Of course. Have you ever tried to enter the Microsoft premises at night without telling the guards? if you had, I bet you'd still have evidences of their security on your butt, in the form of a big german shepherd's bitemark...
Glad to see they actually listen to the gripes from the media and users.
Microsoft doesn't listen to the media and the users, they listen to their shareholders and their finance guys. And they are saying that Windows looks like crap when it comes to security, undermining the credibility of the product, in turn threatening the sales and therefore their dividends.
Microsoft listen to users? bah... If they did, they'd have jumped on the internet bandwagon much earlier. They're going about the whole security thing just like they dealt with TCP/IP and the web: they're thrasing to catch up. And the sad thing is, they probably will sooner than you think...
do you know any new debugger that has a revolutionary way to help us inspect the data?
I'm noy sure what the question is here. Any debugger will allow you to watch data. If your program is special enough that you can't use a standard debugger, you probably need to write a test suite to go with it (and well, for any reasonably sized project, you should anyway).
That's to help you find "surface" bug, i.e. to catch things like misaligned words, wrong data types, buffer overflows..etc...
For deep structural problems, like when you try to code something and you have no clue how to go about it, and the end result is just not good and never going to be, the cure is usually a total rewrite, so debuggers won't help you there. That's a problem due to bad architecture of the code.
So, I'm not sure anything else is required. FYI, when I code, I believe I have enough experience to architecture and code something relatively clean the first time, then because I've done it for many years, I sort of "instinctively" expect to find a certain amount of this or that types bugs. And usually, I can fix them without debugging because they jump at me. When they dont (and I can do it), I pull out the old "print to stdout" debugging (or LED wiggling, sound generating... on headless embedded boards), and that's usually enough to catch a 99% of whatever bugs remained. Normal debugging techniques using debuggers, or the test suite I made for that particular piece of code, takes care of the rest. My guess is, if you need anymore than that, it's probably that you lack experience.
During that upgrade period, the modding scene began to unfold.
Oh puh-leeze. Okay, so I'll admit, there are cool, tasteful, artistic PC case mods, like this one. But most case mods are just plain vulgar, with brightly colored leds all over the place, bits of things that don't go together visually but are supposed to look "fast", or "powerful" etc..., are ugly and frankly are the computer equivalent of that.
In other news: Al Qaeda members intercepted and arrested today downtown New York, disguised as yellow PacMen. They admitted using a new kind of simulator to train for their failed terrorist attack.
What kind of idiot would confuse a freakin' computer program with a child?
A computer program is much like a child : when you release the first versions, it keeps on crapping out and you're constantly after it to fix it, then it slowly grows and grows and costs more and more money to maintain, then it's big enough that it becomes an ugly unmanageable thing that keeps on making unreasonable demands on the system, then when it finally matures, it leaves the development team and goes in maintenance mode until it's end-of-lifed.
that they open-source it before Sun tanks, or before some nasty company takes control of it. In short, they ought to do like Netscape did, and I'm sure even McNealy would rather do that than any other alternative...
And as for doing something besides programming for a living...you mean to tell me that I spent my teenage years actually studying, getting good grades, and keeping my nose clean, I went to college to get my B.S. in computer science, I worked my tail off for 12 years...and now I'm unemployed and poor? Damn
Well cry me a river...
I'll tell you what: if you don't find what you want in your country, move to another country that'll welcome it. I did it: I moved to the US during the bubble and I got paid lots of money while people in my home country couldn't find any job because of companies in my country outsourcing to the US (you didn't complain about that did you?). You know what? when I was in the US, I was hired because I could code and talk the language of that company's foreign customers, who themselves didn't want to pay extra to get the work done locally. Amazing eh? but that didn't bother you.
Well, sorry for you my friend, but it's your turn. Go somewhere where your competences will be welcome, instead of looking at your shoes and mourning the good ole days. If you don't want to move away from your country (I wouldn't if I were you, it's tough to be American outside of the US these days), then at least stop complaining about the flip-side of a situation your country profited from for a very long time, bite your tongue and good luck at the unemployment office, like the rest of us...
U.S. kids who do well in both, attend excellent universities, but have no guarantees of good jobs when they graduate, Barrett remarks 'I don't have a solution to that one.
I do have a solution: teach them to think globally, be mobile, and they'll naturally want to move to high-growth parts of the world, like India or S-E Asia. Then, maybe the US govermnent will realize the country is getting crusty when it sees all these people expatriating themselves.
The Europeans have been doing that for years. The french are only realizing now that their country is literally bleeding brains because they have such high taxes and high inertia, due to *gasp* social advantages and guaranteed outrageously high pay (U.S. kids who do well in both, attend excellent universities, but have no guarantees of good jobs when they graduate, Barrett remarks 'I don't have a solution to that one.yes, even at the lowest rate, a European employee is much much better off than an Indian). The US is heading that way too now.
The fact is, high-growth areas are those that have the least social protection. I say teach the youngs to want to go make money there for a while, after their graduation, while they're young, and come back home with plenty of experience and money to spend.
bobwyman manages to be the first to submit this story, apparently by using his own web service:... "Well, the PubSub.com SEC Edgar notification system just sent a message ... If you had had a PubSub.com SEC Edgar subscription, you would have been one of the first to see this filing."
Bobwyman, you are are true genius: you managed to graft your shameless plug to promote your site on an important-ish, but totally unrelated, piece of news, make it into one of the most blatant piece of advertisement article submission, and on top ot it manage to get the story accepted by the Slashdot crew. Brilliant! You are my all-time favorite astroturfer.
Note to Slashdot crew: nobody cares about PubSub. Do you guys own stock or something?
I think Daniel made a very wise decision. Gentoo is his child, and it looks like the child is reaching maturity and it's time for Gentoo to move out of the parents' house.
Looks more like it's Daddy who's leaving the house in disgust. I guess Gentoo has entered its spotty teenager anarcho-punk years...
"Gentoo Linux has experienced rapid growth in the past year--much to the credit of Daniel Robbins, the founder and Chief Architect of the project. Earlier today, he announced his resignation from his role on the gentoo-nfp mailing list.
After 4 years of compilation and rapid disk usage growth, the build was 98% complete when the hard drive became full and the the build failed. Daniel Robbins was then struck by a wave of despair and tendered his resignation. Last we heard of him, he was in a house for the mentally disabled, installing, formatting then reinstalling Mandrake and Debian on a 486 box over and over again, banging his head on the wall, munbling incomprehensible things about "precompiled" this or that...
How often do you email an EDITABLE document to someone, have them edit it, then send it back?
Well, I do often enough that it's a big problem for me. But that's not even the problem. The problem is the rest of the world insisting on.DOC, whether it's justified or not, just because they don't know any better. Last time I was looking for a job, most emailable job application required a resume in.DOC format. If you send PDFs instead, people will plain and simply dismiss your application immediately, as someone who don't want to follow the rules.
Here are the 3 things that will prevent OpenOffice from replacing MS Office massively:
- Lack of good specialized dictionaries (in particular, a good medical dictionary)
-.DOC compatibility
-.DOC compatibility
Oh, and did I mention.DOC compatibility?
I mean, I know it's hard to be compatible with a format that never was disclosed by Microsoft, but there it is: I personally can testify that, while using OpenOffice internally would be roughly equivalent in functionalities to MS Office, exchanging files with the rest of the world is a total bitch.
Microsoft's stranglehold on the Office suite market rests almost entirely on keeping its formats undisclosed, and on shifting them all the time to keep the target moving. I wish the OOo people could stop doing anything else but supporting at least one incarnation of.DOC almost 100%. Then they'd take over the market IMHO...
Mother of all RPGs?
on
D&D Is 30
·
· Score: 3, Funny
is wonderful to see the mother of all RPG's given respect and mention in the national press.
Well quite, but I must say I prefer throwing high explosive devices than slinging D&D books at monsters in Quake, it's more efficient...
Sounds sorta like the North Korean mentality of "torture the families of political dissentors": get the familes of anyone who wants to speak out to go against anyone who might say something that is considered dissent.
Well, yeah:-)
However horrible the purpose, NK seems successful at it.
One has to ask though, is blocking an entire country like this the future of spamfighting, or has something gone horribly wrong?
What went horribly wrong is that Telefonica should allow spammers to operate on their network. So yes, blacklisting them would, perhaps, send a much-needed signal to them.
Actually, if it was running a spam blocklist, I'd suggest that administrators using it automatically send out, every 1000 blocked mail or so, at random, an email explaining why an email from this domain was blocked. Eventually, such an auto-reply is bound to reach one of the domain's legit customers (in this case, Telefonica) who would in turn demand explanations from the ISP they leave money to.
Getting ISP customers to fight the spam war they would normally don't give a toss about is, in my opinion, the way to go against spammers.
It's easy to dismiss DCC as a flawed protocol. Sure it has its shortcomings, but remember, it was designed before the internet started to become firewalled to death. I remember, until perhaps 1997, DCC was just fine and easy to use, and almost never gave us any trouble. Now you have to prep up your firewall, deal with your NAT box, or get the IRC client to take care of it,...
Here's a quick overview of how a DCC connection is initiated:
- The initiator's IRC client opens a TCP socket, then (let's call him Bob) sends a DCC (CHAT, SEND) request through normal messaging. Basically it's a plain-text message starting with ^A, similar to a CTCP request. Then it listens to the socket.
- The target IRC client (let's call him Joe) gets it, decodes Bob's socket's IP address and port inside the DCC request, and tries to initiate a TCP connection to Bob.
- Once the connection is established, if it's a DCC CHAT, text is sent as-is across the TCP connection back and forth. If it's a DCC SEND, then the file transfer protocol is used over the connection.
Of course, the confusing thing for people who aren't familiar with DCC is that it's the initiator's client that temporarily becomes the server for the contacted client, and not the other way round, like most people are used to, with http for example. So basically, it's people who initiate DCC connections who must open one or more inbound TCP ports in their firewalls, and configure their IRC clients to limit themselves to using those ports.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft has security projects?
Of course. Have you ever tried to enter the Microsoft premises at night without telling the guards? if you had, I bet you'd still have evidences of their security on your butt, in the form of a big german shepherd's bitemark...
Glad to see they actually listen to the gripes from the media and users.
Microsoft doesn't listen to the media and the users, they listen to their shareholders and their finance guys. And they are saying that Windows looks like crap when it comes to security, undermining the credibility of the product, in turn threatening the sales and therefore their dividends.
Microsoft listen to users? bah... If they did, they'd have jumped on the internet bandwagon much earlier. They're going about the whole security thing just like they dealt with TCP/IP and the web: they're thrasing to catch up. And the sad thing is, they probably will sooner than you think...
Linus Torvalds (CA)
Oh yeah, great example of American technology right there...
Hear here folks: the father of Linux is now American and, before you know it, he'll have created Linux when he was a student at Berkeley!
Here's a site that'll give you advices on how to save big: clickey
do you know any new debugger that has a revolutionary way to help us inspect the data?
..etc...
... on headless embedded boards), and that's usually enough to catch a 99% of whatever bugs remained. Normal debugging techniques using debuggers, or the test suite I made for that particular piece of code, takes care of the rest. My guess is, if you need anymore than that, it's probably that you lack experience.
I'm noy sure what the question is here. Any debugger will allow you to watch data. If your program is special enough that you can't use a standard debugger, you probably need to write a test suite to go with it (and well, for any reasonably sized project, you should anyway).
That's to help you find "surface" bug, i.e. to catch things like misaligned words, wrong data types, buffer overflows
For deep structural problems, like when you try to code something and you have no clue how to go about it, and the end result is just not good and never going to be, the cure is usually a total rewrite, so debuggers won't help you there. That's a problem due to bad architecture of the code.
So, I'm not sure anything else is required. FYI, when I code, I believe I have enough experience to architecture and code something relatively clean the first time, then because I've done it for many years, I sort of "instinctively" expect to find a certain amount of this or that types bugs. And usually, I can fix them without debugging because they jump at me. When they dont (and I can do it), I pull out the old "print to stdout" debugging (or LED wiggling, sound generating
During that upgrade period, the modding scene began to unfold.
Oh puh-leeze. Okay, so I'll admit, there are cool, tasteful, artistic PC case mods, like this one. But most case mods are just plain vulgar, with brightly colored leds all over the place, bits of things that don't go together visually but are supposed to look "fast", or "powerful" etc..., are ugly and frankly are the computer equivalent of that.
Real good case mods are not many.
In other news: Al Qaeda members intercepted and arrested today downtown New York, disguised as yellow PacMen. They admitted using a new kind of simulator to train for their failed terrorist attack.
What kind of idiot would confuse a freakin' computer program with a child?
A computer program is much like a child : when you release the first versions, it keeps on crapping out and you're constantly after it to fix it, then it slowly grows and grows and costs more and more money to maintain, then it's big enough that it becomes an ugly unmanageable thing that keeps on making unreasonable demands on the system, then when it finally matures, it leaves the development team and goes in maintenance mode until it's end-of-lifed.
Java lacks some pretty vital stuff anyhow (e.g fork() --- and forking the JVM is not really a solution).
A good thing then, since you can't fork().
that they open-source it before Sun tanks, or before some nasty company takes control of it. In short, they ought to do like Netscape did, and I'm sure even McNealy would rather do that than any other alternative...
And as for doing something besides programming for a living...you mean to tell me that I spent my teenage years actually studying, getting good grades, and keeping my nose clean, I went to college to get my B.S. in computer science, I worked my tail off for 12 years...and now I'm unemployed and poor? Damn
Well cry me a river...
I'll tell you what: if you don't find what you want in your country, move to another country that'll welcome it. I did it: I moved to the US during the bubble and I got paid lots of money while people in my home country couldn't find any job because of companies in my country outsourcing to the US (you didn't complain about that did you?). You know what? when I was in the US, I was hired because I could code and talk the language of that company's foreign customers, who themselves didn't want to pay extra to get the work done locally. Amazing eh? but that didn't bother you.
Well, sorry for you my friend, but it's your turn. Go somewhere where your competences will be welcome, instead of looking at your shoes and mourning the good ole days. If you don't want to move away from your country (I wouldn't if I were you, it's tough to be American outside of the US these days), then at least stop complaining about the flip-side of a situation your country profited from for a very long time, bite your tongue and good luck at the unemployment office, like the rest of us...
Okay, if they don't want to be called Benedict Arnold CEOs, that's fine. I suggest Klaus Fuchs CEO instead then...
U.S. kids who do well in both, attend excellent universities, but have no guarantees of good jobs when they graduate, Barrett remarks 'I don't have a solution to that one.
I do have a solution: teach them to think globally, be mobile, and they'll naturally want to move to high-growth parts of the world, like India or S-E Asia. Then, maybe the US govermnent will realize the country is getting crusty when it sees all these people expatriating themselves.
The Europeans have been doing that for years. The french are only realizing now that their country is literally bleeding brains because they have such high taxes and high inertia, due to *gasp* social advantages and guaranteed outrageously high pay (U.S. kids who do well in both, attend excellent universities, but have no guarantees of good jobs when they graduate, Barrett remarks 'I don't have a solution to that one.yes, even at the lowest rate, a European employee is much much better off than an Indian). The US is heading that way too now.
The fact is, high-growth areas are those that have the least social protection. I say teach the youngs to want to go make money there for a while, after their graduation, while they're young, and come back home with plenty of experience and money to spend.
bobwyman manages to be the first to submit this story, apparently by using his own web service: ... "Well, the PubSub.com SEC Edgar notification system just sent a message ... If you had had a PubSub.com SEC Edgar subscription, you would have been one of the first to see this filing."
Bobwyman, you are are true genius: you managed to graft your shameless plug to promote your site on an important-ish, but totally unrelated, piece of news, make it into one of the most blatant piece of advertisement article submission, and on top ot it manage to get the story accepted by the Slashdot crew. Brilliant! You are my all-time favorite astroturfer.
Note to Slashdot crew: nobody cares about PubSub. Do you guys own stock or something?
Irregardless of what you call it
So I must call it Linspire then?
I think Daniel made a very wise decision. Gentoo is his child, and it looks like the child is reaching maturity and it's time for Gentoo to move out of the parents' house.
Looks more like it's Daddy who's leaving the house in disgust. I guess Gentoo has entered its spotty teenager anarcho-punk years...
1) It was a truely refreshing outlook on a distribution
*COUGH* FreeBSD
2) It is source based
So? my apps will go 5% faster if I bother to wait 5000% more during the install?
3) I was free from being unwitting pawn in the software binary release freedom debate
Do they distribute a bag of coke with the Gentoo CD? What in the name of the Lord are you talking about?
"Gentoo Linux has experienced rapid growth in the past year--much to the credit of Daniel Robbins, the founder and Chief Architect of the project. Earlier today, he announced his resignation from his role on the gentoo-nfp mailing list.
After 4 years of compilation and rapid disk usage growth, the build was 98% complete when the hard drive became full and the the build failed. Daniel Robbins was then struck by a wave of despair and tendered his resignation. Last we heard of him, he was in a house for the mentally disabled, installing, formatting then reinstalling Mandrake and Debian on a 486 box over and over again, banging his head on the wall, munbling incomprehensible things about "precompiled" this or that...
How often do you email an EDITABLE document to someone, have them edit it, then send it back?
.DOC, whether it's justified or not, just because they don't know any better. Last time I was looking for a job, most emailable job application required a resume in .DOC format. If you send PDFs instead, people will plain and simply dismiss your application immediately, as someone who don't want to follow the rules.
Well, I do often enough that it's a big problem for me. But that's not even the problem. The problem is the rest of the world insisting on
Here are the 3 things that will prevent OpenOffice from replacing MS Office massively:
.DOC compatibility
.DOC compatibility
.DOC compatibility?
.DOC almost 100%. Then they'd take over the market IMHO...
- Lack of good specialized dictionaries (in particular, a good medical dictionary)
-
-
Oh, and did I mention
I mean, I know it's hard to be compatible with a format that never was disclosed by Microsoft, but there it is: I personally can testify that, while using OpenOffice internally would be roughly equivalent in functionalities to MS Office, exchanging files with the rest of the world is a total bitch.
Microsoft's stranglehold on the Office suite market rests almost entirely on keeping its formats undisclosed, and on shifting them all the time to keep the target moving. I wish the OOo people could stop doing anything else but supporting at least one incarnation of
is wonderful to see the mother of all RPG's given respect and mention in the national press.
Well quite, but I must say I prefer throwing high explosive devices than slinging D&D books at monsters in Quake, it's more efficient...
who recently proclaimed Scribus to be one of "Free Software's Killer Applications"
Oh yes yes sure... but when will they learn? the *only* free software killer application is here. And I should know, it very nearly killed me.
Oh and by the way, I'm sure it can do desktop publishing too some way or another...
Sounds sorta like the North Korean mentality of "torture the families of political dissentors": get the familes of anyone who wants to speak out to go against anyone who might say something that is considered dissent.
:-)
Well, yeah
However horrible the purpose, NK seems successful at it.
One has to ask though, is blocking an entire country like this the future of spamfighting, or has something gone horribly wrong?
What went horribly wrong is that Telefonica should allow spammers to operate on their network. So yes, blacklisting them would, perhaps, send a much-needed signal to them.
Actually, if it was running a spam blocklist, I'd suggest that administrators using it automatically send out, every 1000 blocked mail or so, at random, an email explaining why an email from this domain was blocked. Eventually, such an auto-reply is bound to reach one of the domain's legit customers (in this case, Telefonica) who would in turn demand explanations from the ISP they leave money to.
Getting ISP customers to fight the spam war they would normally don't give a toss about is, in my opinion, the way to go against spammers.
It's easy to dismiss DCC as a flawed protocol. Sure it has its shortcomings, but remember, it was designed before the internet started to become firewalled to death. I remember, until perhaps 1997, DCC was just fine and easy to use, and almost never gave us any trouble. Now you have to prep up your firewall, deal with your NAT box, or get the IRC client to take care of it, ...
Here's a quick overview of how a DCC connection is initiated:
- The initiator's IRC client opens a TCP socket, then (let's call him Bob) sends a DCC (CHAT, SEND) request through normal messaging. Basically it's a plain-text message starting with ^A, similar to a CTCP request. Then it listens to the socket.
- The target IRC client (let's call him Joe) gets it, decodes Bob's socket's IP address and port inside the DCC request, and tries to initiate a TCP connection to Bob.
- Once the connection is established, if it's a DCC CHAT, text is sent as-is across the TCP connection back and forth. If it's a DCC SEND, then the file transfer protocol is used over the connection.
Of course, the confusing thing for people who aren't familiar with DCC is that it's the initiator's client that temporarily becomes the server for the contacted client, and not the other way round, like most people are used to, with http for example. So basically, it's people who initiate DCC connections who must open one or more inbound TCP ports in their firewalls, and configure their IRC clients to limit themselves to using those ports.