I thought it not being in the filesystem was adequate until I saw a demo of Katie, which lets you mount the repository as an NFS filesystem and access snapshots of the repository at certain points as different directories, take diffs just by running the standard diff between these directories, etc.
If only there was a stable (Katie's author describes it as "pre-alpha") and free piece of software to do it...
The previous article you point to shows recommendations from a group of companies that argue that bug reports should not be made public. Bugtraq does not follow this recommendation, and I doubt that it ever will
"ever" is a strong word. Remember that one of the companies giving those recommendations is Symantec. Symantec own SecurityFocus. SecurityFocus runs Bugtraq.
I know about the Atkins diet. (Disclaimer: My employer is in the weight loss field. I am, however, a programmer, not a dietician, and anything I state hear is certainly not endorsed by them..)
Basically, the Atkins diet puts your body into a kind of shock which causes it to shed wait. It certainly seems to work for some people, however it's not the healthiest way to lose weight, and it certainly isn't the healthiest way for people who are already a healthy weight to maintain (rather than gain) weight.
Also, my understanding of the Atkins diet is that you need to cut out ALL your carbs (well, keep it to an absolutely negligible level) for ketosis to kick in, which is what causes the dramatic weight loss. To not reduce, but actually ELIMINATE carbs, you'd need a tax on stuff with ANY carb in it (not 50%) and it'd need to be a hundred dollar tax to stop people from eating so much as a sandwich per day.
How about a tax on foods of which more than 50% of the caloric content is provided by carbohydrates and sugars?
Like bread?:)
I think you maybe meant fat instead of carbohydrates... although that's still problematic since iirc whole milk, which is a dietary staple for most and generally healthy in sane quantities, is rather fatty.
there's more to the security world than those 11 companies. Yes, some of the security firms involved are high profile and there's a lot lost in their soul-selling, but there will always be BugTraq
Bugtraq is one of those 11 companies. (Bugtraq is part of Symantec)
I recently tried reading an eBook on the Palm. It was presented similarly to a PDF - fixed pages with fixed text in fixed positions. This totally ignores the sort of advantages an electronic device has over paper!
I can't shrink the font size to get more text on the screen, because I'm viewing one page at a time and it's always got the same text on it. Even worse, I loaded the same eBook in the desktop version of the reader, and I was still viewing the same amount of text at once, in a ludicrously large font.
Fixed layout is bad enough when shoehorning Letter size PDFs onto A4 paper. Taking the same approach to eBooks which will be viewed on a wide variety of devices is just retarded.
Winamp and the Nullsoft installer system are probably my favorite
The installer, NSIS, is really good, and it's released under a zlib-style "do what the fuck you like" license.
I'll confess to now feeling a little worried that AOL might try (although I don't think they could legally do so) to "revoke and terminate" everyone's NSIS license.
It would be nifty if enough people with weblogs linked to this story. It could get to the point where this story was prominently ranked in a search for "Miss Vermont".
Parent is an obvious troll, moderators on crack as usual. The real Donald Knuth does not and will not ever post on Slashdot, although somehow I suspect our troll here will end up moderated up regularly just like that "head of nintendo research" fellow.
Yeah but didn't he also say that there was a provision of Aussie law
which preented the copyright holder from revoking the license just cuz?
Something about a reasonable expectation that the license would be valid and not revoked?
Given the whole gnutella thing, and the lack of an explicit contract, I'm not sure how "reasonable" an expectation that could be. And given only 24 hours or so passed between WASTE being thrown up and taken back down, even if you starting using it the second that Nullsoft released it, the most damage you'd be able to claim would be a day's work.
Can't speak for elsewhere, but it turns out under Australian law that even if I release something under the GPL, I might be able to "take it back." It has something to do with the fact that the law makes it extremely difficult to give something away - that's the reason that if, for instance, I want to give someone a house, I can't "give" it to them, I have to "sell" it to them for $1.
A lawyer called Jeremy Malcolm gave a rather good talk on this at Linux.conf.au 2003 (there should be links to his slides and audio of the talk itself on the site, if anyone's interested).
As far as I can see (don't have a Windows system up and running to actually run the program:), this was basically a P2P application with the same capabilities as ICQ (messaging, group chat, file transfer), along with the ability to search for files on other people's systems. Instead of being centralised like ICQ/AIM/MSN Messenger, people would form small networks consisting of the people they knew.
Currently, most people use products like AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ, which forward messages through centralised servers owned by AOL. The commercial clients also display AOL advertisements, I believe. AOL also sells a corporate version which allows a company to set up an internal server for employees only, which employees use to message each other and transfer files.
While the file transfer angle certainly exists, I think AOL's problem is that this free, open source piece of software competes with AOL's existing messenger offerings.
I recall reading something about how some beta of windows 95 or NT 3.x failed a DOD acceptance test because a lot of it depended on the mouse, so Microsoft spent considerable time making it work fine in case of mouse failure.
I suspect it's because originally, Windows was an on-the-shelf software product which ran on DOS. People would have to make a deliberate choice to get Windows. Lots of PC owners didn't have mice, so requiring one would probably have made Windows less appealing.
Contrast with the X Window System, which was generally provided with your machine by Sun/Digital/etc. Every workstation/X-Terminal shipped came with a mouse, so there was no need to take the mouse-centric UI and make it keyboard friendly. Ditto for Apple machines.
I've found FreeBSD coders to be somewhat... elitest.
Thing is, this isn't something that a coder slings at a user, this is something that a FreeBSD coder would see as a result of their own mistake.
I'm a coder, and when I make a stupid mistake I'll call myself all manner of things when I figure it out. Then someone in the office will ask and I'll explain what I did, and they'll follow up with a Nelson laugh.
It's all in good fun. The only reason for removing this error (aside from, as stated in the Usenet thread, some columnist wanker getting ahold of it and blowing it out of proportion) would be to never have a "stupid error" code thrown in your face when you do something.. really stupid. I'm not quite sensitive enough to think that's necessary.
If your Motherboard cracks in mid-transaction you will lose transactions.
No you won't. There's a difference between a transaction not happening, and a transaction being lost - a lost transaction is one that happened, and application and the user think it happened, but in fact the data was never stored.
That's the difference between depositing $100 and it never appears in your bank account, and turning up to the bank with $100 but walking away because the bank was closed.
If a database does proper ACID transactions, then the application accessing the database will not receive confirmation of the transaction until it's fully done and committed to disk. And if the database dies midtransaction, it'll be as though the transaction never even started.
Directfb already has full gnome support, X emulation
I think "X emulation" is a bit of a misnomer. X is just a specification for communications between an application and the graphics server. If an X11 application can connect to Directfb via X11 and display it's UI, then Directfb is X, just as much as Xfree86, Sun X11, Exceed (and XWin32, and the multitude of other X servers available for MS Windows), etc.
Last time I looked at it, TWIN needed an X server or a pure Linux console - as in literally sitting in front of a machine running Linux on the keyboard. Telnetting or SSHing in wouldn't work.
Obviously, TWIN is so much faster than X because X can work over a network, and TWIN can't. How many people use network transparency anyway? Down with X!
They will only follow if morons continue to buy their products.
And herein lies the problem. The "free market" is an economic model that makes many assumptions. In a "free market" the theoretical consumers make rational decisions all the time, and are perfectly informed.
The fact that morons exist and are consumers is one of the uncountably large number of reasons that a pure free market will never exist in the real world, and therefore we can't magically expect the market's "invisible hand" to make things work well.
Allow me to make a slight modification to your post:
.NET support in Unix is spotty. I know the knee-jerk reaction is "And we care why?" but that's not appropriate. Server-side.NET is very important for web-services and web-apps. My opinion is that until you get more native support from Microsoft and some SDK developers Unix isn't even an option. If this support was better, Unix would be a legitimate candidate for application-level boxes (instead of just web-level running apache) running the real guts of the apps & services...
My point? Yes, lots of people are very much into Java. But there are also people doing stuff that doesn't involve Java at all, and for them Java support or lack thereof has no impact on BSD's ability to "run the real guts of the apps and services."
SPAM to me seems like another one of those things in life like drug dealing
I know it's not the main point you were trying to make, but I don't think this is a valid analogy. Drug dealing is a 'victimless' crime in which all parties concerned are consenting. Spamming is not.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought it not being in the filesystem was adequate until I saw a demo of Katie, which lets you mount the repository as an NFS filesystem and access snapshots of the repository at certain points as different directories, take diffs just by running the standard diff between these directories, etc.
If only there was a stable (Katie's author describes it as "pre-alpha") and free piece of software to do it...
Plenty of filesystems are out there that do ACLs. FreeBSD's UFS2 does, I'm pretty sure SGI's XFS and IBM's JFS do also.
While certainly the driver is at fault here and should be punished, kids shouldn't be running after fucking balls.
"ever" is a strong word. Remember that one of the companies giving those recommendations is Symantec. Symantec own SecurityFocus. SecurityFocus runs Bugtraq.
I know about the Atkins diet. (Disclaimer: My employer is in the weight loss field. I am, however, a programmer, not a dietician, and anything I state hear is certainly not endorsed by them..)
Basically, the Atkins diet puts your body into a kind of shock which causes it to shed wait. It certainly seems to work for some people, however it's not the healthiest way to lose weight, and it certainly isn't the healthiest way for people who are already a healthy weight to maintain (rather than gain) weight.
Also, my understanding of the Atkins diet is that you need to cut out ALL your carbs (well, keep it to an absolutely negligible level) for ketosis to kick in, which is what causes the dramatic weight loss. To not reduce, but actually ELIMINATE carbs, you'd need a tax on stuff with ANY carb in it (not 50%) and it'd need to be a hundred dollar tax to stop people from eating so much as a sandwich per day.
Like bread? :)
I think you maybe meant fat instead of carbohydrates... although that's still problematic since iirc whole milk, which is a dietary staple for most and generally healthy in sane quantities, is rather fatty.
Bugtraq is one of those 11 companies. (Bugtraq is part of Symantec)
Their trial strategy worked, didn't it? :/
I recently tried reading an eBook on the Palm. It was presented similarly to a PDF - fixed pages with fixed text in fixed positions. This totally ignores the sort of advantages an electronic device has over paper!
I can't shrink the font size to get more text on the screen, because I'm viewing one page at a time and it's always got the same text on it. Even worse, I loaded the same eBook in the desktop version of the reader, and I was still viewing the same amount of text at once, in a ludicrously large font.
Fixed layout is bad enough when shoehorning Letter size PDFs onto A4 paper. Taking the same approach to eBooks which will be viewed on a wide variety of devices is just retarded.
The installer, NSIS, is really good, and it's released under a zlib-style "do what the fuck you like" license.
I'll confess to now feeling a little worried that AOL might try (although I don't think they could legally do so) to "revoke and terminate" everyone's NSIS license.
It would be nifty if enough people with weblogs linked to this story. It could get to the point where this story was prominently ranked in a search for "Miss Vermont".
Parent is an obvious troll, moderators on crack as usual. The real Donald Knuth does not and will not ever post on Slashdot, although somehow I suspect our troll here will end up moderated up regularly just like that "head of nintendo research" fellow.
Indeed it does. Malcolm's point is that in Australia, it's not necessarily possible for those rights to be granted in an irrevocable fashion.
Given the whole gnutella thing, and the lack of an explicit contract, I'm not sure how "reasonable" an expectation that could be. And given only 24 hours or so passed between WASTE being thrown up and taken back down, even if you starting using it the second that Nullsoft released it, the most damage you'd be able to claim would be a day's work.
Can't speak for elsewhere, but it turns out under Australian law that even if I release something under the GPL, I might be able to "take it back." It has something to do with the fact that the law makes it extremely difficult to give something away - that's the reason that if, for instance, I want to give someone a house, I can't "give" it to them, I have to "sell" it to them for $1.
A lawyer called Jeremy Malcolm gave a rather good talk on this at Linux.conf.au 2003 (there should be links to his slides and audio of the talk itself on the site, if anyone's interested).
As far as I can see (don't have a Windows system up and running to actually run the program :), this was basically a P2P application with the same capabilities as ICQ (messaging, group chat, file transfer), along with the ability to search for files on other people's systems. Instead of being centralised like ICQ/AIM/MSN Messenger, people would form small networks consisting of the people they knew.
Currently, most people use products like AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ, which forward messages through centralised servers owned by AOL. The commercial clients also display AOL advertisements, I believe. AOL also sells a corporate version which allows a company to set up an internal server for employees only, which employees use to message each other and transfer files.
While the file transfer angle certainly exists, I think AOL's problem is that this free, open source piece of software competes with AOL's existing messenger offerings.
I suspect it's because originally, Windows was an on-the-shelf software product which ran on DOS. People would have to make a deliberate choice to get Windows. Lots of PC owners didn't have mice, so requiring one would probably have made Windows less appealing.
Contrast with the X Window System, which was generally provided with your machine by Sun/Digital/etc. Every workstation/X-Terminal shipped came with a mouse, so there was no need to take the mouse-centric UI and make it keyboard friendly. Ditto for Apple machines.
Thing is, this isn't something that a coder slings at a user, this is something that a FreeBSD coder would see as a result of their own mistake.
I'm a coder, and when I make a stupid mistake I'll call myself all manner of things when I figure it out. Then someone in the office will ask and I'll explain what I did, and they'll follow up with a Nelson laugh.
It's all in good fun. The only reason for removing this error (aside from, as stated in the Usenet thread, some columnist wanker getting ahold of it and blowing it out of proportion) would be to never have a "stupid error" code thrown in your face when you do something.. really stupid. I'm not quite sensitive enough to think that's necessary.
No you won't. There's a difference between a transaction not happening, and a transaction being lost - a lost transaction is one that happened, and application and the user think it happened, but in fact the data was never stored. That's the difference between depositing $100 and it never appears in your bank account, and turning up to the bank with $100 but walking away because the bank was closed.
If a database does proper ACID transactions, then the application accessing the database will not receive confirmation of the transaction until it's fully done and committed to disk. And if the database dies midtransaction, it'll be as though the transaction never even started.
I think "X emulation" is a bit of a misnomer. X is just a specification for communications between an application and the graphics server. If an X11 application can connect to Directfb via X11 and display it's UI, then Directfb is X, just as much as Xfree86, Sun X11, Exceed (and XWin32, and the multitude of other X servers available for MS Windows), etc.
Last time I looked at it, TWIN needed an X server or a pure Linux console - as in literally sitting in front of a machine running Linux on the keyboard. Telnetting or SSHing in wouldn't work.
Obviously, TWIN is so much faster than X because X can work over a network, and TWIN can't. How many people use network transparency anyway? Down with X!
Hint: this was a joke
The games section is really taking off..
Oh yeah, first post :)
And herein lies the problem. The "free market" is an economic model that makes many assumptions. In a "free market" the theoretical consumers make rational decisions all the time, and are perfectly informed.
The fact that morons exist and are consumers is one of the uncountably large number of reasons that a pure free market will never exist in the real world, and therefore we can't magically expect the market's "invisible hand" to make things work well.
Allow me to make a slight modification to your post:
My point? Yes, lots of people are very much into Java. But there are also people doing stuff that doesn't involve Java at all, and for them Java support or lack thereof has no impact on BSD's ability to "run the real guts of the apps and services."
I know it's not the main point you were trying to make, but I don't think this is a valid analogy. Drug dealing is a 'victimless' crime in which all parties concerned are consenting. Spamming is not.