It's possible the files were transferred in ASCII mode. This means that any place a '\r\n' appeared in the file, it was replaced by a '\n'. This is normally OK (and sometimes desirable) for text files, but can really cause problems with binary files. Because \r is 0x0d and \n is 0x0a, they can often appear in sequence in that in a binary file (like two pixels in an image) when they do not mean a line break.
I would recommend that the submitted check to make sure that binary mode was enabled in the FTP client and also to generate MD5 sums for the files before and after transit. The MD5 sums will tell you if the file's contents were changed.
...the odds of extraterrestrial life in our own Solar System.
There is only one Solar System in the entire galaxy. This is because the name the star that Earth orbits is "Sol", hence the Solal System. There are other stellar systems (I think that's the right phrase) out there, but only one Solar System.
Slashdot was written in the late 90s when there were no other web forums (or at least not many) and BBcode didn't exist (ah, good times!) Back then, everyone knew that to bold something you used <b>, not [b]. And Slashdot does have a post preview -- just some people choose not to use it:)
Frankly, I don't see what's so hard about using HTML in your posts. It's not any harder than something like BBcode (mostly just use angle brackets instead of square brackets). HTML is harder on the server side since Slashdot has to parse it and figure out what's OK HTML, like <b>, and what's bad HTML, like <script> (though if/. filtered out some of its own scripts, that would be good too).
Choosing "Plain Old Text" as the posting method is usually the easiest. You don't have to use <br> or <p> to do line formatting, but you still get to use other HTML stuff. You do have to use < and >, though, which can be annoying. And to bring this post on topic, I don't know why that isn't the default option for posting. I'm pretty sure you can set it to be in your user options, because it's always what is set by default for my posts.
I'm sure everyone's spam problems are different, but I think this drastically reduced my volume of spam. My spam levels haven't been that high lately, maybe a dozen a day. But for the last couple of days, it's been practically zero. I don't know if it's related, but almost all the spams I got were spams with just an image (that contained a URL and drug prices). Lately, they seemed to switch to RTF attachments, but now they aren't coming in at all. I actually thought my email server might be broken:)
I'm sure that in a few more days the spammers will regain control of their botnets, but at least I have a few spam free days.
You're using an extremely weird unit testing framework if it pops up dialogs for errors by default, and if it cannot be configured to just log all errors. I'm not actually aware of any that does that (in particular, MSTest - the one that comes with VS - doesn't do that).
It's a homegrown system, but it really was just a wrapper around assert(). We've actually recently changed it to throw an exception on failure on Windows, and all exceptions are caught and printed in main(). That should hopefully limit test failure popups. Though I'm pretty sure that hardware exceptions (like null pointer deferences) would still cause a popup.
Programming on Windows is easier? Seriously, I just can't let that go.
At work, we have a codebase that compiles on Sun, Linux, and SGI fine, and mostly compiles on that monstrosity known as Windows. I'm sure that most of our issues working with Windows stem from the fact that the system started its life on UNIX and was ported to Windows, but that's no excuse for some of the issues we face:
It literally takes an order of magnitude longer to compile on Windows. It's a pretty big system, and takes about 2-3 hours to compile on Linux. But that's nothing compared to the 24+ hours it takes on Windows. Now, a lot of that is due to the fact that the higher ups in the company demand that we use ClearCase, which means everything on the compile is done over the network. Some people have done experiments where they copy all the code and 3rd party libraries to the local hard drive, and the compile is much faster. But all that points to the fact that Windows network drivers are bad.
Debugging is a PITA. No core files. If something crashes, you might get a message box saying an exception occurred, you know, somewhere. I suppose if we re-compiled with debugging symbols, we might be able to use VS to figure out where the fault is, but we can't always compile everything in debug mode (even on Linux that significantly increases binary sizes and run times).
Pop-ups at the wrong times. We have an extensive suite of unit test programs that we like to run to make sure that the code is correct. On UNIX, if a test fails, we'll get an assertion failure written to the log file and maybe a core file. On Windows, we get a popup saying there is an error. Which would be nice, if we weren't doing the testing over night (see 24+ hour build time), so the popup stops the build! And there are at least 3 different types of popups that could happen. At least the most common can be overcome with the "stapler trick" -- lock the machine and place a stapler on the "enter" key on the right of the keyboard so the popup is immediately dismissed.
Random brokenness in each new VS release. Whenever we consider changing VS versions, I always wonder what will break in the new version. We generally use VS2003 for compiling because VS2005 had a lot of problems. I don't remember all the details, but ISTR there were a lot of things we couldn't easily work around. I do remember something about calling access(2) with some arguments (not even bad arguments) could cause a crash.
Missing functionality in the system. Lots of common POSIX features just aren't present on Windows. Things like symlink(2)/readlink(2), fork(2), signals, and even strptime(3) just aren't present. We've mostly worked around these (providing our own implementation, or using other methods), but it's a pain, and some things don't work right.
Weirdness in the libraries. Did you know that in a Windows C++ library, 'static' data members aren't automatically included across libraries? VS makes a second copy of the static variable in the calling library and leaves it uninitialized, unless you put __declspec(dllimport) in the static declaration. When compiling the calling library, at least -- that can't be there when compiling the code for the called library! Which leads to weird macros for something the compiler should do by default.
And last, my current build machine has been messed up for some time, and our IT dept doesn't seem to know how to fix it. It suffers from some sort of PID starvation. No PIDs can be reused without rebooting the machine. It gets up to about PID 100000 and then just says it can't run anything else. Since Windows PIDs are always a multiple of 4, this means I get at most 25,000 processes per boot. Seems like a lot until you consider that make tends to run a lot of processes. I can't even get through generating all the Makefiles before I run out of processes and have to reboot. I suspec this is a driver problem of some sort, but don't know what. Fortunately, this means I just don't have
In case anyone is curious, this is the type of thing that coppro is talking about:
c:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\include\io.h(318) : see declaration of 'close'
Message: 'The POSIX name for this item is deprecated. Instead, use the ISO C++ conformant name: _close. See online help for details.'
Now, as far as I know, no ISO body has deprecated functions like close(2), open(2), read(2), and write(2). And I've always heard that methods that start with an underscore are internal compiler functions and shouldn't be called directly. I don't know why the MS compiler writers think they can do this, but it is really annoying to get hundreds of warnings like this when compiling. In addition, it hides legitimate warnings that could indicate real problems.
As to the article in question, I can't think of any good reason why memcpy(3C) would be considered unsafe, since it specifies the amount of memory to copy. Sure, you could use it to copy outside the bounds of dst, but that's just calling it incorrectly. It's not like sprintf(3C) where you could easily accidentally write outside the bounds of the string.
I use this in (x)emacs all the time, so I thought that would be a really neat feature in OOo. However, when I tried it on Ubuntu it tried to read the file or directory named '$PWD' and didn't expand it to the environment variable. It could be because OOo is using the Gnome file dialogs and they don't support environment variable expansion. Too bad -- it would be really neat if they did.
"Though the satellite has a global coverage we will use it only for our use," ISRO chief G Madhavan Nair told reporters at a post-launch press conference.
Yeah... just like RICO was only used against gangsters, the PATRIOT act only against terrorists, and asset forfeiture only against drug lords. And red light cameras and automatic speed traps are for safety, not revenue generation. Sure.
Not that there's any reason that they couldn't or shouldn't use their new satellite to look at other nations, it's just annoying when officials say something like that that they know (or should know) will be false.
Sure, Java is more efficient than Python. But is it more efficient than native code? http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/ has statistics and comparisons for many languages. They wrote the best programs they could to perform different tasks in each language and compared the results.
C++ is slightly faster on all the tests, but not by as much as I'd expect, and Java is faster than some of the C implementations. At best, C++ is 3x faster and at worst it's about the same. Java does have a 10 to 30x memory footprint, though.
So I hope GAE charges by the CPU hour and not the amount of memory used:)
IE usage down to 14% seems like a major story, even for a tech heavy site like Slashdot. It would be interesting to see trends of browsers on/. over time. And maybe even OS stats?
btw, Taco, I use noscript to turn off the Javascript on/., mostly because Firefox 2 on my Solaris machine is just too slow (and there's really no hope of getting Firefox 3 working -- I'd have to compile half of Gnome in library upgrades). I can accept some of the UI weirdness (like the gray triangle on top of every story on the main page), but I hope you don't make Javascript a requirement for viewing/. That would be painful!
As I understand it, e-file is only free if you make less than a certain amount. For the rest of us, it's either pay for tax preparation software (which can come with "free" e-files) or print out the forms. Since I don't want to support an industry that lobbies to make our taxes harder, I choose to print the forms.
Sadly, I think I'm the only person I know IRL who still does this. Whenever I ask a friend about taxes, they just say "I don't know -- I just used TurboTax".
I don't have to read a bunch of text or watch a MS ad. All I have to do is look at the prices in the latest Best Buy circular. Hm, let's see.
digs out Best Buy ad
Laptops,... laptops... ah here they are, right in the middle.
It looks like I could get a netbook for $300, but forget that. Or a low end laptop with only 2GB of RAM and a 160 GB HD for $400. Or on the higher end, I could get an HP with 4 GB of RAM and a 320 GB HD for $730, or a similar spec'd Dell but with a few more bells and whistles for $900.
Or I could go really high end and get a MacBook. For the low price of $1000, I could get a laptop with 2 GB of RAM and 120 GB hard drive.
Seriously, do Apple apologists not look at things like this? The most expensive PC laptop BB advertises is $100 less than the cheapest Mac laptop. And its specs aren't that great. Its CPU and graphics are closer to the high end system, but the RAM and HD are at the low end.
Now I'm sure Mac's are really nice to use (at least that's what everybody says, I prefer the openness of Linux), and their hardware is supposed to be top notch. But as everyone who goes shopping for computers finds out, Macs are just more expensive. There are plenty of good reasons for that, I don't deny it. And maybe it's worth it -- that's for the buyer to decide. But don't try to pretend it isn't true. Maybe it's a good thing. It's not like it's hurt Porche's image being way more expensive than other cars. Macs are just the "luxury" computers. And I'll leave the implications of that as an exercise to the reader:)
I assume you're talking about winmail.dat files? Try the LookOut addon for Thunderbird. I think this is what I have installed at home to deal with those occasional annoyances.
Well, they at least share part of the blame. The scumbags at Phorm get some of it, too.
If rules limiting the amount of sport, gossip and leisure stories were enforced, we would have better watchdogs.
Doubtful. And frankly, disgusting. There are plenty of news sources out there that don't have a lot of those stories (NPR, for example). But they don't have high ratings. Why? Because, sadly, people want sports, gossip, leisure stories, and don't care about their freedoms.
I'm not sure how we could encourage society as a whole to care about what you and I would consider the more important things. Societies have had this problem going back to Rome (and before). Maybe there isn't a way. But I can tell you that forcing the media to report only what you think is important definitely isn't the way.
That's easy. Imagine you're a normal person (OK, that might be hard for the/. crowd). You want to buy a new computer. Your choices are Vista or Mac. More than 90% of people out there are never going to replace the OS (and that's not necessarily a bad thing). I know what I'm doing, and I'm usually a little nervous when I format the drive. But for the average person, if you don't want Vista (for whatever reason), you can get a Mac or nothing.
It's true there are more ways to get a Linux machine retail now, such as netbooks. But for laptops or desktops for normal people, it's Vista or Mac. As Vista becomes less popular, it's only natural for Mac to become more popular.
FF and T-bird really need an "override lock" option for these cases. Expecting users to be able to find and remove the "lock" and ".parentlock" files is pretty unreasonable.
- non-technical users always finding new ways to download and install software on their home dirs that behaves badly over NFS.
That sounds like proof that Linux is ready for the desktop:)
But seriously, there shouldn't be any problems running software from an NFS mount. At my employer, nothing but the operating system is installed locally. Everything else is run over NFS mounts (both IT installed and our own developed stuff). Are you using soft NFS mounts? If so, that could cause problems if the network drops out briefly or if the NFS server dies. Using "hard" mounts seems to work better, but it can sometimes cause processes to go into uninterruptable sleep.
As I understand it, the USA did not outright ban stem cell research. Instead, President Bush banned the use of federal funds in research involving embryonic stem cell lines created after a certain date. Research could still continue, just not with federal money. Now, maybe this effectively banned the research, and it probably slowed it down, but it wasn't like the research was against the law.
I don't remember if President Obama is allowing federal funds to go to research with later stem cell lines.
I can't imagine there is a netbook or lightweight laptop out there that is so slow it cannot run Emacs to load source files, which are just plain text. Emacs may have been bloated 20 years ago, but by today's standards it's lean and mean (of course, this means we've developed whole new levels of bloat in things like Eclipse). Any machine that can run Firefox can run emacs.
I guess it's neat that you can edit source files through a browser, and I can even think of times where it would be useful (editing files on a server you have no other access to). But for day to day usage? It seems like it would be pretty bad.
Business accounts are more expensive than regular accounts. If the phone company decided that I couldn't call a specific area code unless I upgraded to a business account, I wouldn't be too please. Degrading the service and then saying you can get rid of the block by paying more money is awfully close to extortion.
Because Comcast has blocked incoming port 25 traffic as well!
As someone with a personal domain, I'm not sure what the long term solution is going to be. Eventually, everyone is going to block all port 25 traffic, and only the "big guys" will be able to send and receive email. I don't want to pay for some co-lo since I am already paying for Internet service and can run a small mail server just fine. Google mail for domains (or whatever its called) might be a solution, but I don't like the idea of Google reading all my mail, and there's no guarantee that service would be around forever anyway.
I wish DNS allowed me to specify a port in addition to the host in the MX record.
#3. Provide a "known good" list of files (names, date/time, multiple checksums) for ALL of the OS files. This way, at least infections can be removed easier. It's easier to find a file that is NOT on the known good and remove it than it is to find a file that MAY be a newly obfuscated version of an old virus.
You can't trust anything on the computer once it's been compromised - it's basic computer science theory. You can hope for the best, but that's about it.
The tripwire folks figured out how to do this well over a decade ago. All you have to do is cryptographically sign your hashes, preferably with a key that is not readily available to the system (either it's kept elsewhere or there is a password on it). Sure, the intruding SW could corrupt or delete the hash list, but it couldn't fool you into thinking a binary was good.
Unfortunately, the last time I had it working, tripwire was a PITA to setup and use. It seemed to check the wrong things (I didn't care that/dev/tty0 changed because someone logged in, or something like that) and always had to be updated after system updates were installed. I don't know if anyone has done any tripwrite + package manager integration since I last used it, but that would probably make it easier to use.
I had this happen once. I went in for an advertised UPS, and I couldn't find it. I asked one of the guys there, and he couldn't find any either, so they ordered one for me, shipped right to me house. No extra charge for shipping. I later realized that the deal was supposed to be a "web only", so I probably should have paid some shipping charge. The employee probably broke some rule by giving it to me with free shipping, but I was happy.
Interesting side note, the UPS arrived just afterTropical Storm Fay came through my area. I remember thinking it would have been a lot more useful if it had come a few days earlier.
Slashdot Mirror
It's possible the files were transferred in ASCII mode. This means that any place a '\r\n' appeared in the file, it was replaced by a '\n'. This is normally OK (and sometimes desirable) for text files, but can really cause problems with binary files. Because \r is 0x0d and \n is 0x0a, they can often appear in sequence in that in a binary file (like two pixels in an image) when they do not mean a line break.
I would recommend that the submitted check to make sure that binary mode was enabled in the FTP client and also to generate MD5 sums for the files before and after transit. The MD5 sums will tell you if the file's contents were changed.
He could start charging Facebook users. Then he wouldn't need as many servers.
:)
...the odds of extraterrestrial life in our own Solar System.
There is only one Solar System in the entire galaxy. This is because the name the star that Earth orbits is "Sol", hence the Solal System. There are other stellar systems (I think that's the right phrase) out there, but only one Solar System.
Slashdot was written in the late 90s when there were no other web forums (or at least not many) and BBcode didn't exist (ah, good times!) Back then, everyone knew that to bold something you used <b>, not [b]. And Slashdot does have a post preview -- just some people choose not to use it :)
Frankly, I don't see what's so hard about using HTML in your posts. It's not any harder than something like BBcode (mostly just use angle brackets instead of square brackets). HTML is harder on the server side since Slashdot has to parse it and figure out what's OK HTML, like <b>, and what's bad HTML, like <script> (though if /. filtered out some of its own scripts, that would be good too).
Choosing "Plain Old Text" as the posting method is usually the easiest. You don't have to use <br> or <p> to do line formatting, but you still get to use other HTML stuff. You do have to use < and >, though, which can be annoying. And to bring this post on topic, I don't know why that isn't the default option for posting. I'm pretty sure you can set it to be in your user options, because it's always what is set by default for my posts.
I'm sure everyone's spam problems are different, but I think this drastically reduced my volume of spam. My spam levels haven't been that high lately, maybe a dozen a day. But for the last couple of days, it's been practically zero. I don't know if it's related, but almost all the spams I got were spams with just an image (that contained a URL and drug prices). Lately, they seemed to switch to RTF attachments, but now they aren't coming in at all. I actually thought my email server might be broken :)
I'm sure that in a few more days the spammers will regain control of their botnets, but at least I have a few spam free days.
It's a homegrown system, but it really was just a wrapper around assert(). We've actually recently changed it to throw an exception on failure on Windows, and all exceptions are caught and printed in main(). That should hopefully limit test failure popups. Though I'm pretty sure that hardware exceptions (like null pointer deferences) would still cause a popup.
Interesting pointer on CreateSymbolicLink(), though it's only in Vista. There also doesn't seem to be a readlink() equivalent, which is odd.
Programming on Windows is easier? Seriously, I just can't let that go.
At work, we have a codebase that compiles on Sun, Linux, and SGI fine, and mostly compiles on that monstrosity known as Windows. I'm sure that most of our issues working with Windows stem from the fact that the system started its life on UNIX and was ported to Windows, but that's no excuse for some of the issues we face:
In case anyone is curious, this is the type of thing that coppro is talking about:
c:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\include\io.h(318) : see declaration of 'close'
Message: 'The POSIX name for this item is deprecated. Instead, use the ISO C++ conformant name: _close. See online help for details.'
Now, as far as I know, no ISO body has deprecated functions like close(2), open(2), read(2), and write(2). And I've always heard that methods that start with an underscore are internal compiler functions and shouldn't be called directly. I don't know why the MS compiler writers think they can do this, but it is really annoying to get hundreds of warnings like this when compiling. In addition, it hides legitimate warnings that could indicate real problems.
As to the article in question, I can't think of any good reason why memcpy(3C) would be considered unsafe, since it specifies the amount of memory to copy. Sure, you could use it to copy outside the bounds of dst, but that's just calling it incorrectly. It's not like sprintf(3C) where you could easily accidentally write outside the bounds of the string.
I use this in (x)emacs all the time, so I thought that would be a really neat feature in OOo. However, when I tried it on Ubuntu it tried to read the file or directory named '$PWD' and didn't expand it to the environment variable. It could be because OOo is using the Gnome file dialogs and they don't support environment variable expansion. Too bad -- it would be really neat if they did.
From TFA:
"Though the satellite has a global coverage we will use it only for our use," ISRO chief G Madhavan Nair told reporters at a post-launch press conference.
Yeah... just like RICO was only used against gangsters, the PATRIOT act only against terrorists, and asset forfeiture only against drug lords. And red light cameras and automatic speed traps are for safety, not revenue generation. Sure.
Not that there's any reason that they couldn't or shouldn't use their new satellite to look at other nations, it's just annoying when officials say something like that that they know (or should know) will be false.
Sure, Java is more efficient than Python. But is it more efficient than native code? http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/ has statistics and comparisons for many languages. They wrote the best programs they could to perform different tasks in each language and compared the results.
Java compared to Python
Java compared to C
Java compared to C++
C++ is slightly faster on all the tests, but not by as much as I'd expect, and Java is faster than some of the C implementations. At best, C++ is 3x faster and at worst it's about the same. Java does have a 10 to 30x memory footprint, though.
So I hope GAE charges by the CPU hour and not the amount of memory used :)
IE usage down to 14% seems like a major story, even for a tech heavy site like Slashdot. It would be interesting to see trends of browsers on /. over time. And maybe even OS stats?
btw, Taco, I use noscript to turn off the Javascript on /., mostly because Firefox 2 on my Solaris machine is just too slow (and there's really no hope of getting Firefox 3 working -- I'd have to compile half of Gnome in library upgrades). I can accept some of the UI weirdness (like the gray triangle on top of every story on the main page), but I hope you don't make Javascript a requirement for viewing /. That would be painful!
As I understand it, e-file is only free if you make less than a certain amount. For the rest of us, it's either pay for tax preparation software (which can come with "free" e-files) or print out the forms. Since I don't want to support an industry that lobbies to make our taxes harder, I choose to print the forms.
Sadly, I think I'm the only person I know IRL who still does this. Whenever I ask a friend about taxes, they just say "I don't know -- I just used TurboTax".
I don't have to read a bunch of text or watch a MS ad. All I have to do is look at the prices in the latest Best Buy circular. Hm, let's see.
digs out Best Buy ad
Laptops, ... laptops... ah here they are, right in the middle.
It looks like I could get a netbook for $300, but forget that. Or a low end laptop with only 2GB of RAM and a 160 GB HD for $400. Or on the higher end, I could get an HP with 4 GB of RAM and a 320 GB HD for $730, or a similar spec'd Dell but with a few more bells and whistles for $900.
Or I could go really high end and get a MacBook. For the low price of $1000, I could get a laptop with 2 GB of RAM and 120 GB hard drive.
Seriously, do Apple apologists not look at things like this? The most expensive PC laptop BB advertises is $100 less than the cheapest Mac laptop. And its specs aren't that great. Its CPU and graphics are closer to the high end system, but the RAM and HD are at the low end.
Now I'm sure Mac's are really nice to use (at least that's what everybody says, I prefer the openness of Linux), and their hardware is supposed to be top notch. But as everyone who goes shopping for computers finds out, Macs are just more expensive. There are plenty of good reasons for that, I don't deny it. And maybe it's worth it -- that's for the buyer to decide. But don't try to pretend it isn't true. Maybe it's a good thing. It's not like it's hurt Porche's image being way more expensive than other cars. Macs are just the "luxury" computers. And I'll leave the implications of that as an exercise to the reader :)
I assume you're talking about winmail.dat files? Try the LookOut addon for Thunderbird. I think this is what I have installed at home to deal with those occasional annoyances.
The media is to blame for this.
Well, they at least share part of the blame. The scumbags at Phorm get some of it, too.
If rules limiting the amount of sport, gossip and leisure stories were enforced, we would have better watchdogs.
Doubtful. And frankly, disgusting. There are plenty of news sources out there that don't have a lot of those stories (NPR, for example). But they don't have high ratings. Why? Because, sadly, people want sports, gossip, leisure stories, and don't care about their freedoms.
I'm not sure how we could encourage society as a whole to care about what you and I would consider the more important things. Societies have had this problem going back to Rome (and before). Maybe there isn't a way. But I can tell you that forcing the media to report only what you think is important definitely isn't the way.
That's easy. Imagine you're a normal person (OK, that might be hard for the /. crowd). You want to buy a new computer. Your choices are Vista or Mac. More than 90% of people out there are never going to replace the OS (and that's not necessarily a bad thing). I know what I'm doing, and I'm usually a little nervous when I format the drive. But for the average person, if you don't want Vista (for whatever reason), you can get a Mac or nothing.
It's true there are more ways to get a Linux machine retail now, such as netbooks. But for laptops or desktops for normal people, it's Vista or Mac. As Vista becomes less popular, it's only natural for Mac to become more popular.
FF and T-bird really need an "override lock" option for these cases. Expecting users to be able to find and remove the "lock" and ".parentlock" files is pretty unreasonable.
That sounds like proof that Linux is ready for the desktop :)
But seriously, there shouldn't be any problems running software from an NFS mount. At my employer, nothing but the operating system is installed locally. Everything else is run over NFS mounts (both IT installed and our own developed stuff). Are you using soft NFS mounts? If so, that could cause problems if the network drops out briefly or if the NFS server dies. Using "hard" mounts seems to work better, but it can sometimes cause processes to go into uninterruptable sleep.
As I understand it, the USA did not outright ban stem cell research. Instead, President Bush banned the use of federal funds in research involving embryonic stem cell lines created after a certain date. Research could still continue, just not with federal money. Now, maybe this effectively banned the research, and it probably slowed it down, but it wasn't like the research was against the law.
I don't remember if President Obama is allowing federal funds to go to research with later stem cell lines.
I can't imagine there is a netbook or lightweight laptop out there that is so slow it cannot run Emacs to load source files, which are just plain text. Emacs may have been bloated 20 years ago, but by today's standards it's lean and mean (of course, this means we've developed whole new levels of bloat in things like Eclipse). Any machine that can run Firefox can run emacs.
I guess it's neat that you can edit source files through a browser, and I can even think of times where it would be useful (editing files on a server you have no other access to). But for day to day usage? It seems like it would be pretty bad.
Business accounts are more expensive than regular accounts. If the phone company decided that I couldn't call a specific area code unless I upgraded to a business account, I wouldn't be too please. Degrading the service and then saying you can get rid of the block by paying more money is awfully close to extortion.
Because Comcast has blocked incoming port 25 traffic as well!
As someone with a personal domain, I'm not sure what the long term solution is going to be. Eventually, everyone is going to block all port 25 traffic, and only the "big guys" will be able to send and receive email. I don't want to pay for some co-lo since I am already paying for Internet service and can run a small mail server just fine. Google mail for domains (or whatever its called) might be a solution, but I don't like the idea of Google reading all my mail, and there's no guarantee that service would be around forever anyway.
I wish DNS allowed me to specify a port in addition to the host in the MX record.
The tripwire folks figured out how to do this well over a decade ago. All you have to do is cryptographically sign your hashes, preferably with a key that is not readily available to the system (either it's kept elsewhere or there is a password on it). Sure, the intruding SW could corrupt or delete the hash list, but it couldn't fool you into thinking a binary was good.
Unfortunately, the last time I had it working, tripwire was a PITA to setup and use. It seemed to check the wrong things (I didn't care that /dev/tty0 changed because someone logged in, or something like that) and always had to be updated after system updates were installed. I don't know if anyone has done any tripwrite + package manager integration since I last used it, but that would probably make it easier to use.
I had this happen once. I went in for an advertised UPS, and I couldn't find it. I asked one of the guys there, and he couldn't find any either, so they ordered one for me, shipped right to me house. No extra charge for shipping. I later realized that the deal was supposed to be a "web only", so I probably should have paid some shipping charge. The employee probably broke some rule by giving it to me with free shipping, but I was happy.
Interesting side note, the UPS arrived just after Tropical Storm Fay came through my area. I remember thinking it would have been a lot more useful if it had come a few days earlier.