Okay... so we can't fix the software or the users.
on
Clever New Windows Worm
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· Score: 5, Interesting
It's still mind-boggling to me that companies don't have
better policies in place for handling these situations. As
another poster mentioned using mail filters to strip
attachments w/ dangerous file types is nice and all,
but it isn't going to be 100% effective. George Guninski
released an example a while ago where filename.txt.{some big guid here}
would look just like filename.txt on the desktop, but when
opened you'd find it was HTML w/ an IE exploit inside.
So... now you have to add a rule to your filter script to
catch those, and hope that you knew about it before
an expoit in the wild. Not 100% safe.
Why are companies letting people thrash the mail system
inadvertantly and go on like nothing happened? This
is a social problem, albeit one that has been made more
prevalent by bad technology. So what if Outlook
took out the double-click-run-and-destroy feature for
attachments? Trojan's would get mailed along w/
instructions on how to safe to your disk and run the
program. And some idiot would do it too.
I'd much rather see corporations making their employees
responsible for breaking things on the network. If the
admin fscks up the entire system he'd be up to his
knees in shit -- but the "users" are allowed to do it
because they can claim ignorance? No thanks. Draw
up some strick hard-line rules for your employees and
get this crap taken care of. My personal suggestions
would be:
No using IE at work -- Netscape/Mozilla/Konq only. Far fewer vulnerabilities.
No Outlook/Outlook Express for mail. Use Outlook -only- for calendering functions. I'd personally like to see corps going back to how my old university did it. One Unix box w/ pine on it for users to read their mail. Use SMB to attach the user's/home dir to the Windows machine and let them save attachments that way. No HTML email viruses, no buffer overflows. Plain jane simple email.
Running an attachment sent via email should be punished just as if the user walked in w/ a virus on a disk and ran it from home. And make them -work- to get that attachment to run.
Forgo the use of the.doc format entirely. What's so bad with RTF? Do you -really- need to spend all this extra time authoring up nifty documents for internal use only? Sure, use.doc to interface with clients but keep it's use limited.
Sure, it's a bit drastic. But is productivity really benefiting from wreckless use/abuse of insecure software? Must your employees use Outlook so they get that warm fuzzy feeling of being able to fiddle with all sorts of buttons on their screen? Why can't the computer be viewed like another other tool? If you don't know how to use it why in the world are you using it at work? I wouldn't dream of putting joe-schmoe on a fork life w/out some training, why put people w/ no training on a computer? If joe-schmoe runs the fork-lift into a wall you bet he'll get some heat for it. Run a virus though? Nah, everybody does that.. let it slide, let IT clean it up.
Hey now... some people -need- that stuff to keep their hands from shaking. I know somebody who worked with a painter (house, not artist) that couldn't trim a window until he had a pint of booze in him. After that his hand was all nice and steady and his lines were as straight as can be.
There's a technical term for this disease.... but the name escapes me right now.:)
Okay, I took a gander at the horror stories and it seems that most of them flow along as such:
Buyer PayPal's somebody money for good/services. PayPal withdraws money from Buyer's bank account, holds it and places it within the Seller's PayPal account. Seller sees money in PayPal account and then sweeps it into their own bank account. Buyer never gets goods and complains to PayPal.
Well, duh. PayPal no longer has the money, why in the heck would they start shelling out money from their own pocket becuase -you- purchased something from a crook?
Use your heads... if you don't feel comfortable sending money to somebody use an escrow service or take your risks. Personally I think it's a great service. I mostly used it though to split bills w/ my roomate. No checks, no running to the bank, and I knew the guy wasn't going to hawk my half of the rent and run out on me.
PayPal's not trying to rip anybody off here. No evil corporation trying to take all of your money, no conspiracy theory and no black helicopters. Move along n ow.
I'll admit, drunk driving isn't the brightest idea i n the world but I honestly think it's taking more blame for traffic accidents than it really causes. I'd like to find some stats to actually research this (pointers anybody)? rather than my own anecdotal evidence though.
Accidents usually come down to one thing... people not paying enough attention. Granted, this is harder to do when you're drunk (and impossible after a certain point) but things like fast food, cell phones, the radio, etc all cause accidents. Cell-phones are taking some of the heat now but that's only because not all of the population needs/has a cell phone. Everybody eats, so it's acceptable to eat in the car. That's my own opinion. Now, for an ironic anecdotal story:
My brother was hanging out with some friends last weekend when one guy got up to leave and head home. He'd been drinking pretty heavy so one of the young women there who was dead-straight sober said to him he can't drive -- she'll drive him home and have a friend follow and bring her back. He agreed, handed her the keys and off they went. She missed the road to turn on, went thorugh a red-light that was blinking (she stopped, but thought it was a 4 way). It wasn't a 4-way, and she -totaled- a full sized pickup truck. Irony at it's finest.
I'm sure these sound like a really good idea to you, but do you -honestly- think they will do anything good? You do realize that such devices -could- possibly cause problems?
You put more stuff into a device and you increase the chances that it will break. I don't have any education the area of engineering but I assume this is a very basic principle. The more complex it is, the more likely it's going to break. Do you -really- want to be late for work one day when your drunk-driving auto-detection thingy goes haywire? Probably not.
Do you really think somebody won't figure out a way to get past these things? Grab an air, compressor, fill a balloon up a ways, perhaps heat it to a reasonable temperature and let the damned breathalizer analyse that. Fire up your car and off you go. Whoopee. Sure, you could make the thing more complex; perhaps get a very preciese thermometer in the thing to make sure your breath is 98.6 degrees or at least very close. Now, mom has to take her child to school, has a fever of 101 degrees and can't start the car. Wonderful.
What if I'm loaded off my ass, and feel like changing my own in -my own backyard-. I don't think there should be any technological measure in place to keep me from pulling my car up onto blocks and doing my thing. Sure, it ain't safe, but it's my life.
GPS Systems to track my speed? Bull. There's no way law enforcement is ever going to get their act together enough to actually build a database of all the roads with all the necessary speed requirements. If I'm ever sold a car with this kind of crap in it I'll make damned sure it's not functioning as soon as I can. There -are- times where speeding is warranted. I don't want my car shutting down on me when I -really- need to get somewhere fast. I'll refrain from such examples -- use your imagination.
So, should we make these types of things mandatory in cars? What if it's detected that mine is broken, accidentally or not? Do I -really- want to be labled as an offender or criminal because my GPS system got splashed with water and I'm unaware of that? Sure, you can get ticketed now for having defects in vehicles -- but they're defects that are visible to the eye. Broken windshields, tailights, etc. Any idiot can tell when those are broken. Do we really want to include a GPS calibration routine in a pre-drive checkout for the average consumer? Hah... no.
What's the current American population anyhow? 300 million? Do they really expect us to beleive that 1 in 6 people is handicapped in a way that makes a computer hard to use? Give me a break. One more statistic that's easily disputed by simple math and at least one half-working eye.
What hardware are you talking about though? What do you need for an office machine? A simple video card (drivers exist for anything but whiz-bang-gotta-have-it-to-play-my games cards if you ask me). A sound card? Nope, not -needed- in an office but most of them are well supported too, in fact very easy. A network card? Yep, gotta have that. Again, drivers here are easier to install than in Windows by 10 fold if you ask me.
The only thing that I find a bear are printers -- but that's because I dont' use them very often even in Windows.
Quick tip for getting you drivers loaded... run/sbin/lspci, look at what the -real- name of the card is (not what they say on the box) and find the driver for it, they're all in the kernel source. Once you're familiar with common hardware it's just one/sbin/lspci, a few modprobe's and edit/etc/modules.conf so it's all replaced on reboot and you're done in under 10 minutes.
Lack of drivers for -sane office hardware- is no longer an issue for Linux if you ask me.
Worms is an excellent game on the Dreamcast too. I started playing Worms II on the PC, a friend had it on PS1 (that one didn't work so well though.. screen kinda sucked) but on the DC the game plays very well. You can find various versions, Worms Armageddon and Worms World Party. I prefer World Party because you have the option of using more than 1 controller where as Armageddon forces you to pass the controller around from person to person. It's not the act of passing it that bothers me, but it's easy to bump the "fire" button while passing and kill the next guy's worm with a bazooka blast planted right in front of him on accident. If you've ever played it you probably know what I mean.
It's a fun game for a group of 4 people, very addictive if you ask me. Can be quite humorous at times too. Really fun when you get more than 2 people going because you get "politics" going as people gang up on the leader and such. Maybe that's just my group of friends though.
Oh yeah, like all DC games now it's cheap. I got a copy for $20.
I have a younger brother that sounds alot like you. He once made a town of lesbians in the original Sims game. Apparently it takes a long time but he had three houses in his town each occupied by a lesbian couple. I can only imagine what happened when one would go underwater in the hot-tub.
This is awesome. It's small, you can't really hurt yourself on it it seems, and it won't fall over. Looks like the perfect mode of transportation for bar hopping if you ask me. All you have to do is slump forward and fiddle w/ your wrists to steer yourself around. If you fall off it, it stops. Giddy up.
If you've ever tried downloading a Debian.iso and install off if you'll find that they intentionally do not provice.iso images to save on bandwidth. However, making 12-16 floppies with all the possible drivers on it was something I was -not- going to do.
For my first 2.2. installation I put the drivers.tgs and the base2_2.tgz on my existing windows partition then just used the boot/root disks to do the install. This was nice; and I did something similar on two machines which were shipped to me w/ a RedHat installation on them.
But... what do you do when you don't have an existing OS on there? After some thinking I put together my own.iso that had nothing but the boot * root floppies, base2_2.tgz, and drivers.tgz, burned it to disk and viola. All I needed now was my CD, two floppy disks and I could do a 'net install just fine. If I ever got adventurous I'd have actually made the CD bootable and put the root FS on it but quite frankly It's only once every month or so that I have to do an install so finding the floppies isn't a big deal.
How 'bout it Debian team... a ~20MB.iso image for download, burn to disc, and have all the tools to do a 'net install off of it? Made my life pretty simple; wouldn't take more than a day to smash together I'd imagine either.
If I'm not mistaken one of the engineers of the system tried warning the French government that it was possible to make a smart-card that could be fake; ie: not really "filled" with real money. Nobody would listen so he finally made one, bought some subway tickets and mailed them to the government proving that it could be done.
Then they threw him in jail for stealing the subway tickets. Anybody else remember this or have more info on it?
Mod this.. and my post, down. There is nothing wrong with the SQL Server code here, it's entirely the admin's fault. If you can't see that your blind as fuck.
From what I know the Dreamcast Broad Band Adapter is basted of the RealTek 8139 chip, which is common supported. I bought a DC planning on getting on hacking this thing (currently I just play "Worms" on it.. fun game). I took the modem out to look at the interface and it's definately not a stock PCI slot that it plugs into. I'm not very big on hardware but I'd imagine taking your modem and using the parts form that to rip the adapter off and slap it onto an RTL8139 card is possible but I'd like to hear from somebody much more knowledgable on the matter. For me it'd be a heck of a lot of fun whipping out the soldering iron, a $20 NIC and turning it into a BBA adapater for the DC. Can it be done?
And tell me, how many of them go complaining back to the shop saying how they hate the goddam computer because the operating system sucks ass?
Oh that's interesting, basically none..
Nope, instead by buy "for Dummies" books on Windows, and buy CDs from informercials that will walk them through how to use a "computer" (read: Windows). Watch those commercials sometime, they refere to use a -computer- not Windows. Why? Because to our infamous Joe Sixpack computer == Windows. If Windows is so advanced and easy to us e then why in the world do these training progams even exist? Why do I have to -show- people how to copy files sometimes? Why do people -not know- where they saved a file to on their uber-intuitive desktop system?
My parents -are- Joe/Jane Sixpack when it comes to computers. They're also business people and don't see anything wrong with how MS has acted, though they don't know everything going on. They contest that Microsoft has made the best product and that's why they're in the lead. So, I just ask them what other choices they had when they bought their PC? Yep... no other realistic choice is available. Why did my laptop get shipped to me with a Windows ME license -on the bottom of the damned case-? Wanna know what I did when I pulled out of the box? Grabbed a Debian CD and ripped th e sticker off irked that it's even on there and that I had to pay for it.
Face it, you walk into a consumer level electronics store to buy a computer you walk out with something that has Windows on it with the exception of CompUSA.
I'd go insane if I tried to use a compiled language for frequently-changing applications (eg. web interfaces to purchasing systems, database large object manipulation & indexing, etc.) but likewise I'd grow old waiting for things to happen if the cores weren't in C.
Tisk tisk... if it's changing so often why it is integrated right into the logic of the code? Simple, it shouldn't be. Find a way of breaking the presentation layer out of the actual code; and write a config file for other options, one that's expandable. Don't suffer from C programmer's diesease thinking that changing #define statements and recompile is a "user friendly" way of doing things.
On the other hand, object-oriented (or at least modular) PHP and Perl code, and decently-written Java code, is much easier to adapt to changing demands.
I can't really think of any basis for this to tell you the truth. Well designed c/c++ projects shouldn't be any harder to modify than any other language. If they are then the initial design is too inflexible which usually means the original coder didn't know the language at hand well enough to properly put together a project.
I'm not saying that you've picked the wrong languages for whatever you're working on... just disagreeing with the overall "blanket" type nature of the post.
What says they should is a more reasonable question. Being fully preemtible means that while user-level processes will be more responsive the over all throughput of the system will decline. As a server you want more throughput, as a user you want your user-level processes to come back to life quicker.
The real question is what area is the kernel headed into? Or, is it possible that a compile-time option can be set to chose from the two different schemes?
You might want to check out bugtraq archives or securityfocus.com for vulerabilities in the EFS system. I've seen it come up a few times in the past though because I don't use it I paid little attention to what they had to say about it. It -does- act weird, and I'm pretty sure it's a rather weak when it comes to actually protecting any data.
Okay, I'm weird perhaps -- but I actually like the stupid little banners at the bottom of the screen. Sure, it gets annoying when they start overlapping when one station re-broadcasts news feeds from others but I'm still glad they're there. I don't watch much TV, and I when I do I channel flip everytime a commercial hits the screen. I often forget what channel number I was on but I can remember which station it was (TNT, TLC, Discovery, etc) just because that logo was there and I can -find- the station again when I know the commercials are over. Call me weird, but I wish they'd put them there -all- the time. When it's missing I often flip right past the station I was looking for.
Agreed that transparent logos are harder to detect..but won't they remove more cleanly? Once you identified the level of distortion (just an RGB value) for each pixel within the logo it should be pretty easy to just subtract those values out of the pixel to return it to it's natural state, yes?
They should allow opt-in cookies, but I'd still like every site to be required to state what data it keeps in its cookies and what it does with it as part of its privacy policy.
"They" don't store any data in "their" cookies. They're on your machine in plain-text format and ready for your inspection at any time you wish to look at them. Always have been, probably always will be. Some places have tried encrypting the data within the cookies but it's not usually done very securely. Invariable somebody cracks whatever bunk some web monkey came up with.
I'd like to see browsers with more refined cookie control. I should be able to set the cookie policy for each domain.
As far as I know every major browser does this, or at least you can be asked each time if you want them. If you're using IE I have no idea where it'd be though. NS 6 and Mozilla can do it. Another poster mentioned that Konquerer can also.
Not a kernel developer here... but I've got a -tiny- bit of education on the stuff.
Thing is, what kind of mechanism would you use to label stuff OOM immune? You'd certainly have to modify the PCB structure for each process, unless there's some unused bits in there already. If there -is- an unused bit you really wouldn't have any hit at process switch time because you were already copying that unused bit. If you -do- have to add one there's 32 more bits that need to be copied. I dunno how much of a hit this would cause really but I'd imagine keeping process switch time down to an absolute minimum is essential.
Now, you'd need another user-land tool to set these flags which would presumably be run as root only, and make a decision as to whether a process starts as OOM immune or not.
Then again, maybe OOM immune status could be determined simply by the 'nice' value of a process.
I'd imagine the code to do this would be fairly trivial, but the impact would be rather large. Man, thinking about stuff like this really makes me want to get down and dirty and start doing some -real- programming again.
Exceptions are little more than syntatically nicer glorified GOTO statements. Take a peak into the Linux Kernel and you'll see goto's are actually used fairly often for exception handling. This isn't saying that you -should- use goto's, because they are harder to trace through in code but programmers should at least recognize just how pithy they really are. They're a flow-control mechanism more than a fix-all-error handling mechanism like I seem them being used all too often by beginning programmers. ie:
The only real upshot that I see to exceptions is that it allows the error to traverse back up the calling stack (or down, however you look at it) until somebody catches the thing. All this adds overhead to the entire program though when it's compiled to be made aware of exceptions (in the case of C++... Java just keeps track of it all the time).
Excpetions certainly -can- be used in a proper manner but they can be abused too. One thing I'm not fond of is code like this:
try {
// Open file for reading
// read password
// open db connection using passwowrd
// pull back recordset from db
} catch (...) {
// Now what?
}
Sure, in the above you should be trying to catch different exceiptions (one for file IO, one for the db, perhaps one for the recordset). Once you start really getting down to a line-by-line error handling mechanism things just get awkward. Larget code blocks leaving you wondering how control got to the catch{} block in the first place when you're not sure which line actually tossed the error out. To do things properly you almost need to be trying{} and catching{} every single line of code IMHO. Guess what? We're back to C style error-return value handling now. I think that was my point to begin with...
I've been asked before in projects, 'What kind of error handling mechanism will you/we be using?'. My response is usually a cocky, "Pft, we don't put errors in our code, so why would we look for them?".
Slashdot Mirror
Why are companies letting people thrash the mail system inadvertantly and go on like nothing happened? This is a social problem, albeit one that has been made more prevalent by bad technology. So what if Outlook took out the double-click-run-and-destroy feature for attachments? Trojan's would get mailed along w/ instructions on how to safe to your disk and run the program. And some idiot would do it too.
I'd much rather see corporations making their employees responsible for breaking things on the network. If the admin fscks up the entire system he'd be up to his knees in shit -- but the "users" are allowed to do it because they can claim ignorance? No thanks. Draw up some strick hard-line rules for your employees and get this crap taken care of. My personal suggestions would be:
Sure, it's a bit drastic. But is productivity really benefiting from wreckless use/abuse of insecure software? Must your employees use Outlook so they get that warm fuzzy feeling of being able to fiddle with all sorts of buttons on their screen? Why can't the computer be viewed like another other tool? If you don't know how to use it why in the world are you using it at work? I wouldn't dream of putting joe-schmoe on a fork life w/out some training, why put people w/ no training on a computer? If joe-schmoe runs the fork-lift into a wall you bet he'll get some heat for it. Run a virus though? Nah, everybody does that.. let it slide, let IT clean it up.
Hey now... some people -need- that stuff to keep their hands from shaking. I know somebody who worked with a painter (house, not artist) that couldn't trim a window until he had a pint of booze in him. After that his hand was all nice and steady and his lines were as straight as can be.
:)
There's a technical term for this disease.... but the name escapes me right now.
Okay, I took a gander at the horror stories and it seems that most of them flow along as such:
Buyer PayPal's somebody money for good/services. PayPal withdraws money from Buyer's bank account, holds it and places it within the Seller's PayPal account. Seller sees money in PayPal account and then sweeps it into their own bank account. Buyer never gets goods and complains to PayPal.
Well, duh. PayPal no longer has the money, why in the heck would they start shelling out money from their own pocket becuase -you- purchased something from a crook?
Use your heads... if you don't feel comfortable sending money to somebody use an escrow service or take your risks. Personally I think it's a great service. I mostly used it though to split bills w/ my roomate. No checks, no running to the bank, and I knew the guy wasn't going to hawk my half of the rent and run out on me.
PayPal's not trying to rip anybody off here. No evil corporation trying to take all of your money, no conspiracy theory and no black helicopters. Move along n ow.
I'll admit, drunk driving isn't the brightest idea i n the world but I honestly think it's taking more blame for traffic accidents than it really causes. I'd like to find some stats to actually research this (pointers anybody)? rather than my own anecdotal evidence though.
... people not paying enough attention. Granted, this is harder to do when you're drunk (and impossible after a certain point) but things like fast food, cell phones, the radio, etc all cause accidents. Cell-phones are taking some of the heat now but that's only because not all of the population needs/has a cell phone. Everybody eats, so it's acceptable to eat in the car. That's my own opinion. Now, for an ironic anecdotal story:
Accidents usually come down to one thing
My brother was hanging out with some friends last weekend when one guy got up to leave and head home. He'd been drinking pretty heavy so one of the young women there who was dead-straight sober said to him he can't drive -- she'll drive him home and have a friend follow and bring her back. He agreed, handed her the keys and off they went. She missed the road to turn on, went thorugh a red-light that was blinking (she stopped, but thought it was a 4 way). It wasn't a 4-way, and she -totaled- a full sized pickup truck. Irony at it's finest.
I'm sure these sound like a really good idea to you, but do you -honestly- think they will do anything good? You do realize that such devices -could- possibly cause problems?
You put more stuff into a device and you increase the chances that it will break. I don't have any education the area of engineering but I assume this is a very basic principle. The more complex it is, the more likely it's going to break. Do you -really- want to be late for work one day when your drunk-driving auto-detection thingy goes haywire? Probably not.
Do you really think somebody won't figure out a way to get past these things? Grab an air, compressor, fill a balloon up a ways, perhaps heat it to a reasonable temperature and let the damned breathalizer analyse that. Fire up your car and off you go. Whoopee. Sure, you could make the thing more complex; perhaps get a very preciese thermometer in the thing to make sure your breath is 98.6 degrees or at least very close. Now, mom has to take her child to school, has a fever of 101 degrees and can't start the car. Wonderful.
What if I'm loaded off my ass, and feel like changing my own in -my own backyard-. I don't think there should be any technological measure in place to keep me from pulling my car up onto blocks and doing my thing. Sure, it ain't safe, but it's my life.
GPS Systems to track my speed? Bull. There's no way law enforcement is ever going to get their act together enough to actually build a database of all the roads with all the necessary speed requirements. If I'm ever sold a car with this kind of crap in it I'll make damned sure it's not functioning as soon as I can. There -are- times where speeding is warranted. I don't want my car shutting down on me when I -really- need to get somewhere fast. I'll refrain from such examples -- use your imagination.
So, should we make these types of things mandatory in cars? What if it's detected that mine is broken, accidentally or not? Do I -really- want to be labled as an offender or criminal because my GPS system got splashed with water and I'm unaware of that? Sure, you can get ticketed now for having defects in vehicles -- but they're defects that are visible to the eye. Broken windshields, tailights, etc. Any idiot can tell when those are broken. Do we really want to include a GPS calibration routine in a pre-drive checkout for the average consumer? Hah... no.
What's the current American population anyhow? 300 million? Do they really expect us to beleive that 1 in 6 people is handicapped in a way that makes a computer hard to use? Give me a break. One more statistic that's easily disputed by simple math and at least one half-working eye.
What hardware are you talking about though? What do you need for an office machine? A simple video card (drivers exist for anything but whiz-bang-gotta-have-it-to-play-my games cards if you ask me). A sound card? Nope, not -needed- in an office but most of them are well supported too, in fact very easy. A network card? Yep, gotta have that. Again, drivers here are easier to install than in Windows by 10 fold if you ask me.
/sbin/lspci, look at what the -real- name of the card is (not what they say on the box) and find the driver for it, they're all in the kernel source. Once you're familiar with common hardware it's just one /sbin/lspci, a few modprobe's and edit /etc/modules.conf so it's all replaced on reboot and you're done in under 10 minutes.
The only thing that I find a bear are printers -- but that's because I dont' use them very often even in Windows.
Quick tip for getting you drivers loaded... run
Lack of drivers for -sane office hardware- is no longer an issue for Linux if you ask me.
Worms is an excellent game on the Dreamcast too. I started playing Worms II on the PC, a friend had it on PS1 (that one didn't work so well though.. screen kinda sucked) but on the DC the game plays very well. You can find various versions, Worms Armageddon and Worms World Party. I prefer World Party because you have the option of using more than 1 controller where as Armageddon forces you to pass the controller around from person to person. It's not the act of passing it that bothers me, but it's easy to bump the "fire" button while passing and kill the next guy's worm with a bazooka blast planted right in front of him on accident. If you've ever played it you probably know what I mean.
It's a fun game for a group of 4 people, very addictive if you ask me. Can be quite humorous at times too. Really fun when you get more than 2 people going because you get "politics" going as people gang up on the leader and such. Maybe that's just my group of friends though.
Oh yeah, like all DC games now it's cheap. I got a copy for $20.
I have a younger brother that sounds alot like you. He once made a town of lesbians in the original Sims game. Apparently it takes a long time but he had three houses in his town each occupied by a lesbian couple. I can only imagine what happened when one would go underwater in the hot-tub.
Ho hum...
This is awesome. It's small, you can't really hurt yourself on it it seems, and it won't fall over. Looks like the perfect mode of transportation for bar hopping if you ask me. All you have to do is slump forward and fiddle w/ your wrists to steer yourself around. If you fall off it, it stops. Giddy up.
If you've ever tried downloading a Debian .iso and install off if you'll find that they intentionally do not provice .iso images to save on bandwidth. However, making 12-16 floppies with all the possible drivers on it was something I was -not- going to do.
.iso that had nothing but the boot * root floppies, base2_2.tgz, and drivers.tgz, burned it to disk and viola. All I needed now was my CD, two floppy disks and I could do a 'net install just fine. If I ever got adventurous I'd have actually made the CD bootable and put the root FS on it but quite frankly It's only once every month or so that I have to do an install so finding the floppies isn't a big deal.
.iso image for download, burn to disc, and have all the tools to do a 'net install off of it? Made my life pretty simple; wouldn't take more than a day to smash together I'd imagine either.
For my first 2.2. installation I put the drivers.tgs and the base2_2.tgz on my existing windows partition then just used the boot/root disks to do the install. This was nice; and I did something similar on two machines which were shipped to me w/ a RedHat installation on them.
But... what do you do when you don't have an existing OS on there? After some thinking I put together my own
How 'bout it Debian team... a ~20MB
Justin Buist
If I'm not mistaken one of the engineers of the system tried warning the French government that it was possible to make a smart-card that could be fake; ie: not really "filled" with real money. Nobody would listen so he finally made one, bought some subway tickets and mailed them to the government proving that it could be done.
Then they threw him in jail for stealing the subway tickets. Anybody else remember this or have more info on it?
Mod this.. and my post, down. There is nothing wrong with the SQL Server code here, it's entirely the admin's fault. If you can't see that your blind as fuck.
From what I know the Dreamcast Broad Band Adapter is basted of the RealTek 8139 chip, which is common supported. I bought a DC planning on getting on hacking this thing (currently I just play "Worms" on it.. fun game). I took the modem out to look at the interface and it's definately not a stock PCI slot that it plugs into. I'm not very big on hardware but I'd imagine taking your modem and using the parts form that to rip the adapter off and slap it onto an RTL8139 card is possible but I'd like to hear from somebody much more knowledgable on the matter. For me it'd be a heck of a lot of fun whipping out the soldering iron, a $20 NIC and turning it into a BBA adapater for the DC. Can it be done?
And tell me, how many of them go complaining back to the shop saying how they hate the goddam computer because the operating system sucks ass?
Oh that's interesting, basically none..
Nope, instead by buy "for Dummies" books on Windows, and buy CDs from informercials that will walk them through how to use a "computer" (read: Windows). Watch those commercials sometime, they refere to use a -computer- not Windows. Why? Because to our infamous Joe Sixpack computer == Windows. If Windows is so advanced and easy to us e then why in the world do these training progams even exist? Why do I have to -show- people how to copy files sometimes? Why do people -not know- where they saved a file to on their uber-intuitive desktop system?
My parents -are- Joe/Jane Sixpack when it comes to computers. They're also business people and don't see anything wrong with how MS has acted, though they don't know everything going on. They contest that Microsoft has made the best product and that's why they're in the lead. So, I just ask them what other choices they had when they bought their PC? Yep... no other realistic choice is available. Why did my laptop get shipped to me with a Windows ME license -on the bottom of the damned case-? Wanna know what I did when I pulled out of the box? Grabbed a Debian CD and ripped th e sticker off irked that it's even on there and that I had to pay for it.
Face it, you walk into a consumer level electronics store to buy a computer you walk out with something that has Windows on it with the exception of CompUSA.
I'd go insane if I tried to use a compiled language for frequently-changing applications (eg. web interfaces to purchasing systems, database large object manipulation & indexing, etc.) but likewise I'd grow old waiting for things to happen if the cores weren't in C.
Tisk tisk... if it's changing so often why it is integrated right into the logic of the code? Simple, it shouldn't be. Find a way of breaking the presentation layer out of the actual code; and write a config file for other options, one that's expandable. Don't suffer from C programmer's diesease thinking that changing #define statements and recompile is a "user friendly" way of doing things.
On the other hand, object-oriented (or at least modular) PHP and Perl code, and decently-written Java code, is much easier to adapt to changing demands.
I can't really think of any basis for this to tell you the truth. Well designed c/c++ projects shouldn't be any harder to modify than any other language. If they are then the initial design is too inflexible which usually means the original coder didn't know the language at hand well enough to properly put together a project.
I'm not saying that you've picked the wrong languages for whatever you're working on... just disagreeing with the overall "blanket" type nature of the post.
from the does-the-doj-doesn't-run-exchange dept.
I've been staring at that for a few minutes now... what in the hell were they trying to type?
What says they should is a more reasonable question. Being fully preemtible means that while user-level processes will be more responsive the over all throughput of the system will decline. As a server you want more throughput, as a user you want your user-level processes to come back to life quicker.
The real question is what area is the kernel headed into? Or, is it possible that a compile-time option can be set to chose from the two different schemes?
You might want to check out bugtraq archives or securityfocus.com for vulerabilities in the EFS system. I've seen it come up a few times in the past though because I don't use it I paid little attention to what they had to say about it. It -does- act weird, and I'm pretty sure it's a rather weak when it comes to actually protecting any data.
Justin Buist
Okay, I'm weird perhaps -- but I actually like the stupid little banners at the bottom of the screen. Sure, it gets annoying when they start overlapping when one station re-broadcasts news feeds from others but I'm still glad they're there. I don't watch much TV, and I when I do I channel flip everytime a commercial hits the screen. I often forget what channel number I was on but I can remember which station it was (TNT, TLC, Discovery, etc) just because that logo was there and I can -find- the station again when I know the commercials are over. Call me weird, but I wish they'd put them there -all- the time. When it's missing I often flip right past the station I was looking for.
Agreed that transparent logos are harder to detect..but won't they remove more cleanly? Once you identified the level of distortion (just an RGB value) for each pixel within the logo it should be pretty easy to just subtract those values out of the pixel to return it to it's natural state, yes?
They should allow opt-in cookies, but I'd still like every site to be required to state what data it keeps in its cookies and what it does with it as part of its privacy policy.
"They" don't store any data in "their" cookies. They're on your machine in plain-text format and ready for your inspection at any time you wish to look at them. Always have been, probably always will be. Some places have tried encrypting the data within the cookies but it's not usually done very securely. Invariable somebody cracks whatever bunk some web monkey came up with.
I'd like to see browsers with more refined cookie control. I should be able to set the cookie policy for each domain.
As far as I know every major browser does this, or at least you can be asked each time if you want them. If you're using IE I have no idea where it'd be though. NS 6 and Mozilla can do it. Another poster mentioned that Konquerer can also.
Not a kernel developer here... but I've got a -tiny- bit of education on the stuff.
Thing is, what kind of mechanism would you use to label stuff OOM immune? You'd certainly have to modify the PCB structure for each process, unless there's some unused bits in there already. If there -is- an unused bit you really wouldn't have any hit at process switch time because you were already copying that unused bit. If you -do- have to add one there's 32 more bits that need to be copied. I dunno how much of a hit this would cause really but I'd imagine keeping process switch time down to an absolute minimum is essential.
Now, you'd need another user-land tool to set these flags which would presumably be run as root only, and make a decision as to whether a process starts as OOM immune or not.
Then again, maybe OOM immune status could be determined simply by the 'nice' value of a process.
I'd imagine the code to do this would be fairly trivial, but the impact would be rather large. Man, thinking about stuff like this really makes me want to get down and dirty and start doing some -real- programming again.
The only real upshot that I see to exceptions is that it allows the error to traverse back up the calling stack (or down, however you look at it) until somebody catches the thing. All this adds overhead to the entire program though when it's compiled to be made aware of exceptions (in the case of C++... Java just keeps track of it all the time).
Excpetions certainly -can- be used in a proper manner but they can be abused too. One thing I'm not fond of is code like this:
Sure, in the above you should be trying to catch different exceiptions (one for file IO, one for the db, perhaps one for the recordset). Once you start really getting down to a line-by-line error handling mechanism things just get awkward. Larget code blocks leaving you wondering how control got to the catch{} block in the first place when you're not sure which line actually tossed the error out. To do things properly you almost need to be trying{} and catching{} every single line of code IMHO. Guess what? We're back to C style error-return value handling now. I think that was my point to begin with...
I've been asked before in projects, 'What kind of error handling mechanism will you/we be using?'. My response is usually a cocky, "Pft, we don't put errors in our code, so why would we look for them?".