Seriously, immediate toss out any single-vendor solutions like ASP.net or ColdFusion. They're nifty, they're quick-to-market, and they're completely and utterly locked to a lone platform. Your future upgrades are dependent on the whims of one company that may or may not have your best interests in mind. On the other hand, PHP, Perl, Zope, Java, and other crossplatform solutions are a good business decisions because they allow growth in the direction most convenient for you.
Put another way, I can still install PHP3 on a brand-new FreeBSD webserver if I want to. Are you 100% certain that a proprietary solution will run on Longhorn a few years from now, especially if its vendor has been marginalized by Free or Open Source competitors? Are you willing to bet your business on it?
As a side note, I know this sounds like flamebait but I honestly mean it: contractors who advocate Free/Open solutions will probably do a better job than one who wants to use the latest closed offering. Why? Because there's currently a higher barrier to entry, meaning that the ones who have the initiative and smarts to get up and running on their own are the ones competing for your business. Contrast with "Be a certified web developer in just 14 days!" commercials on TV - do you really think they teach those courses on Tomcat?
What right do you have to claim it as "your" culture?
Most Disney movies are based on old legends, fairy tales, and historical events. Those are pieces of my culture as much as they are Disney's. Content producers have the constitutional right to a limited protection of their works, after which they are expected to revert to the public domain.
If you mistakenly believe otherwise, then I hope you demand that the publisher of your "collected works of William Shakespeare" track down his rightful, legal heir and fork over the appropriate royalties. Or that Disney pays Hans Christian Andersen's family for "The Little Mermaid". Or that Mel Gibson found someone to pay for the rights to Jesus's life story. Otherwise, you're a corporatist hypocrite who doesn't really understand the "intellectual property" rights you seem to be in love with.
Dang, writing that made me feel dirty. I'm a pretty staunch conservative, but this idea that recent works based on old public domain offerings have some natural right to be privatized for the rest of eternity is just plain bizarre.
I'd be hard pressed to come up with a worse set of compression test data:
13,255,761 bytes of text files (1824 text files)
Uncompressed DOA Beach Volleyball trailer, weighing in at 1,265,647 KB
Compressed DOA Beach Volleyball trailer, weighing in at 35,690 KB
The Descent® program directory, with the LOTW set included. (31.9 megs, 1994 game, 1.4 patch)
The Starcraft:Broodwars Directory, stock, upgraded to the latest version (1.1 I believe, 116,135 KB)
With the exception of #1, which is probably not exemplary of what most non-Unix users would be doing with an archiver, the rest largely consist of a few executable and huge sets of video data. For example, nothing managed to reduce the size of #3 by more than 5 percent, which is pretty much to be expected.
I'd be much more interested in the comparative results of, say, the Mozilla installation directory. Or a set of Office files. Or C:\Windows. I think any of those three would be much closer to the average user's usage.
People who sell machines that compete with Ultracade based on MAME rely on customers to obtain ILLEGAL copies of the ROMS in question to play the games, or load the ROMS illegally.
While that may be true, that sounds like an issue between the illegal ROM distributors and their original publishers. What legal standing should this idiot have? If I make an unauthorized copy of a book you wrote, should he be able to trademark "Xerox" since I used one of their copiers in the process?
You're factually correct - not everything is free - but your whole point seems to be a straw man in this case.
As long as you can prove that you did not request the source code for the offending page from their server, and operate a web browser explicitly designed to execute such code, I think you might have a point. However, I suspect that neither of those is true.
On some level, I wish you were right. On the other hand, I'm generally opposed to involving the legal system any more than absolutely necessary. Are you sure you want (liberal or conservative - whichever you're not) judges deciding what code you can legally send to customers? That's a slope I don't want to go down.
Typical application slow down ratio compared to native
QEMU
5 to 10
QEMU + QEMU accelerator
1 to 2
I read those "ratios" as, well, ratios: "Wow, QEMU has a 5:10 slowdown, while the accelerator only has a 1:2 slowdown! I should write one with a.1:.2 slowdown! Oops, done."
My "last straw" was the whole NSAKEY thing back in the late 90s. I was already on the fence about permanently migrating off Windows, and the remote possibility that it was true was enough to make me pick sides. That was the last time I voluntarily used Windows for personal purposes.
You have to be kidding, unless after that one time you just stopped using MS products forever (which is damn near impossible, even with my magical consumer dollar power. I have to work.)
The first thing I did at my new job was shrink the XP partition on my company-issued PC and install Debian in the new space. I haven't touched a Windows machine for work purposes since that day. I still have to keep an old copy of Windows 2000 around to run Quickbooks Pro (so I can exchange files with my accountant), but that's going to be replaced by Quickbooks Pro Mac running on my wife's iMac in a month or so.
So, for all intents and purposes I use only non-MS software, and that will be completely true in the very near future. Your conclusion that you have to use Windows because "[you] have to work" is a condition of your state of affairs, and not universally true of the rest of us.
Reduced gravity would also make some of the problems the elderly face less of a bother; getting around would be MUCH easier.
Of course, that whole 8G launch thing might be hell on the ol' osteoporotic hips. I hope your space station includes an infirmary with "Below the waste amputations while you wait!" coupons.
There are a couple basic smart choices, but there is no way you're going to get everybody to agree to only use them.
The main reason this is a problem is that we have many more programmers than lawyers. Programmers write programs. We understand how they work, we know how to test them, and we know how to tell if they're working as expected. On the other hand, we don't know jack about legalese.
Yet, we'll still come up with our own half-baked license that's better, clearer, and freer than anything else - typically until someone hardline about licensing like the OpenBSD team discovers some fatal flaw that we weren't trained to identify. This is why I personally always choose between the BSD and GPL licenses for my code. Neither of them are perfect, but I know they're a lot better (and far, far more legally sound) than anything I'd scratch out on my own.
Thanks Berkeley, thanks RMS, for taking care of this stuff so that I can go back to writing code!
Ain't no way I'm spraypainting a Powerbook keyboard in camouflage. My old beater K6-3 with the EFF sticker, though - yeah, baby! I'll 0wn the Barnes & Noble cafe, see if I don't!
Y'know, I saw Hackers a few nights ago. The fact that I (still) can't type "mess with the best, die like the rest" in flaming letters on my RISC laptop really peeves me.
Go, X.org! Lead us to The Gibson and beyond! Give us our translucent Pac-Man viruses and melting death heads! Oh, and Angelina Jolie while you're at it, OK?
I'd still disagree with that. Raster's probably done a fine job of implementing an efficient toolkit on top of X - I don't mean to take that away from him - but when it comes down to it, Enlightenment is still running on top of X.
Imagine how much nicer and faster it could be if he had access to the new features that they're building directly into the server, especially since many of them could then be hardware accelerated. I don't care how elegant and efficient his drawing algorithms are if he still has to send the results to the display using state-of-the-1993-art primitives.
See, that's where that thing called "opinion" comes in. I personally think Enlightenment is ugly, or at least that I've never seen an E theme that wasn't ugly. You can't just throw that out as fact and call it case closed.
More to the point, though, is that this is backend server stuff. E may be technically brilliant, but it's still limited by the capabilities of the underlying X server. If that server were to get a massive feature upgrade, as talked about in the article, then you'll find E to be even more fast, featureful, and pretty than it was before. The Gnome and KDE camps will see the same enhancements in their preferred environments. This is a Good Thing for almost everyone who uses a graphical Unix environment.
Is anyone other than you promoting Poly1305-AES? I didn't see mention of it in the usual places, but I didn't look very hard either so I very well might have simply overlooked it.
guaranteed to be as secure as AES.
If it's found to have insecurities, will you assign the blame to the underlying OS / FPU (interesting choice to use floating point registers, BTW) / whatever and insist that Poly1305-AES it still completely secure?
Frankly, Dan, you may be one hell of a programmer, but your overall track record isn't so hot. For example, with Qmail your released a barely-functional core and called it "secure". Of course, to actually make it do anything, you have to apply a ton of patches, and when some of those break, you get to say "but Qmail is secure! That wasn't Qmail!" Between that and your much-publicized screwing over of your own students, a lot of us just don't trust you any more.
Still, if this algorithm is as good as you say, and is generally useful without having to add a lot of outside, unaudited code, then I wish you the best and look forward to its wide adoption. Good luck with it!
My ISP dropped its Usenet feed a few years ago. I worked out an exchange with them: they give me a small block of static IPs, and I use port 119 on one of them to host a little Leafnode server. I configured it to drop all binary groups (with a few specific exceptions; one guy wanted to read alt.binaries.pictures.furniture so I let that one through), or messages over something like 100KB in size.
So, everyone was happy. I got my Usenet fix. Their other customers continued to get service. The ISP wasn't out a penny. I got a static netblock. Then, their upstream provider (cwix.com) dropped their Usenet feeds. I was in a mad scramble to find someone to let me "borrow" their feed ("Hey, Bob, mind if I set up SSH port forwarding to pull down Usenet through your DSL account? You do? Darn.") until I finally found news.individual.net a few weeks ago. They explicitly allow you to host your own server, so it was a perfect fit.
However, I'm not so sure about using it as a paid service. First off, it means that Usenet would move into the "paid hobby" category for me. Although that might seem silly, this was something I've always done for fun and introducing money into the equation kind of puts a damper on that. Second, although they seem like perfectly respectable folk, I'm not sure that I want to be sending money to a vendor on another continent. Third, their current TOS is a bit more restrictive than I'm willing to pay for, given that I'm not the only person using my server. If my ISP has a jackass customer that violates the TOS, then I'm personally out the money. Losing a free service because of someone else's actions is annoying, but losing a paid service for the same reason would be on a wholly different level.
So, unless cwix.com magically decides to re-open their server to their paying customers, or I can find another feed to mooch from, my Usenet days (and those of my ISP's other customers) are pretty much over. It was a good run, but I'm quickly reaching the point of diminishing returns.
My poor little dialup domain has been receiving around 50-60,000 spams a day to those bogus accounts. It hit 120,000 one day.
Two words:
DNSBL
Greylisting
Add those to your setup and see that drop to about 30-40. Let SpamAssassin clean up the rest and forget about it.
Let me be the first to say...
on
SHA-1 Broken
·
· Score: 0
...oh, shit. This is so seriously beyond Not Good that it's not funny. SHA-1 is used for all sorts of things, many of which critically depend on it as the background of their security.
We (possibly? probably?) can't trust MD5 anymore, and now SHA-1 might have fallen. Does anyone know whether their exploits are overlapping? If not, can we reasonably move to H(x)=MD5(SHA-1(x))? Are there any other good hash algorithms working their way through the pipeline?
You mean, like when Barbra Streisand rants about the environment from the comfort of her SUV? How can you discuss "California", "environment", "cars", and "Mad Cow" without mentioning her?
No, don't start your business here. Please. Try Nebraska, or Kansas or some place like that. I'm sure they'll welcome you with open arms. I hope you don't need educated, skilled labor. If they live in a small midwestern town, they probably already have good jobs. Maybe you should consider outsourcing?
I live in a small town in Nebraska. I'm the application developer for a small company with awesome benefits. My boss pays me to write Free software. I bought a 4,500 sq. ft. 6BR 4BA house for less than $200,000. My taxes are low, the air is clean, and the schools are excellent.
Californians and New Englanders are often amazed to find out that there's actually life between the coasts.
Have a credit card like vehicle registration card that you put into the pump and based off your vehicle type you are charged a specific per gallon tax, so gas guzzlers pay a higher tax so even light but fast cars pay too. This way the vehicles that do the most damage to the environment/roads pay the most in taxes. It also helps the curb people illegally driving since they wouldn't be able to register a vehicle.
But why? That Prius sips one-third the gas of the Yukon, so under the current system the former's owner already pays one-third the taxes of the latter. What's the advantage of adding a new layer of bureaucracy to achieve the exact same condition we have now?
Besides, the article quoted whining officials who hate the fact that high-efficiency vehicle owners aren't paying their fair share. Your idea would establish that as legal fact, so even the government wouldn't be likely to endorse it.
So a tiny, lightweight, low-torque Prius should pay the same taxes as a huge, heavy, high-torque Yukon - even though its lower weight and acceleration forces impart much less wear on the road surface? If so, then what's the point of paying extra for a high-efficiency vehicle?
That's just great. I think state senators need to have "REMEMBER THE LAW OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES" tattooed onto their butts.
Slashdot Mirror
Put another way, I can still install PHP3 on a brand-new FreeBSD webserver if I want to. Are you 100% certain that a proprietary solution will run on Longhorn a few years from now, especially if its vendor has been marginalized by Free or Open Source competitors? Are you willing to bet your business on it?
As a side note, I know this sounds like flamebait but I honestly mean it: contractors who advocate Free/Open solutions will probably do a better job than one who wants to use the latest closed offering. Why? Because there's currently a higher barrier to entry, meaning that the ones who have the initiative and smarts to get up and running on their own are the ones competing for your business. Contrast with "Be a certified web developer in just 14 days!" commercials on TV - do you really think they teach those courses on Tomcat?
Most Disney movies are based on old legends, fairy tales, and historical events. Those are pieces of my culture as much as they are Disney's. Content producers have the constitutional right to a limited protection of their works, after which they are expected to revert to the public domain.
If you mistakenly believe otherwise, then I hope you demand that the publisher of your "collected works of William Shakespeare" track down his rightful, legal heir and fork over the appropriate royalties. Or that Disney pays Hans Christian Andersen's family for "The Little Mermaid". Or that Mel Gibson found someone to pay for the rights to Jesus's life story. Otherwise, you're a corporatist hypocrite who doesn't really understand the "intellectual property" rights you seem to be in love with.
Dang, writing that made me feel dirty. I'm a pretty staunch conservative, but this idea that recent works based on old public domain offerings have some natural right to be privatized for the rest of eternity is just plain bizarre.
With the exception of #1, which is probably not exemplary of what most non-Unix users would be doing with an archiver, the rest largely consist of a few executable and huge sets of video data. For example, nothing managed to reduce the size of #3 by more than 5 percent, which is pretty much to be expected.
I'd be much more interested in the comparative results of, say, the Mozilla installation directory. Or a set of Office files. Or C:\Windows. I think any of those three would be much closer to the average user's usage.
While that may be true, that sounds like an issue between the illegal ROM distributors and their original publishers. What legal standing should this idiot have? If I make an unauthorized copy of a book you wrote, should he be able to trademark "Xerox" since I used one of their copiers in the process?
You're factually correct - not everything is free - but your whole point seems to be a straw man in this case.
So a guy named "Foley" is pissing people off, right? I think there's already a a term of art for that.
On some level, I wish you were right. On the other hand, I'm generally opposed to involving the legal system any more than absolutely necessary. Are you sure you want (liberal or conservative - whichever you're not) judges deciding what code you can legally send to customers? That's a slope I don't want to go down.
I read those "ratios" as, well, ratios: "Wow, QEMU has a 5:10 slowdown, while the accelerator only has a 1:2 slowdown! I should write one with a .1:.2 slowdown! Oops, done."
My "last straw" was the whole NSAKEY thing back in the late 90s. I was already on the fence about permanently migrating off Windows, and the remote possibility that it was true was enough to make me pick sides. That was the last time I voluntarily used Windows for personal purposes.
You have to be kidding, unless after that one time you just stopped using MS products forever (which is damn near impossible, even with my magical consumer dollar power. I have to work.)
The first thing I did at my new job was shrink the XP partition on my company-issued PC and install Debian in the new space. I haven't touched a Windows machine for work purposes since that day. I still have to keep an old copy of Windows 2000 around to run Quickbooks Pro (so I can exchange files with my accountant), but that's going to be replaced by Quickbooks Pro Mac running on my wife's iMac in a month or so.
So, for all intents and purposes I use only non-MS software, and that will be completely true in the very near future. Your conclusion that you have to use Windows because "[you] have to work" is a condition of your state of affairs, and not universally true of the rest of us.
BTW, the ex-General speaking against the war was Wesley Clark.
Of course, that whole 8G launch thing might be hell on the ol' osteoporotic hips. I hope your space station includes an infirmary with "Below the waste amputations while you wait!" coupons.
The main reason this is a problem is that we have many more programmers than lawyers. Programmers write programs. We understand how they work, we know how to test them, and we know how to tell if they're working as expected. On the other hand, we don't know jack about legalese.
Yet, we'll still come up with our own half-baked license that's better, clearer, and freer than anything else - typically until someone hardline about licensing like the OpenBSD team discovers some fatal flaw that we weren't trained to identify. This is why I personally always choose between the BSD and GPL licenses for my code. Neither of them are perfect, but I know they're a lot better (and far, far more legally sound) than anything I'd scratch out on my own.
Thanks Berkeley, thanks RMS, for taking care of this stuff so that I can go back to writing code!
Ain't no way I'm spraypainting a Powerbook keyboard in camouflage. My old beater K6-3 with the EFF sticker, though - yeah, baby! I'll 0wn the Barnes & Noble cafe, see if I don't!
Go, X.org! Lead us to The Gibson and beyond! Give us our translucent Pac-Man viruses and melting death heads! Oh, and Angelina Jolie while you're at it, OK?
Imagine how much nicer and faster it could be if he had access to the new features that they're building directly into the server, especially since many of them could then be hardware accelerated. I don't care how elegant and efficient his drawing algorithms are if he still has to send the results to the display using state-of-the-1993-art primitives.
More to the point, though, is that this is backend server stuff. E may be technically brilliant, but it's still limited by the capabilities of the underlying X server. If that server were to get a massive feature upgrade, as talked about in the article, then you'll find E to be even more fast, featureful, and pretty than it was before. The Gnome and KDE camps will see the same enhancements in their preferred environments. This is a Good Thing for almost everyone who uses a graphical Unix environment.
guaranteed to be as secure as AES.
If it's found to have insecurities, will you assign the blame to the underlying OS / FPU (interesting choice to use floating point registers, BTW) / whatever and insist that Poly1305-AES it still completely secure?
Frankly, Dan, you may be one hell of a programmer, but your overall track record isn't so hot. For example, with Qmail your released a barely-functional core and called it "secure". Of course, to actually make it do anything, you have to apply a ton of patches, and when some of those break, you get to say "but Qmail is secure! That wasn't Qmail!" Between that and your much-publicized screwing over of your own students, a lot of us just don't trust you any more.
Still, if this algorithm is as good as you say, and is generally useful without having to add a lot of outside, unaudited code, then I wish you the best and look forward to its wide adoption. Good luck with it!
So, everyone was happy. I got my Usenet fix. Their other customers continued to get service. The ISP wasn't out a penny. I got a static netblock. Then, their upstream provider (cwix.com) dropped their Usenet feeds. I was in a mad scramble to find someone to let me "borrow" their feed ("Hey, Bob, mind if I set up SSH port forwarding to pull down Usenet through your DSL account? You do? Darn.") until I finally found news.individual.net a few weeks ago. They explicitly allow you to host your own server, so it was a perfect fit.
However, I'm not so sure about using it as a paid service. First off, it means that Usenet would move into the "paid hobby" category for me. Although that might seem silly, this was something I've always done for fun and introducing money into the equation kind of puts a damper on that. Second, although they seem like perfectly respectable folk, I'm not sure that I want to be sending money to a vendor on another continent. Third, their current TOS is a bit more restrictive than I'm willing to pay for, given that I'm not the only person using my server. If my ISP has a jackass customer that violates the TOS, then I'm personally out the money. Losing a free service because of someone else's actions is annoying, but losing a paid service for the same reason would be on a wholly different level.
So, unless cwix.com magically decides to re-open their server to their paying customers, or I can find another feed to mooch from, my Usenet days (and those of my ISP's other customers) are pretty much over. It was a good run, but I'm quickly reaching the point of diminishing returns.
Two words:
Add those to your setup and see that drop to about 30-40. Let SpamAssassin clean up the rest and forget about it.
We (possibly? probably?) can't trust MD5 anymore, and now SHA-1 might have fallen. Does anyone know whether their exploits are overlapping? If not, can we reasonably move to H(x)=MD5(SHA-1(x))? Are there any other good hash algorithms working their way through the pipeline?
s/between/on/ and the middle of the country would agree with you. ;-)
You mean, like when Barbra Streisand rants about the environment from the comfort of her SUV? How can you discuss "California", "environment", "cars", and "Mad Cow" without mentioning her?
It's quite a bit cooler today - 34F - although it was in the low 60s over the weekend. Certainly beats waking up to -15F two weeks ago.
I live in a small town in Nebraska. I'm the application developer for a small company with awesome benefits. My boss pays me to write Free software. I bought a 4,500 sq. ft. 6BR 4BA house for less than $200,000. My taxes are low, the air is clean, and the schools are excellent.
Californians and New Englanders are often amazed to find out that there's actually life between the coasts.
But why? That Prius sips one-third the gas of the Yukon, so under the current system the former's owner already pays one-third the taxes of the latter. What's the advantage of adding a new layer of bureaucracy to achieve the exact same condition we have now?
Besides, the article quoted whining officials who hate the fact that high-efficiency vehicle owners aren't paying their fair share. Your idea would establish that as legal fact, so even the government wouldn't be likely to endorse it.
That's just great. I think state senators need to have "REMEMBER THE LAW OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES" tattooed onto their butts.