This is insightful? Imagnintive, maybe. Seriously, haven't most of the major distros (Mandrake, RedHat, and SUSE at least) put a lot of effort into fancy install programs which set up these things for you? (With a little user input, of course:)
Ironically, I suspect these comments come from someone who is so familiar with Linux that he doesn't bother with these easy install programs. That's why he thinks it has to be hard to explain how to set up things like PPP - because the way he does it is hard.
C'mon guys. Either clean up your act or stop being the first ones to throw the stone.
Of course, many of us are in the position of being "knowledgeable users". We know that our sysadmin is making a mistake like this, but for whatever reason we can't do anything about it. On one hand, this is very irritating. On the other hand, it lets us complain with impunity:)
"If I was the sysadmin this problem would have been fixed years ago..."
Re:Arrogance more powerful than its technology?
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 1
In the Netherlands, they have three sections of most roadways: the regular car section, a sidewalk for pedestrians, and a "middle" lane which is similar to a bike lane, but is used for anything which goes under 50km/h.
When I lived there for a year, I had the same experience many times. Coasting home at maybe 15km/h (after a hard day's work:) I suddenly get passed by a guy on, basically, a small motorcycle, going 50. They usually honk after they pass...
Re:Arrogance more powerful than its technology?
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 1
Really. Firstly, once on wheels, can the driver be considered a "pedestrian?" Secondly, what about bicycles, scooters, and the like.
If I'm not mistaken, bicycles and scooters are legally "vehicles", like cars, at least where I am (see here. This is why they can't be used on the sidewalk, why they're required to have lights at night, etc.
I would like to participate in this contest, but I only get about one Spam e-mail a week, so I don't have enough source material to work with. Could someone please help me out?
Here's the quote from the article which I assume you guys are "discussing":
By careful selection of materials, ENECO scientists are creating highly efficient, solid state conversion devices, called "thermal diodes," that will operate from 200 to 450 Celsius -- typical temperatures for waste heat and for concentrated solar radiation.
This is exactly what the article says. This quote doesn't specifically say that the "waste heat" in question can be waste from nuclear and fossil-fuel burning plants. I would guess that most of the heat generated in either of these plants is used to boil water to turn a steam turbine (the part where electricity is actually generated), so leeching off that heat before that would be kind of pointless. However, I did a web search, and I noticed in this PDF that the steam entering the steam turbine at this power plant is at 256C. It doesn't say what the temperature is afterwards. Perhaps there is enough excess heat when the steam leaves to get some extra power using this technology?
As a side note, the article specifically mentions "concentrated solar radiation". Perhaps solar power plants (the kind which use mirrors to concentrate light on a water tower, I suspect) might get over 200C, yet waste a lot of that energy.
Re:The energy companies...
on
Dreamhack 2001
·
· Score: 2, Funny
The computers are using so much electricity, they can't even get the lights to go on:)
Sounds like fun, until someone realizes that the snack machine doesn't work either...
Celebrate the dead, perhaps. Does anyone know the legal status of SNK's games now? If they are now abandonware, then play those and encourage others to do likewise instead of playing the worst of what's new, such that SNK's products may set an eternal minimum quality bar for all future games of that nature.
Even better, what if we could get the source code for their games and start hacking it? Fans of Samurai Shodown 2 (as it was called in the U.S.) surely know that it could have been one of the greatest fighting games of all time, if SNK had just done a better job with the character balance. Likewise, the AI for Mizuki (the main boss of that game) should be studied by future game designers -- aside from one little bug, that character was probably the best at being "hard to beat without being cheap or overpowered" of any boss character I've ever seen.
Look, ignore for a second that the label on the CD reads "10.0 -> 10.1 upgrade" or somesuch. The fact is that you legally purchased a CD that contains the entire 10.1 operating system. It is the fully functional operating system, and the only requirement for having 10.0 is an artificial one that is easily removed.
What exactly is the meaning (or legal basis) of an "artificial requirement" or "a requirement which is easily removed"? The word "artificial" is almost meaningless here. Everything made by people is "artificial" on some level. And it certainly is not legal to bypass an impedance (example: a lock) simply because it is "easily removed".
I suspect that the complaints of this type of behavior will be much less in the case of CERT, since Microsoft's disclosure policies simply allow slashdotters to take pot shots at MS, but we'll see...The shoe's on the other foot this time.
As a side note, there will also be an increase in SlashDot bashing. That is, bashing us for not bashing Linux (and CERT, this time) as much as MS. There always is. This SlashDot bashing might lead to defensive behavior on the part of SlashDot posters, which may lead to an apparent dearth of CERT bashing. It's just the typical "rally around the (whatever our cause is)" behavior one sees from those who have been attacked.
Yes, the U.S. has aided the Saudi government in staying in power. But even bin Laden didn't object to the Saudi government ruling Arabia until it decided to allow infidels to defend it from Iraq; bin Laden had even offered to lead his own mujahdeen to defend Arabia and the House of Saud against Iraq before he discovered U.S. forces were going to defend the kingdom.
Yeah, you're right. It's the American soldiers on Saudi soil that bin Laden complains about. And no, my Saudi history isn't great. I must have been thinking of the attempts on Syria or something. My bad.
On the other hand...
Your number of "hints for the clueless": 1
Your own arrogantly displayed ignorance: priceless.
History for your edification (I like taking away priceless things):
Pretty strong words from someone who doesn't think the Northern Alliance killed any innocent Afghans (unless you're referring to the decade-long civil war, of course). Or maybe you just did't think to count them until now? Either way, as my.sig says, the media isn't reporting these deaths or (hardly) any others, except for dead Taliban soldiers. It's easy to support a war when none of the "good guys" die, right?
Incidentally, I notice you didn't have anything to say about this in your last post. Yet I assume that's why this argument started. Since that argument seems to be over, shall we just agree that neither of us is perfect and leave it at that?
Nubmer of innocent Afghans killed by American bombs...
Who says we're only counting the ones killed by bombs? Why not those killed by the Northern Alliance while taking over all those cities, or all the refugees fleeing the bombings that died, for example? (Don't even get me started on other countries, like The Sudan, for example)
Installing a peaceful, fair government in Afghanistan: priceless.
Yeah, just look how well it worked with Saudi Arabia. Nobody could possibly disagree with that! (Hint for the clueless: this is one of bin Laden's primary complaints about the U.S.)
Don't forget the BBC, The Australian and Herald Sun, The New Zealand Herald, and every other English-language paper on the planet (for those of us who prefer to read English, that is). These papers often have more details than American papers, especially with regards to this whole terrorism thing. It's really useful to get an international perspective sometimes.
It should be noted that XFS has been around for years. I think your basic premise is still correct, though - neither XFS(in the scope of the Linux kernel) nor ReiserFS have been tested as extensively as ext3. And since ext3's code base started as ext2's code base, it doesn't even need so much checking.
Considering that ReiserFS got in the official kernel first (back at 2.4.1, I believe), I'm not sure I can agree with you. At least one person seems to think that ReiserFS got enough testing to go into the kernel long before ext3 did. Remember also that SUSE was putting ReiserFS in their kernels before it was in the official kernel.
Please do tell me. What is your rule set for identifying whether a URL request is legitimate or not?
The short-term problem which needs fixed is not just about URLs. Turning off Active Scripting is the solution suggested to temporarily fix this problem. So it sounds like MS needs to prevent Active Scripting from being able to modify a user's cookie file.
Here's an idea. How about not allowing Active Scripting to modify any local files at all? Can you think of any situation where a web scripting language interpreted by a browser should be allowed to modify local files? So how about making the file system off limits to the process which is interpreting the script and any child processes it spawns?
And as a side note, if you believe that IE is separate from Windows, then this flaw technically affects two MS products, IE and Outlook (both of which parse HTML). It even says so in the Security Bulletin.
You might complain about the inconveniences, but put things in perspective. Isn't giving up your ability to carry a silly little bag worth it knowing that you won't be blown up by a hidden bomb.
Yeah, wouldn't want to get killed by that! (odds of dying due to bomb - 1 in 100,000,000).
That's why I leave my stuff in my car! (odds of dying in a car crash - 1 in 1000?)
Plus, when I go into the parking lot to grab my camera, I can grab a smoke! (odds of dying from smoking - 1 in 5 or so...)
Good points. I would have to partially disagree, though. As for point #1, I think we can both agree that there are still a lot more games ported to the Mac than to Linux. As for point #2, I'm pretty sure that hardware abstraction layers like SDL (and DirectX, grumble grumble) and multimedia standards like OpenGL/AL/IL are designed to deal with that. I mean, varied hardware hasn't stopped DirectX from being widely adopted, right?
The problem with movies today is that every great plot has been done already. Shakespeare pretty much used them all up about 400 years ago.
Yes, but you can change the details. Shakespeare never did time travel. "Should I, or should I not kill the man who murdered my father" takes on whole new meaning when the "I" is a robot.
Quite frankly I am disgusted with the attitudes of most people in the software industry that assumes that shoddy work is inevitable (all software has bugs? WTF?)
Not a programmer, obviously.
You need to understand that not all bugs are actual errors or "shoddy work". Sometimes it's the interaction between multiple pieces of code, each of which works perfectly well, which causes the problem. Sometimes it's people using the code in unexpected ways which causes the problem (the programmer is not omnipotent, remember). That's why programmers say "all software has bugs". It's not that all software has flaws, but rather that it's almost a sure thing that any given piece of software can be used in a way which causes a problem (or "bug") to arise.
Take this iTunes software bug, for example. Even here, it sounds like there would have been no problem if people followed the directions. Given the simplicity of the fix, it should probably still be called a programming bug. However, what happens if some user actually had the old sh shell on there instead of a link to bash? There could be some subtle errors, as bash does not behave 100% like sh. Bug? Probably not, unless you argue that the programmer should have seen it coming. All right then, suppose some user decides that they only want to use csh, so they link sh to csh instead of bash (note: a Bad Idea)? The installer wouldn't work at all. Bug? Hardly.
The point being, the programmer can't plan for every contingency, and this can lead to problems which people call "bugs". That's why "all software has bugs"... because even if the code is flawless, there's no guarantee that it won't fail somehow.
Slashdot Mirror
Curling is bowling on ice. You Americans call THAT a sport.
Very few of us do that. (Oh, so that's what "curling" is!)
As a side note, we don't call bowling a sport either. Bowling is what you do when your options are 1) drinking beer and 2) bowling and drinking beer.
Well, this is good in that when the unfair WIPO panels rule unfairly, it can be contested further.
:)
Which would be all the time, according to exactly 50% of the litigants (guess which 50%?
This is insightful? Imagnintive, maybe. Seriously, haven't most of the major distros (Mandrake, RedHat, and SUSE at least) put a lot of effort into fancy install programs which set up these things for you? (With a little user input, of course :)
Ironically, I suspect these comments come from someone who is so familiar with Linux that he doesn't bother with these easy install programs. That's why he thinks it has to be hard to explain how to set up things like PPP - because the way he does it is hard.
C'mon guys. Either clean up your act or stop being the first ones to throw the stone.
:)
Of course, many of us are in the position of being "knowledgeable users". We know that our sysadmin is making a mistake like this, but for whatever reason we can't do anything about it. On one hand, this is very irritating. On the other hand, it lets us complain with impunity
"If I was the sysadmin this problem would have been fixed years ago..."
In the Netherlands, they have three sections of most roadways: the regular car section, a sidewalk for pedestrians, and a "middle" lane which is similar to a bike lane, but is used for anything which goes under 50km/h.
:) I suddenly get passed by a guy on, basically, a small motorcycle, going 50. They usually honk after they pass...
When I lived there for a year, I had the same experience many times. Coasting home at maybe 15km/h (after a hard day's work
Really. Firstly, once on wheels, can the driver be considered a "pedestrian?" Secondly, what about bicycles, scooters, and the like.
If I'm not mistaken, bicycles and scooters are legally "vehicles", like cars, at least where I am (see here. This is why they can't be used on the sidewalk, why they're required to have lights at night, etc.
I would like to participate in this contest, but I only get about one Spam e-mail a week, so I don't have enough source material to work with. Could someone please help me out?
Here's the quote from the article which I assume you guys are "discussing":
By careful selection of materials, ENECO scientists are creating highly efficient, solid state conversion devices, called "thermal diodes," that will operate from 200 to 450 Celsius -- typical temperatures for waste heat and for concentrated solar radiation.
This is exactly what the article says. This quote doesn't specifically say that the "waste heat" in question can be waste from nuclear and fossil-fuel burning plants. I would guess that most of the heat generated in either of these plants is used to boil water to turn a steam turbine (the part where electricity is actually generated), so leeching off that heat before that would be kind of pointless. However, I did a web search, and I noticed in this PDF that the steam entering the steam turbine at this power plant is at 256C. It doesn't say what the temperature is afterwards. Perhaps there is enough excess heat when the steam leaves to get some extra power using this technology?
As a side note, the article specifically mentions "concentrated solar radiation". Perhaps solar power plants (the kind which use mirrors to concentrate light on a water tower, I suspect) might get over 200C, yet waste a lot of that energy.
The computers are using so much electricity, they can't even get the lights to go on :)
Sounds like fun, until someone realizes that the snack machine doesn't work either...
Celebrate the dead, perhaps. Does anyone know the legal status of SNK's games now? If they are now abandonware, then play those and encourage others to do likewise instead of playing the worst of what's new, such that SNK's products may set an eternal minimum quality bar for all future games of that nature.
Even better, what if we could get the source code for their games and start hacking it? Fans of Samurai Shodown 2 (as it was called in the U.S.) surely know that it could have been one of the greatest fighting games of all time, if SNK had just done a better job with the character balance. Likewise, the AI for Mizuki (the main boss of that game) should be studied by future game designers -- aside from one little bug, that character was probably the best at being "hard to beat without being cheap or overpowered" of any boss character I've ever seen.
Look, ignore for a second that the label on the CD reads "10.0 -> 10.1 upgrade" or somesuch. The fact is that you legally purchased a CD that contains the entire 10.1 operating system. It is the fully functional operating system, and the only requirement for having 10.0 is an artificial one that is easily removed.
What exactly is the meaning (or legal basis) of an "artificial requirement" or "a requirement which is easily removed"? The word "artificial" is almost meaningless here. Everything made by people is "artificial" on some level. And it certainly is not legal to bypass an impedance (example: a lock) simply because it is "easily removed".
I suspect that the complaints of this type of behavior will be much less in the case of CERT, since Microsoft's disclosure policies simply allow slashdotters to take pot shots at MS, but we'll see...The shoe's on the other foot this time.
As a side note, there will also be an increase in SlashDot bashing. That is, bashing us for not bashing Linux (and CERT, this time) as much as MS. There always is. This SlashDot bashing might lead to defensive behavior on the part of SlashDot posters, which may lead to an apparent dearth of CERT bashing. It's just the typical "rally around the (whatever our cause is)" behavior one sees from those who have been attacked.
Yes, the U.S. has aided the Saudi government in staying in power. But even bin Laden didn't object to the Saudi government ruling Arabia until it decided to allow infidels to defend it from Iraq; bin Laden had even offered to lead his own mujahdeen to defend Arabia and the House of Saud against Iraq before he discovered U.S. forces were going to defend the kingdom.
.sig says, the media isn't reporting these deaths or (hardly) any others, except for dead Taliban soldiers. It's easy to support a war when none of the "good guys" die, right?
Yeah, you're right. It's the American soldiers on Saudi soil that bin Laden complains about. And no, my Saudi history isn't great. I must have been thinking of the attempts on Syria or something. My bad.
On the other hand...
Your number of "hints for the clueless": 1
Your own arrogantly displayed ignorance: priceless.
History for your edification (I like taking away priceless things):
Pretty strong words from someone who doesn't think the Northern Alliance killed any innocent Afghans (unless you're referring to the decade-long civil war, of course). Or maybe you just did't think to count them until now? Either way, as my
Incidentally, I notice you didn't have anything to say about this in your last post. Yet I assume that's why this argument started. Since that argument seems to be over, shall we just agree that neither of us is perfect and leave it at that?
Nubmer of innocent Afghans killed by American bombs...
Who says we're only counting the ones killed by bombs? Why not those killed by the Northern Alliance while taking over all those cities, or all the refugees fleeing the bombings that died, for example? (Don't even get me started on other countries, like The Sudan, for example)
Installing a peaceful, fair government in Afghanistan: priceless.
Yeah, just look how well it worked with Saudi Arabia. Nobody could possibly disagree with that! (Hint for the clueless: this is one of bin Laden's primary complaints about the U.S.)
Is it just me, or does missing his final deadline by "forever" seem like a fitting end to Douglas Adams?
:)
I hope they never publish that book
Don't forget the BBC, The Australian and Herald Sun, The New Zealand Herald, and every other English-language paper on the planet (for those of us who prefer to read English, that is). These papers often have more details than American papers, especially with regards to this whole terrorism thing. It's really useful to get an international perspective sometimes.
It should be noted that XFS has been around for years. I think your basic premise is still correct, though - neither XFS(in the scope of the Linux kernel) nor ReiserFS have been tested as extensively as ext3. And since ext3's code base started as ext2's code base, it doesn't even need so much checking.
Considering that ReiserFS got in the official kernel first (back at 2.4.1, I believe), I'm not sure I can agree with you. At least one person seems to think that ReiserFS got enough testing to go into the kernel long before ext3 did. Remember also that SUSE was putting ReiserFS in their kernels before it was in the official kernel.
Please do tell me. What is your rule set for identifying whether a URL request is legitimate or not?
The short-term problem which needs fixed is not just about URLs. Turning off Active Scripting is the solution suggested to temporarily fix this problem. So it sounds like MS needs to prevent Active Scripting from being able to modify a user's cookie file.
Here's an idea. How about not allowing Active Scripting to modify any local files at all? Can you think of any situation where a web scripting language interpreted by a browser should be allowed to modify local files? So how about making the file system off limits to the process which is interpreting the script and any child processes it spawns?
And as a side note, if you believe that IE is separate from Windows, then this flaw technically affects two MS products, IE and Outlook (both of which parse HTML). It even says so in the Security Bulletin.
Yes, but unfortunately FOLK 2.3.0 appears to be a patch to kernel 2.4.10. So if you want a stable VM, you may have to look elsewhere (for now).
You might complain about the inconveniences, but put things in perspective. Isn't giving up your ability to carry a silly little bag worth it knowing that you won't be blown up by a hidden bomb.
Yeah, wouldn't want to get killed by that! (odds of dying due to bomb - 1 in 100,000,000).
That's why I leave my stuff in my car! (odds of dying in a car crash - 1 in 1000?)
Plus, when I go into the parking lot to grab my camera, I can grab a smoke! (odds of dying from smoking - 1 in 5 or so...)
Thanks for the correct URL, but did you really have to ram it down our throats like that? ;)
Good points. I would have to partially disagree, though. As for point #1, I think we can both agree that there are still a lot more games ported to the Mac than to Linux. As for point #2, I'm pretty sure that hardware abstraction layers like SDL (and DirectX, grumble grumble) and multimedia standards like OpenGL/AL/IL are designed to deal with that. I mean, varied hardware hasn't stopped DirectX from being widely adopted, right?
The problem with movies today is that every great plot has been done already. Shakespeare pretty much used them all up about 400 years ago.
Yes, but you can change the details. Shakespeare never did time travel. "Should I, or should I not kill the man who murdered my father" takes on whole new meaning when the "I" is a robot.
Quite frankly I am disgusted with the attitudes of most people in the software industry that assumes that shoddy work is inevitable (all software has bugs? WTF?)
Not a programmer, obviously.
You need to understand that not all bugs are actual errors or "shoddy work". Sometimes it's the interaction between multiple pieces of code, each of which works perfectly well, which causes the problem. Sometimes it's people using the code in unexpected ways which causes the problem (the programmer is not omnipotent, remember). That's why programmers say "all software has bugs". It's not that all software has flaws, but rather that it's almost a sure thing that any given piece of software can be used in a way which causes a problem (or "bug") to arise.
Take this iTunes software bug, for example. Even here, it sounds like there would have been no problem if people followed the directions. Given the simplicity of the fix, it should probably still be called a programming bug. However, what happens if some user actually had the old sh shell on there instead of a link to bash? There could be some subtle errors, as bash does not behave 100% like sh. Bug? Probably not, unless you argue that the programmer should have seen it coming. All right then, suppose some user decides that they only want to use csh, so they link sh to csh instead of bash (note: a Bad Idea)? The installer wouldn't work at all. Bug? Hardly.
The point being, the programmer can't plan for every contingency, and this can lead to problems which people call "bugs". That's why "all software has bugs"... because even if the code is flawless, there's no guarantee that it won't fail somehow.