... 'no question' that Linux already violates a number of patents, which could lead to further litigation.
Seems reasonable. If you can patent "IsNot" and XOR, then I imagine there are hundreds of other stupid patent violations peppered throughout the kernel source.
he is a Debian Developer.
Sounds like he's an active Free Software participant. Bonus points for that.
I spent all day in Fremantle today on location for the shooting of a new local independent feature film, Fisheye Stiller.
He also has interests outside his mom's basement. More bonus points.
What would you consider to be acceptable pasttimes? Making clocks? Working puzzles? Building Lego kits? Is there anything he could have put on there that you wouldn't be making fun of?
if they had something I was interested in - but all the chicks I met
Ding-ding-ding! We have a winner!
If that's your criterion for a social organization's worth, I bet the "chicks" are beating a path to your door. I'm a Mensa member because I like the diverse interests of the people you meet (even among the men and the older women!) and the magazine is somewhat entertaining. Your inability to get accepted doesn't mean that other people don't find it worthwhile.
I've never paid a penny for a Linux or BSD distribution (although I've donated a small amount to OpenBSD). Unix and Unix-alike servers account for a large percentage of the machines at my company, but 0% of our spending.
I hope you're not actually endorsing the crap site you linked in your sig. For starters, does anyone outside the little blue island in the top right corner of the map think of Oklahoma as "the south" (as opposed to, say, the Midwest, where it really is)? The loser's real rants is about "red states", even though they cover far more of the map than just the southeast US.
Please don't link to such things. You usually have interesting things to say, but your sig cheapens their impact by association.
If you are someone looking to use Solaris to play MP3 files then you have no idea what you are doing.
What's wrong with that? I haven't touched Solaris since I put v7 on an SS5 I had lying around. I'm perfectly happy with my BSD ("Dying!") servers, but I wouldn't mind playing around with Solaris on a spare desktop machine just to see what it's all about. Am I a bad person because I don't care to benchmark Oracle on it, or because I might want to compare it to my Linux desktops out of curiosity?
The most hilarious thing to me when someone gets hacked is looking at their box and a simple nmap shows every port under gods lcd monitor open.
One of our customers was complaining that our mailserver was bouncing the messages they were trying to send to us. Sure enough, Postfix was reporting an inability to resolve their domain (and we reject such mail - if we can't reply to you, we don't want your messages). We knew that they self-hosted their DNS, and after a coworker came to my office to discuss the matter, I nmapped their server to see if the service was running.
Our jaws dropped when we found about 50 running, accessible services on the machine - including file sharing, Oracle (!!!), IPP, an open web proxy (I used curl to fetch Slashdot's front page through it), and everything else IIS has to offer.
We told them that we thought they needed a firewall, and to have their sysadmin contractors take a look at their other security settings (or lack thereof). Other than that, we're not touching their network again for love or money. When they finally discover that they've been pwn3d by 147 different crackers, I don't want our IP in their logs or them to know that we scanned their machine one time.
They won't succeed as long as I patch, because root logins through SSH are disallowed, and I don't have any of the usernames they guess.
That's a good start, but the real reason they won't be logging in should be that they don't have the RSA private keys needed to authenticate. I don't care if you know my username and password - you still won't be getting a shell.
I also highly recommend the Spyderco Delica as an excellent general-purpose knife. They cut anything, and are a little less likely to raise eyebrows than a switchblade or butterfly. I agree with your assessment, though. I love my Leatherman Wave, but the knife is just so-so. It's certainly better than nothing, but severely outclassed by any dedicated blade.
I mean Gaim is great and all, but AOL and AIM have at least 4 orders of magnitude more users than Gaim and Adium combined.
You mean people still use the stock clients?!? I say that only half in jest; while I know someone must, I don't know a single person that still uses AOL's client.
I'm in college, I dare say I couldn't function without AIM, hell this campus would damn near shut down without it.
In that case, your campus sucks. Really. Jabber is every bit as nice as AIM, but you can pick between quite a few nice (Free!) clients. Get someone to set up jabber.yourschool.edu and be done with the reliance on a closed, hostile network once and for all.
Even better, get rid of these stupid null-terminated strings in favor of a string-length word at the beginning of each string. You can get put me on record as saying that a 2^64-byte string ought to be enough for anybody.
My own answer would be for every processor to have its own, unique instruction set; so only code compiled for that one particular individual processor would ever run on it.
Basically, then, you want to encrypt executables so that they can only run on the CPU they're compiled for.
In other words, you want your code to be Trusted before the CPU could even think about Computing it. By Dicky, that's a Really Meaningful suggestion!
2002 called and wants its universally reviled ideas (and lame jokes) back.
You got it write, except that overwriting other data can be just as bad as overwriting executable code:
char buffer[100]; int dataHasBeenVirusChecked = 0; gets(buffer); if (dataHasBeenVirusChecked) { sendAsEmailAttachment(buffer); }
In this case, if "buffer" gets overfilled just so, then the program may incorrectly believe that the data it contains is safe to operate on even though it might not be. Remember, folks, there are other ways to exploit an overflowable buffer then the standard "write executable code to stack and jump to it" method.
The irony is that you are demonstrating a sizable amount of arrogance yourself by assuming that everyone is else uninformed and making poor decisions, and then speaking out decry the fact.
By your own post, the wise would be holding their tongues; yet you're dismissing the opinions of others as "uninformed" - thereby placing yourself into the "arrogant and uninformed" category of your own definition.
well the first thing to optimize is the algorithm.
Amen. I was playing around with a cheesy sieve prime test a little while ago just for nostalgia's sake, and had a line like:
maxtest = sqrt(testvalue) if candidate > maxtest: ..return 1
I realized that I didn't care a bit about an exact value of sqrt, and that the value in testvalue was incrementing by two each time, so I wrote an integer-based replacement that worked like this:
maxsqrt=4 sqrtvalue=2
def isqrt(value): ..global maxsqrt, sqrtvalue ..if value <= maxsqrt: ....return sqrtvalue ..else: ....sqrtvalue += 1 ....maxsqrt = value * value
I shaved about 60% off my runtime by understanding that I never really wanted to compute an accurate value, and could use the nature of the input set to replace the original "simple" function with a more complex, tailored one that ran orders of magnitude faster. No machine will do that for you in the near future.
Our current U.S. political climate bears this out.
In other words, you're unhappy with the current situation because the uninformed arrogant haven't managed to see things your way and vote accordingly. The unintentional irony of this couplet is astounding.
My 1 ghz computer can search enormous databases for information in a matter of seconds, while I'm sending multimedia emails to my friends with the other hand.
Three things:
Got the address of these, um, databases?
You get off on sending "multimedia"?
I don't want to know where the unmentioned original hand is.
There once was a time when I respected Slashdot for it's common-sense + Left'ish wing viewpoints. Now it looks like nothing more then an elementary school whine-fest.
Pot. Kettle. Black.
Interestingly, I've long tolerated Slashdot's hysterics and leftish viewpoints, but it seems like the site is a little less frothing-at-the-mouth since they sacked Michael (which was a very, very good thing - thanks, editors!). I'm about as pro-Free Software and personal freedom as you can get, but for a long time it seemed like every single story was a slam against George Bush and stupid Republicans along the lines of:
Posted by Michael from the burning-the-ozone dept. Anonymous Coward writes "AMD just announced plans for a dual-core Athlon64. Read about it here." This was probably financed by the selected "president" to raise electricity consumption to benefit his big-oil cabal. Go Halliburton - killed any Iraqi children today?
I won't be the slightest bit sad to see all such idiocy disappear from the site.
Poor spelling, grammer and an uncanny nack for re-posting stuff other peoples' work.
I hate to say it, but: You must be new here. Seriously, this has been the state of affairs for years. We love Slashdot for the eclectic mix of opinions and informative technical discussions, not the seamless editing and top-notch accuracy.
But what's the processor utilization? On most systems, its usually less than 10 percent. So when a user does something, the bottleneck is usually not the processor. Its usually the hard drive.
That's most systems, but certainly not all. I wrote a web application in Zope that acts as a portal to our scanned document warehouse. Whenever a customer wants to access some of the data we're storing for them, we fetch a few TIFFs from a Samba filesystem, convert them into a PDF with ImageMagick, and send them out. A RAID wouldn't make a bit of difference to our setup, since even the comparatively slow network file retrieval is much faster than the image processing which is the real bottleneck.
Our system is idle probably 95% of the time. In fact, it currently has a 5-minute load average of 0.04. But in that other 5% of the time, we want it to respond NOW and not 30 seconds from now. This is a pretty common situation for server machines - relatively long periods of inactivity punctuated by short periods of frantic scurrying - and it seems reasonable that AMD is offering their 64-bit server chip with this feature.
How old does a microbe have to be before more time won't inflict more damage? I mean, at some point a spore will be as desiccated as it can get under the conditions it's stored in. If that takes 10 years, do another 500,000,000 years make a difference? Do parts of their dried-up little bodies have half-lives?
I know a lot of people love it, but coming from the pre-GNOME and pre-KDE days when a lot of us were thrilled when WindowMaker came out, it seems like a large portion of the userbase doesn't care for GNOME and KDE.
It's exactly the opposite for me. I upgraded from twm to WindowMaker to E15 and liked it. I switched to Gnome quite a while ago, though, and most recently to KDE. To me, it's superior to any other desktop I've ever used. Most of my long-time Unix friends have switched, too, so my anecdotal evidence is completely different from yours. I'm not saying that I'm more right than you - just that it's generally bad to draw such sweeping conclusions from only personal experience.
He keeps doing it over because he wants to get it right, a desire that is somewhat lacking from most projects.
That's often referred to as second-system effect, and not universally regarded as a Good Thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Point taken. I withdraw my critique with prejudice. ;-)
Seems reasonable. If you can patent "IsNot" and XOR, then I imagine there are hundreds of other stupid patent violations peppered throughout the kernel source.
he is a Debian Developer.
Sounds like he's an active Free Software participant. Bonus points for that.
I spent all day in Fremantle today on location for the shooting of a new local independent feature film, Fisheye Stiller.
He also has interests outside his mom's basement. More bonus points.
What would you consider to be acceptable pasttimes? Making clocks? Working puzzles? Building Lego kits? Is there anything he could have put on there that you wouldn't be making fun of?
Ding-ding-ding! We have a winner!
If that's your criterion for a social organization's worth, I bet the "chicks" are beating a path to your door. I'm a Mensa member because I like the diverse interests of the people you meet (even among the men and the older women!) and the magazine is somewhat entertaining. Your inability to get accepted doesn't mean that other people don't find it worthwhile.
I've never paid a penny for a Linux or BSD distribution (although I've donated a small amount to OpenBSD). Unix and Unix-alike servers account for a large percentage of the machines at my company, but 0% of our spending.
Please don't link to such things. You usually have interesting things to say, but your sig cheapens their impact by association.
What's wrong with that? I haven't touched Solaris since I put v7 on an SS5 I had lying around. I'm perfectly happy with my BSD ("Dying!") servers, but I wouldn't mind playing around with Solaris on a spare desktop machine just to see what it's all about. Am I a bad person because I don't care to benchmark Oracle on it, or because I might want to compare it to my Linux desktops out of curiosity?
One of our customers was complaining that our mailserver was bouncing the messages they were trying to send to us. Sure enough, Postfix was reporting an inability to resolve their domain (and we reject such mail - if we can't reply to you, we don't want your messages). We knew that they self-hosted their DNS, and after a coworker came to my office to discuss the matter, I nmapped their server to see if the service was running.
Our jaws dropped when we found about 50 running, accessible services on the machine - including file sharing, Oracle (!!!), IPP, an open web proxy (I used curl to fetch Slashdot's front page through it), and everything else IIS has to offer.
We told them that we thought they needed a firewall, and to have their sysadmin contractors take a look at their other security settings (or lack thereof). Other than that, we're not touching their network again for love or money. When they finally discover that they've been pwn3d by 147 different crackers, I don't want our IP in their logs or them to know that we scanned their machine one time.
That's a good start, but the real reason they won't be logging in should be that they don't have the RSA private keys needed to authenticate. I don't care if you know my username and password - you still won't be getting a shell.
I also highly recommend the Spyderco Delica as an excellent general-purpose knife. They cut anything, and are a little less likely to raise eyebrows than a switchblade or butterfly. I agree with your assessment, though. I love my Leatherman Wave, but the knife is just so-so. It's certainly better than nothing, but severely outclassed by any dedicated blade.
You mean people still use the stock clients?!? I say that only half in jest; while I know someone must, I don't know a single person that still uses AOL's client.
In that case, your campus sucks. Really. Jabber is every bit as nice as AIM, but you can pick between quite a few nice (Free!) clients. Get someone to set up jabber.yourschool.edu and be done with the reliance on a closed, hostile network once and for all.
Definitely mauve. It has more RAM.
Even better, get rid of these stupid null-terminated strings in favor of a string-length word at the beginning of each string. You can get put me on record as saying that a 2^64-byte string ought to be enough for anybody.
Basically, then, you want to encrypt executables so that they can only run on the CPU they're compiled for.
In other words, you want your code to be Trusted before the CPU could even think about Computing it. By Dicky, that's a Really Meaningful suggestion!
2002 called and wants its universally reviled ideas (and lame jokes) back.
In this case, if "buffer" gets overfilled just so, then the program may incorrectly believe that the data it contains is safe to operate on even though it might not be. Remember, folks, there are other ways to exploit an overflowable buffer then the standard "write executable code to stack and jump to it" method.
By your own post, the wise would be holding their tongues; yet you're dismissing the opinions of others as "uninformed" - thereby placing yourself into the "arrogant and uninformed" category of your own definition.
That was the irony.
Amen. I was playing around with a cheesy sieve prime test a little while ago just for nostalgia's sake, and had a line like:
I realized that I didn't care a bit about an exact value of sqrt, and that the value in testvalue was incrementing by two each time, so I wrote an integer-based replacement that worked like this:I shaved about 60% off my runtime by understanding that I never really wanted to compute an accurate value, and could use the nature of the input set to replace the original "simple" function with a more complex, tailored one that ran orders of magnitude faster. No machine will do that for you in the near future.Our current U.S. political climate bears this out.
In other words, you're unhappy with the current situation because the uninformed arrogant haven't managed to see things your way and vote accordingly. The unintentional irony of this couplet is astounding.
As a general answer, we're optimizing as appropriate for our profile data.
Three things:
Pot. Kettle. Black.
Interestingly, I've long tolerated Slashdot's hysterics and leftish viewpoints, but it seems like the site is a little less frothing-at-the-mouth since they sacked Michael (which was a very, very good thing - thanks, editors!). I'm about as pro-Free Software and personal freedom as you can get, but for a long time it seemed like every single story was a slam against George Bush and stupid Republicans along the lines of:
I won't be the slightest bit sad to see all such idiocy disappear from the site.
Poor spelling, grammer and an uncanny nack for re-posting stuff other peoples' work.
I hate to say it, but: You must be new here. Seriously, this has been the state of affairs for years. We love Slashdot for the eclectic mix of opinions and informative technical discussions, not the seamless editing and top-notch accuracy.
That's most systems, but certainly not all. I wrote a web application in Zope that acts as a portal to our scanned document warehouse. Whenever a customer wants to access some of the data we're storing for them, we fetch a few TIFFs from a Samba filesystem, convert them into a PDF with ImageMagick, and send them out. A RAID wouldn't make a bit of difference to our setup, since even the comparatively slow network file retrieval is much faster than the image processing which is the real bottleneck.
Our system is idle probably 95% of the time. In fact, it currently has a 5-minute load average of 0.04. But in that other 5% of the time, we want it to respond NOW and not 30 seconds from now. This is a pretty common situation for server machines - relatively long periods of inactivity punctuated by short periods of frantic scurrying - and it seems reasonable that AMD is offering their 64-bit server chip with this feature.
How old does a microbe have to be before more time won't inflict more damage? I mean, at some point a spore will be as desiccated as it can get under the conditions it's stored in. If that takes 10 years, do another 500,000,000 years make a difference? Do parts of their dried-up little bodies have half-lives?
I was able to read those in near-realtime. Thanks for providing my "you're a geek, get over it" fix for the morning.
It's exactly the opposite for me. I upgraded from twm to WindowMaker to E15 and liked it. I switched to Gnome quite a while ago, though, and most recently to KDE. To me, it's superior to any other desktop I've ever used. Most of my long-time Unix friends have switched, too, so my anecdotal evidence is completely different from yours. I'm not saying that I'm more right than you - just that it's generally bad to draw such sweeping conclusions from only personal experience.
He keeps doing it over because he wants to get it right, a desire that is somewhat lacking from most projects.
That's often referred to as second-system effect, and not universally regarded as a Good Thing.