I really enjoy getting into the characters - developing them.
Its not about the problem solving. Its about using my imagination to shape things. Coding is the same. I build upon the world, and the structures that I make please me.
A lot of the entertainment in role playing is in the fact that doing so is easy. I can code a behaviour I envision in perhaps a few hours or a few days, but I can create a character in a few minutes - and act him out with much greater detail.
I think that the reason behind this is not so much that coders like to solve problems, but that people who roleplay are drawn to programming for the same reason - its a personality type thing. Which personality type? This one.
weighs about as much as a book, What are you reading on your PDA? Novellas? Dr. Seuss? Or do you actually have a laptop that you're calling a PDA? My PDA is smaller and lighter than any book I own. Key feature is that size, though, since both have a negligible weight compared to what I am capable of carrying. 500 page book isn't going in the pocket. PDA is.
costs 10 times more than a book Certainly it costs more than that! Even still, read more! I only use my PDA for reading. 1 read a book a week...how long did it take to pay itself off? Considering that books are about $6 apiece, and that my PDA is $170 retail, it took just over half a year before it started to pay for itself.
all the pages go blank after a few hours of reading Huh? You mean if you take the batteries out of your PDA or break it? Or is this some specific form of DRM that erases the e-book after a specific length of time? All the pages go blank in a book if you dip it in acid. What's your point?
how many ebooks can you read in those few hours of battery life anyway? Ah, I see. You don't understand batteries. Well, when you first get a PDA, it has a charge in its battery. When this runs out, you can recharge it - you don't have to read everything before the first charge runs out, as you seem to believe.
Even charging isn't much of an issue. I don't know very many people who read more than four hours at a time. That's about the charge I get on my PDA. I read about 45 minutes at a time, and charge it every few days. I seldom run out of power while reading.
You can also read in the dark, or when even a book is too inconvenient (like when you ended up having to wait somewhere that you didn't plan to wait and only have what you carry in your pockets to amuse yourself).
Maybe its not your killer app, but it sure is mine. Books don't hold a candle to books on PDA.
You know, there's a word for a vehicle that doesn't have an engine, or a bed, and is smaller than a car.
It's called a wagon.
Doesn't sound as cool, does it? But that's what it is, isn't it?
Rechargable nanomotors that don't break - that's what we need for this kind of thing. Its the holy grail for nanotech right now.
If you don't avoid all references to objects that move under their own power (and you're talking about nanotech), then you're sensationalizing the news. Its like saying "Fusion done in cold!" when you mean that someone built a fusion laser system in Anarctica. Obviously cold means something specific when its that close to the word "Fusion."
Keep up the sensationalism, and you can't get the point across when you come across something that's actually fantastic.
Ah. So what you really want from your engineers is someone who can look totally confident when they don't know and has totally mastery of B.S.ing. Why don't you throw in a firm, "honest" handshake while you're at it?
What you want is either a con-man or a politician. Programmers are sometimes shy, quiet, and awkward when asked questions - especially assembly and compiler programmers. You may get someone who knows their stuff but is too timid to admit it when you ask them questions. Someone may have the best stuff in the world, but you come away thinking that they can't write anything beyond a Dr. Seuss book.
If you want to manage, but don't have the time to look through their code, find a third party with good communication skills who can.
No, its right. They plan to implement the plan in a few light years. At that time, you should expect download rates of up to 10 kilopascals - available of a low, low price of only 30 monies. The only problem is that this technology uses more energy - you may have to pay for as much as fifty more watts than you're paying for now.
No you didn't. You broke the rules of algebra. You just demonstrated a rule you didn't know about. While there is a zero identity of equality, there is no zero property of inequality.
In other words, your second step is invalid; you're not allowed to do that.
Are you saying that shows about forensics and medicine aren't geeky? Have you watched any of those shows? They're all about the science!
Ever watch MacGuyver? It had a pretty long run, and that wasn't too long ago. How about Jimmy Neutron? Main character, not comic relief, meant to be smart. Its still on.
Its not impossible. Take off your nostalgia glasses and take a closer look. Its cooler to be a geek today than it has ever been. People wear the word with pride. Heck there are even companies that market the fact that they have them (Geek Squad, dial-a-geek).
Its not the coolness we have to blame. People want to be smart more than they ever did. It's that
1) Its hard 2) We don't have enough people who are good at it to teach it.
The same is true in other disciplines. Have you used AIM lately? Spelling, grammar, punctuation and vocabulary are pretty well shot. People don't have the ability to organize their thoughts into paragraphs (case in point: you). It seems as though we've come farther with those than with math.
I don't think so. Its just that most of the other subjects are so much easier for so many people to understand. So they get a little farther with the same amount of effort. Therefore, they seem to be farther along.
I have a hope that the coming of the age of the Internet is changing things. We have not had it very long, and I think that ultimately it is the internet that has changed the perception of geeks as cool. We will have to see how many teachers who are good at Math and science come out of it in the next two decades or so to see if it made a difference; its just too soon to tell.
Of course, by then, we'll really know. Most of the teachers around today are about to retire.
What you are saying is a red herring. It has nothing to do with the point in question.
Why does the GGP's ethics state that the drug war falls into the government's jurisdiction because has nothing to do with ethics, while regulation of the other stuff does not because it has everything to do with it?
This is where the double standard lies, and is the point you have to deal with.
And drug war has nothing to do with ethics, eh? Perhaps you should be a little more specific. I've heard a great many people say that what someone does alone in their own home is nobody else's business.
Why does it apply to sex and violence but not drugs?
I'm not arguing the point either way. It just seems like your attitude is a bit of a double standard from a moralistic point of view.
This isn't about getting people to know about OSS.
Its about filling the seats. You know what you need for that? Women.
Get the babes in there, and the programmers will be all about it. Just combine it with another class. Perhaps the open source software and women's studies, or open source software and elementary education. If you're really bold do open source software and cheerleading practice.* Then teach it on whatever you want.
*All of these classes, which I am clearly stereotyping as predominantly female were, in fact, predominantly female at my college. So it would work there if nowhere else.
Removing external features is easy! Here's a simple, two step guide to removing camera functionality from your PDA:
1) Get a ball point pen. 2) Shove the pen deep into the CCD - cracking it so that it can no longer hold a charge.
VOILA! Camera-free PDA! This same "break the main part" technique can be used on a remarkably large range of electronic functions, including: -Speakers -Microphone -LCD -Phone (more complicated - you have to remove the antenna)
Virtually any external feature you don't like can be removed. On the other hand, it is quite difficult to add these features back.
Arguments in Stored procedures are typed. And types can have a hell lot of restrictions, which being one of the major points of a database.
Like that number I used in the injection was typed? It was clearly a number, and the stored procedure would have recognized it as such. Didn't matter, did it?
No matter what you write in those arguments, at runtime there is no parsing anymore and no ambiguities by cleverly chosen strings matter to the parse anymore...since it is simply not used.
That only works if you can guarantee that you're only sending a single command to your database at any given time, doesn't it? I mean, maybe you can't do anything nasty inside the stored procedure, but you can outside it, can't you? Like in the example I gave?
You still have to do the checks I talked about in order to prevent SQL injections.
Databases are interpreters. They interpret SQL, and the ones that understand stored procedures can interpret even more than that. If you have something against interpreters, then you should stop using databases.
As it stands for me, though, input validation really isn't that hard. Use OOP, and build validation into the top of your hierarchy and you never have to worry about it again. There are not many and varied ways to do it. Wierd combos don't come up that cause problems. Unlike the other security risks, this one only comes up from ignorance, since its so easy to prevent.
In this case, stored procedures shelter you from SQL injection attacks
I'm not sure that they do. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that this doesn't make much sense at all. Not that its hard to protect against injection attacks, though.
Let's say you have a stored procedure called "getnumber" that takes two args. Your goal is that this procedure is going to protect you from injection attacks; that you can put two untrusted args into it and you won't have to worry about someone using the procedure to do something you don't want them to do.
So you run "select * getnumber(arg1,arg2);"
Is this vulnerable to injection attacks? Yes.
If arg2="32); create user..."
You see the problem? Stored procedures didn't help. Actually, I'd like to know what stored procedures will do for you that does help.
On the other hand, having a single place that validates the input does help - pretty much every time, and you're invulnerable. Its not nearly as hard as making sure that there's no buffer overflows.
This is all that is necessary and sufficient to protect against SQL injection: 1) Any quote symbols in the user input are escaped so that they won't be considered quotes. 2) Each user-supplied value is quoted before being put into an SQL statment. 3) Users are allowed to enter values only. If users are allowed to enter column names, then the data must be validated against all allowed column names. But generally this is stupid. Best to let users enter data only, never metadata. 4) Users may not enter any SQL.
Pretty much all of these database converters have one or two points of entry that do 1-2 before doing any kind of optimization/fetching/whatever, and they don't really allow you to do 3-4. Of course, maybe I'm wrong and the GP knows about some mystical forms of SQL injection attacks that I don't. If so, I would certainly like to hear about any injection attempts that can fool this sort of thing. I would also like to hear about some big ORM (object-relational mapping) tools that prove that what the GP says isn't FUD.
Keep in mind that escaped values are escaped both when they're entered, and when they come out of a database. You pretty much always have to manually unescape them if you want to show them the original way.
. . . You have to have the prospect of a sizable enough win to pay your lawyer, or you will find it hard to get one, or, like Boies Schiller, the lawyer will want its money up front. Either way, you will have to feed the lawyer, who hungers for souls and human flesh. It will take you if you are not careful, and in a flight of fancy it may enthrall the wicked with its bite, eventually turning innocent humans into lawyers. The only thing that keeps lawyers on your side are math, and money, and when you run out of either, the lawyers will want life-force. IBM did the math, and SCO isn't looking like deep pockets any more, is it, now that Boies Schiller has drained them of pretty much all they had? . . .
I know there's been talk of wireless mesh networks where everybody is both an end point and a router. This would work in populated areas
This would work in populated areas in theory. In practice, though, 95% of the bandwidth in any given system gets eaten up by 5% of the users unless there is heavy regulation. Actually, we pretty much need the big internet companies in order to get a particular level of QoS.
Like I said, all it takes is one in fifty who won't play nice to ruin it for everybody else. I'd be willing to bet that 1 in 50 people is a sociopathic jerk - probably even more. Ultimately, we need something to keep the sociopaths from going nuts. "Power to the people," like the anarchy that is mesh networking won't work.
I know lots of stuff about reality. Been there, done that. I can't seem to get out of it.
So wikipedia isn't as much fun as I'd like. Better to see a new, enhanced version of reality - where the facts have been changed to make the story more interesting.
8. optionally, transparent compression and encryption will be a big plus point.
9. Snapshots would be nice too, for consistent backups.
10. Versioning is also very welcome.
I sure hope that none of these things are ever part of the filesystem itself. I want my filesystems 100% portable, and fast. You know why NTFS isn't so much, right? All the extra, nearly useless features that should be handled by the OS, but that are done by the file system instead.
These should be layers on top of the file system that are implemented by something else. 9 is basically a cron job, and 10 can be done more ways than I have fingers (and I have a full decimal complement) without using the file system, and there are a few solutions on freshmeat that will do 8 today.
Hopefully there aren't any file system designers who actually think that putting these into their system is actually a good idea.
As far as no "fsck"...I would never use a filesystem without it. Disks and memory go bad. Anyone who tells you that their filesystem never needs checking is deluding themselves. If anything, I want a filesystem with even more error recovery capability. I'd like the file metadata to have lots of redundancy for the sake of reliability, and some forensic tools that are at least as good as the ones already available for ext2.
You can certainly read it that way if you like. You wouldn't be conveying what that sentence did, though. As their focus is security, its understandable that they lead more incentives in these areas than more mainstream Linux distributions.
In this, the word "more" describes "Linux distributions." As it is a comparison, it also refers back to the subject of the phrase. The subject being "they," a pronoun which refers to "OpenBSD." This comparison also draws them into the same category because its comparing a single element to a collective. To clarify, let me simplify this sentence, excluding all (mostly) superfluous modifiers: "OpenBSD is more secure than more mainstream Linux distributions."
So...if open BSD is more secure than other, more mainstream Linux distributions, then it must be one of the lesser Linux distributions. Read more. You'll catch the subtle points more often.
I know it seems strange...but OpenBSD isn't a Linux distribution at all.
I know its hard to wrap head around. Its one of those things you just have to accept. In addition: -deep down, cows are not people too. So you can eat 'em, I guess. -neither are cats or dogs. So don't force them to wear clothing. -neither is information. So it doesn't care about being free or anything else. -"Windows" is somehow both an operating system and a Window manager. You're not supposed to consider them separate things (wierd, isn't it?) -Wearing a tampon with wings will not give you the power of flight.
Kinda...not really. The IT industry is full of bad books - REALLY bad books. There are so many new things coming out, and so people are trying to publish stuff as quickly as possible. With a few exceptions (such as, for instance document publishing languages and compiler tech), things change a lot.
O'Reilly publishing has been the only company that delivers any kind of consistency. That's a really big deal, because all of the computer books sell for around $50! $50 for something that has 1% useful information and 99% stuff the author picked up on some website somewhere isn't worth it at all.
When you first start learning a new technology, its really hard to tell which books are giving you fluff and which have good stuff that will actually help you. So you have to rely on someone else. Friends work out, but only to a point.
Inevitably there will be some areas that you know more about than any of your tech friends, (or you know nothing and neither do they), and you have to trust strangers. I pay for O'Reilly books because O'Reilly stands behind the quality of them, and I can usually trust that I'm going to get a lot out of them.
Oh, and for the tried and true commonly available areas - like perl 5, or html they've got some REALLY high quality gems.
Slashdot Mirror
I really enjoy getting into the characters - developing them.
Its not about the problem solving. Its about using my imagination to shape things. Coding is the same. I build upon the world, and the structures that I make please me.
A lot of the entertainment in role playing is in the fact that doing so is easy. I can code a behaviour I envision in perhaps a few hours or a few days, but I can create a character in a few minutes - and act him out with much greater detail.
I think that the reason behind this is not so much that coders like to solve problems, but that people who roleplay are drawn to programming for the same reason - its a personality type thing. Which personality type?
This one.
weighs about as much as a book,
What are you reading on your PDA? Novellas? Dr. Seuss? Or do you actually have a laptop that you're calling a PDA? My PDA is smaller and lighter than any book I own. Key feature is that size, though, since both have a negligible weight compared to what I am capable of carrying. 500 page book isn't going in the pocket. PDA is.
costs 10 times more than a book
Certainly it costs more than that! Even still, read more! I only use my PDA for reading. 1 read a book a week...how long did it take to pay itself off? Considering that books are about $6 apiece, and that my PDA is $170 retail, it took just over half a year before it started to pay for itself.
all the pages go blank after a few hours of reading
Huh? You mean if you take the batteries out of your PDA or break it? Or is this some specific form of DRM that erases the e-book after a specific length of time? All the pages go blank in a book if you dip it in acid. What's your point?
how many ebooks can you read in those few hours of battery life anyway?
Ah, I see. You don't understand batteries. Well, when you first get a PDA, it has a charge in its battery. When this runs out, you can recharge it - you don't have to read everything before the first charge runs out, as you seem to believe.
Even charging isn't much of an issue. I don't know very many people who read more than four hours at a time. That's about the charge I get on my PDA. I read about 45 minutes at a time, and charge it every few days. I seldom run out of power while reading.
You can also read in the dark, or when even a book is too inconvenient (like when you ended up having to wait somewhere that you didn't plan to wait and only have what you carry in your pockets to amuse yourself).
Maybe its not your killer app, but it sure is mine. Books don't hold a candle to books on PDA.
He meant "dye," as in "tie-dye." He want the Bells to become a bunch of peaceniks, and tie-dyeing their clothing is the first step.
Right on, brother. Give peace a chance.
Flower power over IP.
You know, there's a word for a vehicle that doesn't have an engine, or a bed, and is smaller than a car.
It's called a wagon.
Doesn't sound as cool, does it? But that's what it is, isn't it?
Rechargable nanomotors that don't break - that's what we need for this kind of thing. Its the holy grail for nanotech right now.
If you don't avoid all references to objects that move under their own power (and you're talking about nanotech), then you're sensationalizing the news. Its like saying "Fusion done in cold!" when you mean that someone built a fusion laser system in Anarctica. Obviously cold means something specific when its that close to the word "Fusion."
Keep up the sensationalism, and you can't get the point across when you come across something that's actually fantastic.
Ah. So what you really want from your engineers is someone who can look totally confident when they don't know and has totally mastery of B.S.ing. Why don't you throw in a firm, "honest" handshake while you're at it?
What you want is either a con-man or a politician. Programmers are sometimes shy, quiet, and awkward when asked questions - especially assembly and compiler programmers. You may get someone who knows their stuff but is too timid to admit it when you ask them questions. Someone may have the best stuff in the world, but you come away thinking that they can't write anything beyond a Dr. Seuss book.
If you want to manage, but don't have the time to look through their code, find a third party with good communication skills who can.
No, its right. They plan to implement the plan in a few light years. At that time, you should expect download rates of up to 10 kilopascals - available of a low, low price of only 30 monies. The only problem is that this technology uses more energy - you may have to pay for as much as fifty more watts than you're paying for now.
No you didn't. You broke the rules of algebra. You just demonstrated a rule you didn't know about. While there is a zero identity of equality, there is no zero property of inequality.
In other words, your second step is invalid; you're not allowed to do that.
Next thing you know, they'll be branding cattle, and tattooing ferrets!
And the regulations will only get worse!
Its only a matter of time before you have to have a license to keep exotic predators!
Oh wait...that's the way it is now. I guess society wants to keep track of its animals.
Carry on then.
Are you saying that shows about forensics and medicine aren't geeky? Have you watched any of those shows? They're all about the science!
Ever watch MacGuyver? It had a pretty long run, and that wasn't too long ago. How about Jimmy Neutron? Main character, not comic relief, meant to be smart. Its still on.
Its not impossible. Take off your nostalgia glasses and take a closer look. Its cooler to be a geek today than it has ever been. People wear the word with pride. Heck there are even companies that market the fact that they have them (Geek Squad, dial-a-geek).
Its not the coolness we have to blame. People want to be smart more than they ever did. It's that
1) Its hard
2) We don't have enough people who are good at it to teach it.
The same is true in other disciplines. Have you used AIM lately? Spelling, grammar, punctuation and vocabulary are pretty well shot. People don't have the ability to organize their thoughts into paragraphs (case in point: you). It seems as though we've come farther with those than with math.
I don't think so. Its just that most of the other subjects are so much easier for so many people to understand. So they get a little farther with the same amount of effort. Therefore, they seem to be farther along.
I have a hope that the coming of the age of the Internet is changing things. We have not had it very long, and I think that ultimately it is the internet that has changed the perception of geeks as cool. We will have to see how many teachers who are good at Math and science come out of it in the next two decades or so to see if it made a difference; its just too soon to tell.
Of course, by then, we'll really know. Most of the teachers around today are about to retire.
...And don't forget what radiation did to Bruce Banner.
Oh, and we can't leave out Dr. Strange - what being smart did for Bruce Wayne.
And, finally, we don't want to forget about The Green Lantern - how being near kryptonite affects Clark Kent.
What you are saying is a red herring. It has nothing to do with the point in question.
Why does the GGP's ethics state that the drug war falls into the government's jurisdiction because has nothing to do with ethics, while regulation of the other stuff does not because it has everything to do with it?
This is where the double standard lies, and is the point you have to deal with.
And drug war has nothing to do with ethics, eh? Perhaps you should be a little more specific. I've heard a great many people say that what someone does alone in their own home is nobody else's business.
Why does it apply to sex and violence but not drugs?
I'm not arguing the point either way. It just seems like your attitude is a bit of a double standard from a moralistic point of view.
This isn't about getting people to know about OSS.
Its about filling the seats. You know what you need for that? Women.
Get the babes in there, and the programmers will be all about it. Just combine it with another class. Perhaps the open source software and women's studies, or open source software and elementary education. If you're really bold do open source software and cheerleading practice.* Then teach it on whatever you want.
*All of these classes, which I am clearly stereotyping as predominantly female were, in fact, predominantly female at my college. So it would work there if nowhere else.
Removing external features is easy! Here's a simple, two step guide to removing camera functionality from your PDA:
1) Get a ball point pen.
2) Shove the pen deep into the CCD - cracking it so that it can no longer hold a charge.
VOILA! Camera-free PDA! This same "break the main part" technique can be used on a remarkably large range of electronic functions, including:
-Speakers
-Microphone
-LCD
-Phone (more complicated - you have to remove the antenna)
Virtually any external feature you don't like can be removed. On the other hand, it is quite difficult to add these features back.
Enjoy breaking stuff!
Arguments in Stored procedures are typed. And types can have a hell lot of restrictions, which being one of the major points of a database.
Like that number I used in the injection was typed? It was clearly a number, and the stored procedure would have recognized it as such. Didn't matter, did it?
No matter what you write in those arguments, at runtime there is no parsing anymore and no ambiguities by cleverly chosen strings matter to the parse anymore...since it is simply not used.
That only works if you can guarantee that you're only sending a single command to your database at any given time, doesn't it? I mean, maybe you can't do anything nasty inside the stored procedure, but you can outside it, can't you? Like in the example I gave?
You still have to do the checks I talked about in order to prevent SQL injections.
Databases are interpreters. They interpret SQL, and the ones that understand stored procedures can interpret even more than that. If you have something against interpreters, then you should stop using databases.
As it stands for me, though, input validation really isn't that hard. Use OOP, and build validation into the top of your hierarchy and you never have to worry about it again. There are not many and varied ways to do it. Wierd combos don't come up that cause problems. Unlike the other security risks, this one only comes up from ignorance, since its so easy to prevent.
In this case, stored procedures shelter you from SQL injection attacks
I'm not sure that they do. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that this doesn't make much sense at all. Not that its hard to protect against injection attacks, though.
Let's say you have a stored procedure called "getnumber" that takes two args.
Your goal is that this procedure is going to protect you from injection attacks; that you can put two untrusted args into it and you won't have to worry about someone using the procedure to do something you don't want them to do.
So you run
"select * getnumber(arg1,arg2);"
Is this vulnerable to injection attacks? Yes.
If arg2="32); create user..."
You see the problem? Stored procedures didn't help. Actually, I'd like to know what stored procedures will do for you that does help.
On the other hand, having a single place that validates the input does help - pretty much every time, and you're invulnerable. Its not nearly as hard as making sure that there's no buffer overflows.
This is all that is necessary and sufficient to protect against SQL injection:
1) Any quote symbols in the user input are escaped so that they won't be considered quotes.
2) Each user-supplied value is quoted before being put into an SQL statment.
3) Users are allowed to enter values only. If users are allowed to enter column names, then the data must be validated against all allowed column names. But generally this is stupid. Best to let users enter data only, never metadata.
4) Users may not enter any SQL.
Pretty much all of these database converters have one or two points of entry that do 1-2 before doing any kind of optimization/fetching/whatever, and they don't really allow you to do 3-4. Of course, maybe I'm wrong and the GP knows about some mystical forms of SQL injection attacks that I don't. If so, I would certainly like to hear about any injection attempts that can fool this sort of thing. I would also like to hear about some big ORM (object-relational mapping) tools that prove that what the GP says isn't FUD.
Keep in mind that escaped values are escaped both when they're entered, and when they come out of a database. You pretty much always have to manually unescape them if you want to show them the original way.
.
.
.
You have to have the prospect of a sizable enough win to pay your lawyer, or you will find it hard to get one, or, like Boies Schiller, the lawyer will want its money up front.
Either way, you will have to feed the lawyer, who hungers for souls and human flesh. It will take you if you are not careful, and in a flight of fancy it may enthrall the wicked with its bite, eventually turning innocent humans into lawyers. The only thing that keeps lawyers on your side are math, and money, and when you run out of either, the lawyers will want life-force.
IBM did the math, and SCO isn't looking like deep pockets any more, is it, now that Boies Schiller has drained them of pretty much all they had?
.
.
.
You don't get to do that. Nobody's controlling the connection. Everyone is connected together in a giant mesh.
Sounds like you want someone to have control of things.
Just like I said.
...and I can't do math. 1 in 20 is 5% :)
I know there's been talk of wireless mesh networks where everybody is both an end point and a router. This would work in populated areas
This would work in populated areas in theory. In practice, though, 95% of the bandwidth in any given system gets eaten up by 5% of the users unless there is heavy regulation. Actually, we pretty much need the big internet companies in order to get a particular level of QoS.
Like I said, all it takes is one in fifty who won't play nice to ruin it for everybody else. I'd be willing to bet that 1 in 50 people is a sociopathic jerk - probably even more. Ultimately, we need something to keep the sociopaths from going nuts. "Power to the people," like the anarchy that is mesh networking won't work.
I know lots of stuff about reality. Been there, done that. I can't seem to get out of it.
So wikipedia isn't as much fun as I'd like. Better to see a new, enhanced version of reality - where the facts have been changed to make the story more interesting.
Thats why I like the uncyclopedia.
8. optionally, transparent compression and encryption will be a big plus point.
9. Snapshots would be nice too, for consistent backups.
10. Versioning is also very welcome.
I sure hope that none of these things are ever part of the filesystem itself. I want my filesystems 100% portable, and fast. You know why NTFS isn't so much, right? All the extra, nearly useless features that should be handled by the OS, but that are done by the file system instead.
These should be layers on top of the file system that are implemented by something else. 9 is basically a cron job, and 10 can be done more ways than I have fingers (and I have a full decimal complement) without using the file system, and there are a few solutions on freshmeat that will do 8 today.
Hopefully there aren't any file system designers who actually think that putting these into their system is actually a good idea.
As far as no "fsck"...I would never use a filesystem without it. Disks and memory go bad. Anyone who tells you that their filesystem never needs checking is deluding themselves. If anything, I want a filesystem with even more error recovery capability. I'd like the file metadata to have lots of redundancy for the sake of reliability, and some forensic tools that are at least as good as the ones already available for ext2.
You can certainly read it that way if you like. You wouldn't be conveying what that sentence did, though.
As their focus is security, its understandable that they lead more incentives in these areas than more mainstream Linux distributions.
In this, the word "more" describes "Linux distributions." As it is a comparison, it also refers back to the subject of the phrase. The subject being "they," a pronoun which refers to "OpenBSD." This comparison also draws them into the same category because its comparing a single element to a collective.
To clarify, let me simplify this sentence, excluding all (mostly) superfluous modifiers:
"OpenBSD is more secure than more mainstream Linux distributions."
So...if open BSD is more secure than other, more mainstream Linux distributions, then it must be one of the lesser Linux distributions. Read more. You'll catch the subtle points more often.
than more mainstream Linux distributions
:)
I know it seems strange...but OpenBSD isn't a Linux distribution at all.
I know its hard to wrap head around. Its one of those things you just have to accept. In addition:
-deep down, cows are not people too. So you can eat 'em, I guess.
-neither are cats or dogs. So don't force them to wear clothing.
-neither is information. So it doesn't care about being free or anything else.
-"Windows" is somehow both an operating system and a Window manager. You're not supposed to consider them separate things (wierd, isn't it?)
-Wearing a tampon with wings will not give you the power of flight.
Hopefully I've cleared up a few issues for you.
There is some competition, I guess.
Kinda...not really. The IT industry is full of bad books - REALLY bad books. There are so many new things coming out, and so people are trying to publish stuff as quickly as possible. With a few exceptions (such as, for instance document publishing languages and compiler tech), things change a lot.
O'Reilly publishing has been the only company that delivers any kind of consistency. That's a really big deal, because all of the computer books sell for around $50! $50 for something that has 1% useful information and 99% stuff the author picked up on some website somewhere isn't worth it at all.
When you first start learning a new technology, its really hard to tell which books are giving you fluff and which have good stuff that will actually help you. So you have to rely on someone else. Friends work out, but only to a point.
Inevitably there will be some areas that you know more about than any of your tech friends, (or you know nothing and neither do they), and you have to trust strangers. I pay for O'Reilly books because O'Reilly stands behind the quality of them, and I can usually trust that I'm going to get a lot out of them.
Oh, and for the tried and true commonly available areas - like perl 5, or html they've got some REALLY high quality gems.