do as a normal user is run Windows Update. (And I'm not exactly complaining about that.)
Given that DJB already has implementations of DNS and SMTP around that are heavily focused on security, it wouldn't suprise me if he went into looking at securing NFS (the file system).
I think that would be rather a change in direction for him, since he regularly refers to that NFS as the "Network Failure System".
your blithe attitude is justified in this case, but for the rest of us who use our phones quite often in both our personal and professional lives we don't have the luxury of writing off the concern as a non-issue.
How does this latest news change anything? Phones are insecure. We've known that they are insecure for years.
If you care about security, you shouldn't be using a phone anyway; if you don't care about security, this doesn't change anything.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not really surprising: 90% of the population of the world has never seen a PC.
Not true. The US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Netherlands, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Sweeden, Norway, Finland, Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong together constitute 14% of the world's population; I would be quite surprised if any of those countries had seen-a-PC rates below 95%, let alone 70%. Then, of course, there are all the people in countries like India -- sure, many of them will have never seen a PC, but many will.
It is possible that a majority of the world's population has never seen a PC, but the rate is certainly nowhere near 90%.
Alcohol only gives the perception of warmth,
True, but perception might be important here. We're dealing with someone who was awake for 24 hours here -- I'm not sure about this, but I can imagine that it might be easier to stay awake if you *feel* warmer, even if you're actually colder.
Also (and I might be completely wrong here, since I don't drink) doesn't brandy typically contain a significant amount of sugar?
Why did they have a five foot slide rule? Such an item would be utterly pointless.
The only advantage that slide rules have over log tables is the speed with which they can be used, but a five foot slide rule would be far too cumbersome for easy use anyway.
Based on the fact that privilege separation fixes this, it's reasonable to suppose that the flaw is in the authentication code, and allows users to execute arbitrary code.
Why not just use a cable at that point?
A cable is probably fine if the stations aren't moving, but that is not necessarily the case. One can easily imagine robots which will be moving around within a single room; even though the range would be sufficient, any cable could very easily get tied into knots.
The Top500 rankings are based on LinPack-- a software package for solving dense systems of linear equations
Almost, but not quite. The Top500 rankings are based on solving the dense system of linear equations generated by the LinPack benchmark driver. Using LinPack is optional. For that matter, using Gaussian elimination with partial pivoting is optional, as long as you meet the error bound of O(n \epsilon).
Oddly, we managed to live through a lot of these events before, and have survived a few thousands of years of recorded history without a problem.
There's a slight difference between the present and when such events occured in the past: A thousand years ago, nobody in Europe would have noticed if half of North America was flattened by an asteroid.
The probability of an asteroid wiping out the human race is miniscule. The probability of an asteroid killing large numbers of people is not.
Given that slashdot routinely labels New York Times links with "(free subscription required)", how about space.com get labelled with "(warning, popup hell ahead)"?
A single popup ad is bad enough, but when the story spawns three extra windows, it's just dumb.
The submitter states that he never gave the Internet Archive permission to replicate his work. He is wrong.
By placing material on the web, one is implicitly granting permission for it to be read. If I put a poster up in my window, I lose the right to complain if someone walking by on the street reads it.
Equally, I lose the right to complain if someone walks by and takes a photograph of the front of my house, including the poster. The fact that someone might then be able to read the poster ten years from now is irrelevant.
If the Internet Archive were required to seek permission before archiving freely and publicly available material, then the same argument would require libraries to seek permission prior to archiving (free) newspapers.
Timeshifting is fair use, and it applies to web pages just as well as TV signals.
"Deeper" is usually taken to mean "able to see fainter objects", whereas the longer baselines ("wider dispersion") will actually be allowing the VLA to see finer details instead.
In the context of athmospheric interference, isn't the real benefit of VLA that it becomes possible to see the equally fine details on longer wavelengths? Normally the frequency and resolution are inversely proportional, but I'd expect the athmosphere to impose a limit on the resolution independant of wavelength.
Of course I might be completely wrong here, since I'm neither an astronomer nor an optical engineer, and it's 8AM right now.
If the operating system *mattered* for animation, this would be a big deal... but it doesn't. They're using Linux because it's cheaper, and because any (half-decent) operating system would function just as well for this sort of task.
(various flavours of Unix)
That's where your problem lies. Pick one, and get everyone comfortable with that one.
Even better spin...
"People say that they've never heard of a student graduating in computer science with a GPA like mine."
After all, if a hobbyist releases a tool he wrote for his own use that others may find useful, yet doesnt charge for it, he should not be liable for his free tool causing prolems with something company X used it for.
I disagree. If anyone -- be it a hobbyist, or a company like Microsoft -- releases software with a disclaimer to the effect of "this is a piece of junk, don't trust it with anything important", then they shouldn't be held liable. Of course, that might significantly impair Microsoft's ability to sell their product.
Conversely, if someone releases or distributes software while giving the impression that it will work, it should work. If I install qmail, someone finds a security hole, and I suffer damage as a result, djb should be liable -- not just because he distributed subjuctively insecure code, but because he distributed subjunctively insecure code while making statements which lead me to believe that it was secure.
Delivered-To: freebsd-announce@freebsd.org
To: freebsd-announce@FreeBSD.ORG
Cc: bmah@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: FreeBSD 4.6-RELEASE is now available
From: bmah@FreeBSD.ORG (Bruce A. Mah)
Date: Sat, 15 Jun 2002 16:34:26 -0700
Sender: owner-freebsd-announce@FreeBSD.ORG
I am happy to announce the availability of FreeBSD 4.6-RELEASE, the very latest release on the FreeBSD -STABLE development branch. Since FreeBSD 4.5-RELEASE in January 2002, we have made hundreds of fixes, updated many system components, and addressed a wide variety of security issues.
One of the most significant changes in FreeBSD 4.6 is the adoption of XFree86 4.2.0 as the default version of the X Windows System. We encourage users (particularly those upgrading from older installations of XFree86) to consult the relevant section of the FreeBSD Handbook for information on installing and configuring XFree86 4.2.0. This information can be found on-line at:
http://www.FreeBSD.org/handbook/x11.html
On systems with the doc distribution installed, it can also be found at:
A number of enhancements to network device drivers have been made, as well as updates to the ATA storage subsystem.
Some contributed programs have been updated, such as sendmail (updated to 8.12.3) and the ISC DHCP client (updated to 3.0.1RC8).
For more information about the most significant changes with this release of FreeBSD, please see the release notes:
http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/4.6R/relnotes.htm
It is also useful to peruse the errata file, as it contains late-breaking news about the release:
http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/4.6R/errata.html
For more information about FreeBSD release engineering activities (including a schedule of upcoming releases), please see:
http://www.FreeBSD.org/releng/
Availability
------------
FreeBSD 4.6-RELEASE supports the i386 and alpha architectures and can be installed directly over the net using the boot floppies or copied to a local NFS/FTP server. Distributions for the i386 are available now. Final builds for the alpha architecture are in progress and will be made available shortly.
We can't promise that all the mirror sites will carry the larger ISO images, but they will at least be available from:
ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp2.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp.au.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp.cz.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp.lt.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp.nctu.edu.tw/FreeBSD/
If you can't afford FreeBSD on media, are impatient, or just want to use it for evangelism purposes, then by all means download the ISO images, otherwise please continue to support the FreeBSD Project by purchasing media from one of our supporting vendors. The following companies have contributed substantially to the development of FreeBSD:
FreeBSD Mall, Inc. http://www.freebsdmall.com/
FreeBSD Services Ltd. http://www.freebsd-services.com/
Daemon News http://www.bsdmall.com/freebsd1.html
Each CD or DVD set contains the FreeBSD installation and application package bits for the i386 ("PC") architecture. For a set of distfiles used to build ports in the ports collection, please see the FreeBSD Toolkit, a 6 CD set containing extra bits which no longer fit on the 4 CD set, or the DVD distribution from FreeBSD Services Ltd.
FreeBSD is also available via anonymous FTP from mirror sites in the following countries: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Korea, Lithuania, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, Trantor, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom.
Before trying the central FTP site, please check your regional mirror(s) first by going to:
ftp://ftp..FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD
Any additional mirror sites will be labeled ftp2, ftp3 and so on.
More information about FreeBSD mirror sites can be found at:
http://www.FreeBSD.org/handbook/mirrors-ftp.html
For instructions on installing FreeBSD, please see Chapter 2 of The FreeBSD Handbook. It provides a complete installation walk-through for users new to FreeBSD, and can be found online at:
http://www.FreeBSD.org/handbook/install.html
Acknowledgments
---------------
Many companies donated equipment, network access, or man-hours to finance the release engineering activities for FreeBSD 4.6, including Compaq, Yahoo!, and The FreeBSD Mall.
In addition to myself, the release engineering team for 4.6-RELEASE includes:
Murray Stokely : Release Engineering Lead, i386 Builds
Robert Watson : Release Engineering
John Baldwin : Release Engineering, alpha Builds
Brian Somers : Release Engineering
Steve Price : Package Splits
Will Andrews : Package Splits
Kris Kennaway : Package Building
David O'Brien : XFree86 Integration
Please join me in thanking them for all the hard work which went into making this release. Many thanks are also due to the FreeBSD committers , without whom there would be nothing to release, and thousands of FreeBSD users world-wide who have contributed bug fixes, features, and suggestions.
Enjoy!
Bruce A. Mah
(For the FreeBSD Release Engineering Team)
The (real) announcement came out a couple hours ago; presumably it will appear on the freebsd.org website at 0800 UTC when the site is rebuilt.
Written exams are fine for computer science; Coding exams are dumb.
Remember, computer science is about methods and algorithms, not about learning syntax. If you forget a semicolon when you're writing a program, you'll remember about it as soon as you try to compile it; if you code a bubblesort where a quicksort would be more appropriate, you're going to be stuck with a slow program until someone more clued fixes it.
How much would it be worth to have a few hundred bytes which would allow you to create certificates which would be trusted by almost everyone on the internet?
Linus is alleged to have stated that "Making Linux GPL'd was definitely the best thing I ever did".
From the point of view of Linus' ambivalence towards ideology, and his principle goal of "producing a kick-ass operating system", do you agree with that statement?
Um... we're in 2002 now, in case you hadn't noticed. That means Y2K was two years ago, not last year.
This reinforces a fundamental fact of human behaviour: People generally ignore laws. If there is a policeman standing at their elbow, they'll obey the law, but as soon as the policeman is not obviously present, they'll go back to doing whatever they feel is "right".
When it comes to mp3 trading, usage of illicit drugs, or discussing Chinese politics, there are three simple options in the hands of the government:
1. Allow them,
2. Put police everywhere (think 1984), or
3. Change how people think about such activities (public anti-drinking-and-driving campaigns are a good example of this).
The Great Firewall of China might help the government identify (and eliminate) any rebellious leaders, but it won't stop the spread of ideas and ideals.
The sad thing is, so much stuff doesn't work on NT/2000/XP if you're not a local admin.
Really? I've been using W2K since beta 3 came out, and the only thing I haven't been able to do as a normal user is run Windows Update. (And I'm not exactly complaining about that.)
Given that DJB already has implementations of DNS and SMTP around that are heavily focused on security, it wouldn't suprise me if he went into looking at securing NFS (the file system).
I think that would be rather a change in direction for him, since he regularly refers to that NFS as the "Network Failure System".
your blithe attitude is justified in this case, but for the rest of us who use our phones quite often in both our personal and professional lives we don't have the luxury of writing off the concern as a non-issue.
How does this latest news change anything? Phones are insecure. We've known that they are insecure for years.
If you care about security, you shouldn't be using a phone anyway; if you don't care about security, this doesn't change anything.
I really don't care if they listen in on all my phone calls. For that matter, I don't care if the entire world listens in on all my phone calls.
I can't remember when I last used a phone, but it certainly wasn't any time recently.