I think your comparison with the post office just illustrates what's wrong with the way you look at the issue. It's perfectly possible that the recipient refuses delivery (in particular if it's certified mail or a packet, and he'd need to sign). It's also possible that the recipient does not live there anymore (moved, deceased).
The point is, you cant reasonable expect your letter to be delivered. You only can expect that the post office will inform you of problems. That's exactly the same with snail mail as with email. Reliability means 'tell me if there was a failure'.
If your [Big ISP] fails at this, complain with them, or take them to court for willful suppression of communication (yeah.. in civilized countries there are laws which forbid that).
It's often claimed that 3D vision depends on having two eyes, and measuring the parallax (difference in viewing angle).
Close one of your eyes. Does the world look different? Is it suddenly 2D instead of 3D? No, it isn't. The brain also uses other clues, mostly size of well-known object, to construct the 3D world you see. A 2D screen (the retina of a single eye), together with the brain's image processing, is able to yield a 3D vision.
Huh? Pardon me, but their website doesn't talk about a server-side API.. according to their docs, the server-side stuff (which is available for plenty of languages) is only for verifying the answer. The captcha itself is pulled by the browser from the reCaptcha site, so they know both the user IP as well as the website (which contacts them to verify the answer).
Quoting from the NPR story which aired earlier today:
more than 40,000 Web sites -- including popular ones such as Ticketmaster, Facebook and Craigslist -- are using a new kind of security program called reCAPTCHA.
That's scary. The way ReCaptcha works allows the reCaptcha server to collect the IPs of reCaptcha users (along with the reCaptcha-enabled website they are using). If many websites are using reCaptcha, it allows to track users as they are moving through the web, from one reCaptcha-enabled website to the next.
The idea is cute, but the implementation is fundamentally broken and a huge breach of privacy.
LaTeX itself may be fine, but what the end user sees (and what has to work) is the whole document generating toolchain, up to the final PDF. And Linux distros tend to break things and generate incompatibilities in the toolchain. We're a scientific institute running on Ubuntu, and with every new version of Ubuntu invariably some of our users suddenly can't generate PDFs anymore for some of their documents because of some random quirk.
Default behaviour for ps2pdf changes, some packages/document classes get deprecated by their authors, replaced with newer, slightly incompatible versions...plenty of things can go wrong.
Any webserver (apache) we have setup logs IP addresses automatically. It's standard stuff, not google being evil.
It's the default for apache. It's also plain illegal in at least some contries (e.g. Germany) to keep these logs; depending on how you interpret the laws, it may even be illegal to let these logs hit the harddisk.
The sad truth is that most open source applications make it quite hard to log in a non privacy-invading way (e.g. for apache, you can keep IPs out of the access log, but not out of the error log; you need mod_removeip for clean logs).
Similar problem with syslog; debian has an anonymizing patch for syslog-ng, but upstream refuses to incorporate it (allegedly because it clashes with some vapourware future extension).
And yes, it's open source, you can patch it. But if you don't use standard packages from your distribution, you miss security updates and have to track them by yourself, which can be a huge pain.
Hardy Heron - I've not personally come across many bugs, YMMV there I suppose.
Ok, let me point out a few I've experienced. Some of these are outright inexcusable, I think. I've filed bugs for some of them, or found them already in the bug database; none of them seem to be handled very well. My overall impression is that Ubuntu is grossly understaffed for solid quality control.
On my laptop, the DVD drive is not recognized at all after boot (it was recognized when installing from CD, though...must be an awfully stupid bug)
Sound not working properly (stutters). Maybe related to the fact that pulseaudio was rushed into the release...
With automounted homedir, 'tracker' causes any 'Save as' dialog to hang for minutes
Likewise, with 'fast-user-switch-applet' installed, GNOME login may hang
Wifi only initialized at boot - switch off/on, and it doesn't work anymore, not initialized
NetworkManager unusable - can't configure static address at one place (home) and DHCP at another place (work)
Firefox 3 looses all bookmarks when the box crashes hard. None of the recovery methods proposed at the Mozilla website works, needed to recover from backup. The funny thing is that Mozilla suggests to upgrade from FF2 to FF3 to fix such problems, while FF2 worked perfectly fine with the profile in question, while FF3 could not read the bookmarks anymore...
Trapping malloc tells you nothing. You can malloc 2GB, and if you never use it, the OS will never reserve it for you (i.e. it remains available for other applications). Almost every modern OS reserves memory pages only when the app writes to them.
Some applications may use this to efficiently implement algorithms that need large, but sparsely populated tables. I'm currently testing one that allocates a 128 MB table upfront, and actually uses a few pages worth of it. Not a big deal - what isn't used, isn't reserved, thus it remains available for other apps. And it would slow things down painfully if (say) a tree instead of a linear table would be used.
... it is a solid truth that Browser X is using occupying fewer system resources than Browser Y.
Is it? I have no idea how the Windows allocator works, but on almost any modern operating system the system resources reserved for an application (and thus unavailable for other apps) are not the same as the resources requested by an application. I deeply distrust any memory benchmarks - it's notoriously difficult to determine the real memory usage of an application. Most authors of such memory usage comparisons don't discuss the issues, giving rise to the suspicion that they don't know what they are doing.
And frankly, I'm fine with memory getting used to speed up things. After all, that's the whole point of spending money on memory. What use is browser X if it is slower due to less caching, just to look better in memory benchmarks?
Not in real world conditions. Just what kind of motorbike are you riding?
A small motorbike (125CC and under) doing under 60 KpH (normal urban driving) has significantly less fuel consumption than a modern 4 cylinder car especially when idling. If we're talking about a Harley or 3-600 CC racing bike then you're correct.
125CC is european driver license class A1 (for underage drivers). In other words, it's not a motorbike, it's a bikelet;) And while it might be useful in the city, it's not really suited for the Autobahn (and I need to take the Autobahn to get to my office).
Huh? A motorbike has terrible aerodynamic drag, making the petrol consumption comparable to a small car (which is more convenient and takes more passengers and load).
I enjoy riding my motorbike, but it's not like I save on petrol.
Which is a pity, because there is some fun stuff to read (like sticking a sword into someone's belly and twisting it around for enhanced effect...don't remember where that was, unfortunately:).
I write OSS software. Targeted at sysadmins, not Joe Random Users. And it requires some (actually not too much) knowledge of Unix filesystem permission. You wouldn't believe how many questions I get about the most simple things (like: you need exec permission on a directory to access files therein..).
If people don't understand Unix file permissions, how can you expect that SELinux can be used effectively by them?
XFS has that nasty 'security' feature that it will zero files that were open when the power failed. Never use XFS on hardware that has no battery backup to shutdown properly if you trip over the power cable.
True for programmers as well: if the system makes it hard to program secure applications, it won't be done. There's a nice paper (pdf) that explains why programmers don't use the principle of least privilege (hint: with the current POSIX API, it's too complex and non-portable, and thus only a few programmers do it, basically in an ad-hoc fashion).
Really? I haven't looked into that in detail, but I had the impression that studies on veganism showed an effect similar to alcohol (strict non-alcoholics having lower life expectancy than people drinking very moderate amounts of alcohol).
Slashdot Mirror
Greylisting is done during the SMTP session. No new message is created, the original message is just rejected during delivery.
The scenario you're talking about has nothing to do with greylisting, just with some fundamentally broken implementation of it.
I think your comparison with the post office just illustrates what's wrong with the way you look at the issue. It's perfectly possible that the recipient refuses delivery (in particular if it's certified mail or a packet, and he'd need to sign). It's also possible that the recipient does not live there anymore (moved, deceased).
The point is, you cant reasonable expect your letter to be delivered. You only can expect that the post office will inform you of problems. That's exactly the same with snail mail as with email. Reliability means 'tell me if there was a failure'.
If your [Big ISP] fails at this, complain with them, or take them to court for willful suppression of communication (yeah.. in civilized countries there are laws which forbid that).
It's often claimed that 3D vision depends on having two eyes, and measuring the parallax (difference in viewing angle).
Close one of your eyes. Does the world look different? Is it suddenly 2D instead of 3D? No, it isn't. The brain also uses other clues, mostly size of well-known object, to construct the 3D world you see. A 2D screen (the retina of a single eye), together with the brain's image processing, is able to yield a 3D vision.
Ah, no children I see.
chance_of_sex = 1 / (year_of_marriage + 5*number of children - WAF/1000)
...and you can block requests to images (i.e. ads) not hosted on the original website, usually without loss of functionality.
Huh? Pardon me, but their website doesn't talk about a server-side API.. according to their docs, the server-side stuff (which is available for plenty of languages) is only for verifying the answer. The captcha itself is pulled by the browser from the reCaptcha site, so they know both the user IP as well as the website (which contacts them to verify the answer).
Quoting from the NPR story which aired earlier today:
That's scary. The way ReCaptcha works allows the reCaptcha server to collect the IPs of reCaptcha users (along with the reCaptcha-enabled website they are using). If many websites are using reCaptcha, it allows to track users as they are moving through the web, from one reCaptcha-enabled website to the next.
The idea is cute, but the implementation is fundamentally broken and a huge breach of privacy.
Huh? There's no 'hardware information' under 'system';'preferences' on my Ubuntu 8.04 box :(
On the other hand, I'm not worried about the machine either..
LaTeX itself may be fine, but what the end user sees (and what has to work) is the whole document generating toolchain, up to the final PDF. And Linux distros tend to break things and generate incompatibilities in the toolchain. We're a scientific institute running on Ubuntu, and with every new version of Ubuntu invariably some of our users suddenly can't generate PDFs anymore for some of their documents because of some random quirk.
Default behaviour for ps2pdf changes, some packages/document classes get deprecated by their authors, replaced with newer, slightly incompatible versions...plenty of things can go wrong.
And I typically got relevant results with little spam, but that may depend on what you are searching for.
Any webserver (apache) we have setup logs IP addresses automatically. It's standard stuff, not google being evil.
It's the default for apache. It's also plain illegal in at least some contries (e.g. Germany) to keep these logs; depending on how you interpret the laws, it may even be illegal to let these logs hit the harddisk.
The sad truth is that most open source applications make it quite hard to log in a non privacy-invading way (e.g. for apache, you can keep IPs out of the access log, but not out of the error log; you need mod_removeip for clean logs).
Similar problem with syslog; debian has an anonymizing patch for syslog-ng, but upstream refuses to incorporate it (allegedly because it clashes with some vapourware future extension).
And yes, it's open source, you can patch it. But if you don't use standard packages from your distribution, you miss security updates and have to track them by yourself, which can be a huge pain.
This sounds a lot like Acovea
They are citing it in the GCC summit paper. So I suppose they know it :)
Ok, let me point out a few I've experienced. Some of these are outright inexcusable, I think. I've filed bugs for some of them, or found them already in the bug database; none of them seem to be handled very well. My overall impression is that Ubuntu is grossly understaffed for solid quality control.
Trapping malloc tells you nothing. You can malloc 2GB, and if you never use it, the OS will never reserve it for you (i.e. it remains available for other applications). Almost every modern OS reserves memory pages only when the app writes to them.
Some applications may use this to efficiently implement algorithms that need large, but sparsely populated tables. I'm currently testing one that allocates a 128 MB table upfront, and actually uses a few pages worth of it. Not a big deal - what isn't used, isn't reserved, thus it remains available for other apps. And it would slow things down painfully if (say) a tree instead of a linear table would be used.
... it is a solid truth that Browser X is using occupying fewer system resources than Browser Y.
Is it? I have no idea how the Windows allocator works, but on almost any modern operating system the system resources reserved for an application (and thus unavailable for other apps) are not the same as the resources requested by an application. I deeply distrust any memory benchmarks - it's notoriously difficult to determine the real memory usage of an application. Most authors of such memory usage comparisons don't discuss the issues, giving rise to the suspicion that they don't know what they are doing.
And frankly, I'm fine with memory getting used to speed up things. After all, that's the whole point of spending money on memory. What use is browser X if it is slower due to less caching, just to look better in memory benchmarks?
Not in real world conditions. Just what kind of motorbike are you riding? A small motorbike (125CC and under) doing under 60 KpH (normal urban driving) has significantly less fuel consumption than a modern 4 cylinder car especially when idling. If we're talking about a Harley or 3-600 CC racing bike then you're correct.
125CC is european driver license class A1 (for underage drivers). In other words, it's not a motorbike, it's a bikeletI enjoy riding my motorbike, but it's not like I save on petrol.
Which is a pity, because there is some fun stuff to read (like sticking a sword into someone's belly and twisting it around for enhanced effect...don't remember where that was, unfortunately :).
I write OSS software. Targeted at sysadmins, not Joe Random Users. And it requires some (actually not too much) knowledge of Unix filesystem permission. You wouldn't believe how many questions I get about the most simple things (like: you need exec permission on a directory to access files therein..). If people don't understand Unix file permissions, how can you expect that SELinux can be used effectively by them?
XFS has that nasty 'security' feature that it will zero files that were open when the power failed. Never use XFS on hardware that has no battery backup to shutdown properly if you trip over the power cable.
This is offered by many banks (at least in Germany) for authorizing online transactions. It's called mPIN (mobile PIN).
Only 26 results. Really disappointing ;-)
True for programmers as well: if the system makes it hard to program secure applications, it won't be done. There's a nice paper (pdf) that explains why programmers don't use the principle of least privilege (hint: with the current POSIX API, it's too complex and non-portable, and thus only a few programmers do it, basically in an ad-hoc fashion).
Really? I haven't looked into that in detail, but I had the impression that studies on veganism showed an effect similar to alcohol (strict non-alcoholics having lower life expectancy than people drinking very moderate amounts of alcohol).
(I know that's not what you hinted at, but it's an interesting distinction for some purposes - think about access password for your database).