The worm could, once installed, have 2 different stages. 1st is replication stage (goes to the internet - maybe search engines - to find other IIS sites)
I'd say that these kinds of bugs would be easier to spot and patch if, say, the source code was available. But I doubt there's many people who read/. who don't know that already. =)
so it seems that ISS are running around jamming fingers in dykes
While Merriam-Webster says that "dyke" is an acceptable (mostly British) spelling of that particular word, in general, I thnk it's more socially acceptable to jam fingers into "dikes".
That's because WebBench is a useless benchmark. Anyone can dump static pages from memory to an ethernet controller. WebBench is little more than an ad for IIS. Does it matter how fast a web server is if my clients are at the other end of a 128kbps pipe or worse?
Apache isn't designed to be fast in these circumstances. It's designed to be stable and flexible. There are other web server choices out there that would be faster in WebBench, including probably 10 lines of Perl code.
One point of view is that at the very least, you'll only be subjected to one page of ads at most (the results page) as interfaces to sites become more distributed.
This is already evident with the true usefulness of things like Apple's Sherlock, and to a lesser extend, the googol search slashbox. Content is opening up -- at some point, users will take the power into their own hands and decide how they want their content presented.
I'm already paying for advertising in my time and attention. Personally, I'd rather micropay Rob directly. Maybe US$.10 for each day that I view/. I get at least US$36.50 of information, enjoyment, fulfillment out of/. per year. Why not pay for it?
Ad banners are a poor revenue model. Clickthru rates are falling and will continue to fall -- see Jakob Nielsen's site for more details.
I'm not saying that micropayments are a great answer...but they would make the web more competetive for what's *really* worthwhile - content.
Well, when all the internet stock values finally deflates, and all the hype is washed away (and a few people jump out of windows when all their portfolio becomes worthless), there will still be information that people need to be able to find.
People will still use search engines like google. And those engines will be valuable, because they provide relevant, useful results.
You can only provide so much support for a piece of software without having the source code in your hands. If you find a bug, you can only fix it if you have the source code. With proprietary software, only the software vendor itself has that code, and thus it is the only truly competent support organization. If you really need a package to run, your chain of support must go to the vendor. If you don't get support from the vendor, you get support from someone who gets support from the vendor. If you don't like the support you get, you either live with it, or change support by changing vendors.
Support costs vendors money. Therefore, they charge money for support. Time comes, they're making a lot of money from their support. At this point, it's becoming in the vendor's best interests to release software that requires support. This leads to software that contains bugs and/or is harder to use/implement. This is regarded as a bad thing.
I'm not saying this is what happens with every vendor. But it is all too likely, what with the money MS makes in support.
My Math is a bit rusty, but IIRC, chaos theories say that things are deterministic but not predictable (because we do not have enough computing power), meaning given one initial condition, only one set of final results may be expected. For example, those nice Julian sets always give you the same result if you use the same input parameters.
yes -- things are deterministic, if you can know initial conditions precisely. In the real world, this is never possible. And as the treatise on SDIC above points out, once you have uncertainty, those uncertainties can have as large an effect as is possible.
Not being a mathematician or meteorologist, I can't be 100% sure, but I'm pretty confident that your statement is inaccurate.
Despite, or maybe even because of it, chaos theory, a certain amount of accuracy can be found. It may not help us discover the weather a week from now, but there are instances where knowing the weather 15 minutes from now, and down to the meter, would be enormously useful.
I had a feeling I wasn't precise enough. You make some good points. Chaos theory says that we can't predict the weather deterministically for all future times, given knowledge of one state.
What, in essence, your post is talking about is limiting the size of X -- which is the range of possible conditions, and placing an upper bound on n, the number of iterations made on the initial conditions.
I wasn't trying to say that supercomputers are useless for weather -- more just an explanation of an accepted but often not understood maxim of chaos.
Not being a mathematician or meteorologist, I can't be 100% sure, but I'm pretty confident that your statement is inaccurate. Despite, or maybe even because of it, chaos theory, a certain amount of accuracy can be found. It may not help us discover the weather a week from now, but there are instances where knowing the weather 15 minutes from now, and down to the meter, would be enormously useful. I had a feeling I wasn't precise enough. You make some good points. Chaos theory says that we can't predict the weather deterministically for all future times, given knowledge of one state. What, in essence, your post is talking about is limiting the size of X -- which is the range of possible conditions, and placing an upper bound on n, the number of iterations made on the initial conditions. I wasn't trying to say that supercomputers are useless for weather -- more just an explanation of an accepted but often not understood maxim of chaos.
Weather is causal (sp?). It's not like a hurricane in Japan would just come from nowhere, Jon Katz's sneeze would've caused it (not too sure about a sneeze causing a hurricane, but you get the idea) and meterologists would see it coming.
The meaning behind the "sneeze causing a hurricane across the globe" is based on the well-founded (i'm assuming) notion that the global weather system is mathematically chaotic.
One of the properties of chaos is Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions (SDIC). Consider the possible conditions of weather (or any chaotic system) as the set X. The function f(x) maps current conditions to conditions a small time into the future. Mathematically speaking, f maps X -> X. Successive iterations of f map further and further into the future.
SDIC says that the value dy = |f(n)(x) - f(n)(x + dx)| can be made as large as possible, no matter how small the value of dx -- simply by choosing an appropriate number n. To clarify, f(3)(x) = f(f(f(x))). (/. doesn't let me use superscripts: =P CmdrTaco)
This means that this is possible: f(2days)(world) = calm weather in Asia f(2days)(world + JKatz's sneeze) = typhoons
Or any number of other possible combinations...Chaos means that, over time, no matter how precise our measurement of initial conditions can get, it's still not precise enough.
IE5 CSS support is just enough to hurt yourself with. That is, it lets you do a lot of things, but doesn't let you do everything you should be able to. Unfortunately, since these specs are never documented, it becomes difficult to tell if the error is in your own coding of a stylesheet, or in the implementation in IE.
A good article on IE 5's css support is available.
This goes for every other incomplete implementation of CSS in release browsers. Incomplete is just a subset of wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
The worm could, once installed, have 2 different stages. 1st is replication stage (goes to the internet - maybe search engines - to find other IIS sites)
Netcraft would be a good place to start looking.
I'd say that these kinds of bugs would be easier to spot and patch if, say, the source code was available. But I doubt there's many people who read /. who don't know that already. =)
Don't forget radar detectors! Why are those things legal?
Because I have a reasonable right to do what I please with the electromagnetic waves that enter my car? Speeding's still illegal.
Actually, they're numbered first, named later. IUPAC has recommended names for most of the recent extremely heave elements
so it seems that ISS are running around jamming fingers in dykes
While Merriam-Webster says that "dyke" is an acceptable (mostly British) spelling of that particular word, in general, I thnk it's more socially acceptable to jam fingers into "dikes".
That's because WebBench is a useless benchmark. Anyone can dump static pages from memory to an ethernet controller. WebBench is little more than an ad for IIS. Does it matter how fast a web server is if my clients are at the other end of a 128kbps pipe or worse?
Apache isn't designed to be fast in these circumstances. It's designed to be stable and flexible. There are other web server choices out there that would be faster in WebBench, including probably 10 lines of Perl code.
And isn't MCI/WorldCom also trying to regain the monopoly that AT&T once had?
One point of view is that at the very least, you'll only be subjected to one page of ads at most (the results page) as interfaces to sites become more distributed.
This is already evident with the true usefulness of things like Apple's Sherlock, and to a lesser extend, the googol search slashbox. Content is opening up -- at some point, users will take the power into their own hands and decide how they want their content presented.
I'm already paying for advertising in my time and attention. Personally, I'd rather micropay Rob directly. Maybe US$.10 for each day that I view /. I get at least US$36.50 of information, enjoyment, fulfillment out of /. per year. Why not pay for it?
Ad banners are a poor revenue model. Clickthru rates are falling and will continue to fall -- see Jakob Nielsen's site for more details.
I'm not saying that micropayments are a great answer...but they would make the web more competetive for what's *really* worthwhile - content.
Well, when all the internet stock values finally deflates, and all the hype is washed away (and a few people jump out of windows when all their portfolio becomes worthless), there will still be information that people need to be able to find.
People will still use search engines like google. And those engines will be valuable, because they provide relevant, useful results.
How long before the google engine only becomes accessible through some overburdened overbranded 'portal' site?
Support costs vendors money. Therefore, they charge money for support. Time comes, they're making a lot of money from their support. At this point, it's becoming in the vendor's best interests to release software that requires support. This leads to software that contains bugs and/or is harder to use/implement. This is regarded as a bad thing.
I'm not saying this is what happens with every vendor. But it is all too likely, what with the money MS makes in support.
yes -- things are deterministic, if you can know initial conditions precisely. In the real world, this is never possible. And as the treatise on SDIC above points out, once you have uncertainty, those uncertainties can have as large an effect as is possible.
second try - /. barfed the first time
I had a feeling I wasn't precise enough. You make some good points. Chaos theory says that we can't predict the weather deterministically for all future times, given knowledge of one state.
What, in essence, your post is talking about is limiting the size of X -- which is the range of possible conditions, and placing an upper bound on n, the number of iterations made on the initial conditions.
I wasn't trying to say that supercomputers are useless for weather -- more just an explanation of an accepted but often not understood maxim of chaos.
Not being a mathematician or meteorologist, I can't be 100% sure, but I'm pretty confident that your statement is inaccurate. Despite, or maybe even because of it, chaos theory, a certain amount of accuracy can be found. It may not help us discover the weather a week from now, but there are instances where knowing the weather 15 minutes from now, and down to the meter, would be enormously useful. I had a feeling I wasn't precise enough. You make some good points. Chaos theory says that we can't predict the weather deterministically for all future times, given knowledge of one state. What, in essence, your post is talking about is limiting the size of X -- which is the range of possible conditions, and placing an upper bound on n, the number of iterations made on the initial conditions. I wasn't trying to say that supercomputers are useless for weather -- more just an explanation of an accepted but often not understood maxim of chaos.
The meaning behind the "sneeze causing a hurricane across the globe" is based on the well-founded (i'm assuming) notion that the global weather system is mathematically chaotic.
One of the properties of chaos is Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions (SDIC). Consider the possible conditions of weather (or any chaotic system) as the set X. The function f(x) maps current conditions to conditions a small time into the future. Mathematically speaking, f maps X -> X. Successive iterations of f map further and further into the future.
SDIC says that the value dy = |f(n)(x) - f(n)(x + dx)| can be made as large as possible, no matter how small the value of dx -- simply by choosing an appropriate number n. To clarify, f(3)(x) = f(f(f(x))). (/. doesn't let me use superscripts: =P CmdrTaco)
This means that this is possible:
f(2days)(world) = calm weather in Asia
f(2days)(world + JKatz's sneeze) = typhoons
Or any number of other possible combinations...Chaos means that, over time, no matter how precise our measurement of initial conditions can get, it's still not precise enough.
If bloat is your concern, and text is your desire, doesn't it make as much sense to have a way to embed lynx as your HTML help file viewer?
What's the footprint on Lynx anyway?
Uptime isn't uptime if you're not up. Duh. =)
Maybe you should write your own statistic -- time since last crash. That would be more meaningful to what you're talking about than uptime.
I dunno. Mug you afterwards?
I, for one, have added to my bookmark list. Can't remember if I used it later, though. Win32.
IE5 CSS support is just enough to hurt yourself with. That is, it lets you do a lot of things, but doesn't let you do everything you should be able to. Unfortunately, since these specs are never documented, it becomes difficult to tell if the error is in your own coding of a stylesheet, or in the implementation in IE.
A good article on IE 5's css support is available.
This goes for every other incomplete implementation of CSS in release browsers. Incomplete is just a subset of wrong.
That's why community minded individuals created cypherpunks/cypherpunks
/. with that sometime.
Hm. I should try logging into
I'd like to be able to grope via packets over the internet. Alas.
And Ping doesn't stand for anything. It's just Ping. Like the submarines do.
Whoops. My mistake.
I suppose if it were the UN, they'd just sit around in blue helmets and watch the domain squatters keep squatting.