Isn't part of the problem that the "crackers" refer to themselves as "hackers"...? For example, www.2600.com mentions sites that have recently been "hacked" and they even seem to have a magazine called "The Hacker Quarterly"...
Given this and the fact that very few outside the "white knight" hacker community refer to anything positive with the term "hacker", I think the best thing to do would be to start using some other term than "hackers" for us "white knights"... I always thought the "hacking" term was a strange one to choose for quality coding, anyway...
That said, I don't like "white knight hackers" either! It should be short, not glorifying but still be easy to associate with something positive and constructive.
The German authorities encourage use of strong cryptography and would like to help ensure that trustworthy implementations are available to the German people. This is good. But please don't forget that Germany, to the best of my knowledge, signed the Wassenaar Arrangement, like so many other countries. So this restricts permission to export cryptography, arms "etc."... or does it??? I am a bit confused, because a page on Wassenaar.org mentions this:
The Wassenaar Arrangement has been established in order to contribute to regional and international security and stability, by promoting transparency and greater responsibility in transfers of conventional arms and dual-use goods and technologies, thus preventing destabilising accumulations. Participating States will seek, through their national policies, to ensure that transfers of these items do not contribute to the development or enhancement of military capabilities which undermine these goals, and are not diverted to support such capabilities.
The decision to transfer or deny transfer of any item will be the sole responsibility of each Participating State. All measures undertaken with respect to the arrangement will be in accordance with national legislation and policies and will be implemented on the basis of national discretion. Therefore for specifics on Export Controls in Participating States, contact the National Authorities in that country.
I read this to state that any of the countries having signed may still disregard what the Wassenaar Arrangement says, for example, about cryptography restrictions. This might be a good part of a bad arrangement...
Vladinator's post, which you replied to, asked for a link to the actual patch, not explanations of file placement, programming style, etc...
Whereas with this kind of security bug, I would personally wait and only upgrade my own kernel when a new version is released (and I think any newbie should wait at least this long as well), the patch can be applied manually as explained in the original post, or applied using a traditional patch that can be found in Alan Cox's bugtraq post.
Notice that every test team must make a test for 4 CPUs and one for a single CPU. I think we'll see that NT/IIS is more mature for a 4-way Xeon with 4x 100Base-TX network cards, and this will be proclaimed in huge letters by Microsoft and the supporting press once the tests show it. But I also think that Linux will be able to outperform NT on uniprocessor systems, even if the hardware is chosen to maximise test results to Microsofts favour! And parts of the press will burst about this too (if indeed the tests come out this way).
All this will be a fair enough. After all, who would seriously recommend a 4-way Xeon with 4 high-performance netcards to run Linux??? Linux, as I see it, does not yet have its strength here. If you would like to use Linux, tailor some other high-end solution, e.g. with multiple servers. If not, then buy expensive hardware from Sun and run Solaris on it! Just don't think that NT is your only alternative.
Others have pointed out that the NT Server configuration is highly optimised to the particular test. Taking advantage of the fact that a fairly small amount of static-only pages will be served, the NT is configured to keep it all in its cache.
While, as Alan cox, among many other things points out, using the (apparently commercial) Zeus webserver might up the Linux webserver performance, but virtually anyone installing a Linux webserver are going to use Apache, so I find find it reasonable to tune Apache instead. But it must be possible for the experts to similarly tune Apache/Linux to take advantage of the nature of the test.
Though the company could have saved at least hundreds of thousands of dollars by opting to set up Windows NT clusters, porting its Unix rendering application would have been a huge chore, Forsyth said. The application is about 2 million lines of code and might have taken years to rewrite for Windows, he said. "We thought about that for three nanoseconds."
I was quite confused about this a second. How could they possibly have saved anything by buying NT instead of using Linux? They would have to port 2M LoC rather than write a bit of custom management for the cluster.
But then I realised that they would have saved (only) a few $100.000 if they used NT instead of the IBM SP2. Now they seem to save $1.870.000 by opting for Linux! (Minus the cost of writing custom code)
The results has a breakdown of Responce details, and it mentions various versions of Linux, but there are NO version 2.2.x... To me that's rather strange.
Maybe it's just the OS Counter that needs to be told about Linux-2.2. But does it mean that Linux-2.2 machines are categorised wrongly, or does it mean they're not counted at all???
I hope to see even more Linux machines turn op here, and generally everywhere else!
While I agree that LoC is absolutely wrong as a measure of programming productivity (and your points on why), this poll is not named "how productive are you as a programmer". Even if it has limited interest/usability it is perfectly okay to ask about LoC produced. I mean, look a the other polls, they're not always all that serious...
But I guess this was a good chance to comment on a perhaps not-so-uncommon mistake and frustration.
Someone is going to have to reverse engineer these [WinModems] if Linux is to be usable for a large segment of the population. Has anyone tried?
As I understand it, the thing is that every one of them are different, so you'd need a driver for each! With normal modems you just have a standard protocol and issue standard modem commands to communicate with them. So to support WinModems would take an enormous effort, as opposed to virtually no effort with other new modems.
With WinModems, all work is done in software, so the modem itself is probably easier and cheaper to produce.
As I see it, the Google method would have many advantages which would also eliminate some of the other relevant issues.
Let everybody be moderators all the time with no restriction on moderation! A single moderator's opinion will not count for much anyway, unless he has very good alignment (in which case it would probably be fair moderation).
Having everybody effectively being moderators would also eliminate some of the ego/anonymity issues. Moderators could even discuss issues of moderation openly (except maybe moderation of specific stories/threads/comments?).
Some would-be "Mee too" posters could perhaps also be satisfied if given a lurker's 2p worth of moderation power. Of course, masses of not-so-impartial 2p votes could obscure moderation, but couldn't that be dealt with by ignoring low-alignment moderation for comments that get lots of both ups and downs?
I think the sheer nature of a Google-like moderation system would make impartiality a non-issue as it should be!
A variant of this system could also be applied to any subset of current moderators, if not all were to become moderators always.
For those who don't know the system used in Google, in Slashdot terms it could translate to this:
"A posting has a high score if
Moderators with high alignment moderated it up
Lots of moderators with high alignment moderated it up
This definition seems circular, and it is. Nonetheless, it yields a well-defined notion of importance that makes finding high quality sites easy." [moderted from http://www.google.com/why_use.html]
Slashdot Mirror
Given this and the fact that very few outside the "white knight" hacker community refer to anything positive with the term "hacker", I think the best thing to do would be to start using some other term than "hackers" for us "white knights"... I always thought the "hacking" term was a strange one to choose for quality coding, anyway...
That said, I don't like "white knight hackers" either! It should be short, not glorifying but still be easy to associate with something positive and constructive.
Can anyone enlighten me on this??
Whereas with this kind of security bug, I would personally wait and only upgrade my own kernel when a new version is released (and I think any newbie should wait at least this long as well), the patch can be applied manually as explained in the original post, or applied using a traditional patch that can be found in Alan Cox's bugtraq post.
All this will be a fair enough. After all, who would seriously recommend a 4-way Xeon with 4 high-performance netcards to run Linux??? Linux, as I see it, does not yet have its strength here. If you would like to use Linux, tailor some other high-end solution, e.g. with multiple servers. If not, then buy expensive hardware from Sun and run Solaris on it! Just don't think that NT is your only alternative.
Others have pointed out that the NT Server configuration is highly optimised to the particular test. Taking advantage of the fact that a fairly small amount of static-only pages will be served, the NT is configured to keep it all in its cache.
While, as Alan cox, among many other things points out, using the (apparently commercial) Zeus webserver might up the Linux webserver performance, but virtually anyone installing a Linux webserver are going to use Apache, so I find find it reasonable to tune Apache instead. But it must be possible for the experts to similarly tune Apache/Linux to take advantage of the nature of the test.
I was quite confused about this a second. How could they possibly have saved anything by buying NT instead of using Linux? They would have to port 2M LoC rather than write a bit of custom management for the cluster.
But then I realised that they would have saved (only) a few $100.000 if they used NT instead of the IBM SP2. Now they seem to save $1.870.000 by opting for Linux! (Minus the cost of writing custom code)
Maybe it's just the OS Counter that needs to be told about Linux-2.2. But does it mean that Linux-2.2 machines are categorised wrongly, or does it mean they're not counted at all???
I hope to see even more Linux machines turn op here, and generally everywhere else!
If I'm not very wrong then apache perl modules are compiled and cached, and hence treated as code pages that are shared between processes.
But I guess this was a good chance to comment on a perhaps not-so-uncommon mistake and frustration.
Someone is going to have to reverse engineer these [WinModems] if Linux is to be usable for a large segment of the population. Has anyone tried?
As I understand it, the thing is that every one of them are different, so you'd need a driver for each! With normal modems you just have a standard protocol and issue standard modem commands to communicate with them. So to support WinModems would take an enormous effort, as opposed to virtually no effort with other new modems.
With WinModems, all work is done in software, so the modem itself is probably easier and cheaper to produce.
As I see it, the Google method would have many advantages which would also eliminate some of the other relevant issues.
Let everybody be moderators all the time with no restriction on moderation! A single moderator's opinion will not count for much anyway, unless he has very good alignment (in which case it would probably be fair moderation).
Having everybody effectively being moderators would also eliminate some of the ego/anonymity issues. Moderators could even discuss issues of moderation openly (except maybe moderation of specific stories/threads/comments?).
Some would-be "Mee too" posters could perhaps also be satisfied if given a lurker's 2p worth of moderation power. Of course, masses of not-so-impartial 2p votes could obscure moderation, but couldn't that be dealt with by ignoring low-alignment moderation for comments that get lots of both ups and downs?
I think the sheer nature of a Google-like moderation system would make impartiality a non-issue as it should be!
A variant of this system could also be applied to any subset of current moderators, if not all were to become moderators always.
For those who don't know the system used in Google, in Slashdot terms it could translate to this:
"A posting has a high score if
- Moderators with high alignment moderated it up
- Lots of moderators with high alignment moderated it up
This definition seems circular, and it is. Nonetheless, it yields a well-defined notion of importance that makes finding high quality sites easy." [moderted from http://www.google.com/why_use.html]