I only wish the Windows and Mac versions of VNC let you start a session that *didn't* control the current display. This is a failure of the design of the windowing systems under Windows and MacOS.
No, it's a design goal of the Windows gui system, end result being that you go spend $$$$$ on Terminal Server.
And I continue today's trend of kicking myself in the teeth by fucking up the "less bug-prone" test code. That first statement is completely unnecessary and useless (albeit harmless).
And I continued today's trend of kicking myself in the teeth by fucking up the "less bug-prone" test code. The first statement is completely superfluous (albeit harmless) *cringe*
The test code could well be three times the size of the normal code (IMHO, it could be much larger than that, but since I only have experience with the more standard way of debugging, I'll tone it down a bit). Doesn't this debugging code have to be bug-free as well?
Testing a solution for correctness, or probable-correctness, is usually easier than figuring out the solution in the first place. This means the test code will be smaller and less bug-prone than the code that does the actual work.
An example: sorting a list of numbers. An efficient sorting implementation can be rather complex, but making sure it works is pretty simple, even in C: min = list[0]; for(i = 1; i < length; i++) assert(list[i-1] <= list[i]);
Looking past the EFA post (an organisation that i have never heard of an have never done anything that I can find)
You've never heard of EFA? They seem to mentioned in the majority of newspaper articles concerning censorship and online privacy these days.
As to the regulations you mention - you're talking about takedown notices, which are issued to people running sites under Australian jurisdiction. For sites hosted overseas, the ABA just submits the URL to a bunch of commercial blockers - NetNanny et al. Why is the government subsidising the work of these commercial companies? Don't know. Are the commercial companies at all obligated to listen to the ABA? Nope. Has this process ever gone wrong, blocking a site that shouldn't be blocked? We have no way of knowing.
Who is affected by the blocking? Potentially anyone behind a blocking utility - this includes many in public schools, libraries and various corporations across Australia. This could become much greater in the future - the government has considered options ranging from a single centralised proxy (like the great firewall of China) to requiring ISPs to enforce blocking themselves.
the code is only enforced when you have done something worthy of enforcement - perhaps like hosting kiddie porn sites?
You don't seem to be aware of what it takes to become illegal content in Australia. You don't need kiddie porn - just actual sex is enough. A real penis entering a real vagina is not legal content. Someone with the goatse.cx picture on their site was issued a takedown notice.
Maybe im cynical but there is no story here that i can see?
This story is of interest to anyone who thinks that (a) government should be open and transparent, (b) the ABA scheme is a waste of money and/or (c) government sponsored censorship is plain wrong.
If you want some kind of reliability guarantee, can't you already outsource to a services company like IBM and say "keep this system running, doing this, with -figure- availability and -figure- mean time between failure"? And have a failure to meet this commitment result in significant loss of payment to IBM?
Of course, such contracts don't come cheap. But then, we're comparing the creation of software to the engineering of bridges, skyscrapers, and bank vaults, and last time I checked bridges weren't cheap either.
... the posts in here have been from Linux elitists... Linux hasn't gotten much market share in the desktop market - the people who write it don't WANT average people to use it...
Do you honestly think many, if any, of the "elitists" making critical comments here write and contribute code to the kernel, or other programs that appear in distributions?
Equating Slashbots and open source coders is about as fair as equating Walmart shoppers and rednecks.
Despite being beaten over the head by the concept for several years, I still don't understand why the second that a computer is concerned, a whole new bunch of rules, regulations and authorities is created for the special case, rather than simply placing the situation under the jurisdiction of things that already exist for the general case.
What if someone's sending me harrassing email? Do the same thing that you'd do if someone was harrassing you via the phone, snail mail, etc. Go to the authorities, who will deal with it, involving the necessary organisations (telco, postal office, network admins etc) as required.
Someone's looking at porn in the computer lab!! If the concern is that someone can't get on the computer to do their assignment, I'm sure that rules already exist to stop people who need to work from being held up by people chatting, playing games etc. If the concern is that people will be offended, surely there's existing rules regarding offensive material in public - could the person bring in a big X-rated poster and show it around?
People are pirating music! Once again, if the concern is the effect on the network, get them under the rules that exist to deal with recreational use of the network being detrimental to it's proper use. If you're actually just offended because you think copying music is wrong, take exactly the same action as you would if, 20 years ago, you'd seen the person copying casette tapes. There's no need to codify things under "net ethics."
> OK, then assign the patents to the FSF.
> No? Why not?
This would give the FSF a lot of leverage over Red Hat that they might choose to use in the future.
So give them a non-exclusive license, wrapped up in a contract. It is possible to give rights to the FSF whilst having an agreement that prevents them from being used against you.
The vibe here seems to be along the lines of "Red Hat needs to do this to defend themselves from other patent holders." But RH is going beyond that, with it's offering of free use only to certain types of software. If self-defense was the only reason for this, RH could easily grant free use to "anybody that agrees not to ever sue us for patent violation." They have not done this.
Software patents are wrong for many reasons. The work that Red Hat have put into what they've patented does not warrant granting them a monopoly on the technique for over a decade. Exploiting a misguided, fascist system to quash potential competitors is wrong.
It was wrong when Amazon did it, and it's wrong now. The fact that Redhat does free software (which 'we' like) and Amazon doesn't (which 'we' don't) doesn't make this right.
There are plenty of decent deals out there. You just have to be reasonable. Leechers should get their head around the fact that they are *not* profitable customers, and will be treated accordingly.
In Perth, Western Australia, Arachnet offers ADSL at pretty much the same price points, which the bonus that traffic to and from WAIX, a local peering point, is free. (Subject to fair use; don't run a heavy-traffic VPN across to your other office in Sydney over it). PlanetMirror is on a network peered to WAIX, so that's all your ISOs taken care of.
The wholesale situation with exchanges and the local loop has finally reached the point where companies other than Telstra and Optus can offer decent pricing. They just need people to start buying the services they offer.
There are others here in WA too; Westnet, iiNet and probably more. I personally don't have any of these products at home (can't justify a long-term contract) - I'm a satisfied Arachnet dialup customer. At work, we have iiNet's offering and it's very, very nice.
There's some stuff that didn't make it into
the ANSI C++ standard that probably should have. Stuff like reference-counted smart pointers makes doing things a lot easier sometimes, especially once you start throwing pointers around inside STL containers. The stuff is quasi-standard; many of the driving people behind boost.org were members of the ANSI committee itself. Definitely worth a look.
Is anyone else worried that upcoming privacy
legislation will fix things so that only wealthy corporations can
"trade" personal information?
Hmm.. when you think about it, large conglomerates (ie wealthy corporations) already do an end run around the entire concept of passing on personal information to a "third party."
Imagine you have a town with a cable TV provider, an ISP, a few magazines and a small movie studio. They're all independently owned. If you give information to one, then pretty much *any* privacy regulation is going to stop it from sharing your details with the others.
Now, imagine that the cable company, ISP, magazines and movie studio are all AOL-Time-Warner. You give your information to one, you've given it them all.
Anybody else remember the Doom II Aliens total conversion?
Well, it originally came out for the original Doom. When Doom II came out, someone kindly hacked the files about so they'd work with the new game.
Incidentally, if anyone feels like giving it a spin for old time's sake and has a copy of the DOOM wad files, go to Doomworld and download an OpenGL-enabled version of Doom, grab a copy of Aliens TC that's been modified to work with modern versions of Doom and let her rip:P
I still tip my hat off to those copyright infringing guys.
The term "foxed" was coined when Fox shut down the Alien Quake project.:/ Somehow, Aliens TC for Doom has managed to survive without any action being taken.
It is if you're telling 100 million of your closest friends about a new herbal pill offer that they JUST CANT PASS UP!!!
The parent post mentioned FTP and Mail services. If you're just sending spam, you're not running a service that others can connect to, you're just running a client which spouts out mail to servers elsewhere.
The last spam I received was approx. 2500 bytes in size. (A few hundred bytes of this was headers tacked on by forwarding mailservers, so the spamming host probably sent out about 2k). If a spammer keeps several outgoing connections open at once (hence maxing their outbound bandwidth, so the other end being slow isn't an issue), if a modem is capable of 2k/s outgoing then they'll send 3600 spams an hour. That's 2.6 million per month.
In practice, take into account that modems are faster than that - 3k/s seems typical for binary data, and text emails are well suited to the kind of compression you'll get on a typical dialup. That's 5 - 10 millions spams a month, on a simple dialup. And this can be further elevated - RCPT TO multiple accounts and you're getting more than one spam recipient per outgoing mail connection.
People running various P2P/FTP/Mail services etc from a traditional 40/month broadband line is simply irresponsible
Mail? Dude, personal mail is pretty low volume, even mail for you and all your friends is pretty low volume. I don't think running your own mailserver is an unreasonable activity.
when my girlfriend wants attention when im on the computer all she has to do is lie naked on me and i'll se her naked body as a keyboard:)) Now all we need is a mouse like this
Dude, just reach down between the legs. It's like the trackpoint on a notebook:)
curl (not to be confused with Curl) is included not the supperior wget.
I don't think it's fair to say that wget
is always superior. They're different
tools for different jobs. wget's big
feature is recursive fetching of linked web
pages. curl concentrates more on single
operations, and lets you do a lot more in this
area. One biggie that I'd really miss is the
ability to use HTTP POST instead of GET. It
can also upload files (HTTP and FTP); wget
can't.
It's worth noting that curl is basically
a simple wrapper around libcurl, which is
probably the best cross-platform library
out there for doing stuff with HTTP.
Keep in mind that it doesn't have all of this in one nice code sequence, hence the bug wasn't obvious. Anyways, regarding why it might be worse on some architectures: You're not allowed to call free twice like that, however it's possible that it won't do any harm.
FreeBSD will actually detect the double free and print out a warning. glibc (the C library used by most Linux distros) will crash and burn. Other OS' may exhibit different responses.
Slashdot Mirror
So, I guess you're either a copyright holder or you're not.
Congratulations, America. Just over 200 years and you've developed your very own class system.
No, it's a design goal of the Windows gui system, end result being that you go spend $$$$$ on Terminal Server.
And I continue today's trend of kicking myself in the teeth by fucking up the "less bug-prone" test code. That first statement is completely unnecessary and useless (albeit harmless).
And I continued today's trend of kicking myself in the teeth by fucking up the "less bug-prone" test code. The first statement is completely superfluous (albeit harmless) *cringe*
Testing a solution for correctness, or probable-correctness, is usually easier than figuring out the solution in the first place. This means the test code will be smaller and less bug-prone than the code that does the actual work.
An example: sorting a list of numbers. An efficient sorting implementation can be rather complex, but making sure it works is pretty simple, even in C: min = list[0]; for(i = 1; i < length; i++) assert(list[i-1] <= list[i]);
Ob-Disclosure: I'm a paying member of EFA.
You've never heard of EFA? They seem to mentioned in the majority of newspaper articles concerning censorship and online privacy these days.
As to the regulations you mention - you're talking about takedown notices, which are issued to people running sites under Australian jurisdiction. For sites hosted overseas, the ABA just submits the URL to a bunch of commercial blockers - NetNanny et al. Why is the government subsidising the work of these commercial companies? Don't know. Are the commercial companies at all obligated to listen to the ABA? Nope. Has this process ever gone wrong, blocking a site that shouldn't be blocked? We have no way of knowing.
Who is affected by the blocking? Potentially anyone behind a blocking utility - this includes many in public schools, libraries and various corporations across Australia. This could become much greater in the future - the government has considered options ranging from a single centralised proxy (like the great firewall of China) to requiring ISPs to enforce blocking themselves.
You don't seem to be aware of what it takes to become illegal content in Australia. You don't need kiddie porn - just actual sex is enough. A real penis entering a real vagina is not legal content. Someone with the goatse.cx picture on their site was issued a takedown notice.
This story is of interest to anyone who thinks that (a) government should be open and transparent, (b) the ABA scheme is a waste of money and/or (c) government sponsored censorship is plain wrong.
If you want one so badly, how about writing it?
It would probably make for a great story on the other site.
If you want some kind of reliability guarantee, can't you already outsource to a services company like IBM and say "keep this system running, doing this, with -figure- availability and -figure- mean time between failure"? And have a failure to meet this commitment result in significant loss of payment to IBM?
Of course, such contracts don't come cheap. But then, we're comparing the creation of software to the engineering of bridges, skyscrapers, and bank vaults, and last time I checked bridges weren't cheap either.
Do you honestly think many, if any, of the "elitists" making critical comments here write and contribute code to the kernel, or other programs that appear in distributions?
Equating Slashbots and open source coders is about as fair as equating Walmart shoppers and rednecks.
Despite being beaten over the head by the concept for several years, I still don't understand why the second that a computer is concerned, a whole new bunch of rules, regulations and authorities is created for the special case, rather than simply placing the situation under the jurisdiction of things that already exist for the general case.
What if someone's sending me harrassing email? Do the same thing that you'd do if someone was harrassing you via the phone, snail mail, etc. Go to the authorities, who will deal with it, involving the necessary organisations (telco, postal office, network admins etc) as required.
Someone's looking at porn in the computer lab!! If the concern is that someone can't get on the computer to do their assignment, I'm sure that rules already exist to stop people who need to work from being held up by people chatting, playing games etc. If the concern is that people will be offended, surely there's existing rules regarding offensive material in public - could the person bring in a big X-rated poster and show it around?
People are pirating music! Once again, if the concern is the effect on the network, get them under the rules that exist to deal with recreational use of the network being detrimental to it's proper use. If you're actually just offended because you think copying music is wrong, take exactly the same action as you would if, 20 years ago, you'd seen the person copying casette tapes. There's no need to codify things under "net ethics."
So give them a non-exclusive license, wrapped up in a contract. It is possible to give rights to the FSF whilst having an agreement that prevents them from being used against you.
The vibe here seems to be along the lines of "Red Hat needs to do this to defend themselves from other patent holders." But RH is going beyond that, with it's offering of free use only to certain types of software. If self-defense was the only reason for this, RH could easily grant free use to "anybody that agrees not to ever sue us for patent violation." They have not done this.
Software patents are wrong for many reasons. The work that Red Hat have put into what they've patented does not warrant granting them a monopoly on the technique for over a decade. Exploiting a misguided, fascist system to quash potential competitors is wrong.
It was wrong when Amazon did it, and it's wrong now. The fact that Redhat does free software (which 'we' like) and Amazon doesn't (which 'we' don't) doesn't make this right.
Huh? 99.9% of the time all you see is characters in a window. Can't complain about a terminal doing that.
No it's not. Except for hobbyist and educational use.
There are plenty of decent deals out there. You just have to be reasonable. Leechers should get their head around the fact that they are *not* profitable customers, and will be treated accordingly.
In Perth, Western Australia, Arachnet offers ADSL at pretty much the same price points, which the bonus that traffic to and from WAIX, a local peering point, is free. (Subject to fair use; don't run a heavy-traffic VPN across to your other office in Sydney over it). PlanetMirror is on a network peered to WAIX, so that's all your ISOs taken care of.
The wholesale situation with exchanges and the local loop has finally reached the point where companies other than Telstra and Optus can offer decent pricing. They just need people to start buying the services they offer.
There are others here in WA too; Westnet, iiNet and probably more. I personally don't have any of these products at home (can't justify a long-term contract) - I'm a satisfied Arachnet dialup customer. At work, we have iiNet's offering and it's very, very nice.
Or just get QuickSearch from the IE Powertoys and configure "g " in the address bar to go to http://google.com/search?q=
There's some stuff that didn't make it into the ANSI C++ standard that probably should have. Stuff like reference-counted smart pointers makes doing things a lot easier sometimes, especially once you start throwing pointers around inside STL containers. The stuff is quasi-standard; many of the driving people behind boost.org were members of the ANSI committee itself. Definitely worth a look.
www.boost.org
Hmm.. when you think about it, large conglomerates (ie wealthy corporations) already do an end run around the entire concept of passing on personal information to a "third party."
Imagine you have a town with a cable TV provider, an ISP, a few magazines and a small movie studio. They're all independently owned. If you give information to one, then pretty much *any* privacy regulation is going to stop it from sharing your details with the others.
Now, imagine that the cable company, ISP, magazines and movie studio are all AOL-Time-Warner. You give your information to one, you've given it them all.
Well, it originally came out for the original Doom. When Doom II came out, someone kindly hacked the files about so they'd work with the new game.
Incidentally, if anyone feels like giving it a spin for old time's sake and has a copy of the DOOM wad files, go to Doomworld and download an OpenGL-enabled version of Doom, grab a copy of Aliens TC that's been modified to work with modern versions of Doom and let her rip :P
The term "foxed" was coined when Fox shut down the Alien Quake project. :/ Somehow, Aliens TC for Doom has managed to survive without any action being taken.
The parent post mentioned FTP and Mail services. If you're just sending spam, you're not running a service that others can connect to, you're just running a client which spouts out mail to servers elsewhere.
The last spam I received was approx. 2500 bytes in size. (A few hundred bytes of this was headers tacked on by forwarding mailservers, so the spamming host probably sent out about 2k). If a spammer keeps several outgoing connections open at once (hence maxing their outbound bandwidth, so the other end being slow isn't an issue), if a modem is capable of 2k/s outgoing then they'll send 3600 spams an hour. That's 2.6 million per month.
In practice, take into account that modems are faster than that - 3k/s seems typical for binary data, and text emails are well suited to the kind of compression you'll get on a typical dialup. That's 5 - 10 millions spams a month, on a simple dialup. And this can be further elevated - RCPT TO multiple accounts and you're getting more than one spam recipient per outgoing mail connection.
Mail? Dude, personal mail is pretty low volume, even mail for you and all your friends is pretty low volume. I don't think running your own mailserver is an unreasonable activity.
If, that is, you can find it. American males, for example, tend to be very deficient in this particular regard.
Indeed. When I posted I was half expecting to be modded down by people who couldn't tell what the hell I was going on about.
Dude, just reach down between the legs. It's like the trackpoint on a notebook :)
curl (not to be confused with Curl) is included not the supperior wget.
I don't think it's fair to say that wget is always superior. They're different tools for different jobs. wget's big feature is recursive fetching of linked web pages. curl concentrates more on single operations, and lets you do a lot more in this area. One biggie that I'd really miss is the ability to use HTTP POST instead of GET. It can also upload files (HTTP and FTP); wget can't.
It's worth noting that curl is basically a simple wrapper around libcurl, which is probably the best cross-platform library out there for doing stuff with HTTP.
What's he's probably getting to re: BSD..
/* double free */
C programs generally use two functions, malloc and free, to allocate and deallocate memory repectively. So the code should do this:
ptr = malloc(number_of_bytes);
/* do stuff */
free(ptr);
The problem that zlib has is a double-free bug; it does this:
ptr = malloc(number_of_bytes);
/* do stuff */
free(ptr);
free(ptr);
Keep in mind that it doesn't have all of this in one nice code sequence, hence the bug wasn't obvious. Anyways, regarding why it might be worse on some architectures: You're not allowed to call free twice like that, however it's possible that it won't do any harm.
FreeBSD will actually detect the double free and print out a warning. glibc (the C library used by most Linux distros) will crash and burn. Other OS' may exhibit different responses.