I committed virtually every sin listed up there. My point is that its hard to maintain open source packages. Especially when the negative comments outweigh the patches fixing the problems, and on top of that, you have another job (like running a website for example;)
And that was perfectly ok in your case, CmdrTaco. After all, you had to run the damn site during all that time, producing at least some original content, but most of all skimming trough heaps of submissions and selecting which to post. The slash code release has been handled very well.
Now I may be wrong, but the main job of the sourceforge guy is to maintain and develop the software, right? Since they have decided to do so in an opensource fashion, they have to take responsibility and either keep up with the updates, or be honest about their being overworked.
Ok, I'm not in any way personnally involved in all of this, but this guys complaints seem valid and should be adressed. They appear to be mainly a problem of lack of communication and information. This can be fixed! (and I bet it will, now that it's up here on flamedot:)
Wow, thank you very much for this info. Everybody complains about how MS hides important API functions from competitors, yet this is the first time I see someone give concrete examples (or maybe I didn't look hard enough, I'm not that interested in windows programming).
Would you happen to know where I can find more information about this?
Or does anyone have other examples of important Windows API functions/system calls which have been hidden and then discovered or reverse engineered by people outside of Microsoft?
I know that DOS had a couple of these already, as illustrated by the numerous "MSDOS exposed", or "DOS internals" books published at that time. I wonder if there exist similar books on windows.
No, the preview pane is not enough. We have been slightly affected by the "LoveBug" at my workplace (4 users double-clicked on it before we reacted). The cleanup is pretty striaghtforward tough, except for the fact that all.jpg files where replaced by.jpg.vbs clones of the virus... No prob, resore from backup.
The mail message is just text. The virus is the attached.vbs file. It does however create an html page in WINDIR which upon opening asks if you don't want to authorize ActiveX. If you do reply yes, it runs the virus' code.
There are two things I haven't been able to figure out about this virus:
1. What does WIN-BUGSFIX.exe do (it tries to download it from an URL by defining it as the IE start page). Has anyone had the chance to disassemble/analyze it yet? The server was dead already when I tried to wget it.
2. Obviously, by double-clicking on the attachement, you execute the code locally with full access to the computer trough WHS. I wonder if it were possible to embed a similar code directly into (MS)HTML, aren't there access restrictions?. That would be one badass motherfucker of a virus/worm.
Well the option is called save as HTML, not XML. I'm not complaining about the format not being well-formed XML.
HTML 4.0, on the other hand...
BTW, someone pointed out this byte article, which I pretty much agree with.
Basically, it's already a great step to have a format which is more or less human readable. This will makes it alot easier to create third party parsers/conversion tools.
Right beneath the normal save option is a nice looking "save as webpage" button. Use it...
...Won't be of much help tough because as other people have pointed out already, this feature actually produces an (MS)HTML document with XMLized OLE related info.
Note that if you have a relatively complex document, Office2K will create a directoy with the same name as the file in which it puts various other stuff.
I just went to the trouble of running a small "saved as webpage"-word2000 doc trough the W3C validation service. Result:
Sorry, this document does not validate as HTML 4.0 Transitional.
But it is quite a nifty feature if you're running an all Microsoft shop (which I have the displeasure of doing), since it allows people to post stuff on the local intranet without any additional work... I guess Microsoft is quite pleased with this feature:)
...I just hope that the KDE guys will leave it as an option to use either KHTMLPart or NGLayout as the HTML renderer in Konqueror. That would be great.
I'm quite ignorant in OS design (still wading trough Tannenbaums "Operating Systems" at Uni), so take it with a grain of salt, but:
1. The language needs a compiler* to create directly executable machine code.
2. The language must provide features to manipulate/manage memory (as in pointers).
3. The language has to provide direct access/control to/of the peripherals (device drivers)
...Other than that, I think anything would do.
* Note that the difference betweeen an interpreted and a compiled language is not fixed and hasn't anything to do with the language itself. Altough Perl is usually (semi-)interpreted, one could create a compiler for it (or is there one already? I don't know Perl very well).
This is out of about 5000 readers who responded. I wonder how the numbers would look in the US (SuSE - RedHat position reversed?)
It bothers me when distros ship with tons and tons of stuff.
I don't really see why. As long as you get the opportunity of manually selecting what you want and what you don't want, I'm perfectly happy with a little application overkill. I like to get as much stuff as possible on the CDs, because online time is still paid for by the minute where I live.
...But if you like RedHat, you should check out Mandrake 7 once. It's the only Linux distro I know of which has a security setup during install (you can go from "all the servers like RedHat" to "nothing listens to my ports"). It's not perfect of course, you still have to upgrade your servers when an exploit is published, but at least it gives the beginner some control over what his box looks like on the network.
What should I be on the look out for, when I try to impress my date with this hot new distro?
Well for one you can optionally install XFree 4.0 instead of 3.3.6, that'll surely impress a woman;)
You can also use ReiserFS for all your partitions except/boot, which is great.
The LVM has been upgraded and now works alot better.
And finally, if you buy the boxed version, you get tons of software on those 6 CDs. I really appreciate that, living in Europe, because it cuts down dramatically on my online costs.
No, you can't sue spammers/telemarketers on the same grounds as ddosing kiddies. I can understand the analogy tough. In both cases, you are flooded with "packets" from various sources. Remember tough, in the case of a ddos, there is a single person pulling the trigger with intent to harm, while telemarketers act independently of each others (and there is no intent to harm, but maybe that's a point to argue about;).
The law against unsolicited commercial faxes passed because it wastes paper you have to actually pay for yourself, so it creates costs for you. Since an incoming phonecall or letter doesn't cost you anything the general consensus seems to be that it's ok (I don't agree with that, my time is worth something too).
Now, here in Europe I have to pay by the minute for my internet connection, I think I could use a similar reasoning against spam-mail.
I am just about to finish reading Database Nation by Simson Garfinkel, and I think the author makes some very good points about possible solutions. There is a very good case to be made for strong governement regulation, strict laws and heavy penalties here. Industry self-regulation simply doesn't work.
The more important issue behind the annoyance of receiving unsollicited mail, however, is companies aggregating large amounts of data about people and selling them. This should be forbidden if there is no prior approval by the concerned person.
Just a short note: If you are using Linux (oh, let's be politically correct, make that any flavor of unix), you always have access to the mail server. Most distributions include sendmail or qmail, trough which you can define filtering rules.
If you have a POP3 account you can get your mail to your local machine by using fetchmail, which (if I recall correctly), includes spam-filtering options.
Ok nothing against SuSE, it's a great (gigantic!)distro. But I found it notoriously difficult to upgrade to the latest version tru FTP. If I were a little paranoid, I'd say that, indeed, they're trying to force you to buy the next version (at least they got me to do so for 6.2->6.3).
Well, maybe I'm clueless, since I've only begun to use SuSE recently (before it was mainly RedHat), so if someone wants to correct me.
I've been trying to use MS Netmeeting 3 across a masquerading Linux box (kernel 2.2.13). There is a kernel module which works whith Netmeeting 2, but with netmeeting 3 only the outgoing video/sound works, while I don't see/hear anything from the other guy.
I didn't see anything on this in the article so I'm asking it here:
Does anyone know if an updated module is in the works for 2.4 (or already in the dev kernels)?
Alternatively, are there good free beer alternatives to netmeeting under windows (or Linux, since I dual-boot... but the webcam is USB - a Phillips Vesta PCV675)
Hmm. No. There was another article in the same edition of the magazine. It talked about a readers CD-ROM which exploded in the drive. They spend a whole page speculating about the possible cause, and mention that some manufacturers stopped at x40 speed.
The stuff you're talking about was hilarious, tough. I think it was in the last quickies here on/.
Well actually, I can. At first I believed the story and spend a whole hour transcribing it into a submittable feature for slashdot. It was going to be my great day. A story by me on slashdot.
Then I recalled that this was the april's issue of c't, and that they had a truly excellent track record of april 1 pranks.
Last year, they distributed a small FTP client for windows, which they claimed used the QOS field in TCP headers to accelerate file transfers by an order of magnitude. As you all know, this field actually exists, so they printed a longish article explaining how TCP/IP works, complete with extracts from the relevant RFCs, to make the prank more believable. I think they used up 4 pages for this. As late as october, they still had people mailing them to complain that the software didn't work. Hilarious.
...Or an older one where they presented the latest Microsoft GUI project, which supposedly featured a fully 3 dimensional desktop. A friend of mine tried to convince me for a whole evening that it wasn't fake (the screenshots where very well made).
To any c't guys reading slashdot: You're the best!
On a related note (and to the other c't readers around here): Do you think the exploding CDs story is fake too?
The main advantage of digital storage is lossless reproducability. But we achieve this by limiting the amount of data to discrete values (like for example audio CD: 16bit/44.1kHz sampling) in the first place. The question being, how much data do we have to collect for it to be "good enough".
Some would say that quantum mechanics is inherently digital tough, as particles can only have discrete energy states...
Of course I have no idea what I'm actually talking about here.
Slashdot Mirror
I committed virtually every sin listed up there. My point is that its hard to maintain open source packages. Especially when the negative comments outweigh the patches fixing the problems, and on top of that, you have another job (like running a website for example ;)
:)
And that was perfectly ok in your case, CmdrTaco. After all, you had to run the damn site during all that time, producing at least some original content, but most of all skimming trough heaps of submissions and selecting which to post. The slash code release has been handled very well.
Now I may be wrong, but the main job of the sourceforge guy is to maintain and develop the software, right? Since they have decided to do so in an opensource fashion, they have to take responsibility and either keep up with the updates, or be honest about their being overworked.
Ok, I'm not in any way personnally involved in all of this, but this guys complaints seem valid and should be adressed. They appear to be mainly a problem of lack of communication and information. This can be fixed! (and I bet it will, now that it's up here on flamedot
I did, here :)
Wow, thank you very much for this info. Everybody complains about how MS hides important API functions from competitors, yet this is the first time I see someone give concrete examples (or maybe I didn't look hard enough, I'm not that interested in windows programming).
Would you happen to know where I can find more information about this?
Or does anyone have other examples of important Windows API functions/system calls which have been hidden and then discovered or reverse engineered by people outside of Microsoft?
I know that DOS had a couple of these already, as illustrated by the numerous "MSDOS exposed", or "DOS internals" books published at that time. I wonder if there exist similar books on windows.
No, the preview pane is not enough. We have been slightly affected by the "LoveBug" at my workplace (4 users double-clicked on it before we reacted). The cleanup is pretty striaghtforward tough, except for the fact that all .jpg files where replaced by .jpg.vbs clones of the virus... No prob, resore from backup.
.vbs file. It does however create an html page in WINDIR which upon opening asks if you don't want to authorize ActiveX. If you do reply yes, it runs the virus' code.
The mail message is just text. The virus is the attached
There are two things I haven't been able to figure out about this virus:
1. What does WIN-BUGSFIX.exe do (it tries to download it from an URL by defining it as the IE start page). Has anyone had the chance to disassemble/analyze it yet? The server was dead already when I tried to wget it.
2. Obviously, by double-clicking on the attachement, you execute the code locally with full access to the computer trough WHS. I wonder if it were possible to embed a similar code directly into (MS)HTML, aren't there access restrictions?. That would be one badass motherfucker of a virus/worm.
Sorry for being Offtopic.
Well the option is called save as HTML, not XML. I'm not complaining about the format not being well-formed XML.
HTML 4.0, on the other hand...
BTW, someone pointed out this byte article, which I pretty much agree with.
Basically, it's already a great step to have a format which is more or less human readable. This will makes it alot easier to create third party parsers/conversion tools.
Am I missing something here?
:)
In a word, yes.
Right beneath the normal save option is a nice looking "save as webpage" button. Use it...
...Won't be of much help tough because as other people have pointed out already, this feature actually produces an (MS)HTML document with XMLized OLE related info.
Note that if you have a relatively complex document, Office2K will create a directoy with the same name as the file in which it puts various other stuff.
I just went to the trouble of running a small "saved as webpage"-word2000 doc trough the W3C validation service. Result:
Sorry, this document does not validate as HTML 4.0 Transitional.
But it is quite a nifty feature if you're running an all Microsoft shop (which I have the displeasure of doing), since it allows people to post stuff on the local intranet without any additional work... I guess Microsoft is quite pleased with this feature
...I just hope that the KDE guys will leave it as an option to use either KHTMLPart or NGLayout as the HTML renderer in Konqueror. That would be great.
When is the last time you bought anything that said "Made in France."
Mandrake Linux. Nuff said.
Very interesting question indeed.
;)
I'm quite ignorant in OS design (still wading trough Tannenbaums "Operating Systems" at Uni), so take it with a grain of salt, but:
1. The language needs a compiler* to create directly executable machine code.
2. The language must provide features to manipulate/manage memory (as in pointers).
3. The language has to provide direct access/control to/of the peripherals (device drivers)
...Other than that, I think anything would do.
* Note that the difference betweeen an interpreted and a compiled language is not fixed and hasn't anything to do with the language itself. Altough Perl is usually (semi-)interpreted, one could create a compiler for it (or is there one already? I don't know Perl very well).
Feel free to correct/flame me at will
Oh shit. I'm sorry for him. Guess I'll have to find a new "real" fake address... What about john@doe.com?
BTW, What is this: vrfy?
Oh, in that case joe@blow.com must be legit then, because that's what I've been using to register stuff for the last 5 years...
:)
Would be fun if it was actually used by someone
... I actually don't think I know anyone using SuSE - Redhat is by far the most popular distro on campus, a few Debian users, couple Mandrakes.
Well SuSE is really big here in Europe. Linux Magazin (a german mag) have published a reader poll in their latest edition and the results were:
SuSE: 75%
RedHat: 11%
Debian: 8.5%
Caldera, DLD, easyLinux, Mandrake, others: 5.5%
This is out of about 5000 readers who responded. I wonder how the numbers would look in the US (SuSE - RedHat position reversed?)
It bothers me when distros ship with tons and tons of stuff.
I don't really see why. As long as you get the opportunity of manually selecting what you want and what you don't want, I'm perfectly happy with a little application overkill. I like to get as much stuff as possible on the CDs, because online time is still paid for by the minute where I live.
Ok, I'm not going to tell you to try Debian...
...But if you like RedHat, you should check out Mandrake 7 once. It's the only Linux distro I know of which has a security setup during install (you can go from "all the servers like RedHat" to "nothing listens to my ports"). It's not perfect of course, you still have to upgrade your servers when an exploit is published, but at least it gives the beginner some control over what his box looks like on the network.
What should I be on the look out for, when I try to impress my date with this hot new distro?
;)
/boot, which is great.
Well for one you can optionally install XFree 4.0 instead of 3.3.6, that'll surely impress a woman
You can also use ReiserFS for all your partitions except
The LVM has been upgraded and now works alot better.
And finally, if you buy the boxed version, you get tons of software on those 6 CDs. I really appreciate that, living in Europe, because it cuts down dramatically on my online costs.
No, you can't sue spammers/telemarketers on the same grounds as ddosing kiddies. I can understand the analogy tough. In both cases, you are flooded with "packets" from various sources. Remember tough, in the case of a ddos, there is a single person pulling the trigger with intent to harm, while telemarketers act independently of each others (and there is no intent to harm, but maybe that's a point to argue about ;).
The law against unsolicited commercial faxes passed because it wastes paper you have to actually pay for yourself, so it creates costs for you. Since an incoming phonecall or letter doesn't cost you anything the general consensus seems to be that it's ok (I don't agree with that, my time is worth something too).
Now, here in Europe I have to pay by the minute for my internet connection, I think I could use a similar reasoning against spam-mail.
I am just about to finish reading Database Nation by Simson Garfinkel, and I think the author makes some very good points about possible solutions. There is a very good case to be made for strong governement regulation, strict laws and heavy penalties here. Industry self-regulation simply doesn't work.
The more important issue behind the annoyance of receiving unsollicited mail, however, is companies aggregating large amounts of data about people and selling them. This should be forbidden if there is no prior approval by the concerned person.
Long live Slatko "the brain"! (Have you seen him in TV Total? He won, and will be back next week, arrgh!)
[moderators: If you don't get it, don't moderate]
Just a short note: If you are using Linux (oh, let's be politically correct, make that any flavor of unix), you always have access to the mail server. Most distributions include sendmail or qmail, trough which you can define filtering rules.
If you have a POP3 account you can get your mail to your local machine by using fetchmail, which (if I recall correctly), includes spam-filtering options.
2 links:
Linux Mail users howto
Linux Mail administrators HOWTO
Ok nothing against SuSE, it's a great (gigantic!)distro. But I found it notoriously difficult to upgrade to the latest version tru FTP. If I were a little paranoid, I'd say that, indeed, they're trying to force you to buy the next version (at least they got me to do so for 6.2->6.3).
Well, maybe I'm clueless, since I've only begun to use SuSE recently (before it was mainly RedHat), so if someone wants to correct me.
I've been trying to use MS Netmeeting 3 across a masquerading Linux box (kernel 2.2.13). There is a kernel module which works whith Netmeeting 2, but with netmeeting 3 only the outgoing video/sound works, while I don't see/hear anything from the other guy.
I didn't see anything on this in the article so I'm asking it here:
Does anyone know if an updated module is in the works for 2.4 (or already in the dev kernels)?
Alternatively, are there good free beer alternatives to netmeeting under windows (or Linux, since I dual-boot... but the webcam is USB - a Phillips Vesta PCV675)
Hmm. No. There was another article in the same edition of the magazine. It talked about a readers CD-ROM which exploded in the drive. They spend a whole page speculating about the possible cause, and mention that some manufacturers stopped at x40 speed.
/.
The stuff you're talking about was hilarious, tough. I think it was in the last quickies here on
Thanks for the dumbass. Search for "Bowie J. Poag" on the page and you'll see what I meant.
(Comment #101, see, I'm even trying to be helpful)
Ok thanks. I found it here, and it is indeed inflammatory. Let's not insist on this.
Care to elaborate? What was up with sourceforge?
(Ugh, I realize this could start a major flamefest, sorry in advance, I'm honestly curious)
Whahaha, I can't believe you fell for it, duesi.
Well actually, I can. At first I believed the story and spend a whole hour transcribing it into a submittable feature for slashdot. It was going to be my great day. A story by me on slashdot.
Then I recalled that this was the april's issue of c't, and that they had a truly excellent track record of april 1 pranks.
Last year, they distributed a small FTP client for windows, which they claimed used the QOS field in TCP headers to accelerate file transfers by an order of magnitude. As you all know, this field actually exists, so they printed a longish article explaining how TCP/IP works, complete with extracts from the relevant RFCs, to make the prank more believable. I think they used up 4 pages for this. As late as october, they still had people mailing them to complain that the software didn't work. Hilarious.
...Or an older one where they presented the latest Microsoft GUI project, which supposedly featured a fully 3 dimensional desktop. A friend of mine tried to convince me for a whole evening that it wasn't fake (the screenshots where very well made).
To any c't guys reading slashdot: You're the best!
On a related note (and to the other c't readers around here): Do you think the exploding CDs story is fake too?
Right on. Just a few minor points:
The main advantage of digital storage is lossless reproducability. But we achieve this by limiting the amount of data to discrete values (like for example audio CD: 16bit/44.1kHz sampling) in the first place. The question being, how much data do we have to collect for it to be "good enough".
Some would say that quantum mechanics is inherently digital tough, as particles can only have discrete energy states...
Of course I have no idea what I'm actually talking about here.