I didn't realize that had been changed recently. How sad. Another bit of Unix lore that only us old-timers will get to experience.
By their argument, `cd/; rm -rf.' still ought to work. Sigh. That lacks the drama, the feeling, the intensity of slamming down the return key knowing you're about to delete every file on the system.:-)
Supposedly Debian (from Sid onwards) also does not allow 'rm -rf/'.
Pathetic. But at least you get the source to rm(1) so you can fix that bug - or write your own, it's not that hard.
Actually it doesn't. You have to unmount all your pseudo filesystems first and it's been a long time since Linux let you do that. I tried it on several systems when I was working at Turbolinux and regularly wiping boxes for "clean" installation tests.
Vintage 4.2 BSD could do it (I watched someone do it on purpose, he was wiping the system for a reinstall). System V-oid boxes could not, due to lacking an rmdir(2) system call and forcing an implementation of rm -r by doing a fork-exec/bin/rmdir (which was setuid root). My first intentional/bin/rm -rf / ended with an endless sequence of `/bin/rmdir: not found' messages.
I wouldn't call her a geek, she doesn't have the same passion for working with tech stuff that I have. But she is knowledgeable and knows quite a bit more about IT than many of my guy friends. She is very comfortable working with vi
For the sake of all that is holy, good god man, teach her emacs!
The hypocrisy of "freedom" libertarians and liberals never ceases to amaze me when it comes to government control of social systems.
No real libertarian is agsinst freedom of speech and you shouldn't lump us into that category.
I'm not going to attempt a car analogy, but a tech analogy would be equating angry bug reports on a newly-released version of software reporting regressions as "hate crime".
I've had an unpleasant on-line gaming experience on WoW. When I was leveling up my Night Elf Rogue (female in game) in HellPen, another character came up to me and started making suggestive[1] comments as if the character in the game were reflective of the person he was/w ing to. No biggie and as unpleasant as it was, there was no way I was going to report him.
I *will* be careful when I let my sons start playing. "Game exerience may change during online play" has meaning.
[1] He said he was from Arkansas and elderly and very crude. Does Bill Clinton play WoW?
I also usually have at least 2 computers on hand, so if a virus makes the thing totally FUBAR, I can recover the files by using the non-FUBAR'ed computer to access the other's hard drive, then format the drive and reinstall windows/drivers/etc. from scratch.
Think about what you just wrote./golfclap
Personally, I think friends should not let friends do Microsoft Windows. But that's just me.
- He's willing to work long hours just to optimize and polish a small piece of code.
This is valid for languages other than C; there's a reason why job interviews in the field of programming often include coding something, or solving a tricky piece of code. I know for a fact that many a prospective employer treats (or at least used to treat) the IOCCC as an excellent test of C proficiency.
Interesting point, though time for code polishing is rarely granted IRL.
Of course, if I were interviewing you, and you gave me a winning IOCCC entry as a code sample I'd do my utmost to have you hired on the spot based on general principles.
True, true and entertaining. I took part in one of the earliest IOCCCs. None of my 3 entries won anything, but at least I have bragging rights that I tried.
1) A program that consisted of mostly all 0/O,1/l characters that converted binary to decimal/decimal to binary depending upon what name it was invoked with.
2) A one liner that printed "Hello World!\n" with each character generated from a subprocess based on an obfuscated state table. That was apparently more obfuscated to the Pyramid kernel than to the reviewers - I got dinged at work when I ran the program right before mailing it off and a subprocess or two got disconnected and ran overnight and my project was billed CPU time. Oops!
3) A curses/CPP hack that used as symbol and keyword names all of the different variant Unix and Unix-wannabe flavors of the time (they're all listed in one of lwall's vintage configure scripts, though I did not use that as a reference) and floated in characters from off-screen to reveal the message "System V - from now on, consider it standard"
My favorite winner is the one that is the source that is portable to FORTRAN,/bin/sh and C.
I wish I still had the rejection messages. Seems like it would make a good job interview item - "Hey, I can't win an obfuscated coding contest even when I *TRY*."
Then you will never truly achieve 'BOFH' status, Grasshopper.
I do believe that whatever else happens with this case, Mr. Childs(, Sir!) has achieved Hall Of Fame BOFH status and I so nominate him.
I think he's right and SF is stupid, but I think all people in NC are stupid, including me for working here.
Split Northern California and Southern California in half, cede Northern California to Zimbabwe or anyone convenient and the budget problems in what's left of the real California will be mostly solved.
"Child" sex is a staple industry in Chinese culture, only it's called "feeding your family when they are desperately poor". You don't get out much, do you? Have you had any experience with the 3rd world whatsoever?
Still out of the hundreds that have flown only 14 have died.
That's an awfully high mortality rate.
For comparison, how many of the hundreds of thousands (or whatever it is) who have flown *on this day* have died? 0?
Scale up the US Space Shuttle where it was transporting people in anywhere near the number commercial aircraft carry people and you might have a real problem.
People complain about this sort of stuff whenever a new OS or new big SP comes out but the reality is this: if you have relatively recent components made by prominent manufacturers, your stuff is going to work 90% of the time.
90% really isn't very good (especially when you're in the 10%) and isn't this the same sort of criticism aimed at Linux?
But point a camera at a naked body and all of the sudden it's ok to have laws just like Singapore or China.
That's a very odd statement considering Chinese culture. You don't get out much, do you? Try googling for where Japanese politicians/salary men like to take sex vacations.
The big difference between Singapore and the US is that Singapore is *clean*. I rather like that. Well that and the fact that I've just plain enjoyed all the time I've spent in Singapore.
Science isn't an exact science, people are involved and people make mistakes. Scientist need to remember that they are human too and they will make mistakes
Those are weasel words. Hmmm, the same kind of weasel words used to attack anyone who dares to commit the heresy of "Global Warming Denial".
You people trumpeting "the warmest... on record" need a wake up call.
Global Warming is to Science as Microsoft Windows is to Computer Science. QED
McCain would have been a good choice _precisely_ because he was a senile old man.... dismissing him out of hand as a senile old man is rather... stupid.
Totally agree.
I would add to your list of arguments:
* A Vice President Palin would have made for most entertaining news.
* An opposition Democrat congress would have made for some slowing of the advancement of federal government power.
I am betting the Democrats learned something from 1993, 1994 and it won't be so easy next time to restore a balance of power.
No politician can get anything done without support from his political base.
THE reason why McCain lost, but go ahead.
We have two main camps-banking & big oil vs media and the lawyer lobby. Neither camp represents my interests. Obama is no different than any other democrat - Biden is especially cozy with the big media lobby.
I'm not sure I see it that way. The big media lobby was in the tank for Obama.
They're getting the ugliest stuff done first so everybody forgets in time for the next election how their rights got sold down the river.
Yes, agreed. Impeached ex-President Clinton did the same thing. It's telling that his Porkulus bill was 2 orders of magnitude smaller than the size of Obama's.
I'm trying to recall what President Bush did for me in his first few months in office and cannot recall anything.
I hope the Obamites are as happy with their President as those of us who mistakenly voted for Bush are with him.
Well, to conservatives, Obama was a 3, and McCain was a 7. To liberals, McCain was a 3 and Obama was a 7.
Except that it wasn't quite like that. McCain was a 3 and Obama was a 1. That was from some issues oriented poll I took at the start of the primaries that rated candidates based on 10 statements on 10 different subjects.
The only thing I agreed with Obama on was getting the US military the hell out of war and he's backtracked on that.
This is going to be worse than Bush who actually ran on a decent platform, only to do a total 180 once he got elected. An example of a promise gone bad: I wanted the US out of the World Court, because it's just plain bad law, not to give the US military the go-ahead to torture prisoners. You Obamites will go through the same thing.
President Reagan did some wonderful things while in office, but he was also responsible for expanding the War on Some Drugs and creating Civil Forfeiture. Impeached ex-President Clinton had a bad first two years, but after he got side-tracked by the first opposition Republican House & Senate in half a century, and then later by his appetite for sex, actually settled down and had a fairly decent administration, as things go in the US.
Gridlock is Good. Maybe the best system would be an anti-parliamentary system where the head of state is chosen from one of the opposition parties.
It's wonderful to see Obama sticking to his campaign promises. Jamming through a 1000+ partisan "emergency" spending bill that no one was given time to read (and signed almost half a week later) is certainly Change We Need.
People are free to use Linux if they want to. Very few want to.
In the US, they are "free to use Linux" after they have paid for a Microsoft License at a typical computer vendor. Personally, I would point an internet n00b at a Mac, my wife loves hers. That wasn't the point I was trying to make.
If you think it is MS stopping them you are clueless.
One of us is clueless, agreed.
People will use whatever is easiest to do what they want to do.
And the easiest thing to do is to go down to a store, buy a computer that looks interesting and use it. I agree.
Why can't you buy a computer in a neighborhood computer shop that's preinstalled with Linux? It's not lack of demand - it happens in countries other than the US.
Perhaps what you should consider is that if Linux were sold as 100% of the preinstalls in computer stores (do not charge for the OS and consider it the same as FreeDOS) and Microsoft Windows had to be purchased and installed separately, what kind of a market share would it have? (And that's not the point I was trying to make either, though it's valid).
The rest of your message is flamebait that I will not respond to.
But at home I want a GUI thank you very much. I also want it to just work. I work on computer systems during the day... when I want to use my machine at night I don't want to 'work' on it.
I'm not sure what exactly is wrong with KDE 3, but according to your previous statement:
I just installed Fedora Core 10 on a spare box with a bc4306 wireless card, and after screwing around for a few hours hooked up an RJ45 to the back because it was just too much a pain in the ass to get wireless to work on it. I would have tried Ubuntu but its support for SATA RAID sucks.
What does an every day GUI have to do with one-time installation?
I'm currently using Fedora 9 (with KDE 4.0 - highly unstable:-() for development because XEmacs works fine and that's what I need the most (besides a command line to run ssh, make patches, etc.).
It's difficult to see what kind of point you're making, since I find the Microsoft Windows UI to be the most unintuitive environment I've ever encountered.
People ignore programs that are hard to use and use programs that are easy or easier to use.
Or maybe they use whatever they were allowed to buy. Non-US countries seem to have no problem with allowing computer shops to sell computers without Microsoft Windows.
Most of the market uses MS. Get the hint?
Most of the (US) market never had a choice. Get the hint? This is NOT a free market at work and your arguments make no sense.
uhm, no, linux's "DLL" files (.so, etc.) are in directories that normal users never have write access to, so there is no need to protect them.
They're already protected by not being writable by default.
Finally, RPM (or dpkg) can easily reinstall any corrupted application anyway.
I don't know about dpkg, but RPM can easily point out alien and modified system files. That's kind of a handy tool for system builders to make sure their RPMs are all in order before inflicting them on the general public.
I'd wait for some unsuspecting soul to walk up, start to take the flag, then seduce them with the succubus(WTF!?........), then have my buddy the Priest come out of hiding, race up to them, cast mind control, then run the poor slob right off the towering cliff next to the flag. I could usually run up to the edge of the cliff just in time to see them hit, far below.
It wasn't us that killed them, it was the landing!
That's funny. Sounds like the guy who made the video of knocking people off the bridge in AV with hardpacked snowballs.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a "bug". Under recent POSIX revisions this is now considered incorrect behaviour (something about trying to follow "/." and "/.."):
http://blogs.sun.com/jbeck/entry/rm_rf_protection
I didn't realize that had been changed recently. How sad. Another bit of Unix lore that only us old-timers will get to experience.
By their argument, `cd /; rm -rf .' still ought to work. Sigh. That lacks the drama, the feeling, the intensity of slamming down the return key knowing you're about to delete every file on the system. :-)
Supposedly Debian (from Sid onwards) also does not allow 'rm -rf /'.
Pathetic. But at least you get the source to rm(1) so you can fix that bug - or write your own, it's not that hard.
Now, get off my lawn.
Actually it doesn't. You have to unmount all your pseudo filesystems first and it's been a long time since Linux let you do that. I tried it on several systems when I was working at Turbolinux and regularly wiping boxes for "clean" installation tests.
Vintage 4.2 BSD could do it (I watched someone do it on purpose, he was wiping the system for a reinstall). System V-oid boxes could not, due to lacking an rmdir(2) system call and forcing an implementation of rm -r by doing a fork-exec /bin/rmdir (which was setuid root). My first intentional /bin/rm -rf / ended with an endless sequence of `/bin/rmdir: not found' messages.
Why not shoot the people of Florida?
Great, let's start with you. PETA fuckwad.
Hey! I'm a D.E.H.T.A's Little P.I.T.A. http://thottbot.com/ach561 assmunch.
I wouldn't call her a geek, she doesn't have the same passion for working with tech stuff that I have. But she is knowledgeable and knows quite a bit more about IT than many of my guy friends. She is very comfortable working with vi
For the sake of all that is holy, good god man, teach her emacs!
The hypocrisy of "freedom" libertarians and liberals never ceases to amaze me when it comes to government control of social systems.
No real libertarian is agsinst freedom of speech and you shouldn't lump us into that category.
I'm not going to attempt a car analogy, but a tech analogy would be equating angry bug reports on a newly-released version of software reporting regressions as "hate crime".
I've had an unpleasant on-line gaming experience on WoW. When I was leveling up my Night Elf Rogue (female in game) in HellPen, another character came up to me and started making suggestive[1] comments as if the character in the game were reflective of the person he was /w ing to. No biggie and as unpleasant as it was, there was no way I was going to report him.
I *will* be careful when I let my sons start playing. "Game exerience may change during online play" has meaning.
[1] He said he was from Arkansas and elderly and very crude. Does Bill Clinton play WoW?
I also usually have at least 2 computers on hand, so if a virus makes the thing totally FUBAR, I can recover the files by using the non-FUBAR'ed computer to access the other's hard drive, then format the drive and reinstall windows/drivers/etc. from scratch.
Think about what you just wrote. /golfclap
Personally, I think friends should not let friends do Microsoft Windows. But that's just me.
well, i know that NTFS was completely reverse engineered without seeing any of the original source, and does not actually use any code from microsoft
Sadly, that protects against plagiarism and copyright violations. It does not protect against patent violations.
My email address as shown is valid, so email it privately, if you wish. Never mind if that's too much invasion of privacy.
- He's willing to work long hours just to optimize and polish a small piece of code.
This is valid for languages other than C; there's a reason why job interviews in the field of programming often include coding something, or solving a tricky piece of code. I know for a fact that many a prospective employer treats (or at least used to treat) the IOCCC as an excellent test of C proficiency.
Interesting point, though time for code polishing is rarely granted IRL.
Of course, if I were interviewing you, and you gave me a winning IOCCC entry as a code sample I'd do my utmost to have you hired on the spot based on general principles.
Do you have a link to your winning entry?
And here are my two winning entries
Nice! The cube solver is indeed a work of art.
Just taking part is a large enough honor!
True, true and entertaining. I took part in one of the earliest IOCCCs. None of my 3 entries won anything, but at least I have bragging rights that I tried.
1) A program that consisted of mostly all 0/O,1/l characters that converted binary to decimal/decimal to binary depending upon what name it was invoked with.
2) A one liner that printed "Hello World!\n" with each character generated from a subprocess based on an obfuscated state table. That was apparently more obfuscated to the Pyramid kernel than to the reviewers - I got dinged at work when I ran the program right before mailing it off and a subprocess or two got disconnected and ran overnight and my project was billed CPU time. Oops!
3) A curses/CPP hack that used as symbol and keyword names all of the different variant Unix and Unix-wannabe flavors of the time (they're all listed in one of lwall's vintage configure scripts, though I did not use that as a reference) and floated in characters from off-screen to reveal the message "System V - from now on, consider it standard"
My favorite winner is the one that is the source that is portable to FORTRAN, /bin/sh and C.
I wish I still had the rejection messages. Seems like it would make a good job interview item - "Hey, I can't win an obfuscated coding contest even when I *TRY*."
Then you will never truly achieve 'BOFH' status, Grasshopper.
I do believe that whatever else happens with this case, Mr. Childs(, Sir!) has achieved Hall Of Fame BOFH status and I so nominate him.
I think he's right and SF is stupid, but I think all people in NC are stupid, including me for working here.
Split Northern California and Southern California in half, cede Northern California to Zimbabwe or anyone convenient and the budget problems in what's left of the real California will be mostly solved.
So what exactly is your point?
"Child" sex is a staple industry in Chinese culture, only it's called "feeding your family when they are desperately poor". You don't get out much, do you? Have you had any experience with the 3rd world whatsoever?
Still out of the hundreds that have flown only 14 have died.
That's an awfully high mortality rate.
For comparison, how many of the hundreds of thousands (or whatever it is) who have flown *on this day* have died? 0?
Scale up the US Space Shuttle where it was transporting people in anywhere near the number commercial aircraft carry people and you might have a real problem.
People complain about this sort of stuff whenever a new OS or new big SP comes out but the reality is this: if you have relatively recent components made by prominent manufacturers, your stuff is going to work 90% of the time.
90% really isn't very good (especially when you're in the 10%) and isn't this the same sort of criticism aimed at Linux?
But point a camera at a naked body and all of the sudden it's ok to have laws just like Singapore or China.
That's a very odd statement considering Chinese culture. You don't get out much, do you? Try googling for where Japanese politicians/salary men like to take sex vacations.
The big difference between Singapore and the US is that Singapore is *clean*. I rather like that. Well that and the fact that I've just plain enjoyed all the time I've spent in Singapore.
Science isn't an exact science, people are involved and people make mistakes. Scientist need to remember that they are human too and they will make mistakes
Those are weasel words. Hmmm, the same kind of weasel words used to attack anyone who dares to commit the heresy of "Global Warming Denial".
You people trumpeting "the warmest ... on record" need a wake up call.
Global Warming is to Science as
Microsoft Windows is to Computer Science.
QED
A war between Russia and the US is hardly what I would call "entertaining."
Brzensky can handle that all by himself, or were you born yesterday and do not know who Zbigniew Brzensky is?
McCain would have been a good choice _precisely_ because he was a senile old man. ... dismissing him out of hand as a senile old man is rather... stupid.
Totally agree.
I would add to your list of arguments:
* A Vice President Palin would have made for most entertaining news.
* An opposition Democrat congress would have made for some slowing of the advancement of federal government power.
I am betting the Democrats learned something from 1993, 1994 and it won't be so easy next time to restore a balance of power.
Sigh.
No politician can get anything done without support from his political base.
THE reason why McCain lost, but go ahead.
We have two main camps-banking & big oil vs media and the lawyer lobby. Neither camp represents my interests. Obama is no different than any other democrat - Biden is especially cozy with the big media lobby.
I'm not sure I see it that way. The big media lobby was in the tank for Obama.
They're getting the ugliest stuff done first so everybody forgets in time for the next election how their rights got sold down the river.
Yes, agreed. Impeached ex-President Clinton did the same thing. It's telling that his Porkulus bill was 2 orders of magnitude smaller than the size of Obama's.
I'm trying to recall what President Bush did for me in his first few months in office and cannot recall anything.
I hope the Obamites are as happy with their President as those of us who mistakenly voted for Bush are with him.
Well, to conservatives, Obama was a 3, and McCain was a 7. To liberals, McCain was a 3 and Obama was a 7.
Except that it wasn't quite like that. McCain was a 3 and Obama was a 1. That was from some issues oriented poll I took at the start of the primaries that rated candidates based on 10 statements on 10 different subjects.
The only thing I agreed with Obama on was getting the US military the hell out of war and he's backtracked on that.
This is going to be worse than Bush who actually ran on a decent platform, only to do a total 180 once he got elected. An example of a promise gone bad: I wanted the US out of the World Court, because it's just plain bad law, not to give the US military the go-ahead to torture prisoners. You Obamites will go through the same thing.
President Reagan did some wonderful things while in office, but he was also responsible for expanding the War on Some Drugs and creating Civil Forfeiture. Impeached ex-President Clinton had a bad first two years, but after he got side-tracked by the first opposition Republican House & Senate in half a century, and then later by his appetite for sex, actually settled down and had a fairly decent administration, as things go in the US.
Gridlock is Good. Maybe the best system would be an anti-parliamentary system where the head of state is chosen from one of the opposition parties.
It's wonderful to see Obama sticking to his campaign promises. Jamming through a 1000+ partisan "emergency" spending bill that no one was given time to read (and signed almost half a week later) is certainly Change We Need.
People are free to use Linux if they want to. Very few want to.
In the US, they are "free to use Linux" after they have paid for a Microsoft License at a typical computer vendor. Personally, I would point an internet n00b at a Mac, my wife loves hers. That wasn't the point I was trying to make.
If you think it is MS stopping them you are clueless.
One of us is clueless, agreed.
People will use whatever is easiest to do what they want to do.
And the easiest thing to do is to go down to a store, buy a computer that looks interesting and use it. I agree.
Why can't you buy a computer in a neighborhood computer shop that's preinstalled with Linux? It's not lack of demand - it happens in countries other than the US.
Perhaps what you should consider is that if Linux were sold as 100% of the preinstalls in computer stores (do not charge for the OS and consider it the same as FreeDOS) and Microsoft Windows had to be purchased and installed separately, what kind of a market share would it have? (And that's not the point I was trying to make either, though it's valid).
The rest of your message is flamebait that I will not respond to.
But at home I want a GUI thank you very much. I also want it to just work. I work on computer systems during the day... when I want to use my machine at night I don't want to 'work' on it.
I'm not sure what exactly is wrong with KDE 3, but according to your previous statement:
I just installed Fedora Core 10 on a spare box with a bc4306 wireless card, and after screwing around for a few hours hooked up an RJ45 to the back because it was just too much a pain in the ass to get wireless to work on it. I would have tried Ubuntu but its support for SATA RAID sucks.
What does an every day GUI have to do with one-time installation?
I'm currently using Fedora 9 (with KDE 4.0 - highly unstable :-() for development because XEmacs works fine and that's what I need the most (besides a command line to run ssh, make patches, etc.).
It's difficult to see what kind of point you're making, since I find the Microsoft Windows UI to be the most unintuitive environment I've ever encountered.
People ignore programs that are hard to use and use programs that are easy or easier to use.
Or maybe they use whatever they were allowed to buy. Non-US countries seem to have no problem with allowing computer shops to sell computers without Microsoft Windows.
Most of the market uses MS. Get the hint?
Most of the (US) market never had a choice. Get the hint? This is NOT a free market at work and your arguments make no sense.
uhm, no, linux's "DLL" files (.so, etc.) are in directories that normal users never have write access to, so there is no need to protect them.
They're already protected by not being writable by default.
Finally, RPM (or dpkg) can easily reinstall any corrupted application anyway.
I don't know about dpkg, but RPM can easily point out alien and modified system files. That's kind of a handy tool for system builders to make sure their RPMs are all in order before inflicting them on the general public.
I'd wait for some unsuspecting soul to walk up, start to take the flag, then seduce them with the succubus(WTF!?........), then have my buddy the Priest come out of hiding, race up to them, cast mind control, then run the poor slob right off the towering cliff next to the flag. I could usually run up to the edge of the cliff just in time to see them hit, far below.
It wasn't us that killed them, it was the landing!
That's funny. Sounds like the guy who made the video of knocking people off the bridge in AV with hardpacked snowballs.