For FreeBSD, there exists the PicoBSD project, basically an initiative to produce slimmed-down versions of FreeBSD useable in embedded and/or read-only environments. However, this is for FreeBSD, not OpenBAS, and while I personally prefer FreeBSD, it does not match OpenBSD in terms of security (while still being more secure than the average Linux distribution). On the
Hebrew has vowels, of course. It just doesn't write most of them, except if you use a vowelization scheme. In spoken Hebrew, they are there. Same applies to Arabic and most other Semitic languages whose alphabet derives from Ugaritic cuneiform, such as Syriac. The only exception is Ethiopic because it is not an alphabet, but rather a syllabary where syllables or syllable fragments are written.
The logical structure of the Arabic grammar is indeed one of the most striking properties of that language. Among Arabists, however, it has become an accepted opinion that the rigidness was probably enforced on the language later on, so that deep down at the core of the language, it is still not very much more logical than other languages.
When reading Classical Arabic texts, one finds that the structure of the language of the Koran (seventh century), for example, is not as unambiguous as the language of later authors, such as Ibn Arabi or Ibn Taimiyya (twelfth century). This implies nothing about the beauty of the language, which, in Arabic, is indeed hardly surpassed in the Koran; nevertheless it appears that authors have agreed on a more formalized scheme in later times.
There is quite a number of cases in Arabic where regulations that cover basic aspects of the language are pretty illogical. For example, the roots "l-q-y" and "b-k-y" share the same structure, yet the past tense of the former is "laqiya", the second one is "baka" (hope you don't mind the ugly transcription), and there is no rule that covers this. Or look at the case and number congruency when combining words with numbers, which would be a real problem in a computer language environment.
In my opinion, though (being a native speaker of German and speaking a couple of other languages, including English and Arabic), Arabic would definitely be a better choice to base a programming language on than English because English has almost no notion of grammatical precision. I know of no programming language that uses it, either, but this is probably due to the problem of having to represent the Arabic script, which computers don't do very well, even by now.
You are confusing verbs and vowels in your example. There exist no languages without vowels, as far as I know. The language with the least known number of different sounds ("phonemes") has 11 phonemes, two of them being vowels, if I remember correctly.
Certain languages exist that draw no syntactic distinctions between nouns and verbs; one of these is the Native American language Nootka, for example (probably the one with the most research).
This is not as uncommon as it sound, though. Arabic, for example, draws very little syntactic distinction between adjectives and verbs. The sentences "The house is red" and "The house burns" could be syntactically identical in Arabic. This is just an example of where differences in natural languages may exist.
If a speaker of a language like Nootka were to devise a computer language, it would probably draw no distinction between entities (such as variables) and instructions (such as functions). The result would probably look a bit like LISP. You are perfectly right there.
Languages that have no specific concept of "yes" or "no" are really frequent. Even some Indo-European languages don't share these words; the Celtic languages, like Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh and Manx don't have them, for example. That's why speakers of Hibernal English (with Irish accent) often answer questions like "Are you feeling OK" with "I am not". It's in the dialect.
The German trademark law is a bit complicated, I'm afraid, and there is probably nothing in the Web in English, but here's at least some information in the form of translated headings to get you an idea of how it is structured.
Those out there with some knowledge of German might try the Bundesgesetzblatt (the Federal Law publishing board) or this comprehensive overview of German trademark law with the texts included; I think you can forget the idea of having it babelfished, though, because it's probably a bit too complicated in style to translate properly. Another good resource is the web site of the DPMA (Deutsches Patent- und Markenamt), the German Patent and Trademark Office.
If you know some German and want to go for an entirely different view of the matter, you might have a look at the other side's point of view, in this case in the form of the aforementioned lawyer Günther von Gravenreuth, well known (not to say notorious) for his actions against private and commercial "computer piracy". There even exists an FAQ for people who had legal trouble with him in one specific matter.
The European Union point of view on trademark law is available at the European Patent Office, with loads upon loads of links to various European and other offices and institutions, European law texts, patent databases and other stuff.
What we need, therefore, is a sensible way of preventing the 15-year-olds with a lack of sense from causing damage.
Hence, A solution that makes the Internet itself less vulnerable to this sort of attack is to be preferred to anything that leaves the overall vulnerability of the Net at its present level and only aims at revealing the intruder.
Anything else would be like not installing airbags in cars, but instead threatening drivers that cause accidents with more severe punishment. It may serve the cause to some extent, but the alternative is definitely preferable
What about longer TCP streams, such as large up- and downloads?
As far as spoofing is concerned, most DDoS attacks may originate from spoofed IP addresses, but the DoS packets themselves are sent from non-spoofed servers (you don't have to spoof a server that isn't yours anyway). For this, we don't really need traceback.
There are thousands of different servers for different applications out there. Do you seriously want to change the way they work?
Just because HTTP requests are short in most cases does not imply that there is no request-oriented non-DOS service active out there on the Internet that actually uses requests of more than one packet in length. (One might also say "HTTP is not the world" or "The Internet is good for other things than web browsing".)
Maybe you would like to hear an example where anonymity really is a good idea.
I am, among other things, a student in Islamic Studies in Germany. We have had students who worked in the Middle East under really weird circumstances; for example, there was one in the early nineties who wrote her Magisterarbeit (you'd call it a Master's Thesis) on the internal structure of Palestinian Islamist terrorist organizations. Back then, the internet practically did not exist down there so she communicated back home from public phone booths using a scrambling device. For our students who are there now, I set up an anonymous remailer that I can trust (because I happen to administer it) in our student organization's office, and they communicate happily, heavily using nyms, remailers and PGP.
For these people, any loss of anonymity (such as a "where did these packet originate" solution) means a serious risk to their lives, while their activity is not at all illegal - it's perfectly ordinary scientific research.
So if I pour my bleeding heart every now and then about my rights in the internet arena, it's because I am perfectly conscious that I need those rights (or friends of mine). There are applications where anonymity is a necessity, and these are not necessarily illegal.
Apart from that, I am a little sensitive to statements like Don't do illegal things, and you'll be able to do without the rights that we are depriving you of. May have something to do with my home country's history over the last couple of centuries.
No. We upgraded it later on, more or less manually. I wouldn't write a HOWTO on that, though, because it was rather informal and not overly systematical. It was only for evaluation, after all.:-)
Well, we mainly used the one in the FreeBSD handbook. It comes with FreeBSD, but it's also available on the web sites, for example here in the online handbook or on one of the mirrors. It works fairly well.
I wouldn't use MySQL in a data warehousing environment because its features are too limited (no stored procedures or triggers, no subqueries). If you want to do data warehousing, open source DBs are not an option (sad but true).
Forgot some details. Database size was 24.7 GB, but that shouldn't matter. We tested it with about thirty to fifty users in an ASP environment (requests were done from a Citrix server). The general setting was mostly data warehousing. This probably explains why FreeBSD performed better due to its comparatively good responsiveness under higher loads.
We tested Sybase Adaptive Server Anywhere and Enterprise as well as Oracle (the Linux versions) on SuSE Linux and FreeBSD 4.0, and it worked fine. FreeBSD was slightly superior in terms of performance.
File size limitations depend on your file systems. For both OS's, filesystems are available that handle 30G files easily.
Hardware was a HP NetServer 4 (LX Pro), dual Xeon 400, 512 MB RAM, 5x16GB RAID disk array on an Adaptec RAID controller.
You are right in so far as PGP is not crackable by a brute-force assault in reasonable time at present, at least when key lengths are large enough.
In theory, however, the key generation mechanism or even the encryption algorithm of PGP may show flaws (as we have seen recently with PGP 5.0 on Unix where key pair generation was not as random as it could have been). This happened in spite of PGP being open source all the time. In theory, the NSA or whoever might exploit these
And since PGP is open source (more or less), its weaknesses, if they exist, are openb for exploiting them - flaws are much more easily discovered than in other products that would need reverse engineering. Of course, this very same open source principle adds to the security to some extent because flaws can be discovered "benevolently" and "publicly", so to speak, but this is no guarantee against the possibility of someone discovering a flaw all by himself and not sharing, but keeping the knowledge, thus gaining the ability to decipher encrypted messages. (No matter if it's the NSA or whoever.)
Well, as long as you take the bother to read stuff in any language other than English, of course, there is quite a good selection of active independent online news sources besides the ones you Americans tend to stick to; for instance, the Heise newsletter, the Spiegel or TAZ online magazines or the web.de service in German or, for example, iltalehti in Finnish, even though that one's fairly yellow press.
Even though some of us don't like it, this is an increasingly globalizing world where being able to understand others is a bit of an advantage.
Seeing that QLX is based on QT, the effort of adapting the system to produce BSD executables should not be too large - it should be just a slightly different threading and memory interface that would need to be supported. I mean, I can run Linux executables on my FreeBSD machine, but I'd like it nevertheless. Another idea might be an option to integrate different compilers in the background (i.e. put a gcc somewhere beneath it). Of course, compiling code would be slower by several degrees of magnitude, but one might write stuff on Linux or BSD and then produce applications for any platform that QLX and/or Qt is available for... and seeing that usually Borland libraries are compilable with Borland tools, one might consider porting the QLX layer as well, thus unleashing a wave of applications not only for Linux, but for practically every OS that supports Qt. This would be really nice.
Slashdot Mirror
For FreeBSD, there exists the PicoBSD project, basically an initiative to produce slimmed-down versions of FreeBSD useable in embedded and/or read-only environments. However, this is for FreeBSD, not OpenBAS, and while I personally prefer FreeBSD, it does not match OpenBSD in terms of security (while still being more secure than the average Linux distribution). On the
I don't think you can break it down into numbers that easily, partly because the code base changed during that time.
You are right about the vowel sounds.
Hebrew has vowels, of course. It just doesn't write most of them, except if you use a vowelization scheme. In spoken Hebrew, they are there. Same applies to Arabic and most other Semitic languages whose alphabet derives from Ugaritic cuneiform, such as Syriac. The only exception is Ethiopic because it is not an alphabet, but rather a syllabary where syllables or syllable fragments are written.
The logical structure of the Arabic grammar is indeed one of the most striking properties of that language. Among Arabists, however, it has become an accepted opinion that the rigidness was probably enforced on the language later on, so that deep down at the core of the language, it is still not very much more logical than other languages.
When reading Classical Arabic texts, one finds that the structure of the language of the Koran (seventh century), for example, is not as unambiguous as the language of later authors, such as Ibn Arabi or Ibn Taimiyya (twelfth century). This implies nothing about the beauty of the language, which, in Arabic, is indeed hardly surpassed in the Koran; nevertheless it appears that authors have agreed on a more formalized scheme in later times.
There is quite a number of cases in Arabic where regulations that cover basic aspects of the language are pretty illogical. For example, the roots "l-q-y" and "b-k-y" share the same structure, yet the past tense of the former is "laqiya", the second one is "baka" (hope you don't mind the ugly transcription), and there is no rule that covers this. Or look at the case and number congruency when combining words with numbers, which would be a real problem in a computer language environment.
In my opinion, though (being a native speaker of German and speaking a couple of other languages, including English and Arabic), Arabic would definitely be a better choice to base a programming language on than English because English has almost no notion of grammatical precision. I know of no programming language that uses it, either, but this is probably due to the problem of having to represent the Arabic script, which computers don't do very well, even by now.
You are confusing verbs and vowels in your example. There exist no languages without vowels, as far as I know. The language with the least known number of different sounds ("phonemes") has 11 phonemes, two of them being vowels, if I remember correctly.
Certain languages exist that draw no syntactic distinctions between nouns and verbs; one of these is the Native American language Nootka, for example (probably the one with the most research).
This is not as uncommon as it sound, though. Arabic, for example, draws very little syntactic distinction between adjectives and verbs. The sentences "The house is red" and "The house burns" could be syntactically identical in Arabic. This is just an example of where differences in natural languages may exist.
If a speaker of a language like Nootka were to devise a computer language, it would probably draw no distinction between entities (such as variables) and instructions (such as functions). The result would probably look a bit like LISP. You are perfectly right there.
Languages that have no specific concept of "yes" or "no" are really frequent. Even some Indo-European languages don't share these words; the Celtic languages, like Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh and Manx don't have them, for example. That's why speakers of Hibernal English (with Irish accent) often answer questions like "Are you feeling OK" with "I am not". It's in the dialect.
The German trademark law is a bit complicated, I'm afraid, and there is probably nothing in the Web in English, but here's at least some information in the form of translated headings to get you an idea of how it is structured.
Those out there with some knowledge of German might try the Bundesgesetzblatt (the Federal Law publishing board) or this comprehensive overview of German trademark law with the texts included; I think you can forget the idea of having it babelfished, though, because it's probably a bit too complicated in style to translate properly. Another good resource is the web site of the DPMA (Deutsches Patent- und Markenamt), the German Patent and Trademark Office.
If you know some German and want to go for an entirely different view of the matter, you might have a look at the other side's point of view, in this case in the form of the aforementioned lawyer Günther von Gravenreuth, well known (not to say notorious) for his actions against private and commercial "computer piracy". There even exists an FAQ for people who had legal trouble with him in one specific matter.
The European Union point of view on trademark law is available at the European Patent Office, with loads upon loads of links to various European and other offices and institutions, European law texts, patent databases and other stuff.
What we need, therefore, is a sensible way of preventing the 15-year-olds with a lack of sense from causing damage.
Hence, A solution that makes the Internet itself less vulnerable to this sort of attack is to be preferred to anything that leaves the overall vulnerability of the Net at its present level and only aims at revealing the intruder.
Anything else would be like not installing airbags in cars, but instead threatening drivers that cause accidents with more severe punishment. It may serve the cause to some extent, but the alternative is definitely preferable
What about longer TCP streams, such as large up- and downloads?
As far as spoofing is concerned, most DDoS attacks may originate from spoofed IP addresses, but the DoS packets themselves are sent from non-spoofed servers (you don't have to spoof a server that isn't yours anyway). For this, we don't really need traceback.
There are thousands of different servers for different applications out there. Do you seriously want to change the way they work?
Just because HTTP requests are short in most cases does not imply that there is no request-oriented non-DOS service active out there on the Internet that actually uses requests of more than one packet in length. (One might also say "HTTP is not the world" or "The Internet is good for other things than web browsing".)
Maybe you would like to hear an example where anonymity really is a good idea.
I am, among other things, a student in Islamic Studies in Germany. We have had students who worked in the Middle East under really weird circumstances; for example, there was one in the early nineties who wrote her Magisterarbeit (you'd call it a Master's Thesis) on the internal structure of Palestinian Islamist terrorist organizations. Back then, the internet practically did not exist down there so she communicated back home from public phone booths using a scrambling device. For our students who are there now, I set up an anonymous remailer that I can trust (because I happen to administer it) in our student organization's office, and they communicate happily, heavily using nyms, remailers and PGP.
For these people, any loss of anonymity (such as a "where did these packet originate" solution) means a serious risk to their lives, while their activity is not at all illegal - it's perfectly ordinary scientific research.
So if I pour my bleeding heart every now and then about my rights in the internet arena, it's because I am perfectly conscious that I need those rights (or friends of mine). There are applications where anonymity is a necessity, and these are not necessarily illegal.
Apart from that, I am a little sensitive to statements like Don't do illegal things, and you'll be able to do without the rights that we are depriving you of. May have something to do with my home country's history over the last couple of centuries.
No. We upgraded it later on, more or less manually. I wouldn't write a HOWTO on that, though, because it was rather informal and not overly systematical. It was only for evaluation, after all. :-)
Well, we mainly used the one in the FreeBSD handbook. It comes with FreeBSD, but it's also available on the web sites, for example here in the online handbook or on one of the mirrors. It works fairly well.
I wouldn't use MySQL in a data warehousing environment because its features are too limited (no stored procedures or triggers, no subqueries). If you want to do data warehousing, open source DBs are not an option (sad but true).
Forgot some details. Database size was 24.7 GB, but that shouldn't matter. We tested it with about thirty to fifty users in an ASP environment (requests were done from a Citrix server). The general setting was mostly data warehousing. This probably explains why FreeBSD performed better due to its comparatively good responsiveness under higher loads.
We tested Sybase Adaptive Server Anywhere and Enterprise as well as Oracle (the Linux versions) on SuSE Linux and FreeBSD 4.0, and it worked fine. FreeBSD was slightly superior in terms of performance.
File size limitations depend on your file systems. For both OS's, filesystems are available that handle 30G files easily.
Hardware was a HP NetServer 4 (LX Pro), dual Xeon 400, 512 MB RAM, 5x16GB RAID disk array on an Adaptec RAID controller.
You are right in so far as PGP is not crackable by a brute-force assault in reasonable time at present, at least when key lengths are large enough.
In theory, however, the key generation mechanism or even the encryption algorithm of PGP may show flaws (as we have seen recently with PGP 5.0 on Unix where key pair generation was not as random as it could have been). This happened in spite of PGP being open source all the time. In theory, the NSA or whoever might exploit these
And since PGP is open source (more or less), its weaknesses, if they exist, are openb for exploiting them - flaws are much more easily discovered than in other products that would need reverse engineering. Of course, this very same open source principle adds to the security to some extent because flaws can be discovered "benevolently" and "publicly", so to speak, but this is no guarantee against the possibility of someone discovering a flaw all by himself and not sharing, but keeping the knowledge, thus gaining the ability to decipher encrypted messages. (No matter if it's the NSA or whoever.)
Well, as long as you take the bother to read stuff in any language other than English, of course, there is quite a good selection of active independent online news sources besides the ones you Americans tend to stick to; for instance, the Heise newsletter, the Spiegel or TAZ online magazines or the web.de service in German or, for example, iltalehti in Finnish, even though that one's fairly yellow press.
Even though some of us don't like it, this is an increasingly globalizing world where being able to understand others is a bit of an advantage.
Seeing that QLX is based on QT, the effort of adapting the system to produce BSD executables should not be too large - it should be just a slightly different threading and memory interface that would need to be supported.
I mean, I can run Linux executables on my FreeBSD machine, but I'd like it nevertheless.
Another idea might be an option to integrate different compilers in the background (i.e. put a gcc somewhere beneath it). Of course, compiling code would be slower by several degrees of magnitude, but one might write stuff on Linux or BSD and then produce applications for any platform that QLX and/or Qt is available for... and seeing that usually Borland libraries are compilable with Borland tools, one might consider porting the QLX layer as well, thus unleashing a wave of applications not only for Linux, but for practically every OS that supports Qt. This would be really nice.