On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!], "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of
ideas that could provoke such a question.
After ten years, they've only made it to version 3.7. FreeBSD isn't that much older and I already have 7-CURRENT on my laptop. Even Windows progressed from 3.11 to 95 in a few short years.
Seriously, though, OpenBSD is simply amazing. Any reasonably experienced Unix user should be able to install it and know what every single running process on the default system does. There's nothing like logging into a multiuser system and seeing a "ps" listing maybe 15 lines long. Their devotion to doing things The Right Way is staggering -- who else bothered to randomize PIDs and TCP serial numbers and encrypt swap?
They treat every theoretical exploit as a practical matter, and the result is some of the most robust, elegant software to be found. I have my reasons for not running it on every system I admin, but that doesn't stop me from giving them my utmost respect. Kudos, Theo et al. Job well done.
Like it or lump it, but that's the reason behind not building a bunch of crazy authentication options into every package.
I actually hadn't even considered authentication. I use LDAP for shared address books, PKI, system settings (like automounter maps), Postfix backends, and other things. I don't care about having a version of KAddressbook that can do PAM authentication; I want one that can search my company's email directory.
It doesn't take too much gray matter to realize that soccer moms outnumber gaming advocates by a pretty wide margin, so who would you rather have included in your base?
Think so? I'd be willing to bet that for every soccer mom, there's a soccer dad who squeezes in some GTA:SA after mom puts Ashley and Courtney to sleep at night.
Signed,
The guy who's playing Silent Hill 4 once his preschoolers drift off later this evening.*
* My wife is an NHL nut and hates soccer, but that's beside the point.
One who'll always use open-source software, even when there's proprietary software more suited for the job?
I'll bite. Any software that makes my company's existence depend on the whims of an outside party is unsuitable for the job.
In my opinion, you have it backwards. An MS tool is one who believes Microsoft will always act in their best interest and stakes their financial future on it.
Upon being turned on, the computer just writes the stored RAM state back from the disk to RAM, and presto! It's just like starting up the computer, except really fast. At least, that was the theory.
The reality ain't so hot. In the meantime, your network connections have dropped. Your Kerberos ticket or domain login has expired. Your clock has drifted but your NTP client hasn't noticed that it hadn't been running in hours.
There's nothing earth shattering that can't be explicitly dealt with, but the problem is that there are a million and one little things that you'd never think of that have to be accounted for. It'd be like you waking up from a year-long coma, and realizing that you'd lost your job and your girlfriend even though it only felt like you'd been away for five minutes.
even though the Mac brought GUI's to the masses -- brought GUI's what to the masses? Poor GUI - what if he didn't want his possessions to be widespread?
And even when you do have multiple addresses allocated, what about the users that have one more machine than usable addresses? Small company networks etc? Now matter how many addressed IPv6 supplies, we will run out eventually, and much sooner than we expect.
Current recommendations are for ISPs to hand out/48 networks to each customer (so that the customers have 80 bits of autoconfig space). If each ISP has 64K (2^16) users, there's still enough address space for 4 billion (2^32) ISPs. Conversely, we could have 64K ISPs, each will 4 billion customers, without overlap.
Besides, this is going to make my "There's no place like 127.0.0.1" shirt obsolete in 10 years! I'll have to get one with colons in it!
Good point. Imagine the joy:
Cute girl: There's no place like... colon?
You: *sob*
Think maybe I'll pass on that one.
Re:Intellisense #1 feature, pay Bram to add it
on
Vim 6.4 Released
·
· Score: 1
I think syntax autocompletion is ruining a new generation of programmers.
You're thinking in terms of small, well-defined libraries. Autocompletion isn't for them. Autocompletion is for huge, chaotic libraries like PHP. No matter how many thousand lines of code I wrote, I could never remember type1_foo(bar, qux) had the opposite prototype of type2_foo(qux, bar) for no apparent reason, and which one expected the arguments in which order. Having a little tooltip to remind be to put bar first this time would've saved countless hours of pointless debugging. It also would've made me much more productive, since I would've have been constantly thrashing between vim and php.net the whole time.
I may or may not agree with you regarding autocompletion and C, but I definitely disagree with you concerning certain other languages.
The point of a journaling file system is that you don't need to run fsck
For the record, the background fsck is mainly used to free resources that weren't cleanly deallocated before a crash. It doesn't actually repair the filesystem, per se.
Don't tell anyone, but FreeBSD builds on-the-fly hashtables of directory contents as they're accessed. I'll see your O(log n) btree and raise you an O(1).
Reiser's a sharp guy, but he doesn't have the only game in town.
When I uninstall a package from my system I want it gone. apt-get remove --purge and a properly packaged deb will do that for you.
So [package uninstaller] on [OS] completely removes that package. Golf clap. A properly packaged (your words) application will work that way on any OS, not just Debian.
I love Debian, and have used it for years. It's great. However, the real admin nightmare comes when you decide you want some non-standard feature supported systemwide. On FreeBSD, for example, if I want LDAP support then I install the OpenLDAP client port (or let it get brought in as a dependency when I request LDAP support in some random program). Et voila, ports compiled from then on get LDAP support where appropriate. Gentoo fans: yeah, I know you have this too. Portage earns its name, I'll give you that.
Debian, on the other hand, requires you to hand-roll special locally-built versions of every application you want to have LDAP support - when a new version comes out, it's hand building time again. Yay! If LDAP is too common to be a good example, check out Kerberos. Debian/unstable has OpenSSH 4.2p1. Nice! If you want a version with Kerberos support, though, plan on rolling back to OpenSSH 3.8.1p1 and losing all of the other features you might have liked to use, or cranking up gcc and your beloved packaging tools.
As I said, I like Debian. Still, I can't pretend that it doesn't have several critical issues that make its administration a lot harder than need be. If the official packages cover all your needs, then it's a dream. If not, things get ugly quickly. You might not like the tradeoffs that FreeBSD and Gentoo have made, but they're there for a reason and are exactly what many of us want and need.
like randomizing [something] for [something in the kernel] a few years ago in one of the BSDs
For the record, that language construct can almost always be re-written as "OpenBSD secured [something in the kernel] a few years ago". I'm not even a particularly big OpenBSD fan, but if someone's talking about adding entropy to something that might possibly be too predictable, then OpenBSD probably did it five releases back.
He is being deprived of his property and his ability to make a living, without due process of law.
If someone makes their living kicking my in the guy parts, forgive my complete lack of sympathy when he gets his steel-toe shoes confiscated. "But without shoes", you say, "how will he make his living?" My answer: who cares? That's his problem, and not one I'm at all interested in.
What gives him the "right" to earn money in this illegal manner, and why shouldn't the FBI be allowed to gather evidence against him? It's not like they confiscated his TV and pool table.
Don't give up hope, RiscOS! You're this close to following AmigaOS's meteoric rise to desktop dominance. Don't loosen your death grip on that code base! Amiga didn't, and now they're poised to overtake Windows any month now. Remember, sharing your code is admitting defeat. Why go the way of the dodo when you can shine in the spotlight like Amiga!
Side note: I actually have a copy of Amiga Forever, which is a licensed set of AmigaOS packages and various applications bundled with UAE (an Amiga emulator). I burned a copy of the new release CD a few weeks ago but had forgotten to eject it from the burner in my server. I rebooted said server a couple days ago to upgrade my FreeBSD kernel and left the room for a few minutes. When I came back, I was staring at an Amiga screen. Seems the CD is actually built on Knoppix, and it auto-configures X and then fires up UAE. Freaked me out to find a ghost of my past staring at me at 2:00 AM.
I'm a pro writer, so I live inside word processors.
Out of curiosity, what makes you think the former implies the latter? I know plenty of writers that live inside text editors while eschewing word processors entirely.
I think the biggest thing lacking with IM seems to be the lack of a corporate tool for IM.
We have an internal Jabber server, using the Psi client for Windows desktops and Kopete on Unix. Our data never leaves our LAN. What more could you ask for?
When prosecuting a case of trespass, the owner must often demarcate their property with signs indicating that it is private property and trespass is not allowed.
That's part of the reason that you don't often see Welcome to system.example.com! any more when you log in. For similar reasons, I've used this login banner for years now:
You are now connected to machine.example.com. This is private property, and all possible legal and technical action will be taken against unauthorized accesses. If you do not have explicit permission to connect to this machine, you are required to terminate this session immediately. Failure to do so indicates an informed willingness to commit illegal acts. You have been warned.
I don't know that it'll ever affect anything, but do know that if a skript k1dd13 ever got charges dropped because he wasn't explicitly told to stay out of my network, I'd be in prison for beating him to death with a Model M keyboard.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but at least it wouldn't evolve.
With a 2.4 GHz Athlon 64, 2 GB of DDR400, and two 7200 RPM 8 MB cache drives in RAID 0
You were just waiting for a chance to slip that into the conversation, weren't you?
-- Charles Babbage
Thank you. I was beginning to wonder if everyone thought I was a jackass who really believed that.
Seriously, though, OpenBSD is simply amazing. Any reasonably experienced Unix user should be able to install it and know what every single running process on the default system does. There's nothing like logging into a multiuser system and seeing a "ps" listing maybe 15 lines long. Their devotion to doing things The Right Way is staggering -- who else bothered to randomize PIDs and TCP serial numbers and encrypt swap?
They treat every theoretical exploit as a practical matter, and the result is some of the most robust, elegant software to be found. I have my reasons for not running it on every system I admin, but that doesn't stop me from giving them my utmost respect. Kudos, Theo et al. Job well done.
I actually hadn't even considered authentication. I use LDAP for shared address books, PKI, system settings (like automounter maps), Postfix backends, and other things. I don't care about having a version of KAddressbook that can do PAM authentication; I want one that can search my company's email directory.
Think so? I'd be willing to bet that for every soccer mom, there's a soccer dad who squeezes in some GTA:SA after mom puts Ashley and Courtney to sleep at night.
Signed,
The guy who's playing Silent Hill 4 once his preschoolers drift off later this evening.*
* My wife is an NHL nut and hates soccer, but that's beside the point.
I'll bite. Any software that makes my company's existence depend on the whims of an outside party is unsuitable for the job.
In my opinion, you have it backwards. An MS tool is one who believes Microsoft will always act in their best interest and stakes their financial future on it.
The reality ain't so hot. In the meantime, your network connections have dropped. Your Kerberos ticket or domain login has expired. Your clock has drifted but your NTP client hasn't noticed that it hadn't been running in hours.
There's nothing earth shattering that can't be explicitly dealt with, but the problem is that there are a million and one little things that you'd never think of that have to be accounted for. It'd be like you waking up from a year-long coma, and realizing that you'd lost your job and your girlfriend even though it only felt like you'd been away for five minutes.
</smartass>
Current recommendations are for ISPs to hand out /48 networks to each customer (so that the customers have 80 bits of autoconfig space). If each ISP has 64K (2^16) users, there's still enough address space for 4 billion (2^32) ISPs. Conversely, we could have 64K ISPs, each will 4 billion customers, without overlap.
I think that we'll manage.
Good point. Imagine the joy:
Cute girl: There's no place like... colon?
You: *sob*
Think maybe I'll pass on that one.
You're thinking in terms of small, well-defined libraries. Autocompletion isn't for them. Autocompletion is for huge, chaotic libraries like PHP. No matter how many thousand lines of code I wrote, I could never remember type1_foo(bar, qux) had the opposite prototype of type2_foo(qux, bar) for no apparent reason, and which one expected the arguments in which order. Having a little tooltip to remind be to put bar first this time would've saved countless hours of pointless debugging. It also would've made me much more productive, since I would've have been constantly thrashing between vim and php.net the whole time.
I may or may not agree with you regarding autocompletion and C, but I definitely disagree with you concerning certain other languages.
For the record, the background fsck is mainly used to free resources that weren't cleanly deallocated before a crash. It doesn't actually repair the filesystem, per se.
Reiser's a sharp guy, but he doesn't have the only game in town.
So [package uninstaller] on [OS] completely removes that package. Golf clap. A properly packaged (your words) application will work that way on any OS, not just Debian.
I love Debian, and have used it for years. It's great. However, the real admin nightmare comes when you decide you want some non-standard feature supported systemwide. On FreeBSD, for example, if I want LDAP support then I install the OpenLDAP client port (or let it get brought in as a dependency when I request LDAP support in some random program). Et voila, ports compiled from then on get LDAP support where appropriate. Gentoo fans: yeah, I know you have this too. Portage earns its name, I'll give you that.
Debian, on the other hand, requires you to hand-roll special locally-built versions of every application you want to have LDAP support - when a new version comes out, it's hand building time again. Yay! If LDAP is too common to be a good example, check out Kerberos. Debian/unstable has OpenSSH 4.2p1. Nice! If you want a version with Kerberos support, though, plan on rolling back to OpenSSH 3.8.1p1 and losing all of the other features you might have liked to use, or cranking up gcc and your beloved packaging tools.
As I said, I like Debian. Still, I can't pretend that it doesn't have several critical issues that make its administration a lot harder than need be. If the official packages cover all your needs, then it's a dream. If not, things get ugly quickly. You might not like the tradeoffs that FreeBSD and Gentoo have made, but they're there for a reason and are exactly what many of us want and need.
For the record, that language construct can almost always be re-written as "OpenBSD secured [something in the kernel] a few years ago". I'm not even a particularly big OpenBSD fan, but if someone's talking about adding entropy to something that might possibly be too predictable, then OpenBSD probably did it five releases back.
If someone makes their living kicking my in the guy parts, forgive my complete lack of sympathy when he gets his steel-toe shoes confiscated. "But without shoes", you say, "how will he make his living?" My answer: who cares? That's his problem, and not one I'm at all interested in.
What gives him the "right" to earn money in this illegal manner, and why shouldn't the FBI be allowed to gather evidence against him? It's not like they confiscated his TV and pool table.
My wife asked why I was integrating across a unit circle to get its volume. When I answered "practice", she looked ready to fetch the Thorazine.
Side note: I actually have a copy of Amiga Forever, which is a licensed set of AmigaOS packages and various applications bundled with UAE (an Amiga emulator). I burned a copy of the new release CD a few weeks ago but had forgotten to eject it from the burner in my server. I rebooted said server a couple days ago to upgrade my FreeBSD kernel and left the room for a few minutes. When I came back, I was staring at an Amiga screen. Seems the CD is actually built on Knoppix, and it auto-configures X and then fires up UAE. Freaked me out to find a ghost of my past staring at me at 2:00 AM.
Out of curiosity, what makes you think the former implies the latter? I know plenty of writers that live inside text editors while eschewing word processors entirely.
We have an internal Jabber server, using the Psi client for Windows desktops and Kopete on Unix. Our data never leaves our LAN. What more could you ask for?
I would, because it was responsible for most of the "new" features MySQL was bragging about.
And btw, people who need transactions and advanced features tend to use postgresql instead of mysql+innodb .
You misspelled "will have to" (excepting Firebird et al).
That's part of the reason that you don't often see Welcome to system.example.com! any more when you log in. For similar reasons, I've used this login banner for years now:
I don't know that it'll ever affect anything, but do know that if a skript k1dd13 ever got charges dropped because he wasn't explicitly told to stay out of my network, I'd be in prison for beating him to death with a Model M keyboard.
The first thing that came to mind when I read that was Emacs' "Zippy" mode. I ran M-x yow and got:
Swear to God. I don't know whether to laugh, cry, or lock myself into the panic room.