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User: r00t

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  1. Oh fuck. on Seagate to Drop IDE Drives by Year End · · Score: 3, Interesting

    What will I do when my drive dies again?

    I happen to like my computer. Being fanless and well-built, it is quite reliable except for the damn hard drive.

  2. Re:I suggest a protest on Senators Call for Universal Internet Filtering · · Score: 1

    You want to leave Washington full of unemployed goatse?

    Well. I guess the place really can get worse!

  3. rather likely to be true actually on Study Proves Having Fat Friends Makes You Fat · · Score: 1

    The cycle is a resonance involving hormones. Based on this fact alone, one can conclude that hormone-based alignment is possible.

    If the periods of the periods greatly differ, alignment might be more difficult. Obviously an alignment would require living in close quarters for a long time. (share the bed, eat all meals together, share clothes, etc.)

  4. non-reproducing is a good thing on PubPat Kills Four Key Monsanto Patents · · Score: 1

    It ends the problem of Monsanto suing farmers for growing Monsanto crops without permission. The crops just won't grow.

    Minor irritations remain. Contaminated fields will have very slightly reduced germination. Monsanto-using farmers won't be saving their Monsanto seed. Neither of these is anything near as bad as the problems we have today.

    Monsanto can even lay off most of their lawyers and get back to research.

  5. you can never go back on Are Cheap Laptops a Roadblock for Moore's Law? · · Score: 1

    Software grows features until the performance is just a bit better than "tolerable" on a high-end developer machine. This makes it barely tolerable on a typical user machine.

    Killing the existing features is never an option, even if the features are near-useless.

    Thus one can never regain the lost performance and return to the slower hardware of the past.

  6. example on Why Linux Has Failed on the Desktop · · Score: 1

    The new container stuff is insane.

    We already have virtualization and SE Linux. We don't need an extra layer of complexity wedged in. Slowaris can have that to itself.

  7. get in early, volume, and low standards on OLPC Mass Production Begins · · Score: 1

    Imperfections, like dead pixels, are OK.

    This is volume, big time. It stabilizes a company.

  8. Re:Poor child turns down OLPC computer on OLPC Mass Production Begins · · Score: 1

    The dirt has lots of bugs. The kid himself probably does too.

  9. memcpy is the answer on New Hack Exploits Common Programming Error · · Score: 1

    If you forgot the length/size, you can't be safe.

    If you do have the length/size, you have the info needed to use memcpy. This is faster then strcpy, and often much faster than strcat or sprintf.

  10. In theory, yes. on Linux Kernel To Have Stable Userspace Drive · · Score: 1

    In practice, where are you going to get a fully capable IOMMU?

    The one on AMD64 chips, intended to be just an AGP-GART, does not protect the full address space.

    Intel has documented the functionality of an IOMMU for the Linux kernel developers, but makes no mention of actual or even proposed chipsets with the feature.

    To protect devices from being used to attack other devices, they can't share busses as is normal for standard PCI. You need one IOMMU per bus.

  11. same with TB on HIV Vaccine Ready For Clinical Trials · · Score: 1

    Many people with tuberculosis do not cough.

    So, would you say we need a separate term for people with tuberculosis who are also coughing?

    If not, why not? Why does HIV infection get two names, while tuberculosis infection only gets one?

    (the obsolete tuberculosis names were purely alternatives, not different names for different stages of the disease -- like the GRID/AIDS situation or the HIV/LAV situation, not the HIV/AIDS situation)

  12. not as many programmers know them? on New Linux Desktop Environment Built on Firefox · · Score: 1

    To really "know" your favorite languages (HTML, CSS, Javascript) is quite rare. Lots of us can get some minor thing half-way working on one browser. Writing solid code is not at all a trivial task; very few people can manage. Not even Google always gets it right.

    While I've seen some very buggy and unportable C code, fixing one platform doesn't tend to break all the others as is the case with the web stuff.

  13. you can do DMA on Linux Kernel To Have Stable Userspace Drive · · Score: 1

    The kernel won't help you do DMA nicely, but it can't stop you. Anything with control over a PCI device can set off a DMA operation, which the PCI device will then perform. PCI DMA is done from the device, not the motherboard.

    This is a massive security hole. One of these drivers can use DMA to read your kernel memory. It can then send this over the network. It can look for data structures in the kernel, then DMA some code and function pointers into the kernel. It's trivial to take control of the system.

  14. he's kind of correct on HIV Vaccine Ready For Clinical Trials · · Score: 3, Interesting

    AIDS and HIV were once considered separate. The definition of AIDS was modified to require HIV.

    That sucks. What about all the people with Aquired Immunodeficiency Syndromes from other causes? There are chemicals that can do it, and many other causes as well. Now that the definition of AIDS has been modified, do these people no longer have Aquired Immonodeficiency Syndromes? They're all healthy and OK now?

    Furthermore, if that's all AIDS means anymore, why do we even need the term? For other infections, we don't have a separate name. If you are infected with tuberculosis and then start coughing, we don't change the description to Aquired Coughing Syndrome (ACS).

  15. Re:Woohoo! on HIV Vaccine Ready For Clinical Trials · · Score: 1

    I guess if you like hepatitis (incurable, destroys your liver, and often causes cancer), herpes (incurable), and numerous other nasty things... then yeah! Fuck away!

    Cancer is an astrological sign, right? That makes it good. Liver is yucky anyway, even with onions.

  16. ANI can be spoofed on Your Own Mini-Stalker · · Score: 1

    It's harder to aquire the needed control, but certainly not impossible. There are places that will help you.

    There are so many ways. Be government. Pay off a phone company insider. Set up your own phony phone company even.

  17. not that battering a women is wrong! on Your Own Mini-Stalker · · Score: 1

    Sometimes they like it, especially if you lick off the batter.

    Tip: don't put raw eggs in the batter, because the woman will probably object to being deep fried. (it doesn't hurt to ask though)

  18. igniting into a mach 3 airflow on Six Minutes of Terror - Landing Humans on Mars · · Score: 1

    The answer is simple: don't do that.

    Method 1:

    Ignite horizontally, above the craft. After ignition, rotate the nozzles 90 degrees and into the airflow.

    Method 2:

    Use the most powerful practical rocket design, the hydrogen boiler. (liquid hydrogen flows over uranium or plutonium, boiling it but not burning it -- skip the oxygen, which is heavy and corrosive anyway)

  19. Re:well you aren't in that line of work on openMosix Is Shutting Down · · Score: 1

    No, "e" almost implies teamwork. My workplace has only one anti-social asshole, who happens to be one of the least bright/skilled of the group.

    Real hackers can work 8 hour days, flex-time.

  20. How do you feel about support library bugs? on openMosix Is Shutting Down · · Score: 1

    When that MS Message Queueing thing fucks up, what do you do?

    The lower level you go, the fewer bugs are underneath you. When you write the compiler and the OS, only the hardware itself can cause you pain.

    BTW, writing a messaging system can be mildly fun. Today I wrote malloc() again. Not your kind of fun?

  21. Re:why not PPPoE on the modem? on Does Comcast Hate Firefox? · · Score: 1

    It's not as if doing PPPoE on the modem takes features away from your router. You can still use the router and even do your NAT on the router.

  22. sure, it would be very yucky on openMosix Is Shutting Down · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Maintaining out-of-tree patches is painful. I was part of a small team doing exactly that, with extremely filthy hacks into the scheduler even. I know of what you speak, from personal experience. Dealing with old kernels is icky too.

    That all comes under desire though, not ability. ("desire" as in "I'd like to do this", not "I'd like somebody else to do this")

    I've known quite a few people with the ability. I expect that any of them, including myself, would actually maintain Mosix if either:

    a. we had strong personal reasons to want Mosix
    b. we got paid decently

    For those of us with the ability, all it takes is the desire -- which I'm not seeing. Mosix just isn't worth the trouble.

  23. I realize that too. on openMosix Is Shutting Down · · Score: 1

    I have a half dozen kids. I actually spend time with them, usually in the morning because of flexible hours at work.

    I do very cool stuff. I won't disclose it, but it involves lots of: hard-core assembly, writing stuff like VMWare, picking apart hex dumps (packets, files, kernel memory, etc.), JIT translation (like doing the .net/java virtual machine implementation), etc.

    So I'm not getting $130/hour. (minus time spent begging for new contracts) Oh well.

    I get to do fun stuff at work (for a hard-core hacker), and I get to enjoy my family.

    Why is money so important? It sounds like your priority is not family, but toys. The money buys a needlessly fancy/new car, home, boat, RV, second home, box seat season ticket, jewelry collection, horse, pedigreed dog... so you can look fancy and distract yourself from the misery of being a .net developer whose life has no meaning.

  24. purpose served, project ended on Microsoft Excludes GPLv3 From Linspire Deal · · Score: 4, Informative

    Samba had been encoding/decoding network packets in a very manual way, with a collection of ugly macros to do the job. Samba-TNG was forked largly to switch over to doing RPC via IDL (an Interface Devinition Language, which gets processed at build time to produce *.c stub/wrapper functions to do the marshalling and unmarshalling).

    The main Samba team learned their lesson. They switched to an IDL for Samba 4. Samba-TNG has been a very close clone of the Microsoft implementation, warts included. Samba 4 is far better.

    Thus Samba-TNG has served it's purpose: teach the Samba developers that IDL is a good idea. Done. Mission accomplished.

  25. it encourages me on Microsoft Excludes GPLv3 From Linspire Deal · · Score: 1

    I'm sort of cool on the whole GPLv3 thing, because of the preamble that unjustly tries to rename Linux against the wishes of the core developers.

    But...

    If the license really bothers Microsoft, then it must be good.

    Hmmm. Tough decision...