12/2002 -I get to interview the Head of Security for OIT for a paper I am writing for the Dean of Students.
He tells me that OIT tested my article and my attacks do work (especially between reader and device). He
says there simply isn't money in the budget to fix the problems, though he wishes he could. When I ask
why wouldn't Tech tell other colleges that my article is accurate, he tells me "off the record, you
embarrassed a lot of people, and they are all struggling to save face."
Heh, I don't think the OIT guy
will be talking to that particular white hat anytime again soon. Hint for Acidus: I don't think "off the record" means what you think it means...
Speaking of stupid editorial tricks, consider the/. practice of not allowing readers to moderate and post replies to the same article. While the rationale is admirable, the effect is a bit bizarre: those who are most interested in moderating and posting on a topic---often the most-qualified folks---now have less of a chance of being heard.
This just happened to me, so I'm cranky about it:-). I can see not letting folks moderate their own postings, or even replies to those postings: this restriction seems sufficient to achieve the desired effect.
In fact, it apparently was long a standard source of fun for photojournalists to try to get the bare breasts into the picture, often lowering the camera angle substantially to do so. The practice dates at least to Ed Meese's prounouncements on porn during the Reagan Administration. Apparently Ashcroft is a bit thin-skinned about this sort of thing.
My work machine connects to the I2 backbone via a high-speed link. I was getting 4Mb/sec for a BitTorrent Knoppix download just now. I doubt the Time-Warner server is managing that for very many folks:-).
Based on the author's description of the Knoppix install, I'd be willing to guess that the target system was borken. It appears that the CD drive was busted, not an uncommon occurence in older systems. Oddly, Knoppix is a bit, er, demanding of CD drives:-).
I'm not sure about the rest of you but I'm not running a linux-distro that's 7 years old.
I'm running a Linux distro that does not have a well-defined age! That's the beauty of Debian: instead of repeated upgrade cataclysms, it's just smooth incremental improvement of the existing bits. I used to administer large collections of Red Hat boxen: I'd never go back.
I talked to Rep. Barnhart (a regular/. reader, BTW!) a bit ago, and it's actually stronger than that. Under the current Oregon rules for competitive bidding of software projects (and I believe this to be true in most states) there is no straightforward mechanism to make it possible to consider open source even if the contracting agency knows they want it. One of the primary purposes of the "must consider" clause is to give contracting agencies that want OSS the ability to reject commercial bids.
The other, less-talked-about clause in HB2932 is the "must support open standards" clause. Rep. Barnhart believes (and I agree) that this is an even bigger deal: it should mean no vendor lock-in on storage and communication formats.
This is the kind of thing that makes me proud to be an Oregonian, right up until the schools close for good.
2066 comments and counting. Heh. Like anyone's going to see this.
Anyway, I have a strange soft spot in my heart for Deal of the Century . I don't know of any other movie---certainly any other comedy---that tries to seriously address the US arms business. It also features an remarkably sympathetic portrayal of a conversion to Christianity (and by a mainstream actor, no less). I love Chevy Chase, and the writing is mostly amusing.
Most of the
comments on IMDB are negative. However, I agree with those posters who said that if you know a bit about the arms business in the late 70s and understand that Friedkin did Dr. Strangelove, these things make it a much better film. Give it a try...
Philip: How do you see your character developing in the Return of the King?
Andy Serkis: I don't want to give too much away actually...
Insightful question (remember, this is the adult interviewer asking) and answer. Now that he's seen the scripts, just think how much money Serkis could make selling the secret ending to LotR!
[Please tell me the above is just a joke, BTW. They wouldn't change the ending. Would they?]
Code like GNOME-XML, pkgconfig, fontconfig, xcursor and xft2 were mainly written by people who're heavily involved into GNOME development.
Heh. Fontconfig, XCursor, and Xft2 were written almost entirely by Keith Packard. My personal experience is that he is quite agnostic on the Gnome/KDE question. Further, there is nothing about the design of any of these three subsystems that favors any particular GUI environment.
Keith Packard has been denied commit access to the XFree86 CVS for several months now. (BTW, he was responsible for making the repository publically accessible---he had a long struggle with certain XFree86 Core Team members to let him do it.) This is obviously an insane situation: he has been the principal developer (outside of 3D and drivers, although he's worked on the latter a bit) for some time now. IMHO the situation is somewhat like locking Linus out of Bitkeeper: of course he would make alternate arrangements!
In short, this is a fork in name only: the major players in the distro business have committed to work with Keith, and this is the clear successor for realistic X development. Note that this is the third such event in the history of X: the X Consortium was eventually largely dismantled and replaced by x.org, which in turn was essentially superseded by the XFree86 project. A big hope is that a charter and organization can be set up so that the governance of the new organization is democratic (ala Apache Foundation, Gnome Foundation, etc), allowing changes in governance without the need to create a new organization.
As an X developer and heavy user, I personally am looking forward to having an X repository with current bits and sensible organization.
It's a ball. That glows. The glow shifts, for example, on the rise or fall of the stock market.
A recent Firesign Theatre album, Boom Dot Bust, has a great bit about a "smart home" whose interior decoration and furnishings change to match the value of the owner's stock portfolio. As the stock bubble comes crashing down (this is a 1999 album, BTW), the house rapidly transforms, with hilarious consequences.
Huh? How can a quote about building a tower to the heavens be inapplicable to an article about building a tower to the heavens? I am surprised that I was modded as "flamebait" for posting a simple, well-known, generally noncontroversial quote with no commentary whatsoever.
It honestly never occurred to me that I was saying anything inflammatory, especially in response to a gag article about Illuminati plots. I just thought that it was an interesting comparison---I am a Christian, but I have no Christian position whatsoever on whether the Space Elevator is a good idea. I am also a scientist with some aerospace expertise, and I find the science highly interesting.
Methinks that a few folks are a bit sensitive about religion...
I think the big question is what fruits these bizarrely twisted metaphors will fertilize on Slashdot? Microsoft was "hoisting its own petard" not long ago: now we're asked "what fruits will reduced R&D bear?"
Ah well: I'd ask you to mod this up, but of course beggars can't be chosen...
One appropriate response to this sort of letter that I don't see advocated much on these forums: find out what Bar Association has authorized the lawyers sending the letter to practice law, and send the Bar Association Ethics Commission a politely-worded formal letter of complaint. IANAL, but IMHO the lawyer is definitely engaging in unethical behavior under the Canons by sending legal notices on behalf of clients without any kind of legal basis to do so. It would be nice to get them sanctioned.
Nickle is an interesting approach. Strictly numeric, but with arbitrary-precision integers and rationals, settable-precision floating point, convenient numeric I/O, GC, and much more. Plus it's a first-rate desk calculator. It's intended for prototyping numeric algorithms, among other things.
Re:To download or not to download...
on
Nethack 3.4.1 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
From the GameSpy article referenced in the parent: Rogue was open source, of course, meaning anyone who loved the game could open it up and start tweaking it.
Which it wasn't, IIRC. There were various clones, but the original Rogue was free but licensed binary, right?
How the heck does this get modded +4 insightful? Turfing?
(Disclaimer: I am from the Lionel Hutz school of law. "Are you a lawyer?" "No, but I watched an episode of Matlock in the bar last night: the sound was off, but I think I got the gist of it.") As I understand it, in the legal world the idea you mention is called the doctrine of statement against self interest: It's amazing, but most experts agree that you are more likely to be telling the truth if you are admitting something that is bad for you than if you are claiming something that is good for you.
Heh. If this is your biggest problem with the X rendering model, you don't understand the X rendering model very well. (My biggest problem, for the record, is the lack of any kind of splines. But the fact that generating wide ellipses that are correct according to the spec requires cubic time and looks terrible is a good candidate. The fact that there is no closed-form solution that meets the spec for dashed wide ellipses---it would require computing an elliptic integral---is also interesting.)
First, wrapping the line and rectangle functions so they do what you want is, of course, trivial. But it's not clear that it is what most people want: the argument is that XDrawRectangle should produce the same result as the 4 XDrawLine calls with the same coordinates that would produce it.
Second, non-circular wide arcs are broken in the X rendering model. Don't do that. (BTW, what is this "manual" you keep referring to? The Digital Press version of the X specs? The O'Reilly books?)
The solution: a better rendering model for X. Fortunately, Packard's X Render Extension and Worth and Packard's Xr provides exactly that. The combination essentially gives a C API to an X implementation of the Postscript rendering model, but with nice anti-aliasing and compositing. All this without throwing the X baby out with the X rendering model bathwater. Imagine that.
Packard suggested this exercise to me: Look at your X screen right now. Try to find something that's not either (a) a bitmap, or (b) composed entirely out of rectangles and lines. For almost every X app in existence today, the old, broken X rendering model is just fine. If you need more power than that, a new rendering model is available.
Those who don't understand X are doomed to repeat it.
Slashdot Mirror
As a legendary communications hacker and an expert on communications security, how does it feel to be /.ed and then asked for an interview?
From the timeline at Acidus:
Heh, I don't think the OIT guy will be talking to that particular white hat anytime again soon. Hint for Acidus: I don't think "off the record" means what you think it means...
Speaking of stupid editorial tricks, consider the /. practice of not allowing readers to moderate and post replies to the same article. While the rationale is admirable, the effect is a bit bizarre: those who are most interested in moderating and posting on a topic---often the most-qualified folks---now have less of a chance of being heard.
This just happened to me, so I'm cranky about it :-). I can see not letting folks moderate their own postings, or even replies to those postings: this restriction seems sufficient to achieve the desired effect.
In fact, it apparently was long a standard source of fun for photojournalists to try to get the bare breasts into the picture, often lowering the camera angle substantially to do so. The practice dates at least to Ed Meese's prounouncements on porn during the Reagan Administration. Apparently Ashcroft is a bit thin-skinned about this sort of thing.
My work machine connects to the I2 backbone via a high-speed link. I was getting 4Mb/sec for a BitTorrent Knoppix download just now. I doubt the Time-Warner server is managing that for very many folks :-).
Based on the author's description of the Knoppix install, I'd be willing to guess that the target system was borken. It appears that the CD drive was busted, not an uncommon occurence in older systems. Oddly, Knoppix is a bit, er, demanding of CD drives :-).
I'm not sure about the rest of you but I'm not running a linux-distro that's 7 years old.
I'm running a Linux distro that does not have a well-defined age! That's the beauty of Debian: instead of repeated upgrade cataclysms, it's just smooth incremental improvement of the existing bits. I used to administer large collections of Red Hat boxen: I'd never go back.
I talked to Rep. Barnhart (a regular /. reader, BTW!) a bit ago, and it's actually stronger than that. Under the current Oregon rules for competitive bidding of software projects (and I believe this to be true in most states) there is no straightforward mechanism to make it possible to consider open source even if the contracting agency knows they want it. One of the primary purposes of the "must consider" clause is to give contracting agencies that want OSS the ability to reject commercial bids.
The other, less-talked-about clause in HB2932 is the "must support open standards" clause. Rep. Barnhart believes (and I agree) that this is an even bigger deal: it should mean no vendor lock-in on storage and communication formats.
This is the kind of thing that makes me proud to be an Oregonian, right up until the schools close for good.
2066 comments and counting. Heh. Like anyone's going to see this.
Anyway, I have a strange soft spot in my heart for Deal of the Century . I don't know of any other movie---certainly any other comedy---that tries to seriously address the US arms business. It also features an remarkably sympathetic portrayal of a conversion to Christianity (and by a mainstream actor, no less). I love Chevy Chase, and the writing is mostly amusing.
Most of the comments on IMDB are negative. However, I agree with those posters who said that if you know a bit about the arms business in the late 70s and understand that Friedkin did Dr. Strangelove, these things make it a much better film. Give it a try...
Blind Fury is one of the all-time greats. The supporting cast is awesome, and the writing is superb.
Insightful question (remember, this is the adult interviewer asking) and answer. Now that he's seen the scripts, just think how much money Serkis could make selling the secret ending to LotR!
[Please tell me the above is just a joke, BTW. They wouldn't change the ending. Would they?]
Code like GNOME-XML, pkgconfig, fontconfig, xcursor and xft2 were mainly written by people who're heavily involved into GNOME development.
Heh. Fontconfig, XCursor, and Xft2 were written almost entirely by Keith Packard. My personal experience is that he is quite agnostic on the Gnome/KDE question. Further, there is nothing about the design of any of these three subsystems that favors any particular GUI environment.
Keith Packard has been denied commit access to the XFree86 CVS for several months now. (BTW, he was responsible for making the repository publically accessible---he had a long struggle with certain XFree86 Core Team members to let him do it.) This is obviously an insane situation: he has been the principal developer (outside of 3D and drivers, although he's worked on the latter a bit) for some time now. IMHO the situation is somewhat like locking Linus out of Bitkeeper: of course he would make alternate arrangements!
In short, this is a fork in name only: the major players in the distro business have committed to work with Keith, and this is the clear successor for realistic X development. Note that this is the third such event in the history of X: the X Consortium was eventually largely dismantled and replaced by x.org, which in turn was essentially superseded by the XFree86 project. A big hope is that a charter and organization can be set up so that the governance of the new organization is democratic (ala Apache Foundation, Gnome Foundation, etc), allowing changes in governance without the need to create a new organization.
As an X developer and heavy user, I personally am looking forward to having an X repository with current bits and sensible organization.
It's a ball. That glows. The glow shifts, for example, on the rise or fall of the stock market.
A recent Firesign Theatre album, Boom Dot Bust, has a great bit about a "smart home" whose interior decoration and furnishings change to match the value of the owner's stock portfolio. As the stock bubble comes crashing down (this is a 1999 album, BTW), the house rapidly transforms, with hilarious consequences.
Now that's glowing cyber-balls.
...and the winner of the MiniDisc vs. DAT competition is...the CD/R!
Huh? How can a quote about building a tower to the heavens be inapplicable to an article about building a tower to the heavens? I am surprised that I was modded as "flamebait" for posting a simple, well-known, generally noncontroversial quote with no commentary whatsoever.
It honestly never occurred to me that I was saying anything inflammatory, especially in response to a gag article about Illuminati plots. I just thought that it was an interesting comparison---I am a Christian, but I have no Christian position whatsoever on whether the Space Elevator is a good idea. I am also a scientist with some aerospace expertise, and I find the science highly interesting.
Methinks that a few folks are a bit sensitive about religion...
"And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven..." --Genesis 11:4
I think the big question is what fruits these bizarrely twisted metaphors will fertilize on Slashdot? Microsoft was "hoisting its own petard" not long ago: now we're asked "what fruits will reduced R&D bear?"
Ah well: I'd ask you to mod this up, but of course beggars can't be chosen...
One appropriate response to this sort of letter that I don't see advocated much on these forums: find out what Bar Association has authorized the lawyers sending the letter to practice law, and send the Bar Association Ethics Commission a politely-worded formal letter of complaint. IANAL, but IMHO the lawyer is definitely engaging in unethical behavior under the Canons by sending legal notices on behalf of clients without any kind of legal basis to do so. It would be nice to get them sanctioned.
This would be a good idea to submit to the halfbakery. Definitely a cool site.
Nickle is an interesting approach. Strictly numeric, but with arbitrary-precision integers and rationals, settable-precision floating point, convenient numeric I/O, GC, and much more. Plus it's a first-rate desk calculator. It's intended for prototyping numeric algorithms, among other things.
From the GameSpy article referenced in the parent: Rogue was open source, of course, meaning anyone who loved the game could open it up and start tweaking it.
Which it wasn't, IIRC. There were various clones, but the original Rogue was free but licensed binary, right?
How the heck does this get modded +4 insightful? Turfing?
(Disclaimer: I am from the Lionel Hutz school of law. "Are you a lawyer?" "No, but I watched an episode of Matlock in the bar last night: the sound was off, but I think I got the gist of it.") As I understand it, in the legal world the idea you mention is called the doctrine of statement against self interest: It's amazing, but most experts agree that you are more likely to be telling the truth if you are admitting something that is bad for you than if you are claiming something that is good for you.
Those crazy experts...
Heh. If this is your biggest problem with the X rendering model, you don't understand the X rendering model very well. (My biggest problem, for the record, is the lack of any kind of splines. But the fact that generating wide ellipses that are correct according to the spec requires cubic time and looks terrible is a good candidate. The fact that there is no closed-form solution that meets the spec for dashed wide ellipses---it would require computing an elliptic integral---is also interesting.)
First, wrapping the line and rectangle functions so they do what you want is, of course, trivial. But it's not clear that it is what most people want: the argument is that XDrawRectangle should produce the same result as the 4 XDrawLine calls with the same coordinates that would produce it.
Second, non-circular wide arcs are broken in the X rendering model. Don't do that. (BTW, what is this "manual" you keep referring to? The Digital Press version of the X specs? The O'Reilly books?)
The solution: a better rendering model for X. Fortunately, Packard's X Render Extension and Worth and Packard's Xr provides exactly that. The combination essentially gives a C API to an X implementation of the Postscript rendering model, but with nice anti-aliasing and compositing. All this without throwing the X baby out with the X rendering model bathwater. Imagine that.
Packard suggested this exercise to me: Look at your X screen right now. Try to find something that's not either (a) a bitmap, or (b) composed entirely out of rectangles and lines. For almost every X app in existence today, the old, broken X rendering model is just fine. If you need more power than that, a new rendering model is available.
Those who don't understand X are doomed to repeat it.
I'll have my Oscar with a nice sprig of oregano, please. If you could garner some for me.
"Garner" still isn't quite right in this context, but at least it looks like an editor has glanced at the text before posting it.