I saw this on a UK television documentary 5 or so years ago. Hitler made some sketchs of what he wanted the Volkswagen to look like, and gave these to Ferdinand Porsche. Porsche used Hitler's sketches as the basis of his own designs.
Look here for a history of the VW Beetle, which seems to clarify that this was indeed the case. It also seems to indicate that Hitler refiened Porsche's designs.
Anyone who has had anthing to do with these scumbags will know exactly what I'm talking about. They screwed one UK company for over £1 millions in software costs alone, and 18 months down the line had still not delivered anything tangible. They constantly had at least 2 'consultants' on site, none of which knew anything about the software they were looking after.
Judging by the number of machines hit by the Ramen worm (Redhat + no security patches), there are a lot of stupid sysadmins out there.
I used to work for a company selling Banyan software in the UK. We had many customers, and a lot of them ran as a default installtion, with customisable parameters set at the default (caching and buffers - nothing was dynamically allocated on these systems), and often no patches (security, performance or other) applied.
People are lazy when it comes to installing servers. They take as little time as possible to install, and selecting default installations is quite common, just to save time. Optimasation for performance, from tweaking hardware parameters to removing redundant daemons, is often missed out.
Distributions that bundle a lot of packages on the CD usually don't pay too much attention to the creation of these packages. I've seen quite a few packages over the years that have been mis-compiled and have had to rebuild them from source.
The other issue is security. With 1000s of executables installed there's bound to be some with security problems, buffer overflows, SETUID expolits,/tmp exploits and the like. The more obscure the program, the less likely it is to have been thoroughly audited for holes. If I can't trust it, I don't want to install it.
I saw a demo of SuSe 7.0 installing last year. Point-click-point and 3 CDs full of shovel-ware gets installed. Yuck!
I prefer the Debian method. Only install what I want to install, and a means of reporting bugs on each package which gets back to the maintainer. Also, via apt-get, there's a centralised mechanism for updating all installed code when and if security problems occurr.
What is the point of this? Most of the code I've seen in the past uses some pre-processor tricks to un-obfusticate the source.
I once saw some obfusticated Perl which appeared to be no more than a standard perl program with all whitespace removed, no comments (naturally), and over-use of $_.
Then again I was attempting to revise one of the sound drivers in the current Linux kernel recently, and that was pretty well obfusticated!
Whilst on the subject of testing, anyone know why XFree-4.0.2 hasn't appeared yet? It is holding up a lot of other packages that depend on the 4 series libs. The excuses file on the Debian web site seems to indicate that some PowerPC debs have not gone into the package pool, but these went in over a month ago. I know that there were problems with the Arm processor port, but these I believe have been circumvented.
I had to amend one of the lesser sound card drivers to work with my card. The code for the driver was a mess, mainly due to the number of IFDEFs for different card sub-types, and little in the form of comments.
But the worse code I saw was the UMDOS FS prior to 2.2. I needed to run this driver for an obscure reason, and attempted to try this with the 2.1 kernel. It didn't work, and I looked at the code. A mess of unexplained comments and error messages, most derived from abbreviations in a language other than English spoken by one of the original authors. No wonder it took the new maintainer over a year to get it working again.
Some of these artists did not record or compose in 1931 or earlier. For example, Robert Johnson recorded in 1936 and 1937. Les Paul/Mary Ford dates from the early 1950s, I believe.
Re:VIA chipset warning.
on
2.2 vs 2.4
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· Score: 2
It appears to be limited to particular VIA chipsets. There's a full discussion on Linux Kernel. AFAIK the problem hasn't been resolved yet.
For those contemplating an upgrade to 2.4, and running a VIA IDE chipset, there are problems that can lead to severe filesystem corruption if UDMA is used.
I've had simillar problems with the patched version of 2.2.18 as supplied with Debian, and I don't want to go through the same again until I know that it is fixed.
Now Microsoft have decreed that security bulletins can only be linked to and not posted elsewhere, it is now impossible to read up-to-date bulletins, as no-one else is allowed to mirror them.
Is working 60 hour weeks prevalent in the States? This is certainly illegal in Europe except in certain professions.
A couple of weeks ago I was contacted about a position working for a US financial organisation in London as some sort of systems admin. The pay was good, but the hours were utterly atrocious - 12+ hour shifts, 5 days a week, and no holidays. This would be illegal under our employment laws.
I contacted the agency concerning this matter and never heard anything more about the post.
Around 15-20 years ago there was a proposal in the UK to charge a levy on the sale of every blank audio tape.
I believe it fell through when it was realised that it was unworkable, as there was no idea how the money raised could be broken down, with the only guideline being the way PRS royalties were divided. The general consensus would that it would make people like McCartney even richer, whilst the struggling small acts wouldn't earn anything.
You can get turned down for credit in the UK due to credit problems with the previous occupier of the property.
I've had great problems getting credit due to the previous occupier of my flat owing a great deal of money. I still don't own a credit card (not that I particularly want one, but some on-line retailers will not accept my debit card).
The odd thing is that I get 2-3 credit card applicaition forms sent as snail-spam every week.
Disk caches statically set at boot-time, to change the cache size needing a reboot. Calculating how much memory your processes would need, and using the rest for cache. Finding the optimum value was not easy, particularly if process sizes varied over the day.
We also had to cope with resource restrictions such as concurrent socket connections, concurrently opened files, Inode tables and so on. This could only be changed by tweaking a kernel parameter, and some could not even be monitored easily. It wasn't always easy to guess the best value to set these to, given that increasing them increased the memory used by the kernel, the memory could not be used elsewhere, and memory was not as cheap and plentiful as it is now.
They don't know they're born today! And yes, I am a Yorkshireman (born on Yorkshire day too!).
I had an Olivetti PC with such a disk, from about 5 years ago. You booted off a floppy and it would reformat the FAT partition, then copy all of Win95 onto the machine. The CD contained an encrypted image of the hard disk, and the copy program decrypted each file as it went. The copy program appeared to look for a particular BIOS signature, as I later tried to install the same CD using another motherboard without success. The installation process took around 40-50 minutes to copy and decrypt all files.
What really annoyed me about this CD was that the Windows installation it provided was really badly configured. DMA had not been configured on the IDE interface. Applications were installed incorrectly (eg. Corel Photopaint could not open images) and file associations were often set up for the wrong applications. It also contained a lot of obsolete Win3.1 applications, and even a Win3.1 Fax driver.
Olivetti also bundled another Windows CD-ROM containing all the files of the standard CD except for SETUP.EXE, meaning that you had to install via the recovery CD.
I prefer the sounds of the OPL3 chip, but only when used properly. Most implementations (old games, Windows MIDI drivers) use the older OPL2 mode, which doesn't sound too good, lacking as many operators. Proper OPL3 sounded great, with real fatty, raspy bass sounds, simillar to old analog synths. The downside was the number of simultaneous sounds, IIRC.
I used to connect my soundcard to my stereo system whilst playing games. There was a replacement Win 3.11 MIDI driver, and I also downloaded a couple of OPL3 drivers for some of my games - the one for Civilization was wonderful - far better than the sounds from my then Wavetable MIDI card (something made by Orchid, I can't recall which model).
Beware if marketing men get hold of version numbering.
I've worked with many pieces of software where version numbers were hiked just to keep the revenue stream coming in.
One OS had version numbers in the form major.minor.patch. The manufacturers would only activly support two revisions at a time, including connecting distint versions together, and API calls were only guaranteed to last that long. Major revisions were released 2-3 years apart, with successive minor releases being released to add new hardware support and other simillar features. Patches were released every few months, and were generally a bundle of minor patches, or occasionally a serious required bug-fix.
Then the marketing men appeared. Firstly patched releases became minor releases, making them appear more significant than they were, and were just an excuse to sell the media at extortionate prices (you could FTP the patches from the FTP site, though). Major releases seemed to appear more often, but with no real API or other significant changes, as was the case in the past. Major version numbers were just used as a ruse to force customers to upgrade, where in fact very little was changing. One major upgrade added so little that I can't recall anything about it, the previous major release only introducing a small filesystem improvement.
Slashdot Mirror
He'll be a bit depressed over this weekend's result, though.
Look here for a history of the VW Beetle, which seems to clarify that this was indeed the case. It also seems to indicate that Hitler refiened Porsche's designs.
Anyone who has had anthing to do with these scumbags will know exactly what I'm talking about. They screwed one UK company for over £1 millions in software costs alone, and 18 months down the line had still not delivered anything tangible. They constantly had at least 2 'consultants' on site, none of which knew anything about the software they were looking after.
Charles Wang makes Bill Gates look like a saint!
I used to work for a company selling Banyan software in the UK. We had many customers, and a lot of them ran as a default installtion, with customisable parameters set at the default (caching and buffers - nothing was dynamically allocated on these systems), and often no patches (security, performance or other) applied.
People are lazy when it comes to installing servers. They take as little time as possible to install, and selecting default installations is quite common, just to save time. Optimasation for performance, from tweaking hardware parameters to removing redundant daemons, is often missed out.
The other issue is security. With 1000s of executables installed there's bound to be some with security problems, buffer overflows, SETUID expolits, /tmp exploits and the like. The more obscure the program, the less likely it is to have been thoroughly audited for holes. If I can't trust it, I don't want to install it.
I saw a demo of SuSe 7.0 installing last year. Point-click-point and 3 CDs full of shovel-ware gets installed. Yuck!
I prefer the Debian method. Only install what I want to install, and a means of reporting bugs on each package which gets back to the maintainer. Also, via apt-get, there's a centralised mechanism for updating all installed code when and if security problems occurr.
THere's a VIA chipset IDE bug that affects some users. Enable DMA and bye-bye filesystem!
What is the point of this? Most of the code I've seen in the past uses some pre-processor tricks to un-obfusticate the source.
I once saw some obfusticated Perl which appeared to be no more than a standard perl program with all whitespace removed, no comments (naturally), and over-use of $_.
Then again I was attempting to revise one of the sound drivers in the current Linux kernel recently, and that was pretty well obfusticated!
Whilst on the subject of testing, anyone know why XFree-4.0.2 hasn't appeared yet? It is holding up a lot of other packages that depend on the 4 series libs. The excuses file on the Debian web site seems to indicate that some PowerPC debs have not gone into the package pool, but these went in over a month ago. I know that there were problems with the Arm processor port, but these I believe have been circumvented.
But the worse code I saw was the UMDOS FS prior to 2.2. I needed to run this driver for an obscure reason, and attempted to try this with the 2.1 kernel. It didn't work, and I looked at the code. A mess of unexplained comments and error messages, most derived from abbreviations in a language other than English spoken by one of the original authors. No wonder it took the new maintainer over a year to get it working again.
Some of these artists did not record or compose in 1931 or earlier. For example, Robert Johnson recorded in 1936 and 1937. Les Paul/Mary Ford dates from the early 1950s, I believe.
It appears to be limited to particular VIA chipsets. There's a full discussion on Linux Kernel. AFAIK the problem hasn't been resolved yet.
I've had simillar problems with the patched version of 2.2.18 as supplied with Debian, and I don't want to go through the same again until I know that it is fixed.
I wonder if any of them mention a DNS DoS attack?
The European Union are, I believe, planning a simillar action which could affect Microsoft almost as strongly.
"But my house already has windows!"
A couple of weeks ago I was contacted about a position working for a US financial organisation in London as some sort of systems admin. The pay was good, but the hours were utterly atrocious - 12+ hour shifts, 5 days a week, and no holidays. This would be illegal under our employment laws.
I contacted the agency concerning this matter and never heard anything more about the post.
I believe it fell through when it was realised that it was unworkable, as there was no idea how the money raised could be broken down, with the only guideline being the way PRS royalties were divided. The general consensus would that it would make people like McCartney even richer, whilst the struggling small acts wouldn't earn anything.
Is this actually legal under EU law?
Don't forget the piece of string. The pencil must be tied to a piece of string. And the pencil has to be a carpenter's pencil, not a normal one.
I've had great problems getting credit due to the previous occupier of my flat owing a great deal of money. I still don't own a credit card (not that I particularly want one, but some on-line retailers will not accept my debit card).
The odd thing is that I get 2-3 credit card applicaition forms sent as snail-spam every week.
Disk caches statically set at boot-time, to change the cache size needing a reboot. Calculating how much memory your processes would need, and using the rest for cache. Finding the optimum value was not easy, particularly if process sizes varied over the day.
We also had to cope with resource restrictions such as concurrent socket connections, concurrently opened files, Inode tables and so on. This could only be changed by tweaking a kernel parameter, and some could not even be monitored easily. It wasn't always easy to guess the best value to set these to, given that increasing them increased the memory used by the kernel, the memory could not be used elsewhere, and memory was not as cheap and plentiful as it is now.
They don't know they're born today! And yes, I am a Yorkshireman (born on Yorkshire day too!).
Only problem is that we'll then get eaten by the Mutant Star Goat.
What really annoyed me about this CD was that the Windows installation it provided was really badly configured. DMA had not been configured on the IDE interface. Applications were installed incorrectly (eg. Corel Photopaint could not open images) and file associations were often set up for the wrong applications. It also contained a lot of obsolete Win3.1 applications, and even a Win3.1 Fax driver.
Olivetti also bundled another Windows CD-ROM containing all the files of the standard CD except for SETUP.EXE, meaning that you had to install via the recovery CD.
I used to connect my soundcard to my stereo system whilst playing games. There was a replacement Win 3.11 MIDI driver, and I also downloaded a couple of OPL3 drivers for some of my games - the one for Civilization was wonderful - far better than the sounds from my then Wavetable MIDI card (something made by Orchid, I can't recall which model).
I've worked with many pieces of software where version numbers were hiked just to keep the revenue stream coming in.
One OS had version numbers in the form major.minor.patch. The manufacturers would only activly support two revisions at a time, including connecting distint versions together, and API calls were only guaranteed to last that long. Major revisions were released 2-3 years apart, with successive minor releases being released to add new hardware support and other simillar features. Patches were released every few months, and were generally a bundle of minor patches, or occasionally a serious required bug-fix.
Then the marketing men appeared. Firstly patched releases became minor releases, making them appear more significant than they were, and were just an excuse to sell the media at extortionate prices (you could FTP the patches from the FTP site, though). Major releases seemed to appear more often, but with no real API or other significant changes, as was the case in the past. Major version numbers were just used as a ruse to force customers to upgrade, where in fact very little was changing. One major upgrade added so little that I can't recall anything about it, the previous major release only introducing a small filesystem improvement.
Does this mean that GPL will be contraviened if I am charged per byte, and all I am doing is an apt-get dist-upgrade?