I don't think the F-117 was ever intended to be completely invisible to radar. It's not as if they designed it to be able to fly down Main Street Baghdad and have people wondering what the noise was. It's not an invisible UFO.
It is, however, more difficult for radar to distinguish from background reflections, and thus more difficult for missile radar to track. It's also heat-shielded against heat-seeking missiles.
the best keyboard I ever had was a Northgate keyboard from the late 80s. Anyone remember Northgate? Pournelle used to rave about their keyboards in Byte, I got one and I loved it...the function keys were on the left and Control was next to A, as God (and IBM) intended. Those function keys were so easy to hit with my left pinky...
I was working for a company that went belly-up around 9/11. I was one of the few people kept on as a contractor, but I wasn't guaranteed that I would be paid. The product was going to be installed at a single (large) client. I put in a simple check to exit with an error message if the app was run past a date a few months in the future. I planned on eventually taking it out if all went well.
I was at least a little clever in how I put it in; didn't make the check too obvious. But our source control system gave me away (I knew it would, but I wasn't trying to be that secure). I've wondered though, how difficult it would be to plant the change in a much older version of the source file. We were using SourceSafe, but I've never looked into the format of the actual files or how that would be done.
Does this mean that I'm going to have to switch to goddamn SBC for my DSL access? I've been more than happy with Earthlink, and the only company I would switch to is SpeakEasy. Both of those only provide me access through Baby Bell infrastructure.
So these Bells are whining about being forced to demonopolize the telephone infrastructure which the US government financed? They want to be a deregulated monopoly on what they were given for free?
Note that the definition of "optimization" is "making small changes to make something that runs ok run faster". Optimization implies that without it, the app would still be at least marginally acceptable. "Better is the enemy of good enough" is a similar quote.
Architectural and design decisions are not optimizations. With the wrong architecture, performance can be so slow as to be impossible to adequately optimize. There is no such thing as "premature design".
1. As a programmer, I often have to learn new technologies and find new ways of doing things. Books are good, but there is nothing better than the internet. When I've had to do things like image compression (not my forte as a developer) I've blatantly 'stolen' code from various sites.
2. As a programmer, I'm often presented with short minutes of downtime, while I recompile. My habit of switching to my browser at these moments is very deeply ingrained. The reason I read/. is because it's frequently updated with something new (and occasionally interesting) to read. I'm so used to this, that when I reboot, my first impulse is to switch to my browser. Then I realize that I can't, and I look around for a book or something.
In 'production' kernels (2.4 and lower) you're right. The latest development series, however, adds both better threading support, faster syscalls, and preemptive scheduling. It will take a while for these features to mature and stabilize, of course.
Solaris certainly has its advantages in code maturity. But one of the biggest advantages Linux has is that they care not a whit for binary compatibility, and can therefore rewrite things from scratch when they want to, keeping only source compatibility (and often not even that). Solaris and other commercial OSs, for obvious reasons, must make sure that they provide easy upgrade paths for existing customers and applications. Therefore, they must keep legacy code and interfaces around, and must avoid making changes which might cause incompatibilities.
It's certainly annoying that you can't depend on code to run across Linux kernels without recompiling; it makes commercial software (particularly driver) development a nightmare. But it allows Linux to make extremely rapid changes and fix mistakes. It's highly unlikely that any commercial OS could have changed as rapidly as Linux has over the last twelve years. That speed of development, combined with the fact that Linux is consciously modelling itself after another OS, has probably equalled or exceeded the extra time and resources Sun has put into Solaris. At this point, Sun's only real advantage is their ability to produce both the hardware and software, and not worry about portability.
The funny thing is: I'm glad to know it's/., and not me--I was worried my company had noticed how much bandwidth is wasted on Slashdot, and was capping it!
Is Slashdot suddenly running unpatched SQL Servers?
It's entirely possible that SCO's claims are accurate. If they inherited valid software patents on some of the basic designs of UNIX, then they have a government-granted right to sue any company which uses those designs.
We all view UNIX as being freely copyable in its design, because traditionally it has been. Linux shares no code with the original UNIX, but it does share both design and interfaces such as syscalls. This is not a copyright issue, it is a patent issue. If the patents are valid, then it's possible Linux is infringing by its very existence. The BSDs are in a different camp, because of their heritage and the previous agreements between Berkely and AT&T, but possibly they're infringing as well.
Of course, it's also possible that there is no actual patent infringement going on. But that depends on what AT&T decided to do back in the day regarding patenting UNIX. I know that IBM's standard policy is to patent *everything*.
(cue Gary Oldman at the end of The Professional: "EVERYTHING!" )
Kreidenko said a secondary booster, which was due to propel the satellite to a higher altitude, had malfunctioned and was circling the earth separately from its payload.
This is a very funny way of saying, "the damn booster just broke off and flew away on its own."
My favorite way to generate passwords is to alternate random consonants and vowels. The results are just about as 'secure' as any other randomly generated password (i.e., knowing the pattern won't help very much) and much easier to remember. Social engineering is always the easiest way to break passwords, and people often write down difficult-to-remember passwords.
Some examples: gymolifi tosenima qopanela
Because of the alternating pattern, the results are almost always pronouncable, which makes the passwords signifigantly easier to remember. Digits or symbols can be added to satisfy password requirements and increase security.
Sprint did the same thing to me. By default, they charge several dollars per minute for overseas calls. They assume (correctly) that people will make an international call before checking on the rates. The kicker is that if you call Sprint, they'll tell you about their "international plan" which brings the cost of the calls to a few cents per minute.
A company which charges a default price twenty-five times more than their "opt-in" price is screwing you over, plain and simple.
If you go buy a piece of candy at the local candy store, does the proprietor of the candy store have the right to gossip about your candy-eating habits? If the local dentist offers to pay him in exchange for a list of people who buy lots of candy, is that illegal? What if the dentist paid a local kid money to watch the store and report who bought lots of stuff?
Excepting monopolies, you have the ability to switch to another candy store, and to avoid using that dentist. But you can't arrest either one of them. If you're concerned about privacy, make sure you have a signed contract with the other party ensuring that certain information will not be disclosed.
And if you're unhappy about that candy-store merchant, think about it this way: candy at that store might be cheaper than the one down the street which doesn't sell your information. If the information-selling business is particularly lucrative, the candy might become practically free.
Wow. Some heads must be rolling at Microsoft over this. Recommending that Microsoft be removed from the list of trusted signees? They're certainly not pulling punches on this one. It looks to me like they're placing a higher priority (with the treatment of this bug) on user security than company image. That's a first...
The reason they're in this mess is the whole "trusted computing" paradigm which they started with this signed-ActiveX stuff and are continuing with Palladium. Perhaps this will make them reconsider. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes: Who watches the watchers?
I agree. I hate overly-biased political writing. I tend to refuse to believe anything which sounds extremist, unless I hear and disagree with an intelligent argument from the other side. I'm pretty liberal, but there's only so much W.-bashing that I can stand before I want to hear something from the conservatives, too.
However, I'm a subscriber to both Salon and Slashdot, and I get my money's worth from them. I'll be sad to see either one go. (Hint, hint: will you be sad, too? Would it be worth a few dollars to you?)
I do development on PocketPC, and I can confirm that the Toshiba e740 (which is XScale) does run slower per mhz than other chips. It's several hundred mhz faster than the Casio (MIPS) device we use, but from a user perspective it runs about the same. (For some operations it's much faster.) I've read that Intel requires changes to the PPC kernel to take better advantage of the XScale. When we upgraded the firmware on some of the devices (upgrading the PPC kernel in the process) they did run a little bit faster. Under PPC 2002, they stopped supporting multiple instruction sets (ARM, MIPS, SH4 etc) and standardized on the ARM op set. Whether there's much overhead in doing this on the XScale, I don't know.
Based on the last/. article on Bayesian filtering, I installed SpamProbe. I gave it a folder of about 70 spam emails, and a few hundred good emails I had in various folders. In the past few weeks, it's had one false negative, and a few false positives which were 'semi-spam' mailing list emails from Dell, RedHat, and Amazon. When I moved those emails into the 'recheck as good' folders, it learned its lesson.
It may be naive, but I was very surprised at how well it worked. It's better than SpamAssassin IMO, especially at foreign-language spam.
I used to use SpamAssassin. It did great except on Spanish spam. Its rules didn't have anything to cover Spanish. I switched to SpamProbe, which builds its own word list, and therefore does very well at even foreign-language spam.
Speaking of dragons...one of my favorite CYOAs was (IIRC) "Dragon Mountain." The thing I found interesting about it was that if you did one thing, there were no dragons, and you ended up back home. If you did something else, there were real dragons controlled by a mad wizard or whatever. If you did a third thing, the dragons were robotic. The background and world of the story was different depending on what you did. Most of the CYOAs just changed the plot a little.
Years later, when studying Kurosawa's Rashomon, I was reminded of Dragon Mountain. The comparison is a stretch, but it's the same idea of "multiple versions of the same story with different facts, and no story is more right than another."
My theory on Dragon's Lair (and Space Ace) was that the games were much more fun to watch other people play than they were to play yourself. I was pretty young when DL came out, and it usually cost too much for me to play (and for a long time, there was always someone playing it). But I watched other people play it for hours and hours.
When I did play it myself years later, I remember thinking..."wow, this isn't as much fun as it looked." When you watch someone play it, you don't realize how little control they have over what's going on on-screen.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think the F-117 was ever intended to be completely invisible to radar. It's not as if they designed it to be able to fly down Main Street Baghdad and have people wondering what the noise was. It's not an invisible UFO.
It is, however, more difficult for radar to distinguish from background reflections, and thus more difficult for missile radar to track. It's also heat-shielded against heat-seeking missiles.
the best keyboard I ever had was a Northgate keyboard from the late 80s. Anyone remember Northgate? Pournelle used to rave about their keyboards in Byte, I got one and I loved it...the function keys were on the left and Control was next to A, as God (and IBM) intended. Those function keys were so easy to hit with my left pinky...
I was working for a company that went belly-up around 9/11. I was one of the few people kept on as a contractor, but I wasn't guaranteed that I would be paid. The product was going to be installed at a single (large) client. I put in a simple check to exit with an error message if the app was run past a date a few months in the future. I planned on eventually taking it out if all went well.
I was at least a little clever in how I put it in; didn't make the check too obvious. But our source control system gave me away (I knew it would, but I wasn't trying to be that secure). I've wondered though, how difficult it would be to plant the change in a much older version of the source file. We were using SourceSafe, but I've never looked into the format of the actual files or how that would be done.
Does this mean that I'm going to have to switch to goddamn SBC for my DSL access? I've been more than happy with Earthlink, and the only company I would switch to is SpeakEasy. Both of those only provide me access through Baby Bell infrastructure.
So these Bells are whining about being forced to demonopolize the telephone infrastructure which the US government financed? They want to be a deregulated monopoly on what they were given for free?
No.
I thought it was the reverse: challenges for systems to hack into.
After that, I thought, maybe it's real 'hacks', as in what the Jargon File would define 'hack' as.
Speaking of which...I tried to provide a link to www.tuxedo.org and got redirected to various sites. What's up with ESR's site?
Note that the definition of "optimization" is "making small changes to make something that runs ok run faster". Optimization implies that without it, the app would still be at least marginally acceptable. "Better is the enemy of good enough" is a similar quote.
Architectural and design decisions are not optimizations. With the wrong architecture, performance can be so slow as to be impossible to adequately optimize. There is no such thing as "premature design".
1. As a programmer, I often have to learn new technologies and find new ways of doing things. Books are good, but there is nothing better than the internet. When I've had to do things like image compression (not my forte as a developer) I've blatantly 'stolen' code from various sites.
/. is because it's frequently updated with something new (and occasionally interesting) to read. I'm so used to this, that when I reboot, my first impulse is to switch to my browser. Then I realize that I can't, and I look around for a book or something.
2. As a programmer, I'm often presented with short minutes of downtime, while I recompile. My habit of switching to my browser at these moments is very deeply ingrained. The reason I read
In 'production' kernels (2.4 and lower) you're right. The latest development series, however, adds both better threading support, faster syscalls, and preemptive scheduling. It will take a while for these features to mature and stabilize, of course.
Solaris certainly has its advantages in code maturity. But one of the biggest advantages Linux has is that they care not a whit for binary compatibility, and can therefore rewrite things from scratch when they want to, keeping only source compatibility (and often not even that). Solaris and other commercial OSs, for obvious reasons, must make sure that they provide easy upgrade paths for existing customers and applications. Therefore, they must keep legacy code and interfaces around, and must avoid making changes which might cause incompatibilities.
It's certainly annoying that you can't depend on code to run across Linux kernels without recompiling; it makes commercial software (particularly driver) development a nightmare. But it allows Linux to make extremely rapid changes and fix mistakes. It's highly unlikely that any commercial OS could have changed as rapidly as Linux has over the last twelve years. That speed of development, combined with the fact that Linux is consciously modelling itself after another OS, has probably equalled or exceeded the extra time and resources Sun has put into Solaris. At this point, Sun's only real advantage is their ability to produce both the hardware and software, and not worry about portability.
The funny thing is: I'm glad to know it's /., and not me--I was worried my company had noticed how much bandwidth is wasted on Slashdot, and was capping it!
Is Slashdot suddenly running unpatched SQL Servers?
It's entirely possible that SCO's claims are accurate. If they inherited valid software patents on some of the basic designs of UNIX, then they have a government-granted right to sue any company which uses those designs.
We all view UNIX as being freely copyable in its design, because traditionally it has been. Linux shares no code with the original UNIX, but it does share both design and interfaces such as syscalls. This is not a copyright issue, it is a patent issue. If the patents are valid, then it's possible Linux is infringing by its very existence. The BSDs are in a different camp, because of their heritage and the previous agreements between Berkely and AT&T, but possibly they're infringing as well.
Of course, it's also possible that there is no actual patent infringement going on. But that depends on what AT&T decided to do back in the day regarding patenting UNIX. I know that IBM's standard policy is to patent *everything*.
(cue Gary Oldman at the end of The Professional: "EVERYTHING!" )
Kreidenko said a secondary booster, which was due to propel the satellite to a higher altitude, had malfunctioned and was circling the earth separately from its payload.
This is a very funny way of saying, "the damn booster just broke off and flew away on its own."
My favorite way to generate passwords is to alternate random consonants and vowels. The results are just about as 'secure' as any other randomly generated password (i.e., knowing the pattern won't help very much) and much easier to remember. Social engineering is always the easiest way to break passwords, and people often write down difficult-to-remember passwords.
Some examples:
gymolifi
tosenima
qopanela
Because of the alternating pattern, the results are almost always pronouncable, which makes the passwords signifigantly easier to remember. Digits or symbols can be added to satisfy password requirements and increase security.
Sprint did the same thing to me. By default, they charge several dollars per minute for overseas calls. They assume (correctly) that people will make an international call before checking on the rates. The kicker is that if you call Sprint, they'll tell you about their "international plan" which brings the cost of the calls to a few cents per minute.
A company which charges a default price twenty-five times more than their "opt-in" price is screwing you over, plain and simple.
If you go buy a piece of candy at the local candy store, does the proprietor of the candy store have the right to gossip about your candy-eating habits? If the local dentist offers to pay him in exchange for a list of people who buy lots of candy, is that illegal? What if the dentist paid a local kid money to watch the store and report who bought lots of stuff?
Excepting monopolies, you have the ability to switch to another candy store, and to avoid using that dentist. But you can't arrest either one of them. If you're concerned about privacy, make sure you have a signed contract with the other party ensuring that certain information will not be disclosed.
And if you're unhappy about that candy-store merchant, think about it this way: candy at that store might be cheaper than the one down the street which doesn't sell your information. If the information-selling business is particularly lucrative, the candy might become practically free.
Wow. Some heads must be rolling at Microsoft over this. Recommending that Microsoft be removed from the list of trusted signees? They're certainly not pulling punches on this one. It looks to me like they're placing a higher priority (with the treatment of this bug) on user security than company image. That's a first...
The reason they're in this mess is the whole "trusted computing" paradigm which they started with this signed-ActiveX stuff and are continuing with Palladium. Perhaps this will make them reconsider. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes: Who watches the watchers?
I agree. I hate overly-biased political writing. I tend to refuse to believe anything which sounds extremist, unless I hear and disagree with an intelligent argument from the other side. I'm pretty liberal, but there's only so much W.-bashing that I can stand before I want to hear something from the conservatives, too.
However, I'm a subscriber to both Salon and Slashdot, and I get my money's worth from them. I'll be sad to see either one go. (Hint, hint: will you be sad, too? Would it be worth a few dollars to you?)
I do development on PocketPC, and I can confirm that the Toshiba e740 (which is XScale) does run slower per mhz than other chips. It's several hundred mhz faster than the Casio (MIPS) device we use, but from a user perspective it runs about the same. (For some operations it's much faster.) I've read that Intel requires changes to the PPC kernel to take better advantage of the XScale. When we upgraded the firmware on some of the devices (upgrading the PPC kernel in the process) they did run a little bit faster. Under PPC 2002, they stopped supporting multiple instruction sets (ARM, MIPS, SH4 etc) and standardized on the ARM op set. Whether there's much overhead in doing this on the XScale, I don't know.
There are already efforts to do this. One is called Razor, IIRC. However, they haven't completely crushed the spam problem, and aren't likely to.
Based on the last /. article on Bayesian filtering, I installed SpamProbe. I gave it a folder of about 70 spam emails, and a few hundred good emails I had in various folders. In the past few weeks, it's had one false negative, and a few false positives which were 'semi-spam' mailing list emails from Dell, RedHat, and Amazon. When I moved those emails into the 'recheck as good' folders, it learned its lesson.
It may be naive, but I was very surprised at how well it worked. It's better than SpamAssassin IMO, especially at foreign-language spam.
I used to use SpamAssassin. It did great except on Spanish spam. Its rules didn't have anything to cover Spanish. I switched to SpamProbe, which builds its own word list, and therefore does very well at even foreign-language spam.
Speaking of dragons...one of my favorite CYOAs was (IIRC) "Dragon Mountain." The thing I found interesting about it was that if you did one thing, there were no dragons, and you ended up back home. If you did something else, there were real dragons controlled by a mad wizard or whatever. If you did a third thing, the dragons were robotic. The background and world of the story was different depending on what you did. Most of the CYOAs just changed the plot a little.
Years later, when studying Kurosawa's Rashomon, I was reminded of Dragon Mountain. The comparison is a stretch, but it's the same idea of "multiple versions of the same story with different facts, and no story is more right than another."
My theory on Dragon's Lair (and Space Ace) was that the games were much more fun to watch other people play than they were to play yourself. I was pretty young when DL came out, and it usually cost too much for me to play (and for a long time, there was always someone playing it). But I watched other people play it for hours and hours.
When I did play it myself years later, I remember thinking..."wow, this isn't as much fun as it looked." When you watch someone play it, you don't realize how little control they have over what's going on on-screen.
PCTools was the app which let me "organize" the c:\ directory better by moving IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS to another folder.
;-)
I know why MY dad made backups so often...after that.