'--link-dest' option. It ensures that only modified files are actually stored multiple times. All files that are identical from backup to backup are hardlinked instead.
I'm betting most people's parents would be likely to plug in a new digital camera via USB to download their images...
... and would work fine with any desktop-oriented distro. I seem to recall that Mandrake (or was it SuSE?) pops up a new camera icon on the desktop when you plug in a USB camera. You almost pulled of that bait-and-switch you did there.
You can't accidently stumble on the same approach, they are complicated an non-obvious.
Yes. You. Can. Wherever someone is sitting around "inventing"/discovering something someone else is sitting around somewhere else "inventing"/discovering the exact same thing. Regardless of how complex a given (software) solution is, it was almost always arrived at in small logical steps. There is no particular reason to believe that somebody else could not have replicated the essential parts of the though process required to arrive at that solution.
Very few things indeed require a "leap" and those are almost never software-related, they are things like General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, the realization that there are these tiny little things called Bacteria, etc. In fact, about the only such "leaps" in computing were the Babbage's Analytical Engine and the "invention" of the Turing Machine. (And the latter could even be argued to be the inevitable conclusion of all the theoretical work that was being done on models of computation -- especially since TMs are the most "powerful" model of computation currently known).
One of my biggest issues with software-patentability in general is the fact that there is no allowance for independent invention (like there is with e.g. copyright)... You simply cannot protect yourself from liability (and it appears that not even billion-dollar companies with hordes of lawyers can either).
Just realized that people have actually used biological agents in warfare (albeit 'by accident'): The Europeans who arrived in America in 1492 did carry diseases which they were (well, almost) immune to, but which proved disasterous for the indigenous peoples. So much for biological agents not being effective.
BTW, chemical and biological weapons technically are not WMD. They are battlefield weapons. Terrorists have employed them before, such as in the sarin nerve gas bombings in Tokyo where 12 people were killed. They are not effective off of the battlefield.
Umm... while this may be true of chemical weapons (such as Sarin nerve gas), AFAIK nobody has ever even tried to use biological agents such as viruses "in battle" (so to speak). They could be absolutely devastating, but the problem with them is that it's very hard to ensure that the virus/whatever doesn't spread back to you -- and secretly immunizing a whole population before an attack is (almost?) impossible. Unfortunately, some terrorists may just be mad enough to not let this deter them.
(I mean people who carry out terrorist attacks are pretty far off their rocker/desperate... who's to say they won't try to use biological agents...?)
a complete moron if you use wget. It automatically escapes/encodes form(!) data for you. Dear lord, the youth today... want everything handed to you on a silver platter. Wget. Sheesh.
I mean, when have you ever heard of any reasonably competent Windows admin (yes, they do exist!) installing, say, a service pack without some serious testing beforehand?
Even if you use Java or other "safe" languages, such a vulnerability will still result in an array-out-of-bounds exception (hopefully properly handled) in the best case, and it won't be long before you get an OutOfMemoryException or an infinite loop or even worse.
There is a big difference between a DoS (which programs in "safe" languages may be open to) and an actual exploit -- which is basically a privilege escalation from "I can ping you" (or even less, actually, with these "passive" exploits that are becoming more and more popular) to "I can install a keylogger". Big. Difference.
Dammit. Wrote a long reply, but slashcode (or my browser) ate it.:(
Anyway, I think it boils down to two things:
1) The "purity" of not having useless crap installed.
2) Flexibility: If, for example, a package can only support Qt or GTK+ (but not both at the same time), *you* get to choose, not the packager. The ease of maintaining one's own package repository with overrides shouldn't be underestimated either.
Are you referring to the exponential number of packages bit? Well, in order to have the flexibility as USE flags in a binary disto you basically need 2^(number of use flags relevant for that package) versions of each and every package. As example, "kdebase" currently has 8 USE flags which can be toggled independently (i.e. things like samba support, ldap support, etc.). That means that to provide the same flexibility, a binary disto would have to have 256 versions(*) of the kdebase package -- clearly something which is simply too much for binary distro makers to handle... so they make the choices for you, i.e. requiring you to install e.g. samba support when you actually don't need it.
Some people don't have any problem with installing the extra samba stuff even if they're never going to use it, but I'm kind of a purist... (Some extras may also lead to security holes and such, but that's probably a rarity).
Like the sibling to your post said there's also other advantages, but the USE flags thing is really the clincher for me.
I usually just recommend people to try it once (assuming that they're knowledgeable enough to get it installed in the first place). If they don't like it, fine. If they do like it... well then I guess we've just assimilated one more user...:)
(*) I'm overstating it since many of those optional things *can* probably be compiled separately, but only to make a point. Besides, some packages have 20 USE flags and no separate compilation for those optional bits.
I think you've misunderstood what Gentoo is really about(*) : USE flags. Just try implementing something like that in a binary distro -- it would cause exponential growth of the number of packages. This is the #1 reason I use Gentoo.
(*) Forget the speed difference some people try to claim, it's a red herring -- like you said, nobody really notices the difference either way.
combatting spam. It's about being able to verify that the envelope sender is actually authorized to send mail for the domain in the envelope. That is all.
are overflows. I believe a XUL vulnerability was recently discovered (Revealed? I seem to recall something about it having been known about for ages, just not publicly) which would leave you vulnerable regardless of W^X, stack prot., whatever else you have. Welcome to the wonderful world of a turing complete UI language.
on how many domains a spammer can register over time -- for much the same reason that you can still have huge bandwidth even if your latency is crap. It's just a question of reducing the initial delay from registration to activation.
Kx's database is column-based instead of row based. That makes it hugely efficient for some queries (which tradition row-based RDBMSs have trouble with) and incredibly bad at others (in which traditional RDBMSs shine). It's just a question of trade-offs.
Also, if databases were ueber-efficient at executing SQL queries, there'd be no great need to use server side stored procedures to speed things up.
I think you've misunderstood something. The idea behind Stored Procedures is that you offload the data processing onto the server (which is much, much more powerful, presumably) and you don't have to transmit huge amounts of data to the client. The usefulness of SPs has nothing to do with the efficiency of SQL as such, it's more about relative processing power and infrastructure.
(We didn't consider reiserfs because of its lack of bad block handling).
Oh, dear. Bad block handling is not needed on modern drives, all moderns drives have automatic remapping of failing blocks, and if you have a drive which actually has bad blocks which are visible to the OS you should not be storing any data on that drive.
Just to add a data point: I've also had very mixed experiences with XFS. I installed it and it seemed to be chugging along fine for ~1 year (just regular desktop machine, no particular I/O load to speak of) until suddenly the initial root mount showed an empty/. I was never able to track the cause down, but I promptly changed to ReiserFS and haven't looked back since.
if you can intentionally cause collisions by modifying messages appropriately. Then the hash becomes useless for verifying message integrity (because someone could have modified the message while keeping the hash identical).
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'--link-dest' option. It ensures that only modified files are actually stored multiple times. All files that are identical from backup to backup are hardlinked instead.
n/t = i can't be bothered to put any text here.
It's meant as a Natural Law (ie. one which always applies). You don't go around "invoking" the Law of Gravity, do you?
Yes. You. Can. Wherever someone is sitting around "inventing"/discovering something someone else is sitting around somewhere else "inventing"/discovering the exact same thing. Regardless of how complex a given (software) solution is, it was almost always arrived at in small logical steps. There is no particular reason to believe that somebody else could not have replicated the essential parts of the though process required to arrive at that solution.
Very few things indeed require a "leap" and those are almost never software-related, they are things like General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, the realization that there are these tiny little things called Bacteria, etc. In fact, about the only such "leaps" in computing were the Babbage's Analytical Engine and the "invention" of the Turing Machine. (And the latter could even be argued to be the inevitable conclusion of all the theoretical work that was being done on models of computation -- especially since TMs are the most "powerful" model of computation currently known).
One of my biggest issues with software-patentability in general is the fact that there is no allowance for independent invention (like there is with e.g. copyright)... You simply cannot protect yourself from liability (and it appears that not even billion-dollar companies with hordes of lawyers can either).
Just realized that people have actually used biological agents in warfare (albeit 'by accident'): The Europeans who arrived in America in 1492 did carry diseases which they were (well, almost) immune to, but which proved disasterous for the indigenous peoples. So much for biological agents not being effective.
Umm... while this may be true of chemical weapons (such as Sarin nerve gas), AFAIK nobody has ever even tried to use biological agents such as viruses "in battle" (so to speak). They could be absolutely devastating, but the problem with them is that it's very hard to ensure that the virus/whatever doesn't spread back to you -- and secretly immunizing a whole population before an attack is (almost?) impossible. Unfortunately, some terrorists may just be mad enough to not let this deter them.
(I mean people who carry out terrorist attacks are pretty far off their rocker/desperate... who's to say they won't try to use biological agents...?)
A virulent strain of virus, no less? Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
:)
I mean, when have you ever heard of any reasonably competent Windows admin (yes, they do exist!) installing, say, a service pack without some serious testing beforehand?
There is a big difference between a DoS (which programs in "safe" languages may be open to) and an actual exploit -- which is basically a privilege escalation from "I can ping you" (or even less, actually, with these "passive" exploits that are becoming more and more popular) to "I can install a keylogger". Big. Difference.
have misspelled netcat. Don't mention it, glad to be of service.
Dammit. Wrote a long reply, but slashcode (or my browser) ate it. :(
Anyway, I think it boils down to two things:
1) The "purity" of not having useless crap installed.
2) Flexibility: If, for example, a package can only support Qt or GTK+ (but not both at the same time), *you* get to choose, not the packager. The ease of maintaining one's own package repository with overrides shouldn't be underestimated either.
Are you referring to the exponential number of packages bit? Well, in order to have the flexibility as USE flags in a binary disto you basically need 2^(number of use flags relevant for that package) versions of each and every package. As example, "kdebase" currently has 8 USE flags which can be toggled independently (i.e. things like samba support, ldap support, etc.). That means that to provide the same flexibility, a binary disto would have to have 256 versions(*) of the kdebase package -- clearly something which is simply too much for binary distro makers to handle... so they make the choices for you, i.e. requiring you to install e.g. samba support when you actually don't need it.
:)
Some people don't have any problem with installing the extra samba stuff even if they're never going to use it, but I'm kind of a purist... (Some extras may also lead to security holes and such, but that's probably a rarity).
Like the sibling to your post said there's also other advantages, but the USE flags thing is really the clincher for me.
I usually just recommend people to try it once (assuming that they're knowledgeable enough to get it installed in the first place). If they don't like it, fine. If they do like it... well then I guess we've just assimilated one more user...
(*) I'm overstating it since many of those optional things *can* probably be compiled separately, but only to make a point. Besides, some packages have 20 USE flags and no separate compilation for those optional bits.
I think you've misunderstood what Gentoo is really about(*) : USE flags. Just try implementing something like that in a binary distro -- it would cause exponential growth of the number of packages. This is the #1 reason I use Gentoo.
(*) Forget the speed difference some people try to claim, it's a red herring -- like you said, nobody really notices the difference either way.
combatting spam. It's about being able to verify that the envelope sender is actually authorized to send mail for the domain in the envelope. That is all.
are overflows. I believe a XUL vulnerability was recently discovered (Revealed? I seem to recall something about it having been known about for ages, just not publicly) which would leave you vulnerable regardless of W^X, stack prot., whatever else you have. Welcome to the wonderful world of a turing complete UI language.
I belive there are quite a few security issues with older versions of Fire*.
He's a mormon. You decide which of those applies to him.
on how many domains a spammer can register over time -- for much the same reason that you can still have huge bandwidth even if your latency is crap. It's just a question of reducing the initial delay from registration to activation.
I think you've misunderstood something. The idea behind Stored Procedures is that you offload the data processing onto the server (which is much, much more powerful, presumably) and you don't have to transmit huge amounts of data to the client. The usefulness of SPs has nothing to do with the efficiency of SQL as such, it's more about relative processing power and infrastructure.
Oh, dear. Bad block handling is not needed on modern drives, all moderns drives have automatic remapping of failing blocks, and if you have a drive which actually has bad blocks which are visible to the OS you should not be storing any data on that drive.
Just to add a data point: I've also had very mixed experiences with XFS. I installed it and it seemed to be chugging along fine for ~1 year (just regular desktop machine, no particular I/O load to speak of) until suddenly the initial root mount showed an empty
if you can intentionally cause collisions by modifying messages appropriately. Then the hash becomes useless for verifying message integrity (because someone could have modified the message while keeping the hash identical).
a little thing called Windows ME.