You would expect the slashdot *editors* would have discovered the distinction between latency and troughput by now. 128 (or whatever) OC-12 running in parallell does not give you a lower ping-time than a single one. (unless your high ping is caused by congestion)
What it does is allow you to transfer more data. Consider this analogy: Sending a hundred postcards at once doesn't make your message get there faster, but it *does* give you space for a longer message.
Ofcourse Internet2 is also built to have low latencies, however the humongous bandwith doesn't contribute directly to this, except as in making congestion less likely.
This project will always lag behind the Wine-LGPL tree.
The reason is simple. Anyone can take code under the X11-license and relicense it under the LGPL, while it is not allowed to distribute code under the LGPL under a X11-license.
The practical upshot of this is that any improvements to the Rewind tree can be instantly copied into the Wine-LGPL tree, while any new functionality or bugfixes in Wine-LGPL has to be clea-room re-implemented to go into the Rewind-tree (unless the contributor licenses his contribution under X11-license like some contributors have said they will.)
Uhm. No. Wrong. You see. *all* purchases are subject to sales-tax today. *except* for downloaded content.
So you could not, as you claim, get around the sales-tax by doing "free music, with the purchase of item X", because if you buy item X, regardless of what it is, then you pay sales-tax. Simple and straigthforward.
I'm not saying I agree with this proposal, I'm jsut saying that your objection only suceeds in showcasing your lack of understanding of the issue.
The suggestion is to apply sales-tax to stuff you buy by downloading it from the net. If I order a DVD from the states, I pay sales-tax. (23% in Norway) This suggestion says that I should pay the same thing if I buy the versy same movie, but download it rather than getting it on DVD.
So anything that's free on the net would be unaffected. Oh well, this is slashdot I suppose, it's too much to ask that people actually read what is said before responding to it...
No. you're wrong. Gzip *will* sometimes make a file grow. It has to. Think about it: there are certain sequences of bytes in a file that are "magical" to gzip, which are meant to expand to something more than what they are.
If those sequences show up in the file, they must be "escaped" somehow so as to make gunzip understand that they are to be interpreted literally as opposed to expanded.
This will cause a small growth. But the growth will generally stay very low, I haven't tested, but I would guess no more than 1% growth or so.
Get yourself some random data (real random is of course somewhat hard to find! but the output from a crypto-strength RNG is OK) and zip it. It will (probably) get smaller, a reduction is more likely the bigger the file is.
Bullshit. There will be patterns, but the point is, all patterns are equally likely, so this does not help you. Don't believe me ? Test it yourself. Pull say a megabyte of your/dev/random (this will take a while!) And then try to compress it with all the compressors on your machine. Zip, Compress, Bzip, you name it.
The odds are very high (as in 99.999% ++) that none of the compressors will manage to shrink the file a single byte. Infact they will probably all cause it to grow very sligthly.
Someone already pointed out that repeated compression would give infinite compression with this method. But there's another easy way to show that no compressor can ever manage to shrink all messages
The proof goes like this:
Assume someone claims a compressor that will compress any X-byte message to Y bytes where Y<X
There are 2^(8*X) possible messages X bytes long.
There are 2^(8*Y) possible messages Y bytes long.
Since Y is smaller than X, this means that no 1 to 1 mapping between the two sets can exist, because they're not equally large.
You see this simply if I claim a compressor that can compress any 2-byte message to 1 byte.
There are then 65536 possible input-messages, but onle 256 possible outputs. So It is mathemathically certain that 99.7% of the messages
can not be represented in 1 byte. (regardless of how I choose to encode them)
These claims surface ever so often. They're bullshit every time. It's even a FAQ-entry on sci.compression
By all means, I agree that spending more money for space-research in general would be a good thing to do, including charting the orbits of anyything close to earth.
But it's sort of in the nature of these things that "near misses" will be very common compared to actual hits. Let's look at the numbers:
The earth has a radius of about 6300 km.
This gives a volume of about 10^12 km^3
This asteroid was at the closest about 830000 km from earth
A sphere with a radius of 830000 has a volume of about 2.5*10^18
If we divide these numbers, we find that an object will be this close to earth on the average something a bit more than 2 million times as often as it actually hits the earth.
So, if an asteroid this size hits earth on the average once every 500000 years, then we should expect that one comes this close to earth on the average 4 times a year.
Offcourse I'm simplifying a lot here, and offcourse this is statistics, we migth just as well be hit one month from now. All I'm saying is that it's not very surprising that something comes "this close" fairly often.
You see, you don't get this list from the government. What you do is you send in your adress-list, then they'll wash it for you and send you back the remaining adresses.
So you can deduct who's on the list by running diff on your input and your output, but you'll never be told the adress of anyone unless you already have it.
What makes you think a working opt-out is not possible ?
We do infact have such a system in Norway. There's a single webiste, operated by the government whee you can register yourself, and mark check-boxes for which kind of targeted marketing you accept. (postal or by phone ? Not from anyone, or do you still accept postal marketing or phone-calls from charities?)
Anyone who does direct marketing is legally obligated to wash their adress-lists against this one atleast once every 3 months. Sending postal mail, or doing phone-marketing to a person on the list is a crime. Punishable by fines or prison up to 2 years. (In theory, in practice you get a fine offcourse)
When it comes to email we've got opt-in though. Sending marketing to individuals without *prior* *informed* *active* consent is a crime. Same punishment as above. And it *does* Work. I get about 200 spams a month. And this far in 2001 I've gotten *2* Count them - *TWO* spams from Norwegian spammers. Naturally I've reported them and had them fined.
Opt-out is actually acceptable if there's *one* single point where you opt out, and if there's punishments attached to ignoring your opt-out. I still prefer opt-in, but the opt-out on phone-marketing does work. I've got ZERO phone-marketing-calls after I registered myself on the opt-out site.
Bullshit. All they have to do is write code, and use servers which follow the established standards.
Then any standards-compliant browesr will work. Yes, I'm aware that no 100% compliant browser exists, but a few are close enough to work well in practice.
It's a *long* time since I saw a page that validated under validator.w3.org but still failed to work ok in both Mozilla, Galeon and IE.
That's not a particularily good reason, given that proxy-servers that work with all browsers, IE and otherwise are freely available for all common operating-systems.
This merely moves the problem. "Why must I use IE?" changes into "Why do you use proprietary shit for something as simple as a proxy-server?".
I don't know about you. But I've got better things to do with my time than battling PHB's for permission to use the tools that will allow me to get my job done efficiently.
Your company sounds clueless. There's no sensible reason to enforce a certain browser. And *certainly* no even halfway sensible reason to allow any OS the user wants, but still insist on a spesific browser.
IE on Solaris is a complete dog. And it won't work any *better* even if you manage to by some kludge make it work under some other unix. Exporting it over the network with X11 works, but seriously, what's it all for ? Why can't you just use a browser that works on your OS ? Mozilla ?
I'd ask my boss for the reason for such an idiotic policy. If the answer is not satisfactory, go work for someone who actually has a clue. You'll only regret working for idiots in the long term anyway.
Microsoft offers yet another way for people to change from Java and into some kinda system which only works on Windows.
Why would anyone care ? Is there a lack of windows-only products from Microsoft ? Isn't that the default for everything they make ? Why would a nerd possibly care about possible ways to defeat portability ?
How tall is tall ? How far is far ? There can be no objective, or even half close to sorta-objective answer to these kinds of questions.
The number of developers needed migth be proportional to the rate of changes in a codebase, and perhaps to the complexity of the internal and external apis. But the number of lines of code by itself is fairly irrelevant.
It also makes a *huge* difference if these are fresh or experienced developers, if they know the project already or if they need to spend the first months getting acquianted with it, and simply if they're good or not.
I really think there's no substantially better method than simply to estimate from your current situation. Do remember though, that 5 programmers working on a project are typically not 5 times as efficient as one. That's because they have to communicate internally, spend time understanding code which others have written and so on.
Simply hitting Google and entering "netfilter howto" ?
All of the top 5 hits are directly relevant, and 2 of them are to the "Linux 2.4 packet filtering howto" and the "Linux 2.4 NAT howto"
*sigh* Another day, another totally unresearched "ask slashdot". You'd think the editors would bother spending 2 minutes checking if the question is trivial.
I have no problem with 2^17 being rounded to 125K at all. The problem is that this number is utterly irrelevant to security. Do you really think the internet would be more secure if portnumbers where 12bit ? Or that our current security-problems would seem tiny if the portnumbers where 32-bit ?
The problem I have with the statement is that it's stupid. It's true, but it's irrelevant to the issue at hand. Your actual vulnerability is proportional to the number of listening ports on your machine, but that number bears no direct relationship to the size of the portnumber-field.
Visions says, among other things:
With TCP and UDP alone there are over 125,000 possible ports that attackers could target.. Uhm, yeah. Portunmbers are 16 bit. So there's 65536 possible ports, times 2 if you count tcp and udp. I'm not so sure why this is relevant to anything though.
Their link to closed incidents Gives a: Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers
(0x80040E31)
[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver Not very comforting.
Their domain name is really really dumb.:)
They claim 1200 active agents, and 87K reported incidents the last 24 hours. This is a really high level, and thus means the agent has to report back home every little detail that happens.
On the flipside, they do have a privacy-policy clearly visible on their homepages, and they do support agents under many different OSes. So who knows, maybe they're actually clueful and just manage to come off as clueless.
Actually, what it demonstrates is that Winamp is not ready for the Linux desktop. Big surprise there, since it is, afterall, labelled an _ALPHA_ release.
Winamp is a proprietary mp3-player made by Nullsoft. What this has to do with Linux I don't know. Would you instantly claim Win32 is not ready for the desktop if some company released a buggy alpha-version of an mp3-player for Windows ?
Very Alpha I'd say. With my Mdk 8.1 system and Xfree 4.1.0 the player won't even start. They start it with a shellscript that redirects all error-reporting to/dev/null, After I uncomment that and run it again I see that it fails with:
libpng warning: Incomplete compressed datastream in iCCP chunk
libpng warning: Profile size field missing from iCCP chunk
libpng warning: Incomplete compressed datastream in iCCP chunk
libpng warning: Profile size field missing from iCCP chunk
X Error of failed request: BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)
Major opcode of failed request: 72 (X_PutImage)
Serial number of failed request: 5011
Current serial number in output stream: 5012
Ofcourse since it's closed-source I can't even begin to guess what's causing that. Anyone else have any luck running the player under mdk 8.1 ?
$10 a GB is ridiculously low for most people on the Internet. It's possibly true for those with a flat-rate high-bandwith connection, but if you think that's the majority, then you're up for a surprise.
Here in Norway for example, which is probably about representative, about half the people dial into the Internet with modems, or by ISDN. Flat rate on telephone-calls is uncommon, the vast majority of that half pay about $1 an hour for the connection to the net. That works out as $50 a GB for those on ISDN, and $66 a GB for those on modem.
Even this estimate still assumes that the link is perfectly full, that is, that a person with a ISDN-connection downloads email at a rate of 64kbps, which isn't nessecarily true. (allthough it should be close for your ISP's local mailserver)
A few hundred meters of pro low-friction super-strong syntetic rope. (locked like climbing-rope to me)
Then you can raise a small obelisk on it's end.
Big surprise there. I completely fail to see how this even indicates that the old egyptians/could/ have done this. To demonstrate that possibility you'd have to repeat the experiment with the materials available to the old Egyptians. (this means no nylon, no syntetical fibers, only the kinds of cloth the Egyptians had, no ball-bearing low-friction pulleys.)
I wonder how much of a pull such a kite provides anyway. More than 8 people with an old-fashioned manual winch ? I doubt it. And much less manageable, since you need convenient wind.
Less tran truthful advertising...
on
Why not Ruby?
·
· Score: 3
http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/compar.html claims to compare Ruby to other languages, and such it does. Unfortunately it's full of half-truths and downrigth lies about other languages, that doesn't make me feel warm and fuzzy. A few examples follows from the Python section:
Python types are more limited (no inheritance/subclassing; cannot add methods to existing types). What are they smoking ? No inheritance in Python ? Python has had inheritance since day one as far as I know. Cannot add methods to existing types. Not ? How about:
class chair:
"Class with no methods"
pass
def siton(obj):
print "You sit on the chair"
chair.siton = siton
Just an example, I don't know Perl or tcl well enough to comment, but when I find mistakes in simple factual claims I get a whole lot more skeptical of other claims that I am myself unable to verify.
Slashdot Mirror
You would expect the slashdot *editors* would have discovered the distinction between latency and troughput by now. 128 (or whatever) OC-12 running in parallell does not give you a lower ping-time than a single one. (unless your high ping is caused by congestion)
What it does is allow you to transfer more data. Consider this analogy: Sending a hundred postcards at once doesn't make your message get there faster, but it *does* give you space for a longer message.
Ofcourse Internet2 is also built to have low latencies, however the humongous bandwith doesn't contribute directly to this, except as in making congestion less likely.
This project will always lag behind the Wine-LGPL tree.
The reason is simple. Anyone can take code under the X11-license and relicense it under the LGPL, while it is not allowed to distribute code under the LGPL under a X11-license.
The practical upshot of this is that any improvements to the Rewind tree can be instantly copied into the Wine-LGPL tree, while any new functionality or bugfixes in Wine-LGPL has to be clea-room re-implemented to go into the Rewind-tree (unless the contributor licenses his contribution under X11-license like some contributors have said they will.)
So you could not, as you claim, get around the sales-tax by doing "free music, with the purchase of item X", because if you buy item X, regardless of what it is, then you pay sales-tax. Simple and straigthforward.
I'm not saying I agree with this proposal, I'm jsut saying that your objection only suceeds in showcasing your lack of understanding of the issue.
The suggestion is to apply sales-tax to stuff you buy by downloading it from the net. If I order a DVD from the states, I pay sales-tax. (23% in Norway) This suggestion says that I should pay the same thing if I buy the versy same movie, but download it rather than getting it on DVD.
So anything that's free on the net would be unaffected. Oh well, this is slashdot I suppose, it's too much to ask that people actually read what is said before responding to it...
A 1000000 file grows to about 1000178
You make your own experiments and draw your own conclusions if you like.
If those sequences show up in the file, they must be "escaped" somehow so as to make gunzip understand that they are to be interpreted literally as opposed to expanded.
This will cause a small growth. But the growth will generally stay very low, I haven't tested, but I would guess no more than 1% growth or so.
Bullshit. There will be patterns, but the point is, all patterns are equally likely, so this does not help you. Don't believe me ? Test it yourself. Pull say a megabyte of your
The odds are very high (as in 99.999% ++) that none of the compressors will manage to shrink the file a single byte. Infact they will probably all cause it to grow very sligthly.
The proof goes like this:
- Assume someone claims a compressor that will compress any X-byte message to Y bytes where Y<X
- There are 2^(8*X) possible messages X bytes long.
- There are 2^(8*Y) possible messages Y bytes long.
- Since Y is smaller than X, this means that no 1 to 1 mapping between the two sets can exist, because they're not equally large.
You see this simply if I claim a compressor that can compress any 2-byte message to 1 byte.There are then 65536 possible input-messages, but onle 256 possible outputs. So It is mathemathically certain that 99.7% of the messages can not be represented in 1 byte. (regardless of how I choose to encode them)
These claims surface ever so often. They're bullshit every time. It's even a FAQ-entry on sci.compression
But it's sort of in the nature of these things that "near misses" will be very common compared to actual hits. Let's look at the numbers:
If we divide these numbers, we find that an object will be this close to earth on the average something a bit more than 2 million times as often as it actually hits the earth.
So, if an asteroid this size hits earth on the average once every 500000 years, then we should expect that one comes this close to earth on the average 4 times a year.
Offcourse I'm simplifying a lot here, and offcourse this is statistics, we migth just as well be hit one month from now. All I'm saying is that it's not very surprising that something comes "this close" fairly often.
That's because they can't.
You see, you don't get this list from the government. What you do is you send in your adress-list, then they'll wash it for you and send you back the remaining adresses.
So you can deduct who's on the list by running diff on your input and your output, but you'll never be told the adress of anyone unless you already have it.
What makes you think a working opt-out is not possible ?
We do infact have such a system in Norway. There's a single webiste, operated by the government whee you can register yourself, and mark check-boxes for which kind of targeted marketing you accept. (postal or by phone ? Not from anyone, or do you still accept postal marketing or phone-calls from charities?)
Anyone who does direct marketing is legally obligated to wash their adress-lists against this one atleast once every 3 months. Sending postal mail, or doing phone-marketing to a person on the list is a crime. Punishable by fines or prison up to 2 years. (In theory, in practice you get a fine offcourse)
When it comes to email we've got opt-in though. Sending marketing to individuals without *prior* *informed* *active* consent is a crime. Same punishment as above. And it *does* Work. I get about 200 spams a month. And this far in 2001 I've gotten *2* Count them - *TWO* spams from Norwegian spammers. Naturally I've reported them and had them fined.
Opt-out is actually acceptable if there's *one* single point where you opt out, and if there's punishments attached to ignoring your opt-out. I still prefer opt-in, but the opt-out on phone-marketing does work. I've got ZERO phone-marketing-calls after I registered myself on the opt-out site.
Bullshit. All they have to do is write code, and use servers which follow the established standards.
Then any standards-compliant browesr will work. Yes, I'm aware that no 100% compliant browser exists, but a few are close enough to work well in practice.
It's a *long* time since I saw a page that validated under validator.w3.org but still failed to work ok in both Mozilla, Galeon and IE.
That's not a particularily good reason, given that proxy-servers that work with all browsers, IE and otherwise are freely available for all common operating-systems.
This merely moves the problem. "Why must I use IE?" changes into "Why do you use proprietary shit for something as simple as a proxy-server?".
I don't know about you. But I've got better things to do with my time than battling PHB's for permission to use the tools that will allow me to get my job done efficiently.
Your company sounds clueless. There's no sensible reason to enforce a certain browser. And *certainly* no even halfway sensible reason to allow any OS the user wants, but still insist on a spesific browser.
IE on Solaris is a complete dog. And it won't work any *better* even if you manage to by some kludge make it work under some other unix. Exporting it over the network with X11 works, but seriously, what's it all for ? Why can't you just use a browser that works on your OS ? Mozilla ?
I'd ask my boss for the reason for such an idiotic policy. If the answer is not satisfactory, go work for someone who actually has a clue. You'll only regret working for idiots in the long term anyway.
Microsoft offers yet another way for people to change from Java and into some kinda system which only works on Windows.
Why would anyone care ? Is there a lack of windows-only products from Microsoft ? Isn't that the default for everything they make ? Why would a nerd possibly care about possible ways to defeat portability ?
How tall is tall ? How far is far ? There can be no objective, or even half close to sorta-objective answer to these kinds of questions.
The number of developers needed migth be proportional to the rate of changes in a codebase, and perhaps to the complexity of the internal and external apis. But the number of lines of code by itself is fairly irrelevant.
It also makes a *huge* difference if these are fresh or experienced developers, if they know the project already or if they need to spend the first months getting acquianted with it, and simply if they're good or not.
I really think there's no substantially better method than simply to estimate from your current situation. Do remember though, that 5 programmers working on a project are typically not 5 times as efficient as one. That's because they have to communicate internally, spend time understanding code which others have written and so on.
Simply hitting Google and entering "netfilter howto" ?
All of the top 5 hits are directly relevant, and 2 of them are to the "Linux 2.4 packet filtering howto" and the "Linux 2.4 NAT howto"
*sigh* Another day, another totally unresearched "ask slashdot". You'd think the editors would bother spending 2 minutes checking if the question is trivial.
The problem I have with the statement is that it's stupid. It's true, but it's irrelevant to the issue at hand. Your actual vulnerability is proportional to the number of listening ports on your machine, but that number bears no direct relationship to the size of the portnumber-field.
- Visions says, among other things:
With TCP and UDP alone there are over 125,000 possible ports that attackers could target.. Uhm, yeah. Portunmbers are 16 bit. So there's 65536 possible ports, times 2 if you count tcp and udp. I'm not so sure why this is relevant to anything though.
- Their link to closed incidents Gives a: Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers
(0x80040E31)
[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver Not very comforting.
- Their domain name is really really dumb.
:)
- They claim 1200 active agents, and 87K reported incidents the last 24 hours. This is a really high level, and thus means the agent has to report back home every little detail that happens.
On the flipside, they do have a privacy-policy clearly visible on their homepages, and they do support agents under many different OSes. So who knows, maybe they're actually clueful and just manage to come off as clueless.Actually, what it demonstrates is that Winamp is not ready for the Linux desktop. Big surprise there, since it is, afterall, labelled an _ALPHA_ release.
Winamp is a proprietary mp3-player made by Nullsoft. What this has to do with Linux I don't know. Would you instantly claim Win32 is not ready for the desktop if some company released a buggy alpha-version of an mp3-player for Windows ?
Very Alpha I'd say. With my Mdk 8.1 system and Xfree 4.1.0 the player won't even start. They start it with a shellscript that redirects all error-reporting to /dev/null, After I uncomment that and run it again I see that it fails with:
libpng warning: Incomplete compressed datastream in iCCP chunk
libpng warning: Profile size field missing from iCCP chunk
libpng warning: Incomplete compressed datastream in iCCP chunk
libpng warning: Profile size field missing from iCCP chunk
X Error of failed request: BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)
Major opcode of failed request: 72 (X_PutImage)
Serial number of failed request: 5011
Current serial number in output stream: 5012
Ofcourse since it's closed-source I can't even begin to guess what's causing that. Anyone else have any luck running the player under mdk 8.1 ?
Here in Norway for example, which is probably about representative, about half the people dial into the Internet with modems, or by ISDN. Flat rate on telephone-calls is uncommon, the vast majority of that half pay about $1 an hour for the connection to the net. That works out as $50 a GB for those on ISDN, and $66 a GB for those on modem.
Even this estimate still assumes that the link is perfectly full, that is, that a person with a ISDN-connection downloads email at a rate of 64kbps, which isn't nessecarily true. (allthough it should be close for your ISP's local mailserver)
Actually, 5K times 10 million is 50 gigabytes, not 50 megabytes. So it's a lot worse than you state above.
- A big, modern nylon-kite
- A dozen or soo modern low-friction pulleys.
- A few hundred meters of pro low-friction super-strong syntetic rope. (locked like climbing-rope to me)
Then you can raise a small obelisk on it's end.Big surprise there. I completely fail to see how this even indicates that the old egyptians /could/ have done this. To demonstrate that possibility you'd have to repeat the experiment with the materials available to the old Egyptians. (this means no nylon, no syntetical fibers, only the kinds of cloth the Egyptians had, no ball-bearing low-friction pulleys.)
I wonder how much of a pull such a kite provides anyway. More than 8 people with an old-fashioned manual winch ? I doubt it. And much less manageable, since you need convenient wind.
http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/compar.html claims to compare Ruby to other languages, and such it does. Unfortunately it's full of half-truths and downrigth lies about other languages, that doesn't make me feel warm and fuzzy. A few examples follows from the Python section:
Python types are more limited (no inheritance/subclassing; cannot add methods to existing types). What are they smoking ? No inheritance in Python ? Python has had inheritance since day one as far as I know. Cannot add methods to existing types. Not ? How about:
class chair:
"Class with no methods"
pass
def siton(obj):
print "You sit on the chair"
chair.siton = siton
Just an example, I don't know Perl or tcl well enough to comment, but when I find mistakes in simple factual claims I get a whole lot more skeptical of other claims that I am myself unable to verify.