Sun is in it to make profits to please the shareholders.
I was under the impression that Sun stock didn't pay dividends.
Of course, google hates me today. No suprise.
Re:What day of the week is it?
on
Sun-isms Debunked
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The vultures are circling, and I, for one, can't wait until *something* happens to Sun.
It's attitudes like this that make me want to see SCO sue the crap out of the Linux community, and win, one machine at a time. Mandatory $500 license fees, where advocacy constitutes as probable cause and results in automatic warrants for the cops to come in and search your residence and business.
And that's $500 per COPY, installed or installation media.
It's not that I don't like linux[1]-- it's just the user community has so many members who are down on *every* other operating system, even those that should be the natural allies, that it poisons the well, so to speak. (I saw this same sort of thing in the days of the Amiga -- there were people who wished _ill_ on the Atari ST and MacOS, and fostered nothing but ill-well towards themselves in return...)
Remember, monocultures suck. This applies even if All The World Runs Linux[2].
From where I'm sitting, there's more bull coming out of the Linux community than out of Sun.
[1] I actually like linux, and have been using it continuously since my first pre-1.0 slackware installation (I still have those floppy disks!) on a 5meg '386 (Egads, that was a crappy machine. Five times the RAM than my Amiga 1000, and the best thing going for it was that I could run a *nix-lookalike OS so I could write code at home and have a chance of it compiling at school.)
[2] Different distributions don't count as "different", just as different versions of Win32 API systems don't count as "different". What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, folks.
It's a bit disingenuous to push a voting scheme as a "fair vote" considering that there's no such thing. Arrow's theorem should be required reading for anyone interested in the subject, and those who want to push one voting scheme or another should make sure they understand it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow's_Impossibili ty _Theorem
(Essentially, it's a proof that there is no such thing as a fair voting scheme, and that it's impossible to ever come up with a voting scheme that will always be fair in all conditions.)
This isn't to say that something like IRV wouldn't be an _improvement_ over what we have now. It's just that it isn't going to be *fair*. You'd think that if the fairvote.org folks were serious, they'd acknowledge this sort of thing.
The responses to this article are pretty solidly along the lines of, "Those stupid rich fuckers need to RTFM, rather than being worried about wardrivers."
Yeah, pretty much, as that's generally the response of J. Random Middle-Class user when regaled with stories of the SRFs crying out for the cops to protect $TOYs. (Say, increased patrols in the rich neighborhoods 'cuz the crime rate is up 3% -- let those ghettos go rot as those folks are all freeloaders and criminals anyway.)
Seriously, wouldn't that money would be better spent on hiring more cops or giving the current set slightly better benefits? I haven't heard of an overfunded police department in years -- they're always underfunded and understaffed.
On a personal note...
I know people who came home to find out that they had been robbed, and then had to wait days before the cops showed up to take a statement. On the one hand, it's very annoying to the citizen and unprofessional of the department; on the other, I suspect that the police department is understaffed and that it's not really what the cops consider a serious crime: nobody is dead, nobody was hurt, it's only property, let the insurance company take care of it.
(You can't blame the cops for this triage, and if I'd been knifed by some mugger, I know which one I'd consider to be more important.)
Ponder how you might feel if you were a Regular Joe using your WiFi equipment. You read the confusing literature and try your best to secure your WiFi network.
Well, I, as the non-regular Joe, have been pointing out to people, presumably Regular Joes, that if you don't know exactly what you're doing, you shouldn't go with wireless. I explain that if you don't secure it, you're giving away your bandwidth to anyone and their brother, to send that spam that clutters our mailboxes, or worse.
On the other hand, the WAP-device salesman is extolling the wonders of wireless. And Joe's buddies are talking about how cool it is to browse pr0n in the back bedroom on the heh-heh "laptop". So Ol' Joe is getting mixed signals -- the geeky know-it-alls are telling him that he ought to think twice about setting up wireless, and everyone else is pointing out how EASY it all is. Since geeks are, well, geeks, screw 'em, they're obviously stupid compared to that slick salesman.
Hell, didn't IBM run some commercial where some poor slob was rushed and just barely made a meeting, while is suave companions mock him for not having wireless? You can check the traffic, if you only had wireless. You can do your banking on the road, if only you had wireless....
It's not always the techies that seem elitist.
But you're not exactly sure if you go it right. Now you find out that there are people out there lurking around in your neighborhood whose sole purpose is to look for unsecure networks and...
Yup. Those damn geeks.
Will they gain access to your network? Maybe, mabye not. But it makes you nervous because unlike most Slashdot readers, technology is not your life. You're just doing your best with the stuff you bought at the local ComputerShack.
...got sold.
I don't know why people think that they can just go into any old store, believe the salesman, and walk out with anything halfway decent. You'd think that we'd have it wired into our biology by now: Don't Trust The Salesman.
So no, you're not just doing your best. You've failed to do your best as soon as you walked into the local ComputerShack without doing your research. Claiming that you've done your best *since* is like paying $50,000 for a used Yugo, but you've only gone to the cheapest gas stations since, so naturally you're saving money.
In many ways it is like using Windows [sic]. You try your best to secure it against malware and spam,
Um, no, not really. IBM is pro-IBM. Open source is useful to them at this point in time.
Personally, I think IBM just wants to put a finger into every pie. Any which way the market moves, they want to be there. They want to have a bet on EVERY horse in the race, as it were.
This is an interesing academic exercise, but the basic defenses that have been preached for years work just fine:
Um.... the actual basic defenses being preached go back much farther than you suspect. The Internet did not coincide with the development of the computer, or viruses.
Basic defenses are:
Don't trust live data
Don't let random programs run on your machine if there's
any data accessible -- i.e. control access to your machine
Don't engage in risky/stupid behavior -- practice safe
computing
Long-term backups are important
'Avoiding IE for surfing' should be "Don't use Microsoft Internet Explorer, full stop." Likewise, "Avoid OL/OE for eMail" should be "Don't use Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express, full stop." Both of those fall under the category of "risky/stupid behavior". Just because your boss tells you that you have to use 'em doesn't make it any less risky.
Firewalls do two things -- one, they hide your network, so as to keep the black hats away from the data on your network, and two, they hide broken systems that are running insecure programs. This pretty much counts as controlling access to your machine.
I'm not a big fan of automated patching. Patching, yes, but if you automate it, you offer Yet Another Way for the black hats to sneak in to your system. A program that contacts another program to download programs that are replacing programs on that machine fails to (1) control access to your machine and (2) you're trusting "live data".
"Warn on Anomolous behavior" sounds good (intrusion detection systems are sometimes based on this concept), but it doesn't really help too much in *preventing* viruses.
An up-to-date virus scanner is the belt you use in addition to suspenders; it's there to catch your goofs, where you're falling down on the job. As a mitigation strategy, it is good for your network... but it's already too late to get your system back into a pristine state. (Thus a good backup strategy is essential.)
In "the old days", you could bring a system back to a known-good state by powering it down, inserting known-clean read-only media, and booting it up again. (In hindsight, those floppy-based systems had a lot going for them. If you were careful, you could avoid exposing your system to viruses, even if you ran a known-infected program.)
It's a bit harder on modern operating systems. For one, there isn't a good way to run a program in isolation. If you're lucky enough to get a statically-linked program, a chroot jail is a simple place to start, but chroot jails aren't terribly secure, and there's not a lot of statically-linked programs out there these days. Setting up a chroot jail can be prohibitively expensive (in terms of time or disk space).
User-mode Linux and virtual hardware (e.g. Virtual PC) are even more expensive in terms of disk space and set up costs.
Both chroot jails and user-space operating systems tend to keep a program from usefully interacting with other programs. If the output of one program is the input to another, and they're running in different jails/VMs, I need to start worrying about networking in order to facilitate communication. More complexity!
You can always partition your system so that/,/lib, and/usr are read-only, while/var,/tmp, and/home are noexec, but that's not often done, and more often than not, systems are shipping (or defaulting to) single-partition installs. (Madness, I say, madness!)
What would be nice is a system like chroot, but would make the entire system (to that process and sub-processes) read-only, aside from a list of directories, and no-exec, aside from a _different_ list of directories, and at no time would you have the same aspect of a filesystem both read-write and execut
Even though the chalk is water-soluble, he admitted previously that it takes almost 2 weeks to wash off.
Not quite what's claimed.
It washes off. It takes 15-30 days to biodegrade.
To quote from the website:
Hey, isn't this graffiti?!
Bikes Against Bush will utilize a water-soluble chalk mixture. It is the same material used for marking athletic fields. It is environmentally safe and removes easily with water, or naturally biodegrades within 15-30 days. Thus, while the messages may have the appearance of graffiti, this is certainly not an attempt to damage or deface property.
I've always had excellent email support[1] from
RefactorIT, not only to explain what I'm not grasping, but they typically would improve their product to help avoid the original cause for confusion.
I have also received excellent tech-support from the BookEndz folks (Docking station for me TiBook). It's not all bad out there.
I have a 15" G4 (667MHz) Titanium Powerbook. For most of its life, I've had a battery life (3/4ths brightness, max power save settings, no wireless, etc., only task for these tests has been to either read PDFs or to write text with vi in a Terminal.app window) somewhere between 1 hour 5 minutes to 1 hour 25 minutes. As it's over an hour, the AppleCare Warranty doesn't kick in as "over an hour is good enough".
And yes, I've reconditioned my battery, as per instructed.
A friend who bought exactly the same model has 2-3 hours of life on his battery, and his wife (who has a new version) gets all of 5 hours. An acquaintance has a battery life of 10 minutes, but he didn't get an applecare warranty and never uses his machine without plugging it in anyway.
While I like the laptop, and think the OS is with the home "consumer" needs, I'm not sure I'd buy another laptop, as the battery-life issue seems such a crapshoot, and I don't see any laptops out there with what I would consider a reasonable keyboard layout. I might as well just lug around a happy hacking keyboard and use whatever hardware is available.
Sun demonstrated something very like this at JavaOne a few years ago. It got me thinking about the fundamental failures of this sort of approach.
See, I *want* to have my own machine, as if you compromise the hardware, it's game over. So ubiquitious machines won't work -- it's too easy to get in there and compromise the system.
So I'm going to want my own keyboard (or input device). I might as well provide all the rest of the system, except perhaps for some local RAM, some additional CPU power, and a network connection. . . but by then, why bother? Just give me the 'Net connection and I'll go find my remote host,and feel safer.
Obviously, some people are insufficiently paranoid.
Last time I looked at freenet, there was no obvious way to get involved with helping out with those supposed "java-induced problems". I rather think that the problems aren't java-induced at all; perhaps endemic disorganization permeates the code, too.
Why is Java mainly used server-side? Because an awful lot of the clients are browsers. Plus, in those cases where the client isn't a browser, it doesn't matter so much if the client has a memory leak, or crashes frequently -- users are used to that these days.
Currently, I'm working on a system that does have a Java client (that runs on Linux), but that's been tasked to integrate into an existing.COM client -- but by using Java, we get to use Linux and OS X in our development, even if the target system has to be something that comes from Redmond. I wouldn't touch this project with a ten foot pole if it were in C or C++, as the.COM infection would creep thru the system.
Most of the work is therefore done server-side, in Java.
If Java wasn't here or disallowed, the whole project would probably be in a mixture of C++ and VisualBasic and chasing after.NET, and no unix of any flavor would be involved anywhere in the development cycle. As it is, those of us who use unix systems have been showing the Microsoft-centric developers how much more you can get done with a reasonable toolset and a (relatively) stable operating system.
For crying out loud, people! How hard is it to download Firefox and switch?
How much time do you have to spend? I downloaded and installed FireFox last week, and when I ran it, it choked, and turned into a pid-walker. As Omniweb and NS7 work pretty well for me, I couldn't justify spending any more time trying to figure out what was broken.
It's not that hard. Websites that require Javascript should be considered malware -- there is NOTHING that Javascript can provide the user that either isn't technically necessary or can't be provided some other way.
If everyone disabled Javascript, and boycotted websites that require Javascript, and browsers shipped with Javascript disabled, then this whole popup nonsense would go away.
It's not really a question about whether it's ethical or not. If you have music from the ITMS, you bought it from Apple, and YOU AGREED TO THESE TERMS OF SERVICE. If you make a piece of software to "circumvent or modify any security technology or software that is part of the Service" than you are breaking your contract with Apple, and thusly breaking the law. It's pretty simple.
Point, sorta, except that the original contract is still up in the air as to whether it's ethical or not. If the terms of service is unethical, the question still remains.
Provisions of a contract may be rejected by the courts when the run afoul of the law or of certain rights.
You cannot, for example, sell yourself into slavery, even if you've signed a contract that contains that provision. I believe that if you
sign an NDA, and then you discover evidence of criminal activity and report it, punitive clauses in the NDA cannot be enforced against you.
Alas, there are apparently no punitive measures in place for TRYING to put this sort of crap into contracts. We really do need something like that, especially for non-negotiated contracts / terms of service.
The whole DRM nonsense is one of the reasons I'm not buying anything thru iTunes, and I won't until Apple gets slapped down, hard, and counter-sued for barratry. It also is a cause for great amusement to see Apple sued by Apple for violation of contract...
Y'know, email isn't a guaranteed delivery system. It shouldn't be treated as one. It's bogus to demand that it should be considered so.
So yeah, AOL screwed up. And Harlan sent an email that didn't bounce and didn't get read. SO FRIGGING WHAT? I, for one, am very nervous
about any policy that says that _sending_ an email constitutes a legal notification.
So AOL should apologize, sure. And the fact that Harlan sent an email should be unadmissable... it's irrelevent (unless AOL counter-sues claiming that Harlan didn't/try/ to solve it nicely). Harlan has been screaming for so long, often as not over stupid little things that don't matter and at people who don't deserve it, it's getting hard to remember he's sometimes in the right. And it's all so shrill that it's hard to CARE these days.
As for the rest... Harlan should be going after the/user/ who posted his story, not the ISP. Harlan has broken or bent enough promises that you'd think he'd be willing to give others a little slack, eh?
Harlan *could* have set up a cancelbot. Far more efficient. But that would be actually solving the problem, and we can't be having with that.
While CVS tracks changes made to individual _files_ in the source tree, some other revision control systems (ie. Arch, BitKeeper, etc) store changes to the tree state atomically. That is to say, if you have file1.c and file1.h and you make a change that touches both of them, you can bundle both those changes together into one atomic operation, so that they show up as just one changelog entry and that every developer who applies one of these changes always gets both of them.
Well, that's misusing the term atomic. By atomic, we traditionally mean that it's not interrupted -- it all goes in as a unit. CVS, to my knowledge, does this (that's what all the locking is about). "Atomic" and "changeset" aren't synonyms, although a non-atomic changeset would probably be pretty silly.
That being said, I find that I commit files on a file-by-file basis, and rarely, if ever, commit groups of files as a unit. So changesets are (according to the way I currently work) utterly useless to me. Mostly, I diff the current file against the repository, make a few notes about what I had changed in the file and why, and commit that file. Lather, rinse, and repeat.
In the case of a changeset-oriented system, on the other hand, the appropriate version of both files is just another element of the repository state -- so instead of a set of individual file states, you just have one big repository state that holds everything together.
Is it really common practice to develop in something other than the current tree? In my experience, everyone involved in a project is expected to work in the most current version of the tree, and to update their local working copy first thing every day (and several times throughout the day). People working on the sorts of changes that would break the tree are supposed to be working in a branch, and support of older versions are also done in branches.
Of course, the way we work has been influenced heavily by CVS, but it's a pretty sensible and solid process. I can't say that I've ever had a desire for some of those "alternate workflows" that everyone else seems so keen on.
Part of that does involve a central server to store repository in -- on a local network this is could often be a commonly accessable directory or mounted drive off of a WinServer/SMB or NFS server. CVS also allows for internet checkouts and checkins, which is how a lot of open source stuff is handled.
CVS over NFS is problematic and should be considered unwise. Most of the really strange problems with CVS I've encountered (from hanging in #java) have been with CVS over NFS. I've never bothered to run CVS over NFS myself, but when someone starts asking how their repository got corrupted, so far every time has been that they were using NFS.
(On the other hand, most of the problems involved with setting up CVS involves pserver -- most of the people somehow decided that pserver is simpler than ssh, even if they already have ssh set up on the respository box. Go figure.)
I have a Handspring Visor... I went with Handspring because my order for a Palm PDA was on backorder for a month, so I cancelled it, ordered a Handspring, and it was on my doorstep at the end of the week.
I had a hardware problem after a couple of months, so I called up Handspring, and they took my CC#, sent me a new one, and I sent back the old one... and that was that.
I was so impressed by their service, I recommended Handspring to everyone. I waxed eloquent.
And after awhile, Palm bought Handspring. And now they're discontinuing Mac support? But the only box I sync my little PDA to is my TiBook...
And now my little Handspring PDA is getting old. It requires occasional percussive maintenance these days. So... I'm going to be in the market for another PDA in the near future.
The site doesn't work (for me) with OmniWeb either.
I've run across a couple of Eiffel proponents who evangelized the wonders of all things Eiffel, but I've never seriously looked at the language. And if they can't make their site work for a target audience, they're not likely to get me to look at it either.
Of all the processors out there, yes the x86 is common but it has to be one of the WORST instruction sets - one of the most difficult to work with.
You can get worse, but it's right down there at the bottom among the "successful" CPUs. I'm convinced that learning x86 assembly too early will warp and twist your mind enough to permanently damage your judgement.
There is no indication in the article that the brothers actually have had jobs or other responsibilities. It's no wonder they they got into this sort of thing...
And, of course, there are other amusing bits...
But Ramy was too ambitious to stop there. "I taught myself to program in all the languages: C, C++, Basic, Java, HTML, PHP, CGI."
That's a pretty... limited view of what "all the (programming) languages" are.
I'll grant that they're clever; that, and too much time on their hands made 'em dangerous and irresponsible.
After encountering their first computer, in 1989, at Tel Aviv's Center for the Blind, Ramy and Muzher became enchanted with the IBM clones.
I think it's both hilarious and sad that we're still focusing on terrorists wrt airplanes. They had their chance, and they used it to their great advantage. They'll come at us from a different angle now, knowing that they'll never again surprise us in that particular way.
It's been said that generals always prepare to fight the last war. (Alas, I can't find a definitive cite, although it's quoted everywhere.)
I think this is very true -- and that the only action we really need to take is to issue everyone truncheons as they board the plane, and to allow people to bring on their own Bowie knives.
The simple solutions are best. If the problem we're trying to solve is the one of terrorists taking over a plane, well, truncheons-and-knives seems to be a good place to start. Not all this making stuff more complicated and suchlike.
Of course, if the problem we're trying to solve is the one brought up in
Ghost Riders in the Sky scenario, or the
Operation Pearl scenario, the SoftWalls 'solution' isn't.
When you get right down to it, this idea has some fundamental problems. Would I fly on such a a plane equipped with a system that could over-ride the pilot no matter what? Probably not.
In fact, once you have something like this, why bother with pilots at all? Obviously, the've been declared redundant and useless.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, google hates me today. No suprise.
And that's $500 per COPY, installed or installation media.
It's not that I don't like linux[1]-- it's just the user community has so many members who are down on *every* other operating system, even those that should be the natural allies, that it poisons the well, so to speak. (I saw this same sort of thing in the days of the Amiga -- there were people who wished _ill_ on the Atari ST and MacOS, and fostered nothing but ill-well towards themselves in return...)
Remember, monocultures suck. This applies even if All The World Runs Linux[2].
From where I'm sitting, there's more bull coming out of the Linux community than out of Sun.
[1] I actually like linux, and have been using it continuously since my first pre-1.0 slackware installation (I still have those floppy disks!) on a 5meg '386 (Egads, that was a crappy machine. Five times the RAM than my Amiga 1000, and the best thing going for it was that I could run a *nix-lookalike OS so I could write code at home and have a chance of it compiling at school.)
[2] Different distributions don't count as "different", just as different versions of Win32 API systems don't count as "different". What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, folks.
100 copies of the same 500k image file doesn't constitute 50 megs of data...
It's a bit disingenuous to push a voting scheme as a "fair vote" considering that there's no such thing. Arrow's theorem should be required reading for anyone interested in the subject, and those who want to push one voting scheme or another should make sure they understand it.
i ty _Theorem
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow's_Impossibil
(Essentially, it's a proof that there is no such thing as a fair voting scheme, and that it's impossible to ever come up with a voting scheme that will always be fair in all conditions.)
This isn't to say that something like IRV wouldn't be an _improvement_ over what we have now. It's just that it isn't going to be *fair*. You'd think that if the fairvote.org folks were serious, they'd acknowledge this sort of thing.
Yeah, pretty much, as that's generally the response of J. Random Middle-Class user when regaled with stories of the SRFs crying out for the cops to protect $TOYs. (Say, increased patrols in the rich neighborhoods 'cuz the crime rate is up 3% -- let those ghettos go rot as those folks are all freeloaders and criminals anyway.)
Seriously, wouldn't that money would be better spent on hiring more cops or giving the current set slightly better benefits? I haven't heard of an overfunded police department in years -- they're always underfunded and understaffed.
On a personal note... I know people who came home to find out that they had been robbed, and then had to wait days before the cops showed up to take a statement. On the one hand, it's very annoying to the citizen and unprofessional of the department; on the other, I suspect that the police department is understaffed and that it's not really what the cops consider a serious crime: nobody is dead, nobody was hurt, it's only property, let the insurance company take care of it.
(You can't blame the cops for this triage, and if I'd been knifed by some mugger, I know which one I'd consider to be more important.)
Well, I, as the non-regular Joe, have been pointing out to people, presumably Regular Joes, that if you don't know exactly what you're doing, you shouldn't go with wireless. I explain that if you don't secure it, you're giving away your bandwidth to anyone and their brother, to send that spam that clutters our mailboxes, or worse.
On the other hand, the WAP-device salesman is extolling the wonders of wireless. And Joe's buddies are talking about how cool it is to browse pr0n in the back bedroom on the heh-heh "laptop". So Ol' Joe is getting mixed signals -- the geeky know-it-alls are telling him that he ought to think twice about setting up wireless, and everyone else is pointing out how EASY it all is. Since geeks are, well, geeks, screw 'em, they're obviously stupid compared to that slick salesman.
Hell, didn't IBM run some commercial where some poor slob was rushed and just barely made a meeting, while is suave companions mock him for not having wireless? You can check the traffic, if you only had wireless. You can do your banking on the road, if only you had wireless....
It's not always the techies that seem elitist.
Yup. Those damn geeks.
I don't know why people think that they can just go into any old store, believe the salesman, and walk out with anything halfway decent. You'd think that we'd have it wired into our biology by now: Don't Trust The Salesman.
So no, you're not just doing your best. You've failed to do your best as soon as you walked into the local ComputerShack without doing your research. Claiming that you've done your best *since* is like paying $50,000 for a used Yugo, but you've only gone to the cheapest gas stations since, so naturally you're saving money.
Personally, I think IBM just wants to put a finger into every pie. Any which way the market moves, they want to be there. They want to have a bet on EVERY horse in the race, as it were.
Um.... the actual basic defenses being preached go back much farther than you suspect. The Internet did not coincide with the development of the computer, or viruses.
Basic defenses are:
'Avoiding IE for surfing' should be "Don't use Microsoft Internet Explorer, full stop." Likewise, "Avoid OL/OE for eMail" should be "Don't use Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express, full stop." Both of those fall under the category of "risky/stupid behavior". Just because your boss tells you that you have to use 'em doesn't make it any less risky.
Firewalls do two things -- one, they hide your network, so as to keep the black hats away from the data on your network, and two, they hide broken systems that are running insecure programs. This pretty much counts as controlling access to your machine.
I'm not a big fan of automated patching. Patching, yes, but if you automate it, you offer Yet Another Way for the black hats to sneak in to your system. A program that contacts another program to download programs that are replacing programs on that machine fails to (1) control access to your machine and (2) you're trusting "live data".
"Warn on Anomolous behavior" sounds good (intrusion detection systems are sometimes based on this concept), but it doesn't really help too much in *preventing* viruses.
An up-to-date virus scanner is the belt you use in addition to suspenders; it's there to catch your goofs, where you're falling down on the job. As a mitigation strategy, it is good for your network... but it's already too late to get your system back into a pristine state. (Thus a good backup strategy is essential.)
In "the old days", you could bring a system back to a known-good state by powering it down, inserting known-clean read-only media, and booting it up again. (In hindsight, those floppy-based systems had a lot going for them. If you were careful, you could avoid exposing your system to viruses, even if you ran a known-infected program.)
It's a bit harder on modern operating systems. For one, there isn't a good way to run a program in isolation. If you're lucky enough to get a statically-linked program, a chroot jail is a simple place to start, but chroot jails aren't terribly secure, and there's not a lot of statically-linked programs out there these days. Setting up a chroot jail can be prohibitively expensive (in terms of time or disk space).
User-mode Linux and virtual hardware (e.g. Virtual PC) are even more expensive in terms of disk space and set up costs.
Both chroot jails and user-space operating systems tend to keep a program from usefully interacting with other programs. If the output of one program is the input to another, and they're running in different jails/VMs, I need to start worrying about networking in order to facilitate communication. More complexity!
You can always partition your system so that /, /lib, and /usr are read-only, while /var, /tmp, and /home are noexec, but that's not often done, and more often than not, systems are shipping (or defaulting to) single-partition installs. (Madness, I say, madness!)
What would be nice is a system like chroot, but would make the entire system (to that process and sub-processes) read-only, aside from a list of directories, and no-exec, aside from a _different_ list of directories, and at no time would you have the same aspect of a filesystem both read-write and execut
Perhaps "affect" was meant instead of "effect"?
It washes off. It takes 15-30 days to biodegrade.
To quote from the website:
The scary bit is that he hasn't been charged yet.I have also received excellent tech-support from the BookEndz folks (Docking station for me TiBook). It's not all bad out there.
And yes, I've reconditioned my battery, as per instructed.
A friend who bought exactly the same model has 2-3 hours of life on his battery, and his wife (who has a new version) gets all of 5 hours. An acquaintance has a battery life of 10 minutes, but he didn't get an applecare warranty and never uses his machine without plugging it in anyway.
While I like the laptop, and think the OS is with the home "consumer" needs, I'm not sure I'd buy another laptop, as the battery-life issue seems such a crapshoot, and I don't see any laptops out there with what I would consider a reasonable keyboard layout. I might as well just lug around a happy hacking keyboard and use whatever hardware is available.
See, I *want* to have my own machine, as if you compromise the hardware, it's game over. So ubiquitious machines won't work -- it's too easy to get in there and compromise the system.
So I'm going to want my own keyboard (or input device). I might as well provide all the rest of the system, except perhaps for some local RAM, some additional CPU power, and a network connection. . . but by then, why bother? Just give me the 'Net connection and I'll go find my remote host,and feel safer.
Obviously, some people are insufficiently paranoid.
Why is Java mainly used server-side? Because an awful lot of the clients are browsers. Plus, in those cases where the client isn't a browser, it doesn't matter so much if the client has a memory leak, or crashes frequently -- users are used to that these days.
Currently, I'm working on a system that does have a Java client (that runs on Linux), but that's been tasked to integrate into an existing .COM client -- but by using Java, we get to use Linux and OS X in our development, even if the target system has to be something that comes from Redmond. I wouldn't touch this project with a ten foot pole if it were in C or C++, as the .COM infection would creep thru the system.
Most of the work is therefore done server-side, in Java.
If Java wasn't here or disallowed, the whole project would probably be in a mixture of C++ and VisualBasic and chasing after .NET, and no unix of any flavor would be involved anywhere in the development cycle. As it is, those of us who use unix systems have been showing the Microsoft-centric developers how much more you can get done with a reasonable toolset and a (relatively) stable operating system.
Advocacy is awfully close to hype.
TURN OFF JAVASCRIPT
It's not that hard. Websites that require Javascript should be considered malware -- there is NOTHING that Javascript can provide the user that either isn't technically necessary or can't be provided some other way.
If everyone disabled Javascript, and boycotted websites that require Javascript, and browsers shipped with Javascript disabled, then this whole popup nonsense would go away.
Provisions of a contract may be rejected by the courts when the run afoul of the law or of certain rights.
You cannot, for example, sell yourself into slavery, even if you've signed a contract that contains that provision. I believe that if you sign an NDA, and then you discover evidence of criminal activity and report it, punitive clauses in the NDA cannot be enforced against you.
Alas, there are apparently no punitive measures in place for TRYING to put this sort of crap into contracts. We really do need something like that, especially for non-negotiated contracts / terms of service.
The whole DRM nonsense is one of the reasons I'm not buying anything thru iTunes, and I won't until Apple gets slapped down, hard, and counter-sued for barratry. It also is a cause for great amusement to see Apple sued by Apple for violation of contract...
IANAL, yadda, yadda, yadda...
So yeah, AOL screwed up. And Harlan sent an email that didn't bounce and didn't get read. SO FRIGGING WHAT? I, for one, am very nervous about any policy that says that _sending_ an email constitutes a legal notification.
So AOL should apologize, sure. And the fact that Harlan sent an email should be unadmissable... it's irrelevent (unless AOL counter-sues claiming that Harlan didn't /try/ to solve it nicely). Harlan has been screaming for so long, often as not over stupid little things that don't matter and at people who don't deserve it, it's getting hard to remember he's sometimes in the right. And it's all so shrill that it's hard to CARE these days.
As for the rest... Harlan should be going after the /user/ who posted his story, not the ISP. Harlan has broken or bent enough promises that you'd think he'd be willing to give others a little slack, eh?
Harlan *could* have set up a cancelbot. Far more efficient. But that would be actually solving the problem, and we can't be having with that.
That being said, I find that I commit files on a file-by-file basis, and rarely, if ever, commit groups of files as a unit. So changesets are (according to the way I currently work) utterly useless to me. Mostly, I diff the current file against the repository, make a few notes about what I had changed in the file and why, and commit that file. Lather, rinse, and repeat.
Is it really common practice to develop in something other than the current tree? In my experience, everyone involved in a project is expected to work in the most current version of the tree, and to update their local working copy first thing every day (and several times throughout the day). People working on the sorts of changes that would break the tree are supposed to be working in a branch, and support of older versions are also done in branches.Of course, the way we work has been influenced heavily by CVS, but it's a pretty sensible and solid process. I can't say that I've ever had a desire for some of those "alternate workflows" that everyone else seems so keen on.
(On the other hand, most of the problems involved with setting up CVS involves pserver -- most of the people somehow decided that pserver is simpler than ssh, even if they already have ssh set up on the respository box. Go figure.)
I have a Handspring Visor... I went with Handspring because my order for a Palm PDA was on backorder for a month, so I cancelled it, ordered a Handspring, and it was on my doorstep at the end of the week.
I had a hardware problem after a couple of months, so I called up Handspring, and they took my CC#, sent me a new one, and I sent back the old one... and that was that.
I was so impressed by their service, I recommended Handspring to everyone. I waxed eloquent.
And after awhile, Palm bought Handspring. And now they're discontinuing Mac support? But the only box I sync my little PDA to is my TiBook...
And now my little Handspring PDA is getting old. It requires occasional percussive maintenance these days. So... I'm going to be in the market for another PDA in the near future.
I guess I won't go with anything from Palm.
I've run across a couple of Eiffel proponents who evangelized the wonders of all things Eiffel, but I've never seriously looked at the language. And if they can't make their site work for a target audience, they're not likely to get me to look at it either.
And, of course, there are other amusing bits...
That's a pretty... limited view of what "all the (programming) languages" are.I'll grant that they're clever; that, and too much time on their hands made 'em dangerous and irresponsible.
No wonder they turned out to be criminals!I think this is very true -- and that the only action we really need to take is to issue everyone truncheons as they board the plane, and to allow people to bring on their own Bowie knives.
The simple solutions are best. If the problem we're trying to solve is the one of terrorists taking over a plane, well, truncheons-and-knives seems to be a good place to start. Not all this making stuff more complicated and suchlike.
Of course, if the problem we're trying to solve is the one brought up in Ghost Riders in the Sky scenario, or the Operation Pearl scenario, the SoftWalls 'solution' isn't.
When you get right down to it, this idea has some fundamental problems. Would I fly on such a a plane equipped with a system that could over-ride the pilot no matter what? Probably not.
In fact, once you have something like this, why bother with pilots at all? Obviously, the've been declared redundant and useless.