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User: sommerfeld

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  1. Re:This is meaningless on Apple Looking at ZFS For Mac OS X · · Score: 1

    ZFS -- like solaris's UFS -- has support for something roughly equivalent to Mac file "forks" under the covers.
    It also has a flexible & extensible on-disk format so that additional attributes/metadata can be added to files in newer versions of the filesystem without forcing existing pools to be reformatted.

  2. Re:Pirates.. of Penzance! on CATO Institute Releases Paper Criticizing DMCA · · Score: 1

    It's nice to want things, but this use of pirate is long-established.

    As one example, in the late 1870's, the pirate theme of Gilbert & Sullivan's "Pirates of Penzance" was inspired by pirate (unauthorized) productions of their earlier works.

    It premiered near-simultaneously in New York and England to cope with limitations of the copyright law of the day.

  3. Re:Open alternatives on BitMover Releases Open Source BitKeeper Client · · Score: 1

    svk, uses a big pile of perl on top of subversion to implement a distributed source control model not too different from bk.

    It's very new but some brave folks seem to be using it for production development already. It helps that you can use it to mirror conventional svn repositories without special arrangements..

  4. 1 second sentence per spam, served consecutively. on Ohio Law Could Send Spammers To Jail · · Score: 1

    I've always thought that the criminal penalty should be from one second to one minute per message sent, comparable to the amount of time the spammer intended to cannot be served consecutively with any other penalty. No upper limit on time served; all persons involved in a conspiracy to spam should be subject to the penalty independantly.

    statistical estimation based on all available information from ISP's (link utilization, etc.,) should be used to estimate the number of spam messages sent. messages blocked by spam filters still count, as the unsuccessful sending attempt indicates intent to waste the time of the recipient.

  5. Dunno about Kerry, but ... McCain good, Leahy bad on Would John Kerry Defang the DMCA? · · Score: 2, Interesting

    this is one of those issues where the factions don't line up neatly with the party lines

    See Ed Felten's blog from about 10 days ago:

    http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000701 .h tml,

    where he asks, rhetorically, "Do the Democrats really want to be known as the party that would ban fast-forwarding?"

    (P.S., Leahy is up for election this year in VT.)

  6. Re:Internet ads should be treated like TV and prin on FEC May Regulate Online Political Activity · · Score: 5, Insightful

    History has shown time and time again that it's hard to write laws and regulations to "level a playing field" without accdentally writing in exploitable loopholes. It's really the same sort of problem as the difficulty of writing secure software.

    Attempts to do this may well backfire and amplify the power of those with deep pockets -- they will be in a much better position to afford the lawyer time to look for loopholes in the laws and regulations, use them, and then defend that use in court.

    And as the regulations are incrementally patched to fix each loophole, they will increase in complexity, increasing the risks that the well-intentioned little guy will accidentally break them and end up muzzled.

    There's no good answer here, alas.

    I feel much better about regulations requiring a public audit trail of where the money came from and where it went, rather than attempting to create complex rules and "soft", "hard", etc., classes of money and donors.

  7. RAID-1 between drives made by different vendors. on Which RAID for a Personal Fileserver? · · Score: 1

    Over the past 20 years i've seen any number of cases where a particular drive model had a manufacturing or design defect which caused many/most of the drives to fail when the drive reached a particular age. (Anyone remember the RA81 glue problem? at a site with ~60 of them we were losing one or more a week for a while..).

    You can reduce your vulnerability to this problem by mirroring between drives of different design made by different manufacturers.

  8. sample size too small. on Testing ISP Censorship · · Score: 1

    Only two data points? Given the headline I would have expected a larger sample size.
    There's really insufficient data to draw significant conclusions.. and if you wanted to spin it another way, "Free speech still better protected in US than in UK" would be just as valid a conclusion.

  9. Re:Hosers on Ontario Schools License StarOffice · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's real. Vowels tend to wander in regional dialects so what sounds like an "au" to you might sound closer to an "oo" to me. Google turned up "Canadian Raising" which explains this particular difference better than I can.

  10. Re:Um... on Videogame Character Threatens National Security? · · Score: 1

    I bet it was an april fool's prank gone wrong...

  11. you, too, can have this capability on earth... on Debugging The Spirit Rover · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's not that hard to pull off off this sort of seemingly amazing remote recovery with pure off-the-shelf tech if you plan for it in advance and are willing to pay a modest premium.

    You need remote serial console access -- ideally including firmware/bios serial console access -- and remote power cycling, controlled by a small embedded system, either in separate units (APC masterswitch, terminal servers) or as part of the system unit (common on Sun gear as "LOM"/"ALOM"/etc.; some of this is also creeping into x86 mobos). All this lets you regain control of the system remotely.

    Then it becomes a matter of hardening the system to let you recover from various other insults. Never let go with both hands: Mirrored disks (protecting against hardware failure) and multiple bootable partitions (protecting against software or human error) can both be used; netbooting is also a nice capability to have when you've got a bunch of servers in the same place.

    Disclaimer: I bet you can do much of the above with other people's gear, but I work for Sun and I know it works for me...

  12. yep, it's a solution. on Microsoft, Yahoo Investigate Spam Solution · · Score: 1
    .. but not the way the proponents think it is.

    False positives from good filters are infrequent enough that only the borderline-spammy are likely to trip up the filters often enough to be willing to pay for an edge to be let through.

    Like the Habeas SWE mark, email postage will quickly evolve into a mark which can be used to distinguish spam from wanted email.. if it's got e-postage, it must be spam!

  13. In related news.. on Penn State Students to Get Free Music From Napster · · Score: 2, Funny


    Penn State Strikes Deals with Napster, Budweiser

  14. Still more prior art: 1987 or so. on MS Patents IM Feature Used Since At Least 1996 · · Score: 1

    MIT's Project Athena developed the "Zephyr" notification system (which is also used for what was later called instant messaging) in 1987 (see Feb. 1988 USENIX conference proceedings for paper). It also gives the recipient warning that a message was being composed.

  15. Maybe unrelated but on What's Wacky with Google? · · Score: 2, Insightful

    .. a month or two ago, a friend's hyperagressive cat was prescribed an antidepressant(!). I was curious so I did a google search on "feline paxil" and got very low quality and repetitive search results; most of the top few screens appeared to be related scams by online pill-pushers trying to get you to use their "search engine".

    Perhaps some of google's anti-spamming countermeasures have backfired?

  16. Not news. on Mathematicians: Elections Flawed · · Score: 1

    This mathematical research gets refloated every election. Problem is, they always leave out the *strength* of single-round plurality voting: the inherent simplicity of the system!

    A full comparison of voting systems needs to also include some measurement of error rates and their impact on the result. Can little old ladies who are afraid of their VCR get it right? How many voters will get their preferences backwards? How much impact will a 1% or 2% or 5% error rate have on the results?

  17. Re:With Macgyver Onboard... on Stargate SG-1 Gets A Seventh Season · · Score: 1

    In one of the early season one Stargate SG-1 episodes, Captain (now Major) Carter used "MacGuyver" as a verb, in the presence of Col. O'Neill...
    FWIW, if you need to catch up, see GateWorld.

  18. How did you misplace two refrigerator-sized racks? on When Shipping the Big Iron...? · · Score: 1

    Earlier this year, I was informed that I would be the lucky recipient of some surplus Big Iron (sun E6500 and N8400).

    To make a long story short, I was told to expect it inside a week. Two weeks later, it still hadn't shown up. I made inquiries. Turns out that there were two other shipments leaving that day - one bound for LA, the other for Germany, and it evidently got mixed up with one of the others. It was months before they figured out where it went..

  19. only 10baseT data? lame! on Fiber-to-the-Home Internet, TV, Phone in One Box · · Score: 2, Insightful

    hard to see why they wouldn't put 100baseT in the box -- they can always soft-limit folks to 10mbit/s or 1 mbit/s but keep the option of selling bigger pipes to those who have the ca$h..

    someone's pinching pennies and that will hurt them in the long run.

  20. Ho hum. on Cray's New Solid State Storage · · Score: 1

    Six months ago, sun announced starcat which can take 576GB of main memory. Sun also claims 172.8GByte/sec bandwidth across the interconnect.

  21. Re:SSH Trademark: How about some research, people? on Slashback: Reviews, Resources, Pogo · · Score: 1

    The protocol has always been named "ssh" or "SSH". Only the working group is abbreviated "secsh".

  22. secure shell / secsh / ssh on Slashback: Reviews, Resources, Pogo · · Score: 2

    As others have pointed out, the last "news" item here is not news.
    IETF's naming convention for working group drafts is draft-ietf-wgabbrev-...-NN.txt
    The working group abbreviation "ssh" was already taken, by the Site Security Handbook WG (which has completed its work and disbanded), so "secsh" was used instead.
    The documents are still titled "SSH".
    The protocol is still named "SSH".
    The draft filenames have always been draft-ietf-secsh-*
    Bill Sommerfeld
    IETF Secure Shell working group chair.

  23. -1 on 2b Or !2b: Shakespeare TxtMsg Contest · · Score: 1

    % gdb
    (gdb) p 0x2b|~0x2b
    $1 = -1

  24. how about footprint reduction? on Update to the Mozilla Roadmap · · Score: 3
    Having tried 0.6 and 0.7, moooozilla is clearly a memory hog; it clearly doesn't quite fit on a 64m machine. On those brief moments when the system gives it enough memory it seems to be adequately fast.

    The milestones mentioned "embedded" mozilla. I really can't see the (cost sensitive) embedded types springing for 128mb of memory for web-pads and what have you; they're much more likely to go elsewhere for a more svelte browser..

    if they really want to make the embedded market happy, they should have the developers use 32mb (or smaller) machines for a few months...

  25. Re:Trend in free software.... on plex86 ported to NetBSD/i386 · · Score: 1

    very often bugs in the allegedly "portable" parts of system are uncovered during the porting effort. it also increases the "critical mass" of users for a particular system..