I think more important than knowing asm is knowing the instruction timing.
Yep, but if you're writing assembly without
having the datasheet available for the target
CPU, then you're
immediately onto a losing proposition, and you
might as well stick to C...
Unlikely. The original request was to be able
to connect to the existing office VPN. That
almost certainly means a Cisco VPN using IPsec,
and Vtun doesn't do IPsec.
I know how a computer works, as far as registers and such, yet have little desire to learn to code that myself.
I'd argue that unless you understand assembly,
you don't fully know how registers work. I
haven't had to write any assembly for over
10 years, yet with every single line of code
that I write, I'm thankful that I could if I
needed to. I'm sure you're a very competent
programmer, but empirical evidence from 20 years
of coding shows me that without fail, coders that
don't know assembly are unable to progress
beyond competence into true greatness. Not that
greatness is actually needed for 90% of coding tasks, but nonetheless, those with a background
in assembly are without fail better coders.
As for when it should be learned, I disagree that
it should be a first language, but it should be
mandatory in any CS course at some point.
but
And Slackware wasn't the first one either... it replaced SLS as the leader earlier.
Pah. SLS may have been an early market leader,
but the first distribution was MCC. My first
distribution was MCC because I didn't have the
bandwidth to download the (huge by the standards
of the day) 65MB SLS distribution, nor the disk
space to install it. MCC fitted
onto 3 high density 5.25" disks, and installed
nicely onto a 20MB hard drive.
Before MCC,
we just used a root and boot disk that came
straight from Linus...
I have an application that runs fine on our
Linux and Solaris machines, but isn't available
for Windows. I'd love to use RX to give
the Windows desktops access to the app via a
plugin. Unfortunately, the RX plugin doesn't
seem to be maintained any more, and furthermore,
it crashed mozilla on my test box:-(
I like the KOffice scheam because it inherently produces small files (already compressed).
No, this is an apalling design, and it's
the same flaw from which gnumeric suffers:
leto% file blah.gnumeric
blah.gnumeric: gzip compressed data, deflated, last modified: Thu Aug 3 16:20:22 2000, os: Unix
leto% file blah.kwd
blah.kwd: gzip compressed data, deflated, last modified: Thu Jan 1 01:00:00 1970, os: Unix
By all means use a compressed save format, but
don't just gzip XML, a tar file or some
other standard format. Every application
should have it's own unique file format header,
that's easily parsable by file(1). Otherwise,
we're headed down the windows road, where the only
way to identify a file is by its extension, and
that's somewhere I really don't want to go.
I'd be quite happy if gnumeric/kword used a header
to say "the following block in this file is N bytes long and is a zlib compressed XML reqpresentation
of the data". But just using gzip plain sucks.
employees demand VERY reasonable conditions and pay in exchange for giving their time to make the company money.
Perhaps things are different in the US, but here
in the UK, that's just simply not true. Railway
workers have recently been on strike because
management tried to impose a uniform that included
a red waistcoat, and they didn't like it.
Virtually all the recent strikes in the UK have
included an element of the unions insisting on
jobs for life --
no redundancies in the future.
The rest of the country don't have that luxury, and it pisses
me off to see public service workers striking to
demand it. Striking means misery for millions
trying to get to work / send a letter / whatever
else.
I just can't understand this. Now admittedly,
I am a traditional geek, but I find
the Gimp UI very intuitive and easy to use.
The different selection modes are the only
non-intuitive part, but they're pretty easy
to learn in a short period of time.
Disclaimer: I've been using Gimp since the days
when it was still a Motif app, so maybe I'm
biased. However, from the very first time I
used Gimp, I've never had any problems, and
back then, there was no documentation to speak
of -- if you couldn't work out how to use it,
you were on your own.
the easiest way to get everyone to use e-mail encryption is for Microsoft and/or AOL to pick a standard and integrate it into AOLmail, Hotmail and Outlook Express.
Nope. Every answer I've seen here is looking at
it from the wrong viewpoint. Anything that
requires application support is doomed from the
start. Sure, as soon as something gets into
Outlook, it'll be adopted by the world as a whole,
but only until the next version, when MS will
replace it with something else that's completely
incompatible.
The solution is not encrypted email. It lies in
the use of opportunistic encryption at the network
layer. That way, all traffic is encrypted,
whether it contains an email message, a web page, a DNS lookup or anything else.
Re:What's Not To Like
on
Just For Fun
·
· Score: 5
At one point he even seems to confuse the Netcraft surveys of the webservers with a measure of penetration of Linux.
Netcraft also measure OS penetration. See the
following sample from one of their SSL surveys:
Note that their OS breakdown is generally only available to paying customers, although
I've heard from those who've seen it that Linux
fares very well in the non-SSL rankings.
No. I've yet to see a union that's done anything
constructive. All they do is blackmail companies
to try and extract unreasonable pay and working
conditions.
Yes, but I'd argue that's a flaw with Oracle. Not
that it has one, but that it forces you to use it.
As of 8i release 3, they no longer support a text
install. That's fine, except I've just had to try
and install it on some Sun servers that don't have
X. They're servers (y'know -- the sort of machines
on which Oracle is designed to run), so they don't
have X installed. I can't just remotely display
the installer on my desktop, because the server
doesn't even have the X libraries installed. Nor
should it. X
rocks, and the network transparency is invaluable,
but Oracle is making a huuuge mistake by insisting
on it being there. I'm seriously thinking about
switching to DB2 or Informix (both now owned by IBM).
Most GNU/Linux programs will Compile on BSD/Tru64/AIX/HP-UX/QNX/BeOS or anything that has a POSIX layer
Now I know you're only 13, but man are you naive.
Most trivial programs will compile without too
many problems, and some non-trivial programs as
well. However, unless they're written with
portability in mind (and the vast majority of
programs aren't), porting can involve a considerable
amount of work. Many of the problems come from
non-POSIX/SUS interfaces that have the same name,
but different arguments (or worse, the same
arguments but different semantics) between OSes.
getmntent() is a good example. Other problems
come from the use of system specific interfaces,
such as doors on Solaris.
Firewalls don't help against valid traffic flood attacks.
Of course they can. Any half way decent intrusion
detection system will notice the pattern of a
DoS attack, and dynamically add a firewall rule
to block *all* traffic from the offending IP for
a period of time.
DDoS attacks are trickier, because you need to
block several (often hundreds or even thousands
of IP addresses or ranges), but the same
principle still applies. The concern here is
that a large scale DDoS attack will cause the
firewall to be processing so many rules for each
packet that it's unable to keep up with the
traffic. The undesirable packets won't get past
the firewall, but random packets will start to be
dropped, including ones containing genuine traffic.
So you still get a DoS, albeit a lesser
one than you would have had without the firewall.
So Darren Reed gets his wish, and the OpenBSD people will no longer be modifying his code without his permission.
The OpenBSD people get their wish, and all the code they distribute is completely free of any restrictions on use, modification, etc.
And OpenBSD users are left without any firewalling
solution. I'm using OpenBSD for a couple of
firewalls, and without IPF, they're just useless boxes
sucking up electricity. The sad thing is that I
agree 100% with Theo. I just wish they'd taken a more
pragmatic approach, and kept IPF in the tree
until a suitable alternative could be written.
I suppose, though, that removing it will increase the
pressure to write such a replacement, which might
otherwise have been a back-burner project.
Oh well, I guess at least I still have my OpenBSD
2.8 CDs around...
Hosting a popular site costs thousands of dollars a month in bandwidth alone.
No it doesn't, at least not in the UK, and I'm
pretty confident US bandwidth is cheaper than
here. How much bandwidth do you expect to need?
For a couple of thousand pounds a month, you'll
get a 100Mb/s pipe direct to a LINX
backbone provider in Telehouse.
For a few thousand more, you get gigabit (yes,
true gigabit internet access). I couldn't believe
how cheap bandwidth had become when we were
looking at it over the past few months.
Not that I've had much trouble with the earlier 2.4 kernels on the whole, but I wouldn't run my server farm on them.
I would. For me, the turning point was 2.4.4.
We had a few stability issues with earlier 2.4
kernels, but 2.4.4 has been rock solid. That's
not to say I'd rush out and upgrade a perfectly
functioning 2.2 server farm, but if I was building
one from scratch, it'd be 2.4 all the way.
If a small film maker wishes a DVD to have
worldwide distribution, then the zoning system
doesn't prevent that at all. They can simply
make a zoneless disc. They are, after all, a
small film maker, and hence the arguments
that the larger studios use to justify zoning
don't apply. Of course, zoning is inherently
evil anyway, but that's another matter. Using
bogus logic is not the way to have it wiped from
the face of the planet, and I'd expect a court to
take the same view...
If you want someone to read it, thus respecting it, KISS
Agreed. Legal disclaimers are a nightmare dreamed
up by lawyers to keep themselves in a job. If
they absolutely have to be there (and it's my view that they don't),
then they should simply be a reference to the full
small print:
A disclaimer applies to all email sent from Example, Inc. For the full text, see http://www.example.com/legal/
Why does everyone build clusters using normal
desktop boxes? Rackmount clusters make so much
more sense. Admittedly, I don't think the G4
comes in a rackmount configuration, but surely
that makes other options (Sun Netra, Compaq DS10L
or noname Intel boxen) more appropriate?
Until then like the stick-shift automobile, it will remain strictly a specialist interest.
Only in the USA. The rest of the world is
dominated by manual gearboxes, and an automatic
is an expensive option that's rarely used
except by the
elderly and lazy businessmen.
wedit used to be GPL. Then, all of the sudden, the authors just took the source code out of the site, without warning anybody.
Not a problem. If it was released under the GPL,
and you downloaded it in binary form, then simply
request the source. They are legally obliged to give it to you.
Of course, this only applies to the earlier GPL-licensed
versions, and not to the current version.
Re:As a humanitarian I'm outraged by the waste of
on
Home Improvement
·
· Score: 3
Why must we fund this monumental international waste of money when there are people starving here on Earth ?
So you're a troll, but I'll bite anyway.
The future of humanity depends on our ability
to leave this planet (we'll have to do it sooner
or later, and leaving it to the last minute is
a plan that's doomed from the start). Our ability
to leave the planet is solely dependent on how
much we spend on space research (barring intervention from alien races, of course:-)
Thus, it's
better to sacrifice a few starving people now to
save humanity in general. Or at least, that's the
theory. I'm personally not convinced that the
survival of humanity would be a good thing for
our galaxy. I'm sure other lifeforms would do a
better job of preventing galactic pollution, and
not overtaxing available resources...
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, but if you're writing assembly without having the datasheet available for the target CPU, then you're immediately onto a losing proposition, and you might as well stick to C...
Unlikely. The original request was to be able to connect to the existing office VPN. That almost certainly means a Cisco VPN using IPsec, and Vtun doesn't do IPsec.
I'd argue that unless you understand assembly, you don't fully know how registers work. I haven't had to write any assembly for over 10 years, yet with every single line of code that I write, I'm thankful that I could if I needed to. I'm sure you're a very competent programmer, but empirical evidence from 20 years of coding shows me that without fail, coders that don't know assembly are unable to progress beyond competence into true greatness. Not that greatness is actually needed for 90% of coding tasks, but nonetheless, those with a background in assembly are without fail better coders.
As for when it should be learned, I disagree that it should be a first language, but it should be mandatory in any CS course at some point. but
Pah. SLS may have been an early market leader, but the first distribution was MCC. My first distribution was MCC because I didn't have the bandwidth to download the (huge by the standards of the day) 65MB SLS distribution, nor the disk space to install it. MCC fitted onto 3 high density 5.25" disks, and installed nicely onto a 20MB hard drive. Before MCC, we just used a root and boot disk that came straight from Linus...
Strange, then, that TiVo appear to be doing quite well for themselves with their Linux based set-top box.
I have an application that runs fine on our Linux and Solaris machines, but isn't available for Windows. I'd love to use RX to give the Windows desktops access to the app via a plugin. Unfortunately, the RX plugin doesn't seem to be maintained any more, and furthermore, it crashed mozilla on my test box :-(
No, this is an apalling design, and it's the same flaw from which gnumeric suffers:
By all means use a compressed save format, but don't just gzip XML, a tar file or some other standard format. Every application should have it's own unique file format header, that's easily parsable by file(1). Otherwise, we're headed down the windows road, where the only way to identify a file is by its extension, and that's somewhere I really don't want to go. I'd be quite happy if gnumeric/kword used a header to say "the following block in this file is N bytes long and is a zlib compressed XML reqpresentation of the data". But just using gzip plain sucks.I think you probably mean John the Ripper
Perhaps things are different in the US, but here in the UK, that's just simply not true. Railway workers have recently been on strike because management tried to impose a uniform that included a red waistcoat, and they didn't like it. Virtually all the recent strikes in the UK have included an element of the unions insisting on jobs for life -- no redundancies in the future. The rest of the country don't have that luxury, and it pisses me off to see public service workers striking to demand it. Striking means misery for millions trying to get to work / send a letter / whatever else.
I just can't understand this. Now admittedly, I am a traditional geek, but I find the Gimp UI very intuitive and easy to use. The different selection modes are the only non-intuitive part, but they're pretty easy to learn in a short period of time.
Disclaimer: I've been using Gimp since the days when it was still a Motif app, so maybe I'm biased. However, from the very first time I used Gimp, I've never had any problems, and back then, there was no documentation to speak of -- if you couldn't work out how to use it, you were on your own.
Nope. Every answer I've seen here is looking at it from the wrong viewpoint. Anything that requires application support is doomed from the start. Sure, as soon as something gets into Outlook, it'll be adopted by the world as a whole, but only until the next version, when MS will replace it with something else that's completely incompatible.
The solution is not encrypted email. It lies in the use of opportunistic encryption at the network layer. That way, all traffic is encrypted, whether it contains an email message, a web page, a DNS lookup or anything else.
Netcraft also measure OS penetration. See the following sample from one of their SSL surveys:
Note that their OS breakdown is generally only available to paying customers, although I've heard from those who've seen it that Linux fares very well in the non-SSL rankings.
No. I've yet to see a union that's done anything constructive. All they do is blackmail companies to try and extract unreasonable pay and working conditions.
Yes, but I'd argue that's a flaw with Oracle. Not that it has one, but that it forces you to use it. As of 8i release 3, they no longer support a text install. That's fine, except I've just had to try and install it on some Sun servers that don't have X. They're servers (y'know -- the sort of machines on which Oracle is designed to run), so they don't have X installed. I can't just remotely display the installer on my desktop, because the server doesn't even have the X libraries installed. Nor should it. X rocks, and the network transparency is invaluable, but Oracle is making a huuuge mistake by insisting on it being there. I'm seriously thinking about switching to DB2 or Informix (both now owned by IBM).
Now I know you're only 13, but man are you naive. Most trivial programs will compile without too many problems, and some non-trivial programs as well. However, unless they're written with portability in mind (and the vast majority of programs aren't), porting can involve a considerable amount of work. Many of the problems come from non-POSIX/SUS interfaces that have the same name, but different arguments (or worse, the same arguments but different semantics) between OSes. getmntent() is a good example. Other problems come from the use of system specific interfaces, such as doors on Solaris.
Of course they can. Any half way decent intrusion detection system will notice the pattern of a DoS attack, and dynamically add a firewall rule to block *all* traffic from the offending IP for a period of time. DDoS attacks are trickier, because you need to block several (often hundreds or even thousands of IP addresses or ranges), but the same principle still applies. The concern here is that a large scale DDoS attack will cause the firewall to be processing so many rules for each packet that it's unable to keep up with the traffic. The undesirable packets won't get past the firewall, but random packets will start to be dropped, including ones containing genuine traffic. So you still get a DoS, albeit a lesser one than you would have had without the firewall.
The OpenBSD people get their wish, and all the code they distribute is completely free of any restrictions on use, modification, etc.
And OpenBSD users are left without any firewalling solution. I'm using OpenBSD for a couple of firewalls, and without IPF, they're just useless boxes sucking up electricity. The sad thing is that I agree 100% with Theo. I just wish they'd taken a more pragmatic approach, and kept IPF in the tree until a suitable alternative could be written. I suppose, though, that removing it will increase the pressure to write such a replacement, which might otherwise have been a back-burner project. Oh well, I guess at least I still have my OpenBSD 2.8 CDs around...
No it doesn't, at least not in the UK, and I'm pretty confident US bandwidth is cheaper than here. How much bandwidth do you expect to need? For a couple of thousand pounds a month, you'll get a 100Mb/s pipe direct to a LINX backbone provider in Telehouse. For a few thousand more, you get gigabit (yes, true gigabit internet access). I couldn't believe how cheap bandwidth had become when we were looking at it over the past few months.
I would. For me, the turning point was 2.4.4. We had a few stability issues with earlier 2.4 kernels, but 2.4.4 has been rock solid. That's not to say I'd rush out and upgrade a perfectly functioning 2.2 server farm, but if I was building one from scratch, it'd be 2.4 all the way.
If a small film maker wishes a DVD to have worldwide distribution, then the zoning system doesn't prevent that at all. They can simply make a zoneless disc. They are, after all, a small film maker, and hence the arguments that the larger studios use to justify zoning don't apply. Of course, zoning is inherently evil anyway, but that's another matter. Using bogus logic is not the way to have it wiped from the face of the planet, and I'd expect a court to take the same view...
Agreed. Legal disclaimers are a nightmare dreamed up by lawyers to keep themselves in a job. If they absolutely have to be there (and it's my view that they don't), then they should simply be a reference to the full small print:
Why does everyone build clusters using normal desktop boxes? Rackmount clusters make so much more sense. Admittedly, I don't think the G4 comes in a rackmount configuration, but surely that makes other options (Sun Netra, Compaq DS10L or noname Intel boxen) more appropriate?
Only in the USA. The rest of the world is dominated by manual gearboxes, and an automatic is an expensive option that's rarely used except by the elderly and lazy businessmen.
Not a problem. If it was released under the GPL, and you downloaded it in binary form, then simply request the source. They are legally obliged to give it to you. Of course, this only applies to the earlier GPL-licensed versions, and not to the current version.
So you're a troll, but I'll bite anyway. The future of humanity depends on our ability to leave this planet (we'll have to do it sooner or later, and leaving it to the last minute is a plan that's doomed from the start). Our ability to leave the planet is solely dependent on how much we spend on space research (barring intervention from alien races, of course :-)
Thus, it's
better to sacrifice a few starving people now to
save humanity in general. Or at least, that's the
theory. I'm personally not convinced that the
survival of humanity would be a good thing for
our galaxy. I'm sure other lifeforms would do a
better job of preventing galactic pollution, and
not overtaxing available resources...