DNS is outdated and should be changed
on
Pirate DNS?
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· Score: 1
DNS was formed as a convenience when the net was relatively small and was comprised of the military, government, universities and misc. companies participating in research. It worked because the participants were few enough to not have many domain name conflicts (I'm sure they had a few). They had enough new territory to share among themselves.
Today it is outdated. There are more people vying for domain names while the number of words in the English language has not increased significantly. Adding TLDs will not alleviate the problem.
Of what use is it to add more TLDs? Of what utility is it that a site can call itself slashdot.sex or slashdot.nerd? There is no reason to add more TLDs because they don't add anything, they only shift the problem somewhere else.
As an example, suppose I get up one morning and decide that I want a site called Slashdot. Shucks it's taken under.org so I'll go and register it under.sex. There now I have a web site called slashdot.sex and there are now two sites called slashdot. I've created some confusion for people and gained nothing by being confused with that other wimpy site, slashdot.org. After all, I wanted that domain so I could be unique on the net.
No, the current DNS system is obsolete.
If a new system is to be started it should be based on a different concept. (I'll be damned if I know what it is;-) Maybe there is no good way to solve this problem (maybe there too few English words to go around) and we are stuck with the DNS system becuase there is no other 'better' way.
Hotmail started "logging off" users directly to msn.com shortly after it was bought by M$. They are not very polite about it either. There are at least two redirection attempts, one as a redirect meta tag. Another is in Javascript which, if I remember correctly, will continue trying to redirect the browser until it succeeds. If M$ can do it without a comment from anyone, why shouldn't everyone else do it?
You misunderstood what I wrote. I'm talking about the "development of software". To me this means everything from the first napkin drawing, through the design specification to the actual act of programming it to work. This whole process is a black art, from the napkin to the code. The only time software development is not so, is when you are developing a limited variation on something that has been done before. Bleeding edge software development is always trial and error. If it were not, there would be no dotcom corpses floating around.
Formal this, formal that. Software development is a black art inspite of attempts at trying to formalize it; From flow charts to design specs to UML. Formal is nice but it almost never works in the real world. So far, good design is a result of an ongoing process of trial and error and never the fruit of a first attempt. Open source takes it to the extreme by creating a massively parallel trial and error machine with a decent "good design" selection process.
Does anyone have a game that actually maxes out any of the current generation of video card, or the previous generation for that matter? QA3 at 170fps is meaningless.
Nevermind the fact that M$s request smacks of censorship (and/. did censor the messages quoted in the email) The logical conclusion of this is that tomorrow I can publish my 'For Loop Specification, Version 1.0' and threaten to sue anyone who implements it and possibly win under the DMCA. But for loops have been here long before my spec. so I can't do that. So why does M$ think it can take Kerberos, shift a byte and copyright it?!?! The mind boggles. If they have a legal leg to stand on, God have mercy on America because it's the beginning of the end. I also have serious doubts about the legality of their 'license' barring implementation of the spec. but I can't quite put my finger on it. Anyone else have that feeling too?
Maybe the mettle of/. should be put to the test. I've heard fierce boycott cries against companies such as Amazon and Yahoo for lesser offenses. For all intents and purposes, metallica is a commercial corporate entity and everyone is 'mad' at them so why not boycott metallica too? Or are slashdotters just too small, irrelevant and too attached to their precious metallica CDs?
From a programmer's point of view, the moment you can write a new routine or program perfectly in the first try, then something is wrong. You are writing it perfectly because you can probably do it in your sleep. It's boring code, versions of which you've written a thousand times before. You learn by making mistakes and if you are making mistakes in your code (and fixing them) , then you are learning something. Perfectly crafted programs are signs that you are not learning anything new, just executing a known pattern and dying of boredom in the process.
IMO, English will rule because of the simple fact that no one is trying to dictate it's structure. Instead it evolves and grows by invention and adoption from other languages. No person or commitee can forsee all the different uses a language will be put to, the same way a commitee can't efficiently control an economy. The Soviets tried it with the economy, look where they are now. The French are trying it with French and they are failing pretty miserably too. There are simply too many nooks and crannies that 10 people around a table can't possibly see.
Another reason for English dominance is that all programming languages are essentialy in English.
But really, what difference does it make as long as the dominant language can be typed in ASCII?
Why do they think I should have to download 50+MB every time I want to see an episode? If you are giving it away free, why not just give it instead of dangling it in front of my bandwidth challenged face? At first I was ecstatic, now I'm just pissed... It's becoming more prevalent on the web. More and more sites are using Apple's Quicktime "feature" to make sure the user can't save a movie to disk for *gasp* another view. I should of have realized it was coming when Quicktime came out with that braindead installation, forcing you to re-download the thing every time (I got around that, though). And what does it give them except for excessive network traffic? They are giving it away for FREE for crying out loud. Talk about clueless management...
To me it sounds like the first step in an effort by MS to dump the dying Windows CE. CE never got off the ground in any arena it was targeted for, PDA's, set top boxes, toasters, etc. Now they have declared their plans for their so called X thingamagig (gee, is that an original name) which I doubt will use CE (how many reboots just when you broke your highscore before that thing is tossed outside the window?) but a new fangled and hopefully more stable OS. So the question is, what do we do with the dead duck CE? We "open source" it! It's brilliant! We can slow down development on CE for the next 2 years until we finally stop. If anyone wants to develop it they have the source, it's not our problem anymore. There is good PR here too. We didn't kill CE, we gave it away!
You can't blame iCrave for what they are doing, their aim is to survive. I think the case only illustrates what the RIAA is intended for and is really good at - screwing its member companies' consumers, the American public.
From what I remember from a VLSI course I took, there is always a problem with heat in ICs. In the normal operation of transistors there is a great deal of rapid acceleration of electrons going on. Especially, as feature sizes go down, switching speeds go up and heat goes up. Most electrons accelerate, as they should, from one end of the transistor (drain in, MOS) to the other (source, in MOS). But there are 'rogue' electrons that shoot off in other directions at high speed and hit the transistor itself (oxide layer below the gate, in MOS) and stay there. Eventually, as enough electrons do this, the transistor is damaged and will malfunction (in MOS, the oxide layer will begin conducting, which is bad). Hotter tempartures accelerate this process. This means that all modern ICs will eventually fail (feature sizes are sufficiently small, switching is fast enough and heat is high enough). From what I know, a pentium II is designed to last, on average, 10 years. The moral of the story? No matter what you do, your chip is going to fail eventually but you might be able to prolong its life by keeping it cooler.
Has anyone noticed how the geeks at slashdot are becoming more and more settled into ungeek-like ways? It used to be that new items would be added to slashdot at all hours of the day and night (very geeky). Not anymore. Items are now rarely posted before 900am (Is that when you get to work, guys?) And post times don't go very late into the night (very ungeeky). What happened to your geeky ways? Did success make you dizzy?
The reason I've noticed is that I'm 10 timezones away and slashdot is quite boring during the day here...
Was there no way to avoid having private members (data and methods) of a class in the main definition of a class? One of the ideas of OO is information hiding and encapsulation of implementation details. Private data members declared in a class definition used by external objects runs counter to these OO concepts. Other objects are supposed to be "blind" to the inner workings of the object and yet see private methods and data members. IMHO it is also a major hassle in the earlier stages of a new project or new additions to a project, when changes in the inner workings of classes are frequent. I realize that part of the problem is the need to know the size of the object for memory allocation purposes. Did you think of this contradiction when designing C++ and were there any attempts at solving it?
oops... (just in case it wasn't obvious like I thought it was) .....It would be just a matter of disassembling the player software and finding the point where the stream is in it's cleartext MPEG form or rasterized.
There is another potential 'cleartext' hole which would be much easier to hack into and would be portable. It is very unlikely the that the 'protected' content is directly encoded into the encrypted monitor driving signals. In other words a movie on a disc would still be encoded as an MPEG stream and not an HDCP stream. Software that would want to run a DVD, for instance, would decrpyt the DVD (MPEG) and then re-encrypt it (through the driver or specialized hardware?) into the encrypted monitor driving signals (HDCP). Unless these conversions are done in some specialized chip it would be just a matter of disassembling the player software. IMHO, it is highly unlikely that there will be such specialized hardware.
I'm relatively new to Linux but I'm not new to computers and I can tell you that the last thing a person, any person, should have to do is recompile any kind of code to get something working. Just because you can recompile the kernel doesn't mean it's desirable. In fact, it's a boring hassle.
I, for one, am pretty sick of all the fiddling that has to go on to get something working in Linux, Windoze or any other OS I've seen.
First ask yourself two questions: 1. is the information your password is protecting really important? 2. do you really think anyone is bored enough to actually want to break into whatever it is you are protecting? Hackers/crackers have alot of work to do and I'm not so sure that your shell account is a priority. 3. is the information you're protecting on your computer?
If all three answers are false (and this is the case 90% of the time, e.g. hotmail account or countless other web accounts) then make your life easier by keeping this trivial password, along with all the other trivial passwords, in a plaintext file in a convenient place for you to look up. If your account/information is on a remote computer then keeping your passwords in plaintext on your home computer will not compromise your security unless someone decides to rummage through your home computer (not very likely if this hacker is sitting 1000 miles away and attacking the server. How would he know to find your computer?).
If, against all odds, you find that the information is important (secret diary? Swiss bank account? Nude photos of your neighbor and his dog?) invent a password that is easy to remember (try any random jumble of letters and stick in some vowels, for example: ynbsk --> YaniBusek) and use your memory (the gooey kind in between your ears).
It's amazing there is someone that actualy wants to go through the AOL website... But for the sake of complete fairness I think that any braille they have should be interrupted by commercial messages so as to make the experience as close to possible to the real visual thing.....
Slashdot Mirror
DNS was formed as a convenience when the net was relatively small and was comprised of the military, government, universities and misc. companies participating in research. It worked because the participants were few enough to not have many domain name conflicts (I'm sure they had a few). They had enough new territory to share among themselves.
Today it is outdated. There are more people vying for domain names while the number of words in the English language has not increased significantly. Adding TLDs will not alleviate the problem.
Of what use is it to add more TLDs? Of what utility is it that a site can call itself slashdot.sex or slashdot.nerd? There is no reason to add more TLDs because they don't add anything, they only shift the problem somewhere else.
As an example, suppose I get up one morning and decide that I want a site called Slashdot. Shucks it's taken under .org so I'll go and register it under .sex. There now I have a web site called slashdot.sex and there are now two sites called slashdot. I've created some confusion for people and gained nothing by being confused with that other wimpy site, slashdot.org. After all, I wanted that domain so I could be unique on the net.
No, the current DNS system is obsolete.
If a new system is to be started it should be based on a different concept. (I'll be damned if I know what it is ;-)
Maybe there is no good way to solve this problem (maybe there too few English words to go around) and we are stuck with the DNS system becuase there is no other 'better' way.
Hotmail started "logging off" users directly to msn.com shortly after it was bought by M$. They are not very polite about it either. There are at least two redirection attempts, one as a redirect meta tag. Another is in Javascript which, if I remember correctly, will continue trying to redirect the browser until it succeeds.
If M$ can do it without a comment from anyone, why shouldn't everyone else do it?
You misunderstood what I wrote. I'm talking about the "development of software". To me this means everything from the first napkin drawing, through the design specification to the actual act of programming it to work. This whole process is a black art, from the napkin to the code.
The only time software development is not so, is when you are developing a limited variation on something that has been done before.
Bleeding edge software development is always trial and error. If it were not, there would be no dotcom corpses floating around.
Formal this, formal that. Software development is a black art inspite of attempts at trying to formalize it; From flow charts to design specs to UML.
Formal is nice but it almost never works in the real world.
So far, good design is a result of an ongoing process of trial and error and never the fruit of a first attempt.
Open source takes it to the extreme by creating a massively parallel trial and error machine with a decent "good design" selection process.
Does anyone have a game that actually maxes out any of the current generation of video card, or the previous generation for that matter?
QA3 at 170fps is meaningless.
Nevermind the fact that M$s request smacks of censorship (and /. did censor the messages quoted in the email) The logical conclusion of this is that tomorrow I can publish my 'For Loop Specification, Version 1.0' and threaten to sue anyone who implements it and possibly win under the DMCA.
But for loops have been here long before my spec. so I can't do that. So why does M$ think it can take Kerberos, shift a byte and copyright it?!?! The mind boggles.
If they have a legal leg to stand on, God have mercy on America because it's the beginning of the end.
I also have serious doubts about the legality of their 'license' barring implementation of the spec. but I can't quite put my finger on it. Anyone else have that feeling too?
Maybe the mettle of /. should be put to the test.
I've heard fierce boycott cries against companies such as Amazon and Yahoo for lesser offenses.
For all intents and purposes, metallica is a commercial corporate entity and everyone is 'mad' at them so why not boycott metallica too?
Or are slashdotters just too small, irrelevant and too attached to their precious metallica CDs?
From a programmer's point of view, the moment you can write a new routine or program perfectly in the first try, then something is wrong.
You are writing it perfectly because you can probably do it in your sleep. It's boring code, versions of which you've written a thousand times before. You learn by making mistakes and if you are making mistakes in your code (and fixing them) , then you are learning something.
Perfectly crafted programs are signs that you are not learning anything new, just executing a known pattern and dying of boredom in the process.
IMO, English will rule because of the simple fact that no one is trying to dictate it's structure. Instead it evolves and grows by invention and adoption from other languages.
No person or commitee can forsee all the different uses a language will be put to, the same way a commitee can't efficiently control an economy. The Soviets tried it with the economy, look where they are now. The French are trying it with French and they are failing pretty miserably too. There are simply too many nooks and crannies that 10 people around a table can't possibly see.
Another reason for English dominance is that all programming languages are essentialy in English.
But really, what difference does it make as long as the dominant language can be typed in ASCII?
The sum of all intelligence on the planet is constant.
The population is growing.
Why do they think I should have to download 50+MB every time I want to see an episode?
If you are giving it away free, why not just give it instead of dangling it in front of my bandwidth challenged face?
At first I was ecstatic, now I'm just pissed...
It's becoming more prevalent on the web. More and more sites are using Apple's Quicktime "feature" to make sure the user can't save a movie to disk for *gasp* another view.
I should of have realized it was coming when Quicktime came out with that braindead installation, forcing you to re-download the thing every time (I got around that, though).
And what does it give them except for excessive network traffic? They are giving it away for FREE for crying out loud.
Talk about clueless management...
And add to that that CDs have been at $14 for the last 15 years, far too long to reflect any real production costs but instead a cozy cartel.
CE never got off the ground in any arena it was targeted for, PDA's, set top boxes, toasters, etc.
Now they have declared their plans for their so called X thingamagig (gee, is that an original name) which I doubt will use CE (how many reboots just when you broke your highscore before that thing is tossed outside the window?) but a new fangled and hopefully more stable OS.
So the question is, what do we do with the dead duck CE? We "open source" it! It's brilliant! We can slow down development on CE for the next 2 years until we finally stop. If anyone wants to develop it they have the source, it's not our problem anymore.
There is good PR here too. We didn't kill CE, we gave it away!
I say CE is headed for the MS dustbin.
You can't blame iCrave for what they are doing, their aim is to survive.
I think the case only illustrates what the RIAA is intended for and is really good at - screwing its member companies' consumers, the American public.
Here is a copy of the Audio Home Recording Act. Read it and see that the RIAA is dabbling in misinformation.
From what I remember from a VLSI course I took, there is always a problem with heat in ICs.
In the normal operation of transistors there is a great deal of rapid acceleration of electrons going on. Especially, as feature sizes go down, switching speeds go up and heat goes up.
Most electrons accelerate, as they should, from one end of the transistor (drain in, MOS) to the other (source, in MOS). But there are 'rogue' electrons that shoot off in other directions at high speed and hit the transistor itself (oxide layer below the gate, in MOS) and stay there. Eventually, as enough electrons do this, the transistor is damaged and will malfunction (in MOS, the oxide layer will begin conducting, which is bad).
Hotter tempartures accelerate this process.
This means that all modern ICs will eventually fail (feature sizes are sufficiently small, switching is fast enough and heat is high enough). From what I know, a pentium II is designed to last, on average, 10 years.
The moral of the story?
No matter what you do, your chip is going to fail eventually but you might be able to prolong its life by keeping it cooler.
It used to be that new items would be added to slashdot at all hours of the day and night (very geeky). Not anymore. Items are now rarely posted before 900am (Is that when you get to work, guys?) And post times don't go very late into the night (very ungeeky).
What happened to your geeky ways?
Did success make you dizzy?
The reason I've noticed is that I'm 10 timezones away and slashdot is quite boring during the day here...
Was there no way to avoid having private members (data and methods) of a class in the main definition of a class?
One of the ideas of OO is information hiding and encapsulation of implementation details.
Private data members declared in a class definition used by external objects runs counter to these OO concepts. Other objects are supposed to be "blind" to the inner workings of the object and yet see private methods and data members.
IMHO it is also a major hassle in the earlier stages of a new project or new additions to a project, when changes in the inner workings of classes are frequent.
I realize that part of the problem is the need to know the size of the object for memory allocation purposes.
Did you think of this contradiction when designing C++ and were there any attempts at solving it?
And what is 'full enterprise solution' if not a marketing euphemism for application development tools?
oops...
.....It would be just a matter of disassembling the player software and finding the point where the stream is in it's cleartext MPEG form or rasterized.
(just in case it wasn't obvious like I thought it was)
There is another potential 'cleartext' hole which would be much easier to hack into and would be portable.
It is very unlikely the that the 'protected' content is directly encoded into the encrypted monitor driving signals. In other words a movie on a disc would still be encoded as an MPEG stream and not an HDCP stream.
Software that would want to run a DVD, for instance, would decrpyt the DVD (MPEG) and then re-encrypt it (through the driver or specialized hardware?) into the encrypted monitor driving signals (HDCP).
Unless these conversions are done in some specialized chip it would be just a matter of disassembling the player software.
IMHO, it is highly unlikely that there will be such specialized hardware.
I'm relatively new to Linux but I'm not new to computers and I can tell you that the last thing a person, any person, should have to do is recompile any kind of code to get something working. Just because you can recompile the kernel doesn't mean it's desirable. In fact, it's a boring hassle.
I, for one, am pretty sick of all the fiddling that has to go on to get something working in Linux, Windoze or any other OS I've seen.
Is anything better possible?
First ask yourself two questions:
1. is the information your password is protecting really important?
2. do you really think anyone is bored enough to actually want to break into whatever it is you are protecting? Hackers/crackers have alot of work to do and I'm not so sure that your shell account is a priority.
3. is the information you're protecting on your computer?
If all three answers are false (and this is the case 90% of the time, e.g. hotmail account or countless other web accounts) then make your life easier by keeping this trivial password, along with all the other trivial passwords, in a plaintext file in a convenient place for you to look up.
If your account/information is on a remote computer then keeping your passwords in plaintext on your home computer will not compromise your security unless someone decides to rummage through your home computer (not very likely if this hacker is sitting 1000 miles away and attacking the server. How would he know to find your computer?).
If, against all odds, you find that the information is important (secret diary? Swiss bank account? Nude photos of your neighbor and his dog?) invent a password that is easy to remember (try any random jumble of letters and stick in some vowels, for example: ynbsk --> YaniBusek) and use your memory (the gooey kind in between your ears).
It's amazing there is someone that actualy wants to go through the AOL website... But for the sake of complete fairness I think that any braille they have should be interrupted by commercial messages so as to make the experience as close to possible to the real visual thing.....