I have a question for./ers that is slightly off-topic, so mod away if you have to (I have karma to burn). My question is this: are there any standard free (as in GNU) C or C++ math libraries for handling massive bit-widths like you get in RSA keys? I've been trying to figure it out using google, et. al. but I always get a billion unrelated results. If you care, I am working on some code for this contest, but it seems excessive to have to write sqrt, division, and multiplication functions for huge integers. Thx.
I was half joking, in case you couldn't tell. The problem with your argument is the fact that CGI in itself is inherently secure. The only security holes which open are a direct result of the incompetence of the programmer who writes sloppy middleware code, or sloppy web server CGI handling code. For example, Apache compiled with no modules at all will not be vulnerable to any known CGI based attacks. DDOS attacks OTOH are a threat to any platform/OS combination, and must be either averted or ridden-out, depending on the situation. There is no excuse for buffer overflows;-) FS/open-source patches help this quite a lot (at least on x86 and ppc machines)
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
Security through unpopularity. Let's face it, if you run a web server under BeOS, the likelyhood of getting hacked compared to running IIS, is roughly the same as the ratio between BeOS users and Windows users. Cheap ass security advice: find the most unpopular system you can (put those Commodore 64s to use!), lock it down to the best of your sysadmin abilities, and start praying!
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
Wow, thanks! I sometimes regret that I never studied physics. The software programmer world has always been my true calling. Still, I can't help but wonder if a balding thirty year old perv would scare the cute college girls too much. So instead, I read Hawking, Kiko, Greene, and the like, but they tend to ignore the practical in favor of the abstract. I would like to be able to model physics experiments in software someday, so it has become my new hobby.
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
I think the dot GNU folks at FreeDevelopers have the right idea... "clean room" implementation that doesn't involve MS in any way. Once MS has become involved, they have the right to cry "IP foul", because of their own involvement! I thought of this a few days after reading the original MS working with Ximian article, but by then it would have been lost in the noise.
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
Ads are only successful when they are annoying/intrusive.
Under what authority do you make this assertion? You are 100% wrong. Where is that guy with the "everything you know is wrong (and stupid)" sig when you need him?
Obnoxiousness is not the best way to catch the eye, it is simply the cheapest. Doing anything else requires creativity, and therefore manpower, and therefore $$$. I posted an example of good (read: award winning) advertising here. If you read the linked article, take the marketdroid speak with a grain of salt, but otherwise it is a good representation of the work.
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
Hopefully Robert Llewellyn won't forget about his post as laundry-bot and part-time science officer gig on Red Dwarf! I heard rumors that they are working around his schedule in Junkyard Wars, but I see new Junkyard Wars shows, not Red Dwarf shows or movie. Don't forget about us little people in cult sci-fi fandom!
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
The "cold" in cold-fusion refers to the temperature necessary to start a reaction, not to the heat of the reaction itself. BTW: the bogus cold-fusion experiments carried out by those folks at the University of Utah (I forget their names) reportedly produced excess heat, but was not reliably reproducable by other experimenters. Do a google search on cold-fusion, and you will get a dozen reports on this debacle.
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
IANAP, so I am talking out my ass here, but it seems to me that the interior surface of the container of a reaction might just somehow be able to more directly collect energy, similar to the way solar-panels collect light. Of course, I have no idea what kind material might be used to accomplish this. How do solar-panels work? Silicon? Is it just dumb luck that the elements of a solar panel happen to convert light to energy, or is it a man-made composite, built specifically for that purpose?
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
OK point taken. The last three posts all say the same thing: it's so abundant it might as well be perpetual. That doesn't change the fact that by definition a "perpetual motion" machine requires said machine to function without regards to fuel or any other outside influence, a.k.a. self-contained. That was my only point.
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
that the only way we have invented to caputre the energy of a nuclear reaction was by superheating water and using steam pressure to turn turbines. That always seemed like a hack way to collect the energy. Anyone know if the energy collected from this thing is more direct than heat+water=turbine-power?
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
What I meant was that "theft" and "piracy" are terms that are applied by IP owners to terrorize people into thinking they are doing something very wrong. It was possibly too strong to state that it should not be illegal, but that was not the main point. The main point is that people should help each-other, a truth that extends far beyond RMS or any other self-proclaimed prophet. If you think I'm one of the blind followers of Brian, you are mistaken.
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
GRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!! I've stopped moderating, because I don't want to be lumped into any category with you a-holes. Overrated? I go and spill an important piece of my life and my feelings and I get moderated "overrated". A few days ago, I posted this troll, and got modded +4. Someone needs to hit the moderators with a serious clue stick...
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
is the fact that the GPL comes from an almost saint-like desire to help friends and neighbors. In that sense, the GPL is almost biblical (remember sunday school: respect thy neighbor). The fact is never mentioned that while the GPL might be anti-corporate under some circumstances, it is always pro-community.
The idealism of the GPL hit me personally when I read on the GNU philosophy pages (somewhere here) an insight on how it would be downright rude to refuse to burn a copy of Windows for my buddy. I had done exactly that many times, and RMS was making me realize that this is not "theft", or "piracy", by any stretch of the imagination, and should therefore not be illegal. So what he has done, instead of breaking these draconian laws, was to create a license that put these values into software and software developers.
In other words, the "M$ is evil" posters are right to an extent. Microsoft willfully breaks one of the ten commandments (I'm not religious at all, but the bible sure contains some great human truths) on a regular basis.
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
I was working at Kinkos here in Chicago at the time... The folks from Bungie came in to use our design station to produce comps for the box graphics. Pretty cool. That was in '94 or '95. Pretty sure it was '94 though...
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
I guess you don't have much experience working with ODBMS's (or CORBA) in real-world situations.
Yes, you are correct about this. Why? Because ODBMS's are currently all non-free. I only work with free software. My point was partially that it would be nice to see such a thing GPLd because then I (and a million others) could learn the concepts, and in the purest vein of free software development, improve it. The problems you mention could be overcome by free software developers.
Everyone in this little thread I've started is complaining about speed. The speed of xml sucks, the speed of RDBMS sucks. Well? Not every application needs to handle a zillion connections a second, you know. I think speed is overrated and design elegance and system maintainability is seriously underrated.
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
OK I see your point on speed. I generally work with smaller scale applications that don't require thousands of connections per second, and don't have terrabytes of data.
As for "not doing anything interesting", I have to disagree. Have you looked at xslt? Using it in combination with some programming logic, you can do some seriously interesting things. For example, a job site I am currently working on uses many separate xml files with different purposes. Some logic comes along and stiches the files together, and then processes the whole lot using xslt. The result is similar to RDB JOIN, with the notable difference that I have ultra fine control over every input and output element. Systems like this allow me to easily generate client-specific HTML output, and special case output such as simplified xml for syndication.
Of course when speed isn't a critical issue, a database or xml will work for a system like this. In the end, it comes down to a matter of personal preference.
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
Don't use DOM, use SAX instead. It's much more painful, but also at least 10x faster, without the memory requirements of DOM. Also, which parser are you using? I have found that Apache Xerces is a good API but slow, and that libxml is tougher to use, but faster.
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
The article is a little light on the details, but it would sure be nice to see an object database bundled with the next RH release. The flat "tables and rows" paradigm (did I really just say that?) is ok for some things, but in most cases, I often ask myself "why not use XML instead?" An ODB would give me a better reason to use a database at all. It would be sweet to store serialized C or Java objects this way, or access them through CORBA.
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
The old *BSD license had such a thing, known as an advertising clause. This is fine when a project uses source code from just your project, but can be problematic if/when many projects with such a license are incorporated into a new work. RMS discusses this very subject here.
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
Everyone here seems to be stating over and over the blatantly obvious fact that they didn't use code that was optimized for each target platform.
Well, I think the test was fucked for a completely different reason: They used a live internet connection for the test. Don't they know that the latency between those connections will change from execution to execution? For example, sometimes I hit slashdot, and on my nice slick t1 here at work, it loads instantly. Other times, during heavy loads, it takes up to thirty or fourty-five seconds. My point is that they are connecting to mail-servers which they have no knowledge of the current load of each server. This probably skewed their results wildly. In order for this test to be fair, they should have set up some boxen on their own intranet, and tested the connections with no other traffic around to mess up the results.
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
Slashdot Mirror
I have a question for ./ers that is slightly off-topic, so mod away if you have to (I have karma to burn). My question is this: are there any standard free (as in GNU) C or C++ math libraries for handling massive bit-widths like you get in RSA keys? I've been trying to figure it out using google, et. al. but I always get a billion unrelated results. If you care, I am working on some code for this contest, but it seems excessive to have to write sqrt, division, and multiplication functions for huge integers. Thx.
I was half joking, in case you couldn't tell. The problem with your argument is the fact that CGI in itself is inherently secure. The only security holes which open are a direct result of the incompetence of the programmer who writes sloppy middleware code, or sloppy web server CGI handling code. For example, Apache compiled with no modules at all will not be vulnerable to any known CGI based attacks. DDOS attacks OTOH are a threat to any platform/OS combination, and must be either averted or ridden-out, depending on the situation. There is no excuse for buffer overflows ;-) FS/open-source patches help this quite a lot (at least on x86 and ppc machines)
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
Security through unpopularity. Let's face it, if you run a web server under BeOS, the likelyhood of getting hacked compared to running IIS, is roughly the same as the ratio between BeOS users and Windows users. Cheap ass security advice: find the most unpopular system you can (put those Commodore 64s to use!), lock it down to the best of your sysadmin abilities, and start praying!
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
Wow, thanks! I sometimes regret that I never studied physics. The software programmer world has always been my true calling. Still, I can't help but wonder if a balding thirty year old perv would scare the cute college girls too much. So instead, I read Hawking, Kiko, Greene, and the like, but they tend to ignore the practical in favor of the abstract. I would like to be able to model physics experiments in software someday, so it has become my new hobby.
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
I think the dot GNU folks at FreeDevelopers have the right idea... "clean room" implementation that doesn't involve MS in any way. Once MS has become involved, they have the right to cry "IP foul", because of their own involvement! I thought of this a few days after reading the original MS working with Ximian article, but by then it would have been lost in the noise.
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
Under what authority do you make this assertion? You are 100% wrong. Where is that guy with the "everything you know is wrong (and stupid)" sig when you need him?
Obnoxiousness is not the best way to catch the eye, it is simply the cheapest. Doing anything else requires creativity, and therefore manpower, and therefore $$$. I posted an example of good (read: award winning) advertising here. If you read the linked article, take the marketdroid speak with a grain of salt, but otherwise it is a good representation of the work.Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
Hopefully Robert Llewellyn won't forget about his post as laundry-bot and part-time science officer gig on Red Dwarf! I heard rumors that they are working around his schedule in Junkyard Wars, but I see new Junkyard Wars shows, not Red Dwarf shows or movie. Don't forget about us little people in cult sci-fi fandom!
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
The "cold" in cold-fusion refers to the temperature necessary to start a reaction, not to the heat of the reaction itself. BTW: the bogus cold-fusion experiments carried out by those folks at the University of Utah (I forget their names) reportedly produced excess heat, but was not reliably reproducable by other experimenters. Do a google search on cold-fusion, and you will get a dozen reports on this debacle.
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
IANAP, so I am talking out my ass here, but it seems to me that the interior surface of the container of a reaction might just somehow be able to more directly collect energy, similar to the way solar-panels collect light. Of course, I have no idea what kind material might be used to accomplish this. How do solar-panels work? Silicon? Is it just dumb luck that the elements of a solar panel happen to convert light to energy, or is it a man-made composite, built specifically for that purpose?
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
OK point taken. The last three posts all say the same thing: it's so abundant it might as well be perpetual. That doesn't change the fact that by definition a "perpetual motion" machine requires said machine to function without regards to fuel or any other outside influence, a.k.a. self-contained. That was my only point.
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
What about the supply of deuterium? It's not perpetual...
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
that the only way we have invented to caputre the energy of a nuclear reaction was by superheating water and using steam pressure to turn turbines. That always seemed like a hack way to collect the energy. Anyone know if the energy collected from this thing is more direct than heat+water=turbine-power?
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
What I meant was that "theft" and "piracy" are terms that are applied by IP owners to terrorize people into thinking they are doing something very wrong. It was possibly too strong to state that it should not be illegal, but that was not the main point. The main point is that people should help each-other, a truth that extends far beyond RMS or any other self-proclaimed prophet. If you think I'm one of the blind followers of Brian, you are mistaken.
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
GRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!! I've stopped moderating, because I don't want to be lumped into any category with you a-holes. Overrated? I go and spill an important piece of my life and my feelings and I get moderated "overrated". A few days ago, I posted this troll, and got modded +4. Someone needs to hit the moderators with a serious clue stick...
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
is the fact that the GPL comes from an almost saint-like desire to help friends and neighbors. In that sense, the GPL is almost biblical (remember sunday school: respect thy neighbor). The fact is never mentioned that while the GPL might be anti-corporate under some circumstances, it is always pro-community.
The idealism of the GPL hit me personally when I read on the GNU philosophy pages (somewhere here) an insight on how it would be downright rude to refuse to burn a copy of Windows for my buddy. I had done exactly that many times, and RMS was making me realize that this is not "theft", or "piracy", by any stretch of the imagination, and should therefore not be illegal. So what he has done, instead of breaking these draconian laws, was to create a license that put these values into software and software developers.
In other words, the "M$ is evil" posters are right to an extent. Microsoft willfully breaks one of the ten commandments (I'm not religious at all, but the bible sure contains some great human truths) on a regular basis.
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
DW: I never cared much for the term "uncrackable", it seems a bit too much like "unsinkable".
Brigadier: What's wrong with "unsinkable"?
DW: "Nothing," said the iceberg to the Titanic [glug glug glug]
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
I was working at Kinkos here in Chicago at the time... The folks from Bungie came in to use our design station to produce comps for the box graphics. Pretty cool. That was in '94 or '95. Pretty sure it was '94 though...
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
Yes, you are correct about this. Why? Because ODBMS's are currently all non-free. I only work with free software. My point was partially that it would be nice to see such a thing GPLd because then I (and a million others) could learn the concepts, and in the purest vein of free software development, improve it. The problems you mention could be overcome by free software developers.
Everyone in this little thread I've started is complaining about speed. The speed of xml sucks, the speed of RDBMS sucks. Well? Not every application needs to handle a zillion connections a second, you know. I think speed is overrated and design elegance and system maintainability is seriously underrated.Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
OK I see your point on speed. I generally work with smaller scale applications that don't require thousands of connections per second, and don't have terrabytes of data.
As for "not doing anything interesting", I have to disagree. Have you looked at xslt? Using it in combination with some programming logic, you can do some seriously interesting things. For example, a job site I am currently working on uses many separate xml files with different purposes. Some logic comes along and stiches the files together, and then processes the whole lot using xslt. The result is similar to RDB JOIN, with the notable difference that I have ultra fine control over every input and output element. Systems like this allow me to easily generate client-specific HTML output, and special case output such as simplified xml for syndication.
Of course when speed isn't a critical issue, a database or xml will work for a system like this. In the end, it comes down to a matter of personal preference.
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
Don't use DOM, use SAX instead. It's much more painful, but also at least 10x faster, without the memory requirements of DOM. Also, which parser are you using? I have found that Apache Xerces is a good API but slow, and that libxml is tougher to use, but faster.
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
The article is a little light on the details, but it would sure be nice to see an object database bundled with the next RH release. The flat "tables and rows" paradigm (did I really just say that?) is ok for some things, but in most cases, I often ask myself "why not use XML instead?" An ODB would give me a better reason to use a database at all. It would be sweet to store serialized C or Java objects this way, or access them through CORBA.
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
The old *BSD license had such a thing, known as an advertising clause. This is fine when a project uses source code from just your project, but can be problematic if/when many projects with such a license are incorporated into a new work. RMS discusses this very subject here.
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
Everyone here seems to be stating over and over the blatantly obvious fact that they didn't use code that was optimized for each target platform.
Well, I think the test was fucked for a completely different reason: They used a live internet connection for the test. Don't they know that the latency between those connections will change from execution to execution? For example, sometimes I hit slashdot, and on my nice slick t1 here at work, it loads instantly. Other times, during heavy loads, it takes up to thirty or fourty-five seconds. My point is that they are connecting to mail-servers which they have no knowledge of the current load of each server. This probably skewed their results wildly. In order for this test to be fair, they should have set up some boxen on their own intranet, and tested the connections with no other traffic around to mess up the results.
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;