Well, I'm sure the Swedish government will be tracking you down to have a word with you, since it's YOUR post that will have been responsible for Slashdotting The Swedish Immigration Board's website now...
I have to admit, the idea of real LAN-speed broadband internet in my home is givin' me a nerd-on...
How long will it be, really, before someone either reverse-engineers (or Google provides?) the queries and data that go back and forth? It seems pretty obvious that all of the data is kept server side, and the download for the Windows(tm) version of the application seems to only be about 10MB or so (so I'm guessing - and it IS only a guess - that there's not a lot of processing that the client side has to do).
QT has OpenGL classes in it, doesn't it? How long before there's a "KGoogleEarth" project?...
In reading the links there, it looks like this may NOT be GPL-incompatible (the attribution, etc. restrictions would only apply to the specifications document, NOT to software implementations OF that specification, right?). Is Microsoft finally getting through it's growing pains to become a "mature[1]" company?
With the Office 12 "we decided to roll our own after OASIS did all the initial design work rather than work with them" XML-in-a-ZIP file formats, it seems like the formats THEMSELVES are under similar restrictions, though, so as to prevent GPL-licensed projects from using them legally (simplistic explanation - the GPL says (to paraphrase) "You can't impose any additional restrictions on people to whom you redistribute this or derivatives of it". "You must include the following attribution: [blah blah blah]" is an additional restriction. Sure, it's a very minor restriction, which allows MS to turn around and yell "see how unreasonably those horrible GPL people are? All we wanted was a little credit!" in hopes of undermining the GPL...)
Or are things better or worse than I imagine here?...
[1]As opposed to a company that is still trying to grow (or "growing up"?)
A group of 4 engineers are arguing about the nature of God. Since He is a "creator", that must mean he's some kind of engineer, right? They decide that by examining the human body, they can settle the question of what kind of engineer God is.
"God is obviously a mechanical engineer" says one, and goes on to marvel over the construction of joints and sinews in the human body.
"No, no, he's obviously a chemical engineer" says another, and waxes poetically about the amazing processes of digestion and the composition of the human bloodstream.
"You're both wrong, he's obviously an electrical engineer" opines another, who goes on to describe the complex interplay of electrical signals in the human nervous system.
Finally the last engineer speaks up. "No, it's obvious God is a civil engineer." "A civil engineer? How do you figure that?"...
"Who ELSE would run a sewage pipeline through the middle of a recreational area?"
So I now wonder how ClamAV would perform against the proprietary alternatives...
Actually quite well, in my experience.
We installed a spam/virus scanner to handle incoming internet mail before it goes into our 'internal' mail server, which runs Symantec(tm) Antivirus.
The scanner is running ClamAV via ClamSMTP. Since installing this, the Symantec logs have only shown ONE virus hitting the mail system...which came from someone internal who brought the virus in on a laptop (grrrrr...) and not from the internet at all. So, thus far, it looks like ClamAV is catching everything that Symantec would have caught, and possibly more.
Here's a bit of Useless Knowledge(tm) for everyone: I seem to recall reading somewhere that polar bear milk was something like 40% fat, which seems like it would therefore be suitable for making ice-cream from directly...
I leave the technical challenges involved in milking the polar bears and trying to market "walrus-vanilla flavor ice cream" to a more enterprising individual...
Considering how much my spam has been reduced by the SBL (anywhere from at least 50% up to 75%) I'd like to just say:
The mail servers under my control have always subscribed to the SBL-XBL (well, more accurately, before the XBL was established it was the SBL and cbl.abuseat.org. The latter is dedicated to short-term [72 hours, as I recall] blocking of e.g. spammers operating on DSL or cablemodem lines who are likely to appear on an IP address once or twice and then get kicked off. The CBL is now also represented in the XBL). I have so far, in the last 3-4 years or so, only been able to confirm 1 and 1/2 "false" positives in that entire time - one was from a person in China who was using a confirmed spam-haven ISP, the "1/2" from a company that, after an informative response from the CBL people, I believe were listed for appropriate reasons. In any case, the latter case cleared itself up when they were automatically re-removed from the CBL [they'd been there before] and the email lost WAS an advertisement anyway...)
I have noticed the numerous stories of overzealous blocklists, which are obviously a bad thing, but I can't think of a way to reasonably put the SBL in that category...
Besides, bayesian filtering only works AFTER the spammer has been allowed to tie up my mail server's bandwidth (and then allows them to tie up your mail server's CPU time with the bayesian analysis). I prefer to cut off known spammers before that point whenever possible. THEN I pass the remaining messages through SpamAssassin. Back in the early days of spam, I used to actually go to the effort of picking apart the mail headers and looking up the abuse addresses for the ISP whence the mail came AND the hoster of the spammers website (and on one or two occasions, even the registrar for the spammer's domain name, when I could confirm that the information was falsified). It's been a long time since I was able to keep up doing that with the volume of spam coming in, but I still can't stand the thought of allowing spammers to take ANYTHING from me that I can prevent...
I USED to be able to follow developments in PHP via the PHP Weekly Summaries, but these "weekly" summaries got sporadic late last year (several weeks without any, then the missing weeks would all show up at once) and now it hasn't even been updated in several months...
PHP IS still being developed, I assume, but I haven't spotted any news on it in some time...
I mean that question literally - i.e. will this mean will someone with an MS Windows box be able to go out, license Mac-OSX-for-Intel(tm)-CPU's, and overwrite his or her MS Windows installation (much as I do with Linux)?
Currently, to convert a Windows user Apple has to convince someone to buy a whole new computer to get the OS. If the barrier to entry is about to drop down to "just a license for the new OS" they might see a much faster uptake rate...
An earlier story seemed to hint that current usage of Mac's online might be 16% or so (so much for "90% of desktops" number that gets thrown around so casually if that is true). What percentage is needed to achieve "critical mass"?
Incidentally, this is EXACTLY how OpenOffice 2.x works. The files created in the native format are...XML and embedded components as individual files in a.zip archive.
Microsoft just wants to avoid "playing well with others" (I would be happy to be proven wrong by finding out that MS is really just using the OASIS format without saying so...)
This is an important point, but it seemed obvious to me that the original poster merely didn't consider the terms of the GPL to be an "encumberance" (which, so long as you don't want to try to add additional restrictions to the rights granted to people that you redistribute to, they aren't really). I didn't get that the poster was trying to assert the Linux was public domain.
It's just a matter of semantics, but there is a difference between being "protected" and being "encumbered"...
That's actually the part I'm not sure about - I know I could e.g. format an old 6GB HDD and then use dd to make a filesystem image that I could mount, but I haven't done any digging to find out if it's possible to directly create a ('standard') filesystem as an image file. (Hints welcome...)
Perlfs looks interesting but it appears as though it hasn't been updated in a while (the homepage talks about adding support for linux "2.5" at some point...)
A barely-related subject - I've been wondering whether there's some way to collect the unused space on all the Windows workstations around here into a shared space for storage.
This is purely a speculative exercise, but I keep wondering if some combination of:
Every Windows(tm) workstation "shares" an otherwise-empty subdirectory
a Linux box creates and uses a "filesystem image" file of some kind ("loopback mount"-style image) stored on each share over SMB/CIFS
Linux uses VFS to combine the individual virtual drives into a larger drive (or perhaps two identical-size virtual drives, which are then combined into a single software RAID 1 array?)
Linux then shares this Rube-Goldbergian system as a Samba share...
Yes, I know it's kind of silly, and performance seems like it would be pretty pathetic, but the more I think about it, the more I want to see if I could actually do it (think pretty much the same mindset that the IP-over-carrier-pigeon guys had...)
Heck, it might conceivably actually WORK for a large-but-infrequently-accessed historical repository or something...
Or has someone already started some sort of "Virtual ATA-over-ethernet-from-a-file driver for Windows" project and spoiled my fun?...
Well, indirectly. The article says that Microsoft has been "repeatedly disabling the ability to send TCP/IP packets via "raw sockets"" but that "Security professionals rely heavily on raw sockets".
The conclusion seems obvious to me...Either that or they're saying that Microsoft doesn't want security professionals using Windows. Either way, the way the story is written here amuses me.
[...]if they use a UV-C LED (280 nm wavelength)[...]
Are such things actually available yet? The shortest wavelength LED I'd been able to find for sale thus far was, as I recall, around 340nm, and THEY were $50US each...
How hard is it to turn a (presumably working) LCD from an old dead laptop into either a flatscreen monitor for a VGA signal or a display for analog video? How much of the circuitry necessary to drive the monitor is embedded in the laptop's mainboard and how much is part of the LCD panel?
Slashdot Mirror
Never mind those, when do I get PHPQT?...
If these were needed by anybody they would have been implemented in mysql[...]
(DING!) Your wish is granted...
Well, I'm sure the Swedish government will be tracking you down to have a word with you, since it's YOUR post that will have been responsible for Slashdotting The Swedish Immigration Board's website now...
I have to admit, the idea of real LAN-speed broadband internet in my home is givin' me a nerd-on...
Though Google themselves may not provide it.
How long will it be, really, before someone either reverse-engineers (or Google provides?) the queries and data that go back and forth? It seems pretty obvious that all of the data is kept server side, and the download for the Windows(tm) version of the application seems to only be about 10MB or so (so I'm guessing - and it IS only a guess - that there's not a lot of processing that the client side has to do).
QT has OpenGL classes in it, doesn't it? How long before there's a "KGoogleEarth" project?...
In reading the links there, it looks like this may NOT be GPL-incompatible (the attribution, etc. restrictions would only apply to the specifications document, NOT to software implementations OF that specification, right?). Is Microsoft finally getting through it's growing pains to become a "mature[1]" company?
With the Office 12 "we decided to roll our own after OASIS did all the initial design work rather than work with them" XML-in-a-ZIP file formats, it seems like the formats THEMSELVES are under similar restrictions, though, so as to prevent GPL-licensed projects from using them legally (simplistic explanation - the GPL says (to paraphrase) "You can't impose any additional restrictions on people to whom you redistribute this or derivatives of it". "You must include the following attribution: [blah blah blah]" is an additional restriction. Sure, it's a very minor restriction, which allows MS to turn around and yell "see how unreasonably those horrible GPL people are? All we wanted was a little credit!" in hopes of undermining the GPL...)
Or are things better or worse than I imagine here?...
[1]As opposed to a company that is still trying to grow (or "growing up"?)
The differences between a prostitute, a mistress, and a wife:
A prostitute says "Aren't you done yet?"
A mistress says "Are you done already?"
A wife says "Beige. I think we should paint the ceiling beige...."
A group of 4 engineers are arguing about the nature of God. Since He is a "creator", that must mean he's some kind of engineer, right? They decide that by examining the human body, they can settle the question of what kind of engineer God is.
"God is obviously a mechanical engineer" says one, and goes on to marvel over the construction of joints and sinews in the human body.
"No, no, he's obviously a chemical engineer" says another, and waxes poetically about the amazing processes of digestion and the composition of the human bloodstream.
"You're both wrong, he's obviously an electrical engineer" opines another, who goes on to describe the complex interplay of electrical signals in the human nervous system.
Finally the last engineer speaks up. "No, it's obvious God is a civil engineer." "A civil engineer? How do you figure that?"...
"Who ELSE would run a sewage pipeline through the middle of a recreational area?"
Actually quite well, in my experience.
We installed a spam/virus scanner to handle incoming internet mail before it goes into our 'internal' mail server, which runs Symantec(tm) Antivirus.
The scanner is running ClamAV via ClamSMTP. Since installing this, the Symantec logs have only shown ONE virus hitting the mail system...which came from someone internal who brought the virus in on a laptop (grrrrr...) and not from the internet at all. So, thus far, it looks like ClamAV is catching everything that Symantec would have caught, and possibly more.
Here's a bit of Useless Knowledge(tm) for everyone: I seem to recall reading somewhere that polar bear milk was something like 40% fat, which seems like it would therefore be suitable for making ice-cream from directly...
I leave the technical challenges involved in milking the polar bears and trying to market "walrus-vanilla flavor ice cream" to a more enterprising individual...
Considering how much my spam has been reduced by the SBL (anywhere from at least 50% up to 75%) I'd like to just say:
The mail servers under my control have always subscribed to the SBL-XBL (well, more accurately, before the XBL was established it was the SBL and cbl.abuseat.org. The latter is dedicated to short-term [72 hours, as I recall] blocking of e.g. spammers operating on DSL or cablemodem lines who are likely to appear on an IP address once or twice and then get kicked off. The CBL is now also represented in the XBL). I have so far, in the last 3-4 years or so, only been able to confirm 1 and 1/2 "false" positives in that entire time - one was from a person in China who was using a confirmed spam-haven ISP, the "1/2" from a company that, after an informative response from the CBL people, I believe were listed for appropriate reasons. In any case, the latter case cleared itself up when they were automatically re-removed from the CBL [they'd been there before] and the email lost WAS an advertisement anyway...)
I have noticed the numerous stories of overzealous blocklists, which are obviously a bad thing, but I can't think of a way to reasonably put the SBL in that category...
Besides, bayesian filtering only works AFTER the spammer has been allowed to tie up my mail server's bandwidth (and then allows them to tie up your mail server's CPU time with the bayesian analysis). I prefer to cut off known spammers before that point whenever possible. THEN I pass the remaining messages through SpamAssassin. Back in the early days of spam, I used to actually go to the effort of picking apart the mail headers and looking up the abuse addresses for the ISP whence the mail came AND the hoster of the spammers website (and on one or two occasions, even the registrar for the spammer's domain name, when I could confirm that the information was falsified). It's been a long time since I was able to keep up doing that with the volume of spam coming in, but I still can't stand the thought of allowing spammers to take ANYTHING from me that I can prevent...
I tend to agree, sadly, though I'd offer a slight correction (see .sig)
I USED to be able to follow developments in PHP via the PHP Weekly Summaries, but these "weekly" summaries got sporadic late last year (several weeks without any, then the missing weeks would all show up at once) and now it hasn't even been updated in several months...
PHP IS still being developed, I assume, but I haven't spotted any news on it in some time...
I call out once again to the slashdot coders - we need to add a "-1 Bad Pun" moderation. And a "+1 Bad Pun".
I mean that question literally - i.e. will this mean will someone with an MS Windows box be able to go out, license Mac-OSX-for-Intel(tm)-CPU's, and overwrite his or her MS Windows installation (much as I do with Linux)?
Currently, to convert a Windows user Apple has to convince someone to buy a whole new computer to get the OS. If the barrier to entry is about to drop down to "just a license for the new OS" they might see a much faster uptake rate...
An earlier story seemed to hint that current usage of Mac's online might be 16% or so (so much for "90% of desktops" number that gets thrown around so casually if that is true). What percentage is needed to achieve "critical mass"?
Incidentally, this is EXACTLY how OpenOffice 2.x works. The files created in the native format are...XML and embedded components as individual files in a .zip archive.
Microsoft just wants to avoid "playing well with others" (I would be happy to be proven wrong by finding out that MS is really just using the OASIS format without saying so...)
This is an important point, but it seemed obvious to me that the original poster merely didn't consider the terms of the GPL to be an "encumberance" (which, so long as you don't want to try to add additional restrictions to the rights granted to people that you redistribute to, they aren't really). I didn't get that the poster was trying to assert the Linux was public domain.
It's just a matter of semantics, but there is a difference between being "protected" and being "encumbered"...
Thanks - that saves my lazy butt from having to actually look at the man pages or whatever.
Now I have no excuse not to try it...
That's actually the part I'm not sure about - I know I could e.g. format an old 6GB HDD and then use dd to make a filesystem image that I could mount, but I haven't done any digging to find out if it's possible to directly create a ('standard') filesystem as an image file. (Hints welcome...)
Perlfs looks interesting but it appears as though it hasn't been updated in a while (the homepage talks about adding support for linux "2.5" at some point...)
A barely-related subject - I've been wondering whether there's some way to collect the unused space on all the Windows workstations around here into a shared space for storage.
This is purely a speculative exercise, but I keep wondering if some combination of:
Yes, I know it's kind of silly, and performance seems like it would be pretty pathetic, but the more I think about it, the more I want to see if I could actually do it (think pretty much the same mindset that the IP-over-carrier-pigeon guys had...)
Heck, it might conceivably actually WORK for a large-but-infrequently-accessed historical repository or something...
Or has someone already started some sort of "Virtual ATA-over-ethernet-from-a-file driver for Windows" project and spoiled my fun?...
There are several references demanding that Canada behave like "most developed countries" (or some variation).
This implies, of course, that there are other "developed" countries telling the U.S. media cartel's lobbyists "No."
Anybody know who they are?...
Well, indirectly. The article says that Microsoft has been "repeatedly disabling the ability to send TCP/IP packets via "raw sockets"" but that "Security professionals rely heavily on raw sockets".
The conclusion seems obvious to me...Either that or they're saying that Microsoft doesn't want security professionals using Windows. Either way, the way the story is written here amuses me.
Are such things actually available yet? The shortest wavelength LED I'd been able to find for sale thus far was, as I recall, around 340nm, and THEY were $50US each...
Yes - but Campbell's isn't going to threaten me with lawsuits if I want to design and build my OWN can-opener...
The same way that clicking "Start" is the intuitive and/or easy way to get to the "Shut Down" option...
...and War is Peace, and Freedom is Slavery, and so forth.
Hey, I didn't say it made SENSE...
How hard is it to turn a (presumably working) LCD from an old dead laptop into either a flatscreen monitor for a VGA signal or a display for analog video? How much of the circuitry necessary to drive the monitor is embedded in the laptop's mainboard and how much is part of the LCD panel?