The article says: The Empire has virtually no effect on the daily life of the average, law-abiding citizen.
I think that's a hard argument to make. In the 3 films that come after the empire, we never get a chance to see what the daily life of an average, law-abiding citizen is like. The films mostly follow the rebel alliance, which hides out on remote/uninhabited planets. Check out the different settings used in the movies:
Tatoonine: A remote outer rim planet, where the Empire doesn't really have any control (nor do they want it).
Hoth: Apparently the only creatures that live here are tau-tauns and those Sasquatch things.
Bespin: The only "normal" place shown in the 3 movies. We don't really see the Empire's presence here. However, it must be really bad: Lando turns over his best friend to Darth Vader just to get the Empire to leave him alone.
Endor moon: Nothing here but Ewoks, and they probably deserve whatever punishment the Empire can dish out.
Alderaan: Destroyed by the Empire as part of a negotiating tactic with Princess Leia.
I doubt this guy really thinks the Empire is better than the Rebel Alliance. He might be turned off by the more egalitarian and liberal ideas espoused by the Rebels, but to make the stretch and claim that the Empire is a force for good is deeply disturbing. Star Wars may be an imaginary universe, but The Weekly Standard certainly is real, and it has a real effect(albeit a small one) on political discourse in the United States. If the editors of a major magazine think the Empire is ok, it casts great doubt on their analysis of events in the real world.
-Mike
Re:that doesn't solve any problems
on
Netrek
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· Score: 2
The problem is not that people are talking, the problem is that the players are mostly assholes. This is a problem exposed via that chat window occasionally, but it is also exposed in other ways.
Go look at rec.games.netrek and see how any suggested changes are treated. The core players don't really care if more people start playing, and they act like it.
Its certainly their right to act that way, but its too bad. I didn't quit playing because of their actions, but in an indirect way I did -- its just to hard to find a pick up game these days, because there are not enough players.
-Mike
that doesn't solve any problems
on
Netrek
·
· Score: 2
One idea that just came to mind to prevent such abuses - don't allow players to send freeform messages. Give them a set of canned messages they can execute - escort me, carrying "x" armies, help me, everybody go here now, ogg "x" player, ogg the base - and no more.
Those kinds of messages are already built in. But if those are the only messages that are allowed, then you remove an important way for new players to learn the game.
Rogerborg got a response: "fucking twink, he was out of fuel fuck off and get a clue". While that is certainly a rude thing to say, there is also some truth to it. The opposing player probably was out of fuel, since he had just dropped a load of torps. Shooting your own torps over the planet doesn't help your carrier -- even if the bad guy lived through the volley, the torps exploding on his hull would hurt the carrier.
The opposing player was probably thinking, "Oh fuck, I just blew my wad and missed him, I'm out of fule/at the torp limit and totally helpless... Wait here comes R3 at warp 9, and thank god he's firing torps! det-det-det, eck++". There is nothing worse than sitting there with an empty fuel tank while the carrier takes the planet. Except when he uncloaks after taking and finishes you off.
You have to let people talk, because otherwise you never learn. If the guys talking want to be assholes, then that's their problem. But you have to let them talk.
It seems like someone else was complaining that blocking ads was stealing services(this was around 15:34):
<hemos> Here's the reality:
You block ads.
You cost us money.
Ultimately, I mean.
-Mike
stupidest argument ever
on
Web Services
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· Score: 3, Informative
You don't have to run SOAP services on port 80. If you need to protect them with a firewall, then you should probably run them on some other port.
SOAP isn't any different from CGI. I'm posting this message in a web browser, and it is going to port 80. The horror! If slashdot ran a SOAP service, you could write other clients to do the same thing. Instead of posting to 'postcomment.pl?subject=stupidest+argument+ever&co ntent=...' or whatever, it would encode that stuff in XML and send it to a SOAP proxy.
That's all SOAP is. You can just relax about the use of HTTP. I don't understand why people see something like this, and immediately react with hysterics.
It seems to me that the Trustworthy Computing campaign is succeeding. They found 8 new bugs, and fixed them (well, they didn't find all 8, but they did find some of them...).
Yes, it would be better if they didn't have any bugs in the first place, and yes, it would be a lot better if they would announce the bugs before they had the patches ready, but you can't say that the months of code review failed after they actually found something.
I would be a lot more worried if they didn't find any bugs...
-Mike
Re:And this relates to XML how?
on
Java RMI
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· Score: 2
But if you are passing confidential information (say your customer's bank records) then you will need to work at obfuscating (and de-obfuscating) the XML that is actually sent.
Whoa, that's a bad idea. It is not a security risk to label your data in a clear way; its a security risk to think that 'obfuscating' that data is safe. For example, if you pass this around:
<bankAccount>12345</bankAccount>
it is no less secure than:
<foo>12345</foo>
What you really need to do is encrypt the data somehow, so you end up with:
<bankAccount>encrypted bank account</bankAccount>
Anyway, it doesn't matter if you are sending XML or comma separated values: if you are sending confidential information as clear text, then you are screwed.
Distributed would be great. If you could get ISP's to run their own local servers, or even regular people running a peer on their own machine, you could reduce the load on a central server to a huge degree.
After that, you would need to create a protocol that allows people to post messages to their local server, and then make those messages propagate to the other servers all across the land. If you had a simple enough protocol, people could even write their own custom clients, instead of having to use a web browser.
And since everyone is running their own little server, we could allow anyone to post stories; not just the Slashdot Editors.
Hmm, maybe we should start up a project on Sourceforge. I suggest we call it USENET.
I thought Nader's comments on how the settlement could affect Free Software were really interesting:
Note for example that under J.1 and J.2 of the proposed final order, Microsoft can withhold technical information from third parties on the grounds that Microsoft does not certify the "authenticity and viability of its business," while at the same time it is describing the licensing system for Linux as a "cancer" that threatens the demise of both the intellectual property rights system and the future of research and development.
It seems odd that Microsoft would be allowed to choose to withold secrets based on how viable they thought the other business would be. In other words, they could say (and they have said) "Linux is not a viable/authentic business", and then they would no longer be required to share information with them.
It shouldn't be up to Microsoft to decide who their competitors are, anyway.
Namespace problems are compile-time errors in java. The import statements are just syntatic sugar; it makes it easier for a developer because he doesn't have to type in the fully qualified class names every time. When the source is compiled to byte code, the classes are fully qualified.
For example, if you have code like this:
import java.sql.*;
import java.util.*;
// start up a class, do some stuff, and then...
Date date = new Date()
The compiler will come back with a message like: "Can't figure out if you mean java.sql.Date or java.util.Date". So its not ever a namespace clash, because the compiler catches those problems before they get started.
As far as poor documentation of dependencies, that isn't really a factor either. You can't look at the import section to determine class dependencies anyway, because you don't have to import a class to use it. You might want to make that a convention, but its one of those things that is hard to maintain over a lot of code. If you want to call that 'source-code-level documentation' you can, but that's not what it is. Its not 'source-code-level' any more than the javadoc comments are.
Perhaps FOX should switch the timeslots of Futurama and Malcolm in the Middle for, say, a month.
Futurama came on after the Simpsons for at least the first full season. And guess what? No one watched it.
Just face it: more people like Malcolm in the Middle, for God knows what reason. And more people like That 70's Show, and more people like Boston Public, and more people like Ally McBeal, and more people like to watch football. Futurama is a niche show, and regardless of how good it is, Fox doesn't have to show it if no one is going to watch it.
Futurama wasn't killed by its bad time slot; it died well before that. We were lucky that they kept showing it as long they did...
...I'd #define away their ridiculous verbose names into something short and memorable...
Instead of writing unreadable code, maybe you should check out a new text editor. If you start using xemacs, for example, you can use Meta-/ to fill out the rest of a word. So, for example, if you have ever typed the word "SimpleDateFormatter" and you want to type it gain, you can type in "Simp" and the editor fills it in for you.
While I agree that a preprocessor would be useful in very, very limited circumstances, introducing things like "I don't like the name of that object so I will #define it to something else" is exactly the reason java doesn't include one. We don't want each developer to make up his own standards, much less his own names for things.
As it is, this stupid editorial is just a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
Yes, that's exactly what it is. I think you are misinterpreting the article. The author is trying to say that runtimes can only be optimized for one language, and that the.NET stuff will not be any better at running other languages than the JVM is.
I don't know if that is true or not, but don't try to pretend this article is saying that the JVM is better in some way. The only problems that the author has with the CLR is that (1) it is by Microsoft, and (2) Microsoft is (according to the author) lying about the CLR's capabilities to be cross-langauge.
We've spent the last few months building a web management/authorization tool that is based on mod_python, CVS, and MySQL. People put their content on our staging server, then use our web tool to browse the staging server and sign files to approve the exporting of those files to our new external web server. When the periodic sync happens, a daemon does a CVS export to a working directory, tars it up, and ssh's it out to the heavily secured external web server.
Wow, that sounds really cool. Are you going to GPL this stuff too? I would love to get a hold of it.
Well, at the least it seems less space efficient than CVS.
Well yeah, but with the cost of disks these days, I don't think this is a very big problem. I had a hard drive crash on my server last night (this is at home, so its not professionally backed up or anything), and I was glad to have a real copy of all my source checked out on two different PC's at the time.
This is an interesting subject, though. At work, we are in the middle of an agonizingly slow migration from BCS/RCS (I'd love to give a link to BCS, if there was one:) to CVS. BCS uses an intricate system of softlinks to provide a CVS-like working area, so switching to CVS is likely to chew up a lot more disk. But really, who cares? For a couple hundred bucks you could set up a RAID array that would hold every line of source that you ever wrote in your life, 1000 times over. Plus, you really only have to check out the stuff you are working on, and if you are currently working on gigabytes worth of source code, then whoa. I know you're talented Jon, but jeez...
The arch repositories seem rather frighteningly brittle as well, given that anyone could use file access tools to subtly corrupt the repositories.
Yes, this worries me too. For the projects I work on, I *want* to limit access to the repository to the tool itself, for data integrity and logging purposes, if nothing else. That's one of the problems with CVS: you can still go into those,v files and wreck havok manually. (And the bigger problem is that CVS forces you to do so on occasion, like when moving a file to a new directory).
I think its just different tools for different purposes, though: if you really want that bazaar style, this could be useful. But for most projects, you want tighter control, so CVS or subversion or any client-server based system would be better.
It sounds like it has a lot of nice features, but then you realize the whole thing is written in sh? One of the nice things about CVS is that the client-server nature allows someone to use pretty much any operating system as a client. Subversion takes this to the next step, by making all connections use the client-server model.
Forcing everyone to use sh is a major hassle. I know that it would work with any "reasonably POSIX" OS, but then developers can't get arch accessibility built into their favorite tools, like NetBeans or whatever.
Secondly, I'm constantly amazed at how people mis-read our stats page. The Linux aggregate stats are the total of all unique bugs across all the various distributions we track
I thought this was probably true, but I could not confirm it until I manually added up the bugs for a given year. Maybe you could explain the terms a little better on the page itselft?
Regardless of anything else, using these number to declare that one thing is more secure than another is a mistake.
That sounds like another piece of advice that should be on the stats page, not buried in a slashdot comment. Its unfortunate that someone misinterprets your statistics and publishes a misleading article every 6 months, but I can't help but wonder why you don't take proactive steps to help people understand the meaning of your web page.
Video on D-VHS tapes is uncompressed, so it's enormous. A 75GB hard disk would only hold around 30 minutes of the video, according to company officials, making the trading of HD content over the Internet impossible.
D-VHS can record and play back up to four hours of video in high definition mode -- up to 1,080 lines per screen width, or more than double the resolution of DVD,
And:
The HDCP system can't be broken, however, because only high definition sets will have the HDCP decoder, according to Dan McCarron, national product specialist in JVC's color TV division.
Heh, "can't be broken". Well, we'll just have to wait and see.
Personally, they can do whatever the hell they want. If they want to make it too hard for me to watch movies, then I won't. No skin off my back.
D-VHS isn't any different from DVD in the copy protection department. Remember that DVD's are protected, too.
The point behind D-VHS is that they can hold HDTV formats. DVD can only go up to 480p, which is pretty low for a HDTV.
I'm sure that early adopter-enthusiasts will want to get a machine that can show HDTV on their new TV's. I know that I would be dissapointed to lay out all that cash on a new set and still watch movies in 480p.
While they all could search, none could find matching files by hash code(be it rc5 or whatever it uses)
Furthur does md5 checking to group together the files, and once you start downloading it looks at md5's to figure out what it needs to download. AFAIK, All internal file identification is done by md5, and not by file name.
Of the ones that did multi-home download, none ever kept trying to find sources for the files in progress (enhancment/feature?).
Furthur will look for other sources every 15 minutes (or whatever you set it to). If you start a download, and the guys you are downloading from all leave, you can just let it sit in the Partial tab. Come back in a few days (or whatever), and the show will probably be fully downloading. You never have to do anything after you click "download".
My biggest beef with all of them is that none could continue a d/l that had stopped. So every time it re-started it would start at the beginning.
Furthur can do this of course. It can piece together downloads from multiple people who already have the file, and even from others who are currently downloading. And if the download is interupted, it will pick up where it left off when a source becomes available.
Only a few of them could resume searching/downloading if the client died(or I killed it) (gtk-gnutella could save the d/l requests)
Furthur can do this, too.
Spammage - you could do a exact title serch, and get hacking info, or porno or... well you know what I mean. Heavans forbid if any commercial company really got serious about it.
Well, furthur is still dependent on what people put in the file descriptions, so if someone wanted to put a bunch of spam in there, they could. I haven't seen that happen yet, though.
-Mike
PS I'm not afiliated with Furthur in any way, other than as a satisfied user
One problem is that there is not a big enough database of md5's. There is an ongoing process at etree to certify seeds as "dank" seeds, which basically means that they are the best available source for that particular show. You can see a list of some of those here:
Click on a band, and then click on the links under the "md5" column of the table. You can use those md5's to make sure that what you got is the real deal.
However, I know that furthur does not use these md5's. For one thing, you can share music from bands that are not on the etree list, like Metallica and Bob Marley.
Also, its a fairly big undertaking to have enough trusted people listen to every seed and bestow dank status on it. You can check out the process here:
Otherwise, this is no different from any other P2P filesharing mechanism where files naturally propagte from a source and are eventually downloaded from other nodes.
If I am downloading a new Tenacious D seed from some dude, and another guy starts downloading the same seed, then furthur will allow that guy to download the show from me *while I am still downloading it*.
Some of the magic here is because of the md5 checksumming. When I find a copy of the Wiltern show from 10-24-01, furthur can check the md5's and look for other people who have the exact same show. When I start downloading, I can download from all those people at the same time.
And more importantly, furthur will let people download from me while I am downloading.
This solves the freeloader problem to an amazing degree. Even if I pull files out of my shared collection as soon as I download the whole set, I am still sharing the sets that I am currently downloading. (A recent upgrade allows users to cap the upload speed, which helps keep furthur from sucking down all of your bandwidth, which is something that it used to do quite freely.)
Furthur is the best P2P client I have ever used, bar none. Another great feature is that once you tell it to download a show, it will keep trying until it gets the whole thing. Its totally fire and forget: the md5 checking makes sure that you are getting the files you really asked for.
This works great for live shows, because most shows come from the same source. Since everyone has a lossless shn from the same guy's DAT tape, the md5's are all the same and we can share the show easily. The important thing is that there is usually only one source for each show, so everyone with the 10-24 show has the same shn's.
This wouldn't work quite as well for ripped mp3's from a CD, because each mp3 would be slightly different, so you would get a bunch of different seeds, and furthur wouldn't be able to sort them for you.
Anyway, if you are into live music at all, you should really check out furthur.
The main control used by furthur is in the GUI. When you share a set, you can only choose for a specified list of artists that are taper-friendly. Also, when you search, you have to specify an artist from a pull down list.
This isn't all that secure, of course, because someone could share the latest Britney album under "Tenacious D", but then a lot of people who actually like good music would be pissed off.
Also, the furthur interface is relatively open, but the PCP protocol that it uses to share files is not. So they retain control over the underlying protocol, which *might* give them a better chance at controlling content.
Right now, content is basically self-controlled. If you don't like Phish|Dead|etc, then you don't want to use furthur. But oh man, if you do, then futhur is great.
I wonder about people who are posting all these long uptimes and outdated kernels. There were serious security bugs in all linux kernels before 2.2.19. You can read a little about it here.
Its been discussed on slashdot before, too.
Don't you guys worry about these kinds of things?
It's one thing to avoid upgrading, but it's another
to brag about it in a public forum.
Slashdot Mirror
The article says: The Empire has virtually no effect on the daily life of the average, law-abiding citizen.
I think that's a hard argument to make. In the 3 films that come after the empire, we never get a chance to see what the daily life of an average, law-abiding citizen is like. The films mostly follow the rebel alliance, which hides out on remote/uninhabited planets. Check out the different settings used in the movies:
Tatoonine: A remote outer rim planet, where the Empire doesn't really have any control (nor do they want it).
Hoth: Apparently the only creatures that live here are tau-tauns and those Sasquatch things.
Bespin: The only "normal" place shown in the 3 movies. We don't really see the Empire's presence here. However, it must be really bad: Lando turns over his best friend to Darth Vader just to get the Empire to leave him alone.
Endor moon: Nothing here but Ewoks, and they probably deserve whatever punishment the Empire can dish out.
Alderaan: Destroyed by the Empire as part of a negotiating tactic with Princess Leia.
I doubt this guy really thinks the Empire is better than the Rebel Alliance. He might be turned off by the more egalitarian and liberal ideas espoused by the Rebels, but to make the stretch and claim that the Empire is a force for good is deeply disturbing. Star Wars may be an imaginary universe, but The Weekly Standard certainly is real, and it has a real effect(albeit a small one) on political discourse in the United States. If the editors of a major magazine think the Empire is ok, it casts great doubt on their analysis of events in the real world.
-Mike
The problem is not that people are talking, the problem is that the players are mostly assholes. This is a problem exposed via that chat window occasionally, but it is also exposed in other ways.
Go look at rec.games.netrek and see how any suggested changes are treated. The core players don't really care if more people start playing, and they act like it.
Its certainly their right to act that way, but its too bad. I didn't quit playing because of their actions, but in an indirect way I did -- its just to hard to find a pick up game these days, because there are not enough players.
-Mike
Rogerborg got a response: "fucking twink, he was out of fuel fuck off and get a clue". While that is certainly a rude thing to say, there is also some truth to it. The opposing player probably was out of fuel, since he had just dropped a load of torps. Shooting your own torps over the planet doesn't help your carrier -- even if the bad guy lived through the volley, the torps exploding on his hull would hurt the carrier.
The opposing player was probably thinking, "Oh fuck, I just blew my wad and missed him, I'm out of fule/at the torp limit and totally helpless... Wait here comes R3 at warp 9, and thank god he's firing torps! det-det-det, eck++". There is nothing worse than sitting there with an empty fuel tank while the carrier takes the planet. Except when he uncloaks after taking and finishes you off.
You have to let people talk, because otherwise you never learn. If the guys talking want to be assholes, then that's their problem. But you have to let them talk.
-Mike
You don't have to run SOAP services on port 80. If you need to protect them with a firewall, then you should probably run them on some other port.
o ntent=...' or whatever, it would encode that stuff in XML and send it to a SOAP proxy.
SOAP isn't any different from CGI. I'm posting this message in a web browser, and it is going to port 80. The horror! If slashdot ran a SOAP service, you could write other clients to do the same thing. Instead of posting to 'postcomment.pl?subject=stupidest+argument+ever&c
That's all SOAP is. You can just relax about the use of HTTP. I don't understand why people see something like this, and immediately react with hysterics.
-Mike
It seems to me that the Trustworthy Computing campaign is succeeding. They found 8 new bugs, and fixed them (well, they didn't find all 8, but they did find some of them...).
Yes, it would be better if they didn't have any bugs in the first place, and yes, it would be a lot better if they would announce the bugs before they had the patches ready, but you can't say that the months of code review failed after they actually found something.
I would be a lot more worried if they didn't find any bugs...
-Mike
But if you are passing confidential information (say your customer's bank records) then you will need to work at obfuscating (and de-obfuscating) the XML that is actually sent.
Whoa, that's a bad idea. It is not a security risk to label your data in a clear way; its a security risk to think that 'obfuscating' that data is safe. For example, if you pass this around:
<bankAccount>12345</bankAccount>
it is no less secure than:
<foo>12345</foo>
What you really need to do is encrypt the data somehow, so you end up with:
<bankAccount>encrypted bank account</bankAccount>
Anyway, it doesn't matter if you are sending XML or comma separated values: if you are sending confidential information as clear text, then you are screwed.
-Mike
Distributed would be great. If you could get ISP's to run their own local servers, or even regular people running a peer on their own machine, you could reduce the load on a central server to a huge degree.
After that, you would need to create a protocol that allows people to post messages to their local server, and then make those messages propagate to the other servers all across the land. If you had a simple enough protocol, people could even write their own custom clients, instead of having to use a web browser.
And since everyone is running their own little server, we could allow anyone to post stories; not just the Slashdot Editors.
Hmm, maybe we should start up a project on Sourceforge. I suggest we call it USENET.
-Mike
I thought Nader's comments on how the settlement could affect Free Software were really interesting:
Note for example that under J.1 and J.2 of the proposed final order, Microsoft can withhold technical information from third parties on the grounds that Microsoft does not certify the "authenticity and viability of its business," while at the same time it is describing the licensing system for Linux as a "cancer" that threatens the demise of both the intellectual property rights system and the future of research and development.
It seems odd that Microsoft would be allowed to choose to withold secrets based on how viable they thought the other business would be. In other words, they could say (and they have said) "Linux is not a viable/authentic business", and then they would no longer be required to share information with them.
It shouldn't be up to Microsoft to decide who their competitors are, anyway.
-Mike
For example, if you have code like this:
import java.sql.*;
// start up a class, do some stuff, and then...
import java.util.*;
Date date = new Date()
The compiler will come back with a message like: "Can't figure out if you mean java.sql.Date or java.util.Date". So its not ever a namespace clash, because the compiler catches those problems before they get started.
As far as poor documentation of dependencies, that isn't really a factor either. You can't look at the import section to determine class dependencies anyway, because you don't have to import a class to use it. You might want to make that a convention, but its one of those things that is hard to maintain over a lot of code. If you want to call that 'source-code-level documentation' you can, but that's not what it is. Its not 'source-code-level' any more than the javadoc comments are.
-Mike
Perhaps FOX should switch the timeslots of Futurama and Malcolm in the Middle for, say, a month.
Futurama came on after the Simpsons for at least the first full season. And guess what? No one watched it.
Just face it: more people like Malcolm in the Middle, for God knows what reason. And more people like That 70's Show, and more people like Boston Public, and more people like Ally McBeal, and more people like to watch football. Futurama is a niche show, and regardless of how good it is, Fox doesn't have to show it if no one is going to watch it.
Futurama wasn't killed by its bad time slot; it died well before that. We were lucky that they kept showing it as long they did...
-Mike
...I'd #define away their ridiculous verbose names into something short and memorable ...
Instead of writing unreadable code, maybe you should check out a new text editor. If you start using xemacs, for example, you can use Meta-/ to fill out the rest of a word. So, for example, if you have ever typed the word "SimpleDateFormatter" and you want to type it gain, you can type in "Simp" and the editor fills it in for you.
While I agree that a preprocessor would be useful in very, very limited circumstances, introducing things like "I don't like the name of that object so I will #define it to something else" is exactly the reason java doesn't include one. We don't want each developer to make up his own standards, much less his own names for things.
-Mike
Yes, that's exactly what it is. I think you are misinterpreting the article. The author is trying to say that runtimes can only be optimized for one language, and that the .NET stuff will not be any better at running other languages than the JVM is.
I don't know if that is true or not, but don't try to pretend this article is saying that the JVM is better in some way. The only problems that the author has with the CLR is that (1) it is by Microsoft, and (2) Microsoft is (according to the author) lying about the CLR's capabilities to be cross-langauge.
-Mike
Wow, that sounds really cool. Are you going to GPL this stuff too? I would love to get a hold of it.
-Mike
Well yeah, but with the cost of disks these days, I don't think this is a very big problem. I had a hard drive crash on my server last night (this is at home, so its not professionally backed up or anything), and I was glad to have a real copy of all my source checked out on two different PC's at the time.
This is an interesting subject, though. At work, we are in the middle of an agonizingly slow migration from BCS/RCS (I'd love to give a link to BCS, if there was one :) to CVS. BCS uses an intricate system of softlinks to provide a CVS-like working area, so switching to CVS is likely to chew up a lot more disk. But really, who cares? For a couple hundred bucks you could set up a RAID array that would hold every line of source that you ever wrote in your life, 1000 times over. Plus, you really only have to check out the stuff you are working on, and if you are currently working on gigabytes worth of source code, then whoa. I know you're talented Jon, but jeez...
The arch repositories seem rather frighteningly brittle as well, given that anyone could use file access tools to subtly corrupt the repositories.
Yes, this worries me too. For the projects I work on, I *want* to limit access to the repository to the tool itself, for data integrity and logging purposes, if nothing else. That's one of the problems with CVS: you can still go into those ,v files and wreck havok manually. (And the bigger problem is that CVS forces you to do so on occasion, like when moving a file to a new directory).
I think its just different tools for different purposes, though: if you really want that bazaar style, this could be useful. But for most projects, you want tighter control, so CVS or subversion or any client-server based system would be better.
-Mike
It sounds like it has a lot of nice features, but then you realize the whole thing is written in sh? One of the nice things about CVS is that the client-server nature allows someone to use pretty much any operating system as a client. Subversion takes this to the next step, by making all connections use the client-server model.
Forcing everyone to use sh is a major hassle. I know that it would work with any "reasonably POSIX" OS, but then developers can't get arch accessibility built into their favorite tools, like NetBeans or whatever.
Creating local branches is pretty cool, though.
Mike
I thought this was probably true, but I could not confirm it until I manually added up the bugs for a given year. Maybe you could explain the terms a little better on the page itselft?
Regardless of anything else, using these number to declare that one thing is more secure than another is a mistake.
That sounds like another piece of advice that should be on the stats page, not buried in a slashdot comment. Its unfortunate that someone misinterprets your statistics and publishes a misleading article every 6 months, but I can't help but wonder why you don't take proactive steps to help people understand the meaning of your web page.
-Mike
Interesting bits:
Video on D-VHS tapes is uncompressed, so it's enormous. A 75GB hard disk would only hold around 30 minutes of the video, according to company officials, making the trading of HD content over the Internet impossible. D-VHS can record and play back up to four hours of video in high definition mode -- up to 1,080 lines per screen width, or more than double the resolution of DVD,
And:
The HDCP system can't be broken, however, because only high definition sets will have the HDCP decoder, according to Dan McCarron, national product specialist in JVC's color TV division.
Heh, "can't be broken". Well, we'll just have to wait and see.
Personally, they can do whatever the hell they want. If they want to make it too hard for me to watch movies, then I won't. No skin off my back.
-Mike
D-VHS isn't any different from DVD in the copy protection department. Remember that DVD's are protected, too.
The point behind D-VHS is that they can hold HDTV formats. DVD can only go up to 480p, which is pretty low for a HDTV.
I'm sure that early adopter-enthusiasts will want to get a machine that can show HDTV on their new TV's. I know that I would be dissapointed to lay out all that cash on a new set and still watch movies in 480p.
-Mike
-Mike
Furthur does md5 checking to group together the files, and once you start downloading it looks at md5's to figure out what it needs to download. AFAIK, All internal file identification is done by md5, and not by file name.
Of the ones that did multi-home download, none ever kept trying to find sources for the files in progress (enhancment/feature?).Furthur will look for other sources every 15 minutes (or whatever you set it to). If you start a download, and the guys you are downloading from all leave, you can just let it sit in the Partial tab. Come back in a few days (or whatever), and the show will probably be fully downloading. You never have to do anything after you click "download".
My biggest beef with all of them is that none could continue a d/l that had stopped. So every time it re-started it would start at the beginning.
Furthur can do this of course. It can piece together downloads from multiple people who already have the file, and even from others who are currently downloading. And if the download is interupted, it will pick up where it left off when a source becomes available.
Only a few of them could resume searching/downloading if the client died(or I killed it) (gtk-gnutella could save the d/l requests)
Furthur can do this, too.
Spammage - you could do a exact title serch, and get hacking info, or porno or ... well you know what I mean. Heavans forbid if any commercial company really got serious about it.
Well, furthur is still dependent on what people put in the file descriptions, so if someone wanted to put a bunch of spam in there, they could. I haven't seen that happen yet, though.
-Mike
PS I'm not afiliated with Furthur in any way, other than as a satisfied user
http://db.etree.org/etree_shnlist.php
Click on a band, and then click on the links under the "md5" column of the table. You can use those md5's to make sure that what you got is the real deal.
However, I know that furthur does not use these md5's. For one thing, you can share music from bands that are not on the etree list, like Metallica and Bob Marley.
Also, its a fairly big undertaking to have enough trusted people listen to every seed and bestow dank status on it. You can check out the process here:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dankseeds
-Mike
Some of the magic here is because of the md5 checksumming. When I find a copy of the Wiltern show from 10-24-01, furthur can check the md5's and look for other people who have the exact same show. When I start downloading, I can download from all those people at the same time.
And more importantly, furthur will let people download from me while I am downloading.
This solves the freeloader problem to an amazing degree. Even if I pull files out of my shared collection as soon as I download the whole set, I am still sharing the sets that I am currently downloading. (A recent upgrade allows users to cap the upload speed, which helps keep furthur from sucking down all of your bandwidth, which is something that it used to do quite freely.)
Furthur is the best P2P client I have ever used, bar none. Another great feature is that once you tell it to download a show, it will keep trying until it gets the whole thing. Its totally fire and forget: the md5 checking makes sure that you are getting the files you really asked for.
This works great for live shows, because most shows come from the same source. Since everyone has a lossless shn from the same guy's DAT tape, the md5's are all the same and we can share the show easily. The important thing is that there is usually only one source for each show, so everyone with the 10-24 show has the same shn's.
This wouldn't work quite as well for ripped mp3's from a CD, because each mp3 would be slightly different, so you would get a bunch of different seeds, and furthur wouldn't be able to sort them for you.
Anyway, if you are into live music at all, you should really check out furthur.
-Mike
The main control used by furthur is in the GUI. When you share a set, you can only choose for a specified list of artists that are taper-friendly. Also, when you search, you have to specify an artist from a pull down list.
This isn't all that secure, of course, because someone could share the latest Britney album under "Tenacious D", but then a lot of people who actually like good music would be pissed off.
Also, the furthur interface is relatively open, but the PCP protocol that it uses to share files is not. So they retain control over the underlying protocol, which *might* give them a better chance at controlling content.
Right now, content is basically self-controlled. If you don't like Phish|Dead|etc, then you don't want to use furthur. But oh man, if you do, then futhur is great.
-Mike
Its been discussed on slashdot before, too. Don't you guys worry about these kinds of things? It's one thing to avoid upgrading, but it's another to brag about it in a public forum.
-Mike