but Deja's archive apparently goes back to
only 1995, and that's about when the Usenet became essentially useless due to spam and poor s/n ratio.
Er.. there are hundreds of thousands of regular netnews users out there with no trouble reading their favourite groups. Certainly, there's a lot
of spam, but like most news sites, Deja applies all spam cancel messages issued. Anyone who thinks netnews is dead because of spam is kidding themselves. And the trolls are a lot more mature
on netnews, as well.
I was wondering, why get one of these new fangled 'set top mini box PCs', when you could buy one of these old-fashioned 'normal PCs' at half the price? Both of them are Linux-compatible, which is surely the important part?
Braille?
How's that supposed to work?
Little pimples raise up on the screen?
...pimples on a screen reader, actually. Most screen readers plug in the serial port and display one or two horizontal lines of text. Linux supports this for the console, in fact SuSE 7 automatically runs its installer in text mode if it detects a braille screen reader.
More advanced software for Windows writes what line is currently under the mouse pointer, provided it's text and not a graphic.
Amiga Voyager has a little bank of dots on the status bar, which show a colour to represent each concurrent connection. The primary connection (ie, the page being loaded in that window) gets to write 'looking up', 'reading', 'stalled', etc, into the status bar. Would that help?
They can't, unfortunately. Gosling explained at a lecture/Q&A that a lot of the cool stuff in NEWS is licensed from other companies, crucially the Display Postscript. It would be like Netscape open-sourcing their browser, but without the HTML rendering engine.
I'm a big fan of full disclosure of security issues, but this isn't an alltogether bad idea. If only because of the criticallity of BIND. If we could provide TLD admins with a little (note a
little) warning before exploits were announced it would greatly lessen the chance of a script kiddie doing serious damage. However, the information must be then made public, so other
administrators can stay informed. I would support giving TLD admins a head start. I would not support giving them an opportunity to try to rely on security through obscurity.
Well, while I can see your point, Script Kiddies don't really care if bugtraq posts an exploit or not. They get their exploits from l33t d00dz, not bugtraq. Besides, when is the right time to post an exploit? Good sysadmins want one immediately to see if they're in danger. Bad ones never want one, because they don't know or care there are security holes in their software until a kiddie reminds them that bugtraq is not the only sploit source.
I imagine as a fundamentalist Christian, he might be a little appalled to find his life's work being perverted by being associated with a product named after a secular humanist anti-God,
power-mad secret society.
That's marvellously wrong. Masons are paid-up fundamentalist proddy godslaves (ie they believe in the OT+NT bible, the Queen, and the divine right of men to 0wn women). And from Larry's lovely chapter in the Open Sources book, I doubt he's a redneck fundie himself.
Will someone please explain to me why copyright and patent infringements are called theft? What has been stolen?
It's just propoganda, or PR if you like. Sellers call it "theft". Stallman calls it "sharing". Both have connotations that the correct term, "copyright violations" does not have. However, the people calling it theft or sharing want people to identify with those connotations.
If you copy an entire piece of commercial software and use the copy instead of purchasing that software, the software vendors argue that you have used their service but did not pay them their demanded fee for that service. That would be theft.
It is the using their product without paying their fee that is theft, not the copying part. It's just that the copyright laws are the best tool in law to protect against such theft, but don't knock them because they also bring useful protection, like the right to make a backup.
Re:Accidents, far more than firearms
on
Clever Girl Bess
·
· Score: 2
deaths
from firearms accidents have declined every year since the 1920s.
Whereas, deaths from non-accidental firearms use have gone up every year since the 1920s!
Sorry to hear about your security holes, but I'd rather use something that works best for me. If that means I use a non-GPL license, that's fine. If it means I use a closed-source (gasp! Horror!) program, that's fine, too.
Fine by me too. Just don't cry like a girl when Bernstein comes round to your house to bitchslap you for daring to fix djbdns security holes without his permission!!
What, you think only software under the GPL can be legally used?
No, but only the GPL (and other Free licenses like *BSD, etc) allow true freedom. One of those freedoms is the freedom to distribute binaries, but Bernstein's license won't allow me to do that if my system isn't up to his standards.
Are you saying the jump from 3.0 to 3.1 is more substantial than the leap from 3.1 to 3.9-- 3.9 has updated libraries, bug fixes, setpatch, new prefs, extra features, an improved
workbench (as far as functionality and aesthetics)... That is what an OS update is.
3.1 is basically the same as 3.0. The requirement of 3.1 ROMs to upgrade to 3.5 or 3.9 is a cheap ploy to clear out the back stock of 3.1 ROMs that didn't go into new Amiga models. Everything that is in 3.5 or 3.9 is either already done by or actually taken from the software available from Aminet - it just has an 'official' gloss now.
Three words: Read My Webpage. What machine do I use every day? An Amiga. What machine have I used for the past 8 years? An Amiga. The Amiga died soon after Commodore went bust, but its community lived on. Here are some opinions for you to chew:
OS3.5 and OS3.9 are *not* real OSes; OS3.0/3.1 are. Linux m68k / PPC are.
The set-top box dream, the convergence dream are just that: dreams. The A1200 and A4000 are *real*, and in wide supply.
The greatest contribution to the Amiga Community is not made by H&P, or even Amiga Inc, but Aminet.
Amiga Inc are a *threat* to the Amiga community - just look at their posturing over AROS, they think they should have control over things that aren't theirs to control.
Before their Amiga involvement, what did Taos do? Yes, write an OS for deader-than-dead transputer technology.
Leave it alone! It would spin in its grave at this announcement, if it hadn't been turned into an undead zombie by the evil Tao / Eyetech / Fleece-the-customers Moss conspiracy.
While the RIP act (not a bill - chillingly, it's a real law now) is incredibly draconian and is an outright attack on the online populus, we can take a little comfort in that it has strong enemies:
The Human Rights Act
The Data Protection Act. In particular, our Data Protection Registrar has promised to prosecute any bosses that contravene the DP act under the auspices of the RIP act. Your privacy is safe with her.
As far as privacy goes, this is a consumer-oriented study, so really it's more about what businesses will do with your information, under the juristiction of the Data Protection act. The RIP act is more about MI5 spooks trying to snoop on you from the comfy chairs in GCHQ.
All this means is that the music industry will replace SDMI with something more secure. The fact that it was broken *now* is a positive thing for them as they don't have to worry about supporting hardware that doesn't yet exist.
Duh. You forget rule number one of security through obscurity - IT ISN'T SECURE. Even using the strongest, least crackable encryption method, or most stealthy watermarking will fail, as the SDMI devices will need to reveal their secret key in their execution flow. The secret can't be hidden in software, decades of 16 year old crackers have shown companies that. Only tamper-proof hardware can hide it, and even then the electrical engineers will have a go at opening up the hardware.
It's only possible to be 'secret' by demanding that an SDMI device contact some more secure device via the 'net. But even then the messages sent back and forth can be logged and replayed to fool the SDMI device.
I purport that the next SDMI scheme will be broken. And the one after that. And the one after that, etc. The only secure way to do it is to actually keep a secret, and to do that is just not possible. Public key encryption works by never revealing the private key. Only a human with locks on the doors can do that, an automated device stands no chance of keeping a key private.
For example: let's say you have a function that gets passed a region of malloc()'ed memory. You want to know exactly how much memory you have to play with.
Pass the length as another parameter. That's what fread(), sprintf(), etc mandate.
What you're talking about is home rolled resource tracking. It's not too hard to do it portably, but there are already loads of leak tracking, etc malloc() replacements out there.
Slashdot Mirror
He's posted three of them recently.
but Deja's archive apparently goes back to only 1995, and that's about when the Usenet became essentially useless due to spam and poor s/n ratio.
Er.. there are hundreds of thousands of regular netnews users out there with no trouble reading their favourite groups. Certainly, there's a lot of spam, but like most news sites, Deja applies all spam cancel messages issued. Anyone who thinks netnews is dead because of spam is kidding themselves. And the trolls are a lot more mature on netnews, as well.
Perhaps they can rename it back to "DejaNews". DejaNews - netnews for nerds, stuff that matters.
I was wondering, why get one of these new fangled 'set top mini box PCs', when you could buy one of these old-fashioned 'normal PCs' at half the price? Both of them are Linux-compatible, which is surely the important part?
It means they look nicer and take longer to draw, unless your gfx card does it for free. That's about it.
The bravado is because X has absolutely no support whatsoever for antialiased fonts, and deliberately makes it difficult for the toolkit writer.
Braille? How's that supposed to work? Little pimples raise up on the screen?
...pimples on a screen reader, actually. Most screen readers plug in the serial port and display one or two horizontal lines of text. Linux supports this for the console, in fact SuSE 7 automatically runs its installer in text mode if it detects a braille screen reader.
More advanced software for Windows writes what line is currently under the mouse pointer, provided it's text and not a graphic.
Amiga Voyager has a little bank of dots on the status bar, which show a colour to represent each concurrent connection. The primary connection (ie, the page being loaded in that window) gets to write 'looking up', 'reading', 'stalled', etc, into the status bar. Would that help?
I want them to release NEWS
They can't, unfortunately. Gosling explained at a lecture/Q&A that a lot of the cool stuff in NEWS is licensed from other companies, crucially the Display Postscript. It would be like Netscape open-sourcing their browser, but without the HTML rendering engine.
"Quantum Physics - the dreams that stuff is made of" -- Michael Sinz
In case you're wondering where that joke came from.
I'm a big fan of full disclosure of security issues, but this isn't an alltogether bad idea. If only because of the criticallity of BIND. If we could provide TLD admins with a little (note a little) warning before exploits were announced it would greatly lessen the chance of a script kiddie doing serious damage. However, the information must be then made public, so other administrators can stay informed. I would support giving TLD admins a head start. I would not support giving them an opportunity to try to rely on security through obscurity.
Well, while I can see your point, Script Kiddies don't really care if bugtraq posts an exploit or not. They get their exploits from l33t d00dz, not bugtraq. Besides, when is the right time to post an exploit? Good sysadmins want one immediately to see if they're in danger. Bad ones never want one, because they don't know or care there are security holes in their software until a kiddie reminds them that bugtraq is not the only sploit source.
I imagine as a fundamentalist Christian, he might be a little appalled to find his life's work being perverted by being associated with a product named after a secular humanist anti-God, power-mad secret society.
That's marvellously wrong. Masons are paid-up fundamentalist proddy godslaves (ie they believe in the OT+NT bible, the Queen, and the divine right of men to 0wn women). And from Larry's lovely chapter in the Open Sources book, I doubt he's a redneck fundie himself.
may I recommend that you use ASP instead?
You certainly may, Mr troll. Anything that's good enough for Cleopatra is good enough for me.
Will someone please explain to me why copyright and patent infringements are called theft? What has been stolen?
It's just propoganda, or PR if you like. Sellers call it "theft". Stallman calls it "sharing". Both have connotations that the correct term, "copyright violations" does not have. However, the people calling it theft or sharing want people to identify with those connotations.
If you copy an entire piece of commercial software and use the copy instead of purchasing that software, the software vendors argue that you have used their service but did not pay them their demanded fee for that service. That would be theft.
It is the using their product without paying their fee that is theft, not the copying part. It's just that the copyright laws are the best tool in law to protect against such theft, but don't knock them because they also bring useful protection, like the right to make a backup.
deaths from firearms accidents have declined every year since the 1920s.
Whereas, deaths from non-accidental firearms use have gone up every year since the 1920s!
Sorry to hear about your security holes, but I'd rather use something that works best for me. If that means I use a non-GPL license, that's fine. If it means I use a closed-source (gasp! Horror!) program, that's fine, too.
Fine by me too. Just don't cry like a girl when Bernstein comes round to your house to bitchslap you for daring to fix djbdns security holes without his permission!!
What, you think only software under the GPL can be legally used?
No, but only the GPL (and other Free licenses like *BSD, etc) allow true freedom. One of those freedoms is the freedom to distribute binaries, but Bernstein's license won't allow me to do that if my system isn't up to his standards.
Are you saying the jump from 3.0 to 3.1 is more substantial than the leap from 3.1 to 3.9-- 3.9 has updated libraries, bug fixes, setpatch, new prefs, extra features, an improved workbench (as far as functionality and aesthetics)... That is what an OS update is.
3.1 is basically the same as 3.0. The requirement of 3.1 ROMs to upgrade to 3.5 or 3.9 is a cheap ploy to clear out the back stock of 3.1 ROMs that didn't go into new Amiga models. Everything that is in 3.5 or 3.9 is either already done by or actually taken from the software available from Aminet - it just has an 'official' gloss now.
Leave it alone! It would spin in its grave at this announcement, if it hadn't been turned into an undead zombie by the evil Tao / Eyetech / Fleece-the-customers Moss conspiracy.
- The Human Rights Act
- The Data Protection Act. In particular, our Data Protection Registrar has promised to prosecute any bosses that contravene the DP act under the auspices of the RIP act. Your privacy is safe with her.
As far as privacy goes, this is a consumer-oriented study, so really it's more about what businesses will do with your information, under the juristiction of the Data Protection act. The RIP act is more about MI5 spooks trying to snoop on you from the comfy chairs in GCHQ.ba ba booey to all of you?
Cheers for the info, Bob.
Yummy! Also, Rice Krispies came bundled with strawberry flavoured exploding 'space dust' last year. Scrum-diddily-umptious!
All this means is that the music industry will replace SDMI with something more secure. The fact that it was broken *now* is a positive thing for them as they don't have to worry about supporting hardware that doesn't yet exist.
Duh. You forget rule number one of security through obscurity - IT ISN'T SECURE. Even using the strongest, least crackable encryption method, or most stealthy watermarking will fail, as the SDMI devices will need to reveal their secret key in their execution flow. The secret can't be hidden in software, decades of 16 year old crackers have shown companies that. Only tamper-proof hardware can hide it, and even then the electrical engineers will have a go at opening up the hardware.
It's only possible to be 'secret' by demanding that an SDMI device contact some more secure device via the 'net. But even then the messages sent back and forth can be logged and replayed to fool the SDMI device.
I purport that the next SDMI scheme will be broken. And the one after that. And the one after that, etc. The only secure way to do it is to actually keep a secret, and to do that is just not possible. Public key encryption works by never revealing the private key. Only a human with locks on the doors can do that, an automated device stands no chance of keeping a key private.
For example: let's say you have a function that gets passed a region of malloc()'ed memory. You want to know exactly how much memory you have to play with.
Pass the length as another parameter. That's what fread(), sprintf(), etc mandate.
What you're talking about is home rolled resource tracking. It's not too hard to do it portably, but there are already loads of leak tracking, etc malloc() replacements out there.