and you've got a version of vi new enough to support umlauts
This is usually not a problem. Umlauts etc. are handled by loading the appropriate keymap and fonts. 8-bit clean apps need no more than that, and old popular software is normally 8-bit clean.
As long as you can convince the congressmen from the state of Washington or Virginia or any of these places that it's worthwhile not to give lots of money to lots of American companies, you have my support.
A politician not paying money for software can hand out tax breaks, or spend the money on something more visible.
Either way there is no loss for American companies, all you get is a different distribution of money. Using open source do not transfer any money to foreign entities, buying from a company may very well do as they cut costs by having foreign subcontractors.
>Remember, most of the new Linux users will spend their whole life running as their personal userid - and a virus will not need root access to gra their email, compromise their information and files and so on - it only needs to compromise their account.... a trivial task.
But it still can't compromise the operating system, which helps a lot. Cleanup will definitely be easier. Oh, and we know that there are exploitable buffer overflows, but they are extremely short-lived. A virus can't rely on a particular overflow, because that one will be killed in a few days. And you'll have a hard time writing a generic program for any kind of overflow -something exploiting a sendmail overflow may have to know quite a bit of that protocol before it gets to the weak point, the same goes for all other overflows.
>a an example dedebian is updated so slowly that it will always be behind in the race.
Bad example, I think. New debian packages tend to arrive in a matter of days - if you use the unstable branch. I get many updates (security and others) before redhat users even though the rpm's becomes available a few days earlier. Why? Because I don't have to look for upgrades *anywhere*. I run apt-get update; apt-getdist-upgrade now and then. The same command every time, no searching for packages, no reading the latest security warnings.
And the common "their encryption sucks, it's their fault" argument is trash. If someone breaks into your house because they could smash down your door, is it your fault that you didn't have steel bars?
Wrong analogy. It fits the case of someone guessing an easy password, and abuse it. This didn't happen.
It is more like this: I publish a book, and expect to make money of it (assuming I write well) . However, I post the entire book on my public webpage, encrypted with rot-13 or something similiar a child could crack. With no restriction on downloading. No surprise when few people buy the book because they all viewed it in netscape and used the "rot 13" menu to get at it. Then I sue netscape for lost sales.
As much as I hate to admit it, I can see where Mattel is coming from. Decrypting their list, after all, is kind of an invasion of their corporate privacy
I am going to put my root password on a web page. I'll encrypt it of course, to prevent abuse. My fantastic encryption consist of uppercasing the entire password. Now, if anybody decrypts my lowercase password then I'll go after them in court for invading my privacy. Even worse if they actually <I>use</I> it...
<I>But what do they really expect to gain from the ISP's log files? Are they planning to try to track down every single copy?</I>
Maybe that was the plan originally. Futile now, but they still want to know who got it, so they can pick <I>some</I> people to harass. And they will keep records. If stuff like this happens again they'll look for "repeat offenders". "Hey judge - these people were part of the crack back in 2000 too... a history of crime..."
As far as I know, this has only been in the realms of science fiction. I would like to know if they can get a meaningful distance between the two ends of the 'hole'. A meaningful distance in this instance would have to be extraplanetary, as light does travel pretty damn quick.
The low speed of light is already a problem. Try low-latency communication with something on another continent - it is too slow for some uses, no matter what bandwith you have. Even playing quake around the globe gets too much lag.
The pole would actually move when you pulled it, however, you would have to wait 8 minutes to see the end at the sun move, therefore, yes, it would appear to bend, then 8 minutes later, appear to straiten out.
Make that 16 minutes. (At least) 8 minutes for the pull to propagate, and another 8 minutes for you to see it. And the pole wouldn't merely appear to bend - it <I>would</I> bend.
You don't usually see the bending effect in real life, as you don't handle poles that long. But try pushing someone with really low propagation speed such as water, and you'll see a wave.
I always wondered...say you have a REALLY rigid pole (please no jokes:P) and it spanned from here to say the Sun,</I>
The movement effect travel along the pole with limited speed. Much lower speed than ligth too - it is the speed of sound in the material used. Really rigid material have a much higher speed of sound than air, but still way below the speed of light.
Re:You may need a for-loop
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Date Pagers
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If you really want to send of somebodys alarm you shold have a pager that changes your personality every 1 second. Eventually you will end up with a personality that matches. that would be fun
No need to try all combinations. Her pager transmits her settings. Your hacked device receives, adjusts its settings to match hers, and transmit. <I>Instant</I> success, no trying.
Re:Are these things really needed?
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Date Pagers
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Yeah, but a gay-basher trying to find gays to bash would have to run around with a pager announcing that he is gay, too. Could lead to interesting situations if two of them meet...
Not really. The basher would probably silence his device, these types tend to be paranoid about being mistaken for gay. They will rely on hearing the other guy go beep.
Wonder how many guys with ordinary pagers will be beaten up though.
Re:I bet they are popular...
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Date Pagers
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No, the first and finest hack of these will involve someone tumbling the preferences output. At any given nano-second you are the most desireable man in the world according to your pager.
Or get a display for it, so you can see the preferences of all the people around you. Could be interesting wheter you want them or not. And if someone truly interesting comes up, push a button to generate an instant match. I like to do selection myself, I wouldn't leave that to a device. Seems it can be useful for getting her attention though.
The intended purpose of it is a failure though. Might become a fad, and then disappear. There are so much affecting the choice that isn't easily expressible in logic. Such as looks. And there are too much significant data for anybody to enter into it too.
What kind of resource usage are we looking at in this kernel compared to the 2.2x series?
This is a good one. Many improvements use just a little more memory, but there was a big cut. The disk cache system is rewritten. It is faster, and will, under some circumstances, use half as much memory as usual. This gives more cache as well as more free memory.
Another Debian quirk -- ahem, feature -- is that the sound module is not loaded automatically like in RH, but if you put it in/etc/modules with all other modules you want loaded at boot time, there it will be.</I>
Why do you want modules loaded a boot time? The sound modules on my machine loads automatically when some program opens a sound device. So the memory needed for a sound driver is used only when I use sound. The driver is unloaded if it goes idle for a while, freeing up memory.
Oh yeah, the article I read (maybe it was heard; I know this casts great doubt on my reliability, but sorry!) said that in some countries bribary of foreign government officials was actually tax deductable! (how are you supposed to get a receipt for that?)
Easy. A small bribe is "representation". Maybe you pay a trip to your country for that official so he can sign papers. He want a two week trip, brings his family etc. In reality a paid vacation.
You get a receipt for bigger bribes. It don't say "bribe" for sure. It claims to be some sort of obscure tax. Taxes paid in foreign countries are usually deductible, and it is hard to check that it is a "real" tax. The guy may officially be in a position to issue local taxes - pocketing it is a crime committed by him, not the corporation.
Or he can simply increase the price of some service you pay for. A company official can do that - the fact that he's collecting for himself and not his company is again a matter between he and his company.
Yeah, I remember reading that my 1 Mhz C=64 ran it's code as fast as a 4.77 Mhz IBM PC... something about a more efficient design in the instruction decoding section of the chip. Where the the Intel chip used a ROM look up table, the 6502/6510 chip used combinatorial logic? Is that right?
It isn't just MHz. It is also "how many of these fast clock cycles are necessary for doing the job?"
I had an assembly programming manual for the 6510. Most of the common instructions took 2 or three clock cycles to complete. There were some rare instructions that could take as much as 9 clock cycles, (if they used the seldom used "indirect indexed adressing mode" and also stumbled onto a 256-byte boundary while doing so. That was the very worst case.
The 8088 were a lot worse off - any instruction requiring memory access had an extra cost of address calculation and could easily use 30 or so clock cycles. So the 6510 won on speed, but the 8088 had nifty stuff like 16-bit registers and could access more than 64kB.
The c64 was interesting in another way too - main memory was <I>faster</I> than the processor those days. No cache needed! The c64 video logic accessed memory between the processor's memory cycles - without slowing processing at all. If I could get that kind of memory for today's processors...
Athlon is a superscaler processor that is capable of issuing 9 instructions per cycle, the Pentium 3 according to the intel document is not superscaler, it can only issue 1 instruction per clock.
Something's wrong here. Even the original pentium had an advantage over the 486: It could issue 2 instructions per clock as long as they didn't conflict. The athlon has a clearly superior floating point unit though.
What better way to give feedback to OPEC then to tell them "no thanks, we don't need much oil anymore"
Not very likely. Sure - we'll get hydrogen-powered cars. No carbon dioxide or other pollution. But the hydrogen will mostly come from hydrocarbons, with the carbon removed chemically.
I wonder why HA is such a high concern for all telcos? I mean, the customer is more than willing to put up with delays and disconnects for a cheaper price.
Don't forget accumulated downtime! If your local phone exchange is down 1/100 of the time (99%), then what about a long-distance international calls that goes through hundreds and hundreds of pieces of the same kind of equipment? You would never get through, because 2 of the 200 places would always be down on average.
And they have stuff more important than ordinary phones using the same equipment: emergency lines to police and hospitals, the army use some capacity (at least in some countries). And don't forget the internet, you don't want to wait or get lots of unavailable sites.
Imagine the debate about censorware. A child somewhere might see a breast, in his own home on the internet. The same debate, but this time the government would be able to control information flow into my home. The implications could be scary. The Internet is different than other public works because it contains information.
All they get is an e-mailbox and a number to dial. They still have to get a pc or equivalent equipment. Parents can do something about that part, if they want to.
And the internet </I>isnt't</I> different from all other public service. Consider the phone system - most people have a phone. And there are sex lines anybody (including children) may dial. Still, I don't hear anybody screaming for phone censorship.
Oh, and this is Germany. Why would they even bother worrying about pictures on the internet, considering all the porn they show on their TV channels? Live video feed with no delay at all...
Isn't it odd that the ancient cultures did not have the concept of celestial gravity, yet they were able to make use of leap years.
Not at all. Knowledge of gravity isn't necessary. They simply discovered the year - seasons repeat after about 365 days. This isn't hard to count, and you can measure how high in the sky the sun gets with very primitive instruments, such as a long stick. Or some well-placed stones. The stones are better as they easily last several years. With this they noticed how the year isn't exactly 365 days, so they added leap years to keep the calendar in sync with the seasons.
they are shared, and far too expensive to waste time with a game that often crashes, forcing reboots.
Come on. A mainframe don't crash if used as a gameserver, no matter how buggy the game. Just as linux don't crash when used as gameserver. A good os don't crash - neither from "bugs in games" nor from internal bugs. The only reason you don't get half-life on mainframes the price for the wasted time.
<I>Also, not enough game-related hardware such as GeForce 256 and SBLive! cards are available. </I> Well, would you want to pay the price of a mainframe-compatible sound system?
Slashdot Mirror
and you've got a version of vi new enough to support umlauts
This is usually not a problem. Umlauts etc. are handled by loading the appropriate keymap and fonts. 8-bit clean apps need no more than that, and old popular software is normally 8-bit clean.
As long as you can convince the congressmen from the state of Washington or Virginia or any of these places that it's worthwhile not to give lots of money to lots of American companies, you have my support.
A politician not paying money for software can hand out tax breaks, or spend the money on something more visible.
Either way there is no loss for American companies, all you get is a different distribution of money. Using open source do not transfer any money to foreign entities, buying from a company may very well do as they cut costs by having foreign subcontractors.
>Remember, most of the new Linux users will spend their whole life running as their personal userid - and a virus will not need root access to gra their email, compromise their information and files and so on - it only needs to compromise their account.... a trivial task.
But it still can't compromise the operating system, which helps a lot. Cleanup will definitely be easier. Oh, and we know that there are exploitable buffer overflows, but they are extremely short-lived. A virus can't rely on a particular overflow, because that one will be killed in a few days. And you'll have a hard time writing a generic program for any kind of overflow -something exploiting a sendmail overflow may have to know quite a bit of that protocol before it gets to the weak point, the same goes for all other overflows.
>a an example dedebian is updated so slowly that it will always be behind in the race.
Bad example, I think. New debian packages tend to arrive in a matter of days - if you use the unstable branch. I get many updates (security and others) before redhat users even though the rpm's becomes available a few days earlier. Why? Because I don't have to look for upgrades *anywhere*. I run
apt-get update; apt-getdist-upgrade
now and then. The same command every time, no searching for packages, no reading the latest security warnings.
And the common "their encryption sucks, it's their fault" argument is trash. If someone breaks into your house because they could smash down your door, is it your fault that you didn't have steel bars?
Wrong analogy. It fits the case of someone guessing an easy password, and abuse it. This didn't happen.
It is more like this: I publish a book, and expect to make money of it (assuming I write well) . However, I post the entire book on my public webpage, encrypted with rot-13 or something similiar a child could crack. With no restriction on downloading. No surprise when few people buy the book because they all viewed it in netscape and used the "rot 13" menu to get at it. Then I sue netscape for lost sales.
As much as I hate to admit it, I can see where Mattel is coming from. Decrypting their list, after all, is kind of an invasion of their corporate privacy
..."
I am going to put my root password on a web page. I'll encrypt it of course, to prevent abuse. My fantastic encryption consist of uppercasing the entire password. Now, if anybody decrypts my lowercase password then I'll go after them in court for invading my privacy. Even worse if they actually <I>use</I> it...
<I>But what do they really expect to gain from the ISP's log files? Are they planning to try to track down every single copy?</I>
Maybe that was the plan originally. Futile now, but they still want to know who got it, so they can pick <I>some</I> people to harass. And they will keep records. If stuff like this happens again they'll look for "repeat offenders". "Hey judge - these people were part of the crack back in 2000 too... a history of crime
As far as I know, this has only been in the realms of science fiction. I would like to know if they can get a meaningful distance between the two ends of the 'hole'. A meaningful distance in this instance would have to be extraplanetary, as light does travel pretty damn quick.
The low speed of light is already a problem. Try low-latency communication with something on another continent - it is too slow for some uses, no matter what bandwith you have. Even playing quake around the globe gets too much lag.
but perhaps for some of these they should require a working model to be demonstrated for a patent office clerk.
"I want to patent this improved thermonuclear device." "Sure - bring it in for a demonstration, we'll have to see that it works as advertised..."
The pole would actually move when you pulled it, however, you would have to wait 8 minutes to see the end at the sun move, therefore, yes, it would appear to bend, then 8 minutes later, appear to straiten out.
Make that 16 minutes. (At least) 8 minutes for the pull to propagate, and another 8 minutes for you to see it. And the pole wouldn't merely appear to bend - it <I>would</I> bend.
You don't usually see the bending effect in real life, as you don't handle poles that long. But try pushing someone with really low propagation speed such as water, and you'll see a wave.
I always wondered...say you have a REALLY rigid pole (please no jokes :P) and it spanned from here to say the Sun,</I>
The movement effect travel along the pole with limited speed. Much lower speed than ligth too - it is the speed of sound in the material used. Really rigid material have a much higher speed of sound than air, but still way below the speed of light.
If you really want to send of somebodys alarm you shold have a pager that changes your personality every 1 second. Eventually you will end up with a personality that matches. that would be fun
No need to try all combinations. Her pager transmits her settings. Your hacked device receives, adjusts its settings to match hers, and transmit. <I>Instant</I> success, no trying.
Yeah, but a gay-basher trying to find gays to bash would have to run around with a pager announcing that he is gay, too. Could lead to interesting situations if two of them meet...
Not really. The basher would probably silence his device, these types tend to be paranoid about being mistaken for gay. They will rely on hearing the other guy go beep.
Wonder how many guys with ordinary pagers will be beaten up though.
No, the first and finest hack of these will involve someone tumbling the preferences output. At any given nano-second you are the most desireable man in the world according to your pager.
Or get a display for it, so you can see the preferences of all the people around you. Could be interesting wheter you want them or not. And if someone truly interesting comes up, push a button to generate an instant match. I like to do selection myself, I wouldn't leave that to a device. Seems it can be useful for getting her attention though.
The intended purpose of it is a failure though. Might become a fad, and then disappear. There are so much affecting the choice that isn't easily expressible in logic. Such as looks. And there are too much significant data for anybody to enter into it too.
What kind of resource usage are we looking at in this kernel compared to the 2.2x series?
This is a good one. Many improvements use just a little more memory, but there was a big cut. The disk cache system is rewritten. It is faster, and will, under some circumstances, use half as much memory as usual. This gives more cache as well as more free memory.
Another Debian quirk -- ahem, feature -- is that the sound module is not loaded automatically like in RH, but if you put it in /etc/modules with all other modules you want loaded at boot time, there it will be.</I>
Why do you want modules loaded a boot time?
The sound modules on my machine loads automatically when some program opens a sound device. So the memory needed for a sound driver is used only when I use sound. The driver is unloaded if it goes idle for a while, freeing up memory.
Oh yeah, the article I read (maybe it was heard; I know this casts great doubt on my reliability, but sorry!) said that in some countries bribary of foreign government officials was actually tax deductable! (how are you supposed to get a receipt for that?)
Easy. A small bribe is "representation". Maybe you pay a trip to your country for that official so he can sign papers. He want a two week trip, brings his family etc. In reality a paid vacation.
You get a receipt for bigger bribes. It don't say "bribe" for sure. It claims to be some sort of obscure tax. Taxes paid in foreign countries are usually deductible, and it is hard to check that it is a "real" tax. The guy may officially be in a position to issue local taxes - pocketing it is a crime committed by him, not the corporation.
Or he can simply increase the price of some service you pay for. A company official can do that - the fact that he's collecting for himself and not his company is again a matter between he and his company.
Yeah, I remember reading that my 1 Mhz C=64 ran it's code as fast as a 4.77 Mhz IBM PC... something about a more efficient design in the instruction decoding section of the chip. Where the the Intel chip used a ROM look up table, the 6502/6510 chip used combinatorial logic? Is that right?
It isn't just MHz. It is also "how many of these fast clock cycles are necessary for doing the job?"
I had an assembly programming manual for the 6510. Most of the common instructions took 2 or three clock cycles to complete. There were some rare instructions that could take as much as 9 clock cycles, (if they used the seldom used "indirect indexed adressing mode" and also stumbled onto a 256-byte boundary while doing so. That was the very worst case.
The 8088 were a lot worse off - any instruction requiring memory access had an extra cost of address calculation and could easily use 30 or so clock cycles. So the 6510 won on speed, but the 8088 had nifty stuff like 16-bit registers and could access more than 64kB.
The c64 was interesting in another way too - main memory was <I>faster</I> than the processor those days. No cache needed! The c64 video logic accessed memory between the processor's memory cycles - without slowing processing at all. If I could get that kind of memory for today's processors...
Athlon is a superscaler processor that is capable of issuing 9 instructions per cycle, the Pentium 3 according to the intel document is not superscaler, it can only issue 1 instruction per clock.
Something's wrong here. Even the original pentium had an advantage over the 486: It could issue 2 instructions per clock as long as they didn't conflict. The athlon has a clearly superior floating point unit though.
What better way to give feedback to OPEC then to tell them "no thanks, we don't need much oil anymore"
Not very likely. Sure - we'll get hydrogen-powered cars. No carbon dioxide or other pollution. But the hydrogen will mostly come from hydrocarbons, with the carbon removed chemically.
I wonder why HA is such a high concern for all telcos? I mean, the customer is more than willing to put up with delays and disconnects for a cheaper price.
Don't forget accumulated downtime! If your local phone exchange is down 1/100 of the time (99%), then what about a long-distance international calls that goes through hundreds and hundreds of pieces of the same kind of equipment? You would never get through, because 2 of the 200 places would always be down on average.
And they have stuff more important than ordinary phones using the same equipment: emergency lines to police and hospitals, the army use some capacity (at least in some countries). And don't forget the internet, you don't want to wait or get lots of unavailable sites.
We don't want to contaminate Europa so we contaminate jupiter instead... :-/
Imagine the debate about censorware. A child somewhere might see a breast, in his own home on the internet. The same debate, but this time the government would be able to control information flow into my home. The implications could be scary. The Internet is different than other public works because it contains information.
All they get is an e-mailbox and a number to dial. They still have to get a pc or equivalent equipment. Parents can do something about that part, if they want to.
And the internet </I>isnt't</I> different from all other public service. Consider the phone system - most people have a phone. And there are sex lines anybody (including children) may dial. Still, I don't hear anybody screaming for phone censorship.
Oh, and this is Germany. Why would they even bother worrying about pictures on the internet, considering all the porn they show on their TV channels? Live video feed with no delay at all...
Beaver all girls school is just too easy a joke. I don't think I could say it with a straight face.
Maybe not today. But if you had to say it over and over you'd get tired of the joke quickly. And then - no problem!
Don't care too much about what others think.
Isn't it odd that the ancient cultures did not have the concept of celestial gravity, yet they were able to make use of leap years.
Not at all. Knowledge of gravity isn't necessary. They simply discovered the year - seasons repeat after about 365 days. This isn't hard to count, and you can measure how high in the sky the sun gets with very primitive instruments, such as a long stick. Or some well-placed stones. The stones are better as they easily last several years. With this they noticed how the year isn't exactly 365 days, so they added leap years to keep the calendar in sync with the seasons.
they are shared, and far too expensive to waste time with a game that often crashes, forcing reboots.
Come on. A mainframe don't crash if used as a gameserver, no matter how buggy the game. Just as linux don't crash when used as gameserver. A good os don't crash - neither from "bugs in games" nor from internal bugs. The only reason you don't get half-life on mainframes the price for the wasted time.
<I>Also, not enough game-related hardware such as GeForce 256 and SBLive! cards are available. </I>
Well, would you want to pay the price of a mainframe-compatible sound system?