Me neither, but there are a lot of levels between what you see and the kernel.
Yes, I was just trying to point out the difference between viruses which take advantage of things which are often inapropriately hidden and worms which take advantage of things which are hidden for quite legitimate reasons.
Of course, to be complete, there is a third factor necessary for viruses. In addition to monoculture to provide a growth medium and lack ofinformation to make infection easuer, we must have inapropriate functionality. My mailer is virus proof not just because it runs on FBSD and because I know what it does in response to each command, but because it doesn't try and run anything.
The main reason worms cause so much havoc is the tendency to try to hide stuff from everybody.
That only really applies to viruses not worms, except in the sense that the low levels are (thankfully) hidden from users (I have no wish to have to think about kernel device drivers while I'm trying to write an email).
In any case, if it were not for the monoculture, viruses would only be a way you could screw up your own computer. That would be a Good Thing, hopefully you'd learn something. The monoculture allows you screwing up your computer to lead to oportunities for others to screw up theirs, or even for you to screw up theirs if your virus launches a worm.
The main reason worms can cause such havoc is that they find themselves in a monoculture. We are in the software equivalent of the Irish potato famine.
What the government should do is enforce diversity. Requireing every government department above some minimum size to use systems from at least 3 independent sources would be a start.
The Shuttle, and any next generation craft, is an attempt at creating not just a reusable vehicle, but also one which offers control at landing at a specific place
Of course, having this as a goal presupposes that it is a huge advantage. ISTM that countries like the US and Russia with ``uge great... tracks of land'' can set asside quite big areas to drop a capsule into. Yes it's more expensive to go get a capsule than to have a space plane come to you, but lan transport is quite cheap and so I doubt such costs come close to the costs of launching the wings into space, let alone the other costs of the space-plane designs.
But to say that their R&D toward an orbital space plane was misplaced goes against the very grain of space exploration.
It is not the R&D which is the problem, but the attempt to use what should have been an R&D test bed as a production vehicle.
If NASA had built one space plane, better than the shuttle because it wouldn't have needed the design compromises included to try and turn it into a day to day service, and had in parallel developed lauch systems using up to date but stable technology, everyone would have won, except a few beurocrats and politicians.
We might even have a workable space plane by now, since there could have been real R&D on the prototype using some of the money not spent on trying to keep the shuttle going.
BTW, The Economist has a reasonable article about the scuttle this week. I think you need to be a subscriber to get the online version, so if you're interested go buy some dead tree or hit a library.
My father-in-law worked as a travel agent at one time. He said travel agents never give more than three choices to a client. If you gave them more, they'd have to go home and think about it.
This is only a bad thing from the salesman's point of view. From the consumer's point of view it is rational behaviour. One should thinka while when buying something as expensive as a holliday.
The only common consumer item which has a reasonably standardised interface is the car, and even there there are variations. sales of TVs and mobile phones and so on do not seem to have been harmed by each having an idiosyncratic interface.
The work station side is severely behind the competition, and the reason is directly linked to the failure of all parties to strategically target the GUI togther,
people with no chemistry background would likely not figure it out at all
People with no chemistry background should be very rare in any developed country. If this is not the case where you live, congratulations, your school system is terminally screwed.
It is very likely that the interviewed 'activists' [...] unthinkingly said 'yes' to an interviewer asking if they wanted to sign a petition against a 'Very Dangerous Chemical'?
The key word here is `unthinkingly'. By using it you are agreeing that the people who agreed deserved to be laughed at.
I've just had to live with it. I can't email several friends, and regularly field complaints from people who host on my server.
If your friends have decided that they want to use an ISP/mail service with a draconian anti-spam policy, surely that is their choice. Unless the mail service dropping your mail lied to them of course, in which caseyou have presumably informed them.
ISTM that you are in the position of someone who has a friend who unplugs their phone in the evening to avoid telesales calls, and are blaming the company which manufactured phones which could be unplugged.
All the various blacklists do is provide a choice of policies. This is no different from people making firewall software or hardware which can be configured anywhere from totally open to totally closed. Yes, some ISP could set it up totally closed and deny their customers all service, but that would be their choice, and the customers could decide to like it or to stop giving them money.
I'd rather buy a proper IDE RAID [...] for $300, 8 drives (4 active, 4 hot spares). That's about 160 GB fully redundant drive space for you for $1000.
Which is OK for backup, but that is not the issue at hand.
The application which will have a problem with the short life found for CD-Rs is not backup, but archival storage.
Eg, where will you store your digital photos? For that kind of ordinary, real world application we need a medium with a life measured in at least decades, preferably centuries.
Re:Lameness filter mod time I want to read about B
on
FreeBSD 4.9 Code Freeze
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Set your minimum score setting to 1. End of problem. Anyone who can't be arsed to log in and can't write anything interesting enough to get a moderation point from someone is no loss.
can someone explain why this particular point isn't true?
Can you explain why you think it might be true? It's not very plausible. It's not as if multi processor systems are amazing new technology, they just got cheap in the past few years, so everyone and his dog took a look at the literature to work out how to make the most of them.
That is not, of course, to say there is no skill involved in doing it well but we are not talking about the cutting edge of blue-sky computer science.
BTW `a fraction of a millisecond'? How impressive is that! SCO has the technology to implement a semaphore in less than a million instructions!
Why? Do programs such as cp, ln, and touch really need libc?
No program ever needs a library. You could always implement everything from the ground up. The point of having libraries is to share the code. Re-implementing parts of the standard library in each utility is, apart from the wasted effort, just a way of creating more places for bugs to live.
So you are saying rewrite libc? Is this not reinventing the wheel?
No, it's software development. You fix the one piece of code which does a job so that it is useful in more places rather than writing a dozen independent pieces of code to do the same job.
Some people like the feel of the risk of winning and losing.
But there is no risk of winning and losing in casino games, except for very trivial short term fluctuations. The house wins, or there would be no house.
If somoene wants a thrill they can always find a like minded soul and bet with even odds on the toss of a coin.
Or they could play poker or bet on the horses.
but then, I do like to ride roller coasters. Some people consider me a dope for that.
Roller coasters are probably safer than the journey to the park to get on the roller coaster.
I suppose the two cases are inverses. On a roller coaster there is (essentially) no risk, but it is possible to trick the body into reacting as if there was, and so people can get the thrill of danger without actual danger. In a casino there is (essentially) no possibility of winning, but by smoke and mirrors they can perhaps dupe people's intuitions into telling them there is such a possibility, so they get the fun of getting a windfall without ever actually getting one.
The difference seem to me to be that the roller coaster rider always gets more than they risk, the casino game player always gets less.
This is pretty offensive to the large number of people who go to casinos.
Well, saying `playing find the lady with men on street corners is stupid' might be offensive to find the lady players, but that doesn't make it false.
I count myself among that number: I'm a bloody statistician
A statistician who can count?:-)
But I also see $50 (my expected loss laying, say, $1000 worth of bets) pretty good value for a night's entertainment.
I fail to see the entertainment in giving someone $1050 and having them give you back $1000. Mail them the $50 and you would at least not have lost an evening.
There are forms of gambling where the punter has a chance to win -- betting on horses for instance, or poker, or the stock market -- and I can see the entertainment there.
Can't remember if it happens elsewhere (Bond is frequently shown playing cards), but at least in GoldenEye Bond is playing Baccarat.
Can't remember in Goldeneye, I only saw part of it on TV once, but in earlier Bond movies he is shown at a Baccarat table, but is playing Chemin De Fer.
The difference AIUI (and I'm no expert, it's just one of those fact I have picked up at random somewhere) is that in Baccarat the moves are almost totally fixed, and the customers bet with the house on either the dealer or the player. In Chemin De Fer players play directly against each other, have much more choice in what they do, and directly bet with each other. The house makes it's money by taking a cut. Ie CDF is more like casino poker than casino blackjack.
Obviously this makes CDF a much better game for Bond to show off his nerve and also to go directly head to head with the evil whoeveritisthisyear. Dramatically it works like the traditional poker game in a western.
People enjoy games that require just a little bit of skill. Hell, I like to play solitaire, which is a pretty brain-damaged game.
But do you hand some corporation money for every game you play?
The game is simply broken by design.
The properly designed relative is baccarat where, IIRC, card counting doesn't give the player the advantage. Hence, like roulette, baccarat is a game for people who want to show they have money to burn, or to show they are idiots, depending if they can carry off the pose.
People who actually want to play a game of skil play Chemin De Fer. Apart from actually being a real game, it has the major advantage of allowing you to pretend to be 007:-).
So PAYING attention to the game and being creafull is CHEATING.
Of course it is.
They could essentially make card counting not be an advantage just by playing with a really huge deck (say take 1000 packs and shuffle them together, then start dealing from the top, stop after dealing 52 cards and reshuffle. They don't do this because they are trying to pretend you are playing a card game, and hence there is some skill involved, when you are actually playing a game of chance.
However, they can't actually allow it to degenerate into a game of skill. The only way they can prevent this, while keeping up the pretense, is to throw out anyone who shows any signs of life from the neck up.
Casinos are in the business of selling 10[currency] bills for 100[currency]s, everything else is smoke and mirrors to distract you from this. Think of them as a public service which keeps the terminally stupid off the streets. Obviously anyone not terminally stupid is in the wrong place, and so it is perfectly reasonable that they be kicked out.
Slashdot Mirror
What? Your OS can't do that for you? :-)
Yes, I was just trying to point out the difference between viruses which take advantage of things which are often inapropriately hidden and worms which take advantage of things which are hidden for quite legitimate reasons.
Of course, to be complete, there is a third factor necessary for viruses. In addition to monoculture to provide a growth medium and lack ofinformation to make infection easuer, we must have inapropriate functionality. My mailer is virus proof not just because it runs on FBSD and because I know what it does in response to each command, but because it doesn't try and run anything.
That only really applies to viruses not worms, except in the sense that the low levels are (thankfully) hidden from users (I have no wish to have to think about kernel device drivers while I'm trying to write an email).
In any case, if it were not for the monoculture, viruses would only be a way you could screw up your own computer. That would be a Good Thing, hopefully you'd learn something. The monoculture allows you screwing up your computer to lead to oportunities for others to screw up theirs, or even for you to screw up theirs if your virus launches a worm.
What the government should do is enforce diversity. Requireing every government department above some minimum size to use systems from at least 3 independent sources would be a start.
Of course, having this as a goal presupposes that it is a huge advantage. ISTM that countries like the US and Russia with ``uge great... tracks of land'' can set asside quite big areas to drop a capsule into. Yes it's more expensive to go get a capsule than to have a space plane come to you, but lan transport is quite cheap and so I doubt such costs come close to the costs of launching the wings into space, let alone the other costs of the space-plane designs.
But to say that their R&D toward an orbital space plane was misplaced goes against the very grain of space exploration.
It is not the R&D which is the problem, but the attempt to use what should have been an R&D test bed as a production vehicle.
If NASA had built one space plane, better than the shuttle because it wouldn't have needed the design compromises included to try and turn it into a day to day service, and had in parallel developed lauch systems using up to date but stable technology, everyone would have won, except a few beurocrats and politicians.
We might even have a workable space plane by now, since there could have been real R&D on the prototype using some of the money not spent on trying to keep the shuttle going.
BTW, The Economist has a reasonable article about the scuttle this week. I think you need to be a subscriber to get the online version, so if you're interested go buy some dead tree or hit a library.
isn't that what the X-33 project was? NASA gave lockheed close to US$1B to design and build a new SSTO...
The reason this isn't an example is highlighted by your choice of the word `gave'. Incentives are earned.
Well, impounding all M$ software, starting with that in use in any government agency, would be a start.
This is only a bad thing from the salesman's point of view. From the consumer's point of view it is rational behaviour. One should thinka while when buying something as expensive as a holliday.
The only common consumer item which has a reasonably standardised interface is the car, and even there there are variations. sales of TVs and mobile phones and so on do not seem to have been harmed by each having an idiosyncratic interface.
Ah, yes, I remember CDE.
People with no chemistry background should be very rare in any developed country. If this is not the case where you live, congratulations, your school system is terminally screwed.
It is very likely that the interviewed 'activists' [...] unthinkingly said 'yes' to an interviewer asking if they wanted to sign a petition against a 'Very Dangerous Chemical'?
The key word here is `unthinkingly'. By using it you are agreeing that the people who agreed deserved to be laughed at.
If your friends have decided that they want to use an ISP/mail service with a draconian anti-spam policy, surely that is their choice. Unless the mail service dropping your mail lied to them of course, in which caseyou have presumably informed them.
ISTM that you are in the position of someone who has a friend who unplugs their phone in the evening to avoid telesales calls, and are blaming the company which manufactured phones which could be unplugged.
All the various blacklists do is provide a choice of policies. This is no different from people making firewall software or hardware which can be configured anywhere from totally open to totally closed. Yes, some ISP could set it up totally closed and deny their customers all service, but that would be their choice, and the customers could decide to like it or to stop giving them money.
Which is OK for backup, but that is not the issue at hand.
The application which will have a problem with the short life found for CD-Rs is not backup, but archival storage.
Eg, where will you store your digital photos? For that kind of ordinary, real world application we need a medium with a life measured in at least decades, preferably centuries.
Set your minimum score setting to 1. End of problem. Anyone who can't be arsed to log in and can't write anything interesting enough to get a moderation point from someone is no loss.
Can you explain why you think it might be true? It's not very plausible. It's not as if multi processor systems are amazing new technology, they just got cheap in the past few years, so everyone and his dog took a look at the literature to work out how to make the most of them.
That is not, of course, to say there is no skill involved in doing it well but we are not talking about the cutting edge of blue-sky computer science.
BTW `a fraction of a millisecond'? How impressive is that! SCO has the technology to implement a semaphore in less than a million instructions!
welcome our new poriferan masters!
If you let people plug random machines into your network, you, to all intents and purposes, don't have a firewall.
Laptops which visit the outside world need to be treated as external machines, not internal ones.
No program ever needs a library. You could always implement everything from the ground up. The point of having libraries is to share the code. Re-implementing parts of the standard library in each utility is, apart from the wasted effort, just a way of creating more places for bugs to live.
So you are saying rewrite libc? Is this not reinventing the wheel?
No, it's software development. You fix the one piece of code which does a job so that it is useful in more places rather than writing a dozen independent pieces of code to do the same job.
But there is no risk of winning and losing in casino games, except for very trivial short term fluctuations. The house wins, or there would be no house.
If somoene wants a thrill they can always find a like minded soul and bet with even odds on the toss of a coin.
Or they could play poker or bet on the horses.
but then, I do like to ride roller coasters. Some people consider me a dope for that.
Roller coasters are probably safer than the journey to the park to get on the roller coaster.
I suppose the two cases are inverses. On a roller coaster there is (essentially) no risk, but it is possible to trick the body into reacting as if there was, and so people can get the thrill of danger without actual danger. In a casino there is (essentially) no possibility of winning, but by smoke and mirrors they can perhaps dupe people's intuitions into telling them there is such a possibility, so they get the fun of getting a windfall without ever actually getting one.
The difference seem to me to be that the roller coaster rider always gets more than they risk, the casino game player always gets less.
Well, saying `playing find the lady with men on street corners is stupid' might be offensive to find the lady players, but that doesn't make it false.
I count myself among that number: I'm a bloody statistician
A statistician who can count?:-)
But I also see $50 (my expected loss laying, say, $1000 worth of bets) pretty good value for a night's entertainment.
I fail to see the entertainment in giving someone $1050 and having them give you back $1000. Mail them the $50 and you would at least not have lost an evening.
There are forms of gambling where the punter has a chance to win -- betting on horses for instance, or poker, or the stock market -- and I can see the entertainment there.
Can't remember in Goldeneye, I only saw part of it on TV once, but in earlier Bond movies he is shown at a Baccarat table, but is playing Chemin De Fer.
The difference AIUI (and I'm no expert, it's just one of those fact I have picked up at random somewhere) is that in Baccarat the moves are almost totally fixed, and the customers bet with the house on either the dealer or the player. In Chemin De Fer players play directly against each other, have much more choice in what they do, and directly bet with each other. The house makes it's money by taking a cut. Ie CDF is more like casino poker than casino blackjack.
Obviously this makes CDF a much better game for Bond to show off his nerve and also to go directly head to head with the evil whoeveritisthisyear. Dramatically it works like the traditional poker game in a western.
But do you hand some corporation money for every game you play?
The game is simply broken by design.
The properly designed relative is baccarat where, IIRC, card counting doesn't give the player the advantage. Hence, like roulette, baccarat is a game for people who want to show they have money to burn, or to show they are idiots, depending if they can carry off the pose.
People who actually want to play a game of skil play Chemin De Fer. Apart from actually being a real game, it has the major advantage of allowing you to pretend to be 007:-).
You have to remember that they reformatted it one character per line. They are claiming the whitespace.
Does this mean I will be thrown off of /. for karma counting?
Of course it is.
They could essentially make card counting not be an advantage just by playing with a really huge deck (say take 1000 packs and shuffle them together, then start dealing from the top, stop after dealing 52 cards and reshuffle. They don't do this because they are trying to pretend you are playing a card game, and hence there is some skill involved, when you are actually playing a game of chance.
However, they can't actually allow it to degenerate into a game of skill. The only way they can prevent this, while keeping up the pretense, is to throw out anyone who shows any signs of life from the neck up.
Casinos are in the business of selling 10[currency] bills for 100[currency]s, everything else is smoke and mirrors to distract you from this. Think of them as a public service which keeps the terminally stupid off the streets. Obviously anyone not terminally stupid is in the wrong place, and so it is perfectly reasonable that they be kicked out.
Because reinventing wheels is generally a Bad Thing?
Better to work to make libc smaller, or restructure it so that small utilities only drag in what they absolutely need.