The installation and text-based maintanance of Debian has always kept some of my friends away from it.
That's putting it nicely. I've been doing *NIX admin for 12 years. I started out in the Linux world with Slackware (back when it was about 9 or so floppies for a core system). Since then I've become a Red Hat user.
A while back, I tried to install Debian's "stable" release. It told me that I could create a boot-floppy (actually 2), then put all of the rest of the core system on a system that I'd access over NFS. Sounded cool. I got everything onto my server. Checked the export permissions, rebooted by desktop with the floppy in it and... spent the next 3 hours trying to understand why it wouldn't even ask me how it should be talking to the network.
I combed HOWTOs and READMEs for hours, but to no avail. Eventually, I just re-installed Red Hat and went on with life. Too bad, Debian sounded cool. Someday, I'll go back with an actuall CD and try agian, but the fact that an advertised feature in the install had obviously not been tested was a little scary.
The correct solution is to fight against such encroachment on our liberty, not leave.
Remember, after a war which resulted in several orders of magnitude more Americans dead on American soil (the U.S. Civil War) we did not give up our freedom in order to ensure security.
Surely 140 years has not dacayed our love of freedom so much that this relatively small (by Civil War standards) tragedy (by any standard) can cause us to falter! Aren't we a tad more patriotic than that? Don't we want to see the bastards LOSE more than that? Don't we want to be RIGHT more than that?
If so, we should have a lot more respect for the constitution than for our heat-of-the-moment blood-lust.
When I started reading this, I was disgusted. I was expecting something like CNN's ads after the Gulf war, touting the fact that they were the ones who got most of the scoops.
By the time I got half-way through the actuall content (not the front-page piece) I was in awe of how much went on. Usually when a massive load spike happens on my watch, I try to get everyone's fingers out of the pie so that we have a good chance of the machines just doing their jobs. The fact that these folks were able to make emergency changes in real-time to compensate for the load is just astounding.
CNN should be rolling out a Slash-based discussion forum for top stories. Heck, so should Whitehouse.gov!
Thanks guys, and good luck with your ongoing coverage of News For Nerds, Stuff That Matters!
Re:And here comes Carnivore...
on
More WTC News
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· Score: 2
Get our attack jets in the air? To do what? Shoot the planes down? Until Tuesday, nobody ever thought that planes would be used as missiles.
You're absolutely right. Someone pointed out this flaw in my logic tonight at dinner. It's amazing how much this event has colored my perception. If we had shot down all four planes before they reached their targets, people would be screaming to have Bush impeached (and I would have been one of them)!
Now my attitude is: if a plane is hijacked, you probably don't want to take the time to send up a plane if a cruise missile is available. If I'm on board, I'll understand.
I simply had not thought about it that way until now.
Is this a "war"?
on
More WTC News
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
This is a touchy topic, so stop reading here if speculation about the legal implications will bother you.
Time and again, I hear politicians from the mayor of NY to congress to the president refering to this as an act of war (see the president's most recent remarks).
There's a problem with this. If this was an act of war, it cannot, by definition be a federal crime, no?
What's more, if this was an act of war, anyone we "capture" is a prisoner of war, and we must obey the terms of the Geneva Convention and other international treaties. They will have to be re-patriated after the conflict, or brought before an international court for war crimes, NOT tried for federal crimes in the U.S.
Now, I can see the attack on the WTC being called out as a war crime, but if we treat this as an act of war, the Pentagon was a valid military target, and the attack on that building was legal (the point could even be made that Bin Laden had made it quite clear that he had declared war on the U.S. before the attack, unlike the Japanese who had tried but failed to do so before Pearl Harbor). The use of a commercial airline to do it is obviously not acceptable, but I'm not sure how much weight that will carry in a war crimes tribunal.
What I'm trying to say is that we've painted ourselves a very restrictive map here. There's no such thing as "murder" in the criminal sense in an act of war. There's only international treaty on the rules of war.
Now, I'm not a lawyer (I hate the acronym), and I could be wildly off-base here, but is this just short-sightedness or have we decided that the support that we get from the international community as a result of an act of war outweighs our desire to bring these criminals (soldiers?) to trial? Or, are we just planning to ignore international law, and bring anyone we capture to trial anyway?
Re:And here comes Carnivore...
on
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·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Let's go with the firewall analogy. I think firewalls are all well and good. However, if my ISP starts installing a firewall that logs what sites I visit so that they can profile me and determine if I might be a cracker, I will immediately terminate service with that ISP.
Likewise I will vote against any politician who thinks that invading my privacy in real life will help national security.
Heck, we already had enough information on these guys that we should have known there were suspected terrorists on the flight. Simply connecting that info with "planes off of their flight plans" would have revealed that we had a problem with about 20-30 minutes to get our attack jets in the air.
What, exactly, is carnivore going to do about the fact that we ignore the data we already have?!
Most of us in the U.S. say, rather glibly, that we're willing to "pay the price" for our freedom. Well, tragic though it was, here it is. If we lived in a police state, this would not be possible. Then again, I don't think there would be much of a country left.
Many have called for a "response". Our responses are, of course, already under way and I have faith that no matter how much I may push back against the expanding power of our TLAs and millitary, they are more than able to flush out the culprits for this attack, and remove their threat. If not, our tax dollars are ill-spent.
However, if we sacrifice one shred of our heritage of freedom because of this, then no matter how much we "respond", we've already lost. In times of peace, it's easy to stand up for our freedom. Today, it takes something more, and I ask all of you to rise to the occasion.
Defend the rights of those who will be attacked because they share skin color with those claiming responsibility. Don't give up fights for our freedom on the Net. Cherish your privacy and even your anonymity. If we can keep level heads through this, we will prove ourselves worthy of our nation and the sacrifice of those before us.
How did this get modded up? Isn't this obvious troll material.
Please, someone bounce it back down.
Now, getting to what the article actually says: I'm getting closer and closer to the opinion that we're in the middle of a war on privacy (to use a US-world-view phrase). It started out with the usual garbage about how companies needed to know how good their advertising was (to which I ask "why?").
But, this clearly crosses the line. No one needs to know that on a page with 7 stories, I spent more time looking at the one on penguins. There is no good excuse for this.
I'm missing something. Why would the fact that length(time()) just jumped from 9 to 10 matter? I take it as a matter of faith that anyone who can write Perl code that would care can write Python, C++, Java or Pascal that will fail in all sorts of interesting ways as well.
You can code "shoot self in foot" in any language. Python just makes you use a particular caliber gun which Guido feels is the only right way that one should shoot one's own foot.
Larry, on the other hand feels that assembly is too restrictive in its foot-shooting options.
For all the flaming of MozillaQuest by the [...] late, buggy, and ugly Mozilla project [and] its small remaining core of advocates [...] [snipped from the beginning and end of the post to show the contrast in tone]
This is called flaming. MozillaQuest is factually inaccurate from time to time (though, so is the rest of the tech media). The problem isn't that. The problem is that MozillaQuest reports only part of the story. This story, for example, never reported that, while she was being laid off, she was also going to continue working on the project.
So called "delays" are often clarifications in the time-line (where no dates were previously available). This may or may not be an inaccuracy, depending on how you look at it, but is clearly a misrepresentation of the state of Mozilla development.
Mozilla is, for the record, the browser/mail agent that I've been using as my sole browser for the last six months. So far, I've had less crashes than IE, and far fewer bug-related complaints than with NS4. And yet, according to MozillaQuest, Mozilla is still too buggy for anyone to use....
First off, isn't it obvious? Second, she says so in an interview with Bill Moyers on the DVD release of the PBS production.
It's sort of interesting as a Dick tribute. It's like Dick in reverse. Reality is decaying, yes, but the aliens are clued in and trying to help. The main character ends up essentially whole and sane.
Her work is always amazing to me because of its casual brilliance. Little things like the complexity of the relationship between the doctor and the patient in this book. It's a very deep relationship, and yet has simple motivation that just about any reader can understand.....
For those of you who were not around for it: HP bought Apollo in the early 90s. Apollo had what I stand firm in calling the coolest OS in history (totally network-aware, UNIX-like environment, odd-but-compelling GUI with X support, stable network filesystem, etc). They also marketed the world's first networked workstation (followed quickly by Sun).
When HP bought them, they 86'd all of Apollo's technology (except for the critical RISC tech they wanted in the first place) and as soon as they were allowed to by the terms of the "merger", fired most of the Apollo staff. They even had the gall to go to all of the Apollo customers (who were running an OS that you simply could not beat at the time) and tell them that their "upgrade path" was to transition over to HP/UX (one of the world's most brain-damaged versions of UNIX).
Please, don't assume that HP is going to do anything more sane in buying Compaq. The iPaq will probably suffer and/or be removed. I expect to see the final death-blow to the alpha. All of DEC's old technology will likely be scrapped. HP may have changed, and if they have, more power to them. But, I'll reserve judgement....
I'd forgotten about her children's books. Yes, I was refering to things like The Lathe of Heaven and The Left Hand of Darkness
I've never read any of her stories for younger readers. Should check them out (though I'm a little out of the age range now).
What I'm really hoping for is a resurgance of speculative fiction at all levels from TV's mass-market appeal to children's books to hard-core SF novels. If Harry Potter is the doorway to a younger generation of readers to start demanding quality sotry telling, I say more power to it!
When I was a kid, I was reading things like [...] Ursula K LeGuin
I have to say you were a very advanced "kid". LeGuin is hard reading for most kids. I started with Douglas Adams and Start Trek books, and then dove right into Heinlein short stories at about the age of 12 or so.
Asimov and Clarke were about as deep as I could go, and no offense to those craftsmen, but LeGuin is a diffferent kind of animal. I'd liken her work to Philip K. Dick (Lathe of Heaven was a tribute to Dick, actually) and more recently folks like Johnathan Lethem. All great authors, but not really what I would point your average kid at.
Potter is great stuff, and I associate it (as fantasy) with kids SF like A Wrinkle in Time, which I have no end of respect for.
I speak and read english. If someone sends me Japanese, it's SPAM. This won't be the case for everyone, but it is for me (and the sheer volume of foreign-language spam I get is astounding).
Nope. SPAM. The lot of it. Doesn't matter how long it takes for me to write filters to catch it all. Unsolicited commercial email is still unsolicited and commercial.
What's more I get about 20-100 pieces of spam a day (and that's just what my filters which took months to perfect catch).
This represents a huge use of bandwidth and my personal time. Just identifying it as spam and deleting takes enough time that I could spend hours each month. I will not tolerate that.
I get about the same rate with my simple procmail filters. I do the following:
Bounce subject-less mail
Bounce anything where the initial headers indicate content-type charset containing: ks_c|b2312|DEFAULT_CHARSET|iso-2|euc
Bounce anything with a content-type starting with: text/html|application/|image/|x-.* NOTE: This is only for the initial header. If you have an attachment of one of those types, I allow it.
A content-type header somehwere in the headers or body, but no content-type: text/plain anywhere in the headers or body.
Match a few case-sensitive things in subjects like, FREE!|LOSE WEIGHT
A bunch of simple regular expressions on the body including
=?charset
HR 3113 and S. 1618 references
!!!
SirCam signature, EAALoQAA4ftAnNIbgBTM0hkJBUaG
Bounce some pesky domains that are often mentioned in SPAM or by pushy recruiters
Bounce some bulk mailer signatures
I actually send a reply, assuming that: a) most spammers will never read it and b) my name is already on their lists and c) Someone unfairly caught by my filters will know why I didn't reply in person.
As I specify hardware purchases for my company (and by extension for any of our customers who solicit our input, when deploying our software), I will have to start moving away from Trident-based chipsets due to the recent change in driver specification openness.
This is *not* a political or ideological move, you understand. We use and specify systems that will only ever run Linux, and thus XFree86. Since XFree86 will no longer be able to track your hardware specifications, support will be very limited, and that's just not something that we or our customers can afford.
Please correct me if any of my assumptions here are wrong, or if you've reversed this decision. Thank you.
This is almost entirely true. I "specify", but we have others who input into the process (who will all feel the same way about non-supported hardware). This is a "we don't want customers who run Linux, *BSD or other XFree-based platforms" decision.
Let's see, to avoid exess stack extension from infinite recursion of the exponentially growing process-count:
main() { for(;;){ fork(); } }
There we have a nice little system-killer. But, it's still not quite good enough becuase of that icky branch. If we fork n times, per loop, that's 2^n more processes before they all have to branch again....
Basically, yeah. But Sun's choice for GNOME was not because of the quality of either object model. It was based on the pain that their customers experience every day (remember Sun supports a C++ compiler, the poor bastards) trying to develop portable applications in C++.
Sun has basically thrown in the towel on C++ in favor of C and Java. Like it or not, I think the C++ community needs to face the fact that in the quest for the niftier dynamic, run-time, thread-safe, GUI-friendly, type-aware, wiz-bang language, they frittered away a decade of user pain. Now, 10 years after C++ started to get wide non-accedemic press, we're all suprised that no one's buying the "it's ok now, C++ is standardized!"
Most of the follow-ups have missed your point, I think. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you were asking if anyone had looked at the NSA's code to determine if it had... problems?
I've taken a quick look (very quick) and am convinced that it's exactly how I'd build a set of Linux patches if I wanted to be sure that a hidden flaw (either now or later) would be hard to detect. Basically, you have a set of "security operations" handlers which are dynamically assigned by modules. The question is, of course, when are these handlers set, and how good is the security around setting them.
I've not reviewed the second half (majority?) of their code, which is the modules themselves. We should really get a gorup together and discuss the internals of this thing. If it's really good, and we find no fault with the implementation, perhaps it should be come mainstream. However, for now I think paranoia is wise.
Someone already pointed out the inanity of choosing the midwest to start form, but here's a thought: WHAT did they advertize?
Mononoke is very hard to advertize correctly to the US, becuase what Anime fans like about it is 10 years beyond were most folks in the US sit on animation. If you think back ten years, what hooked the first wave of anime fandom (not the real early birds who were into Astro Boy and the wave of 80s movies like Yamatto, known in the US as the bastardized TV show Star Blazers).... I recall it being the fact that Akira was the first movie I'd ever seen that had serious, gritty action AND the freedom that comes from animation. I recall (now I feel like Kaga) some of the folks with me thinking that this was the future of US animation, and when you explained it to someone else that way, they really bit into it.
So, how to advertize future anime? How about this (using Mononoke as an example):
[black screen]
V.O.: Remember the golden days of animation?
[pause for a beat]
[fade in still of woods from the beginning]
V.O.: That's about to change!
[quick cut to the same woods, with demon leaping out]
[cut to Mononoke looking up, blood on her face, ping sound is heard, as her earring flashes]
V.O.: From the east comes the story of nature's wrath...
[cut to boars charging]
[cut to riflemen fireing]
V.O.: and human frailty
[cut to Mononoke in any of the scenes where she's confused and looking for an answer around her]
V.O.: The story of a princess of the forest
[cut to Mononoke pulling down her mask, preparing to charge]
V.O.: like you've never seen before!
[music cuts in. something with strong precussion on each cut]
[cut through many scenes of violence, leaping on rooftops, decapitation by archery. about 10-20 seconds]
[music stops suddenly, or drops to something quiet]
[fade in nightwalker walking through the treetops, silent for a moment, and then, quietly but forcefully]
V.O.: This is where animated film grows up. Are you ready?
[quick flash of Mononoke dropping from a roof, into a crouch]
[end]
I've never seen an ad for Mononoke (though, of course, I own the DVD). It's interesting that Disney's compaining about sales but has never really pushed the film....
Slashdot Mirror
Seems like we need a good open standardized WYSIWYG oriented xml based format for editing and storage.
AbiWord provides a just this. See the file format section of the AbiWord FAQ or the AbiWord XML DTD.
Enjoy!
The installation and text-based maintanance of Debian has always kept some of my friends away from it.
That's putting it nicely. I've been doing *NIX admin for 12 years. I started out in the Linux world with Slackware (back when it was about 9 or so floppies for a core system). Since then I've become a Red Hat user.
A while back, I tried to install Debian's "stable" release. It told me that I could create a boot-floppy (actually 2), then put all of the rest of the core system on a system that I'd access over NFS. Sounded cool. I got everything onto my server. Checked the export permissions, rebooted by desktop with the floppy in it and... spent the next 3 hours trying to understand why it wouldn't even ask me how it should be talking to the network.
I combed HOWTOs and READMEs for hours, but to no avail. Eventually, I just re-installed Red Hat and went on with life. Too bad, Debian sounded cool. Someday, I'll go back with an actuall CD and try agian, but the fact that an advertised feature in the install had obviously not been tested was a little scary.
The correct solution is to fight against such encroachment on our liberty, not leave.
Remember, after a war which resulted in several orders of magnitude more Americans dead on American soil (the U.S. Civil War) we did not give up our freedom in order to ensure security.
Surely 140 years has not dacayed our love of freedom so much that this relatively small (by Civil War standards) tragedy (by any standard) can cause us to falter! Aren't we a tad more patriotic than that? Don't we want to see the bastards LOSE more than that? Don't we want to be RIGHT more than that?
If so, we should have a lot more respect for the constitution than for our heat-of-the-moment blood-lust.
When I started reading this, I was disgusted. I was expecting something like CNN's ads after the Gulf war, touting the fact that they were the ones who got most of the scoops.
By the time I got half-way through the actuall content (not the front-page piece) I was in awe of how much went on. Usually when a massive load spike happens on my watch, I try to get everyone's fingers out of the pie so that we have a good chance of the machines just doing their jobs. The fact that these folks were able to make emergency changes in real-time to compensate for the load is just astounding.
CNN should be rolling out a Slash-based discussion forum for top stories. Heck, so should Whitehouse.gov!
Thanks guys, and good luck with your ongoing coverage of News For Nerds, Stuff That Matters!
Get our attack jets in the air? To do what? Shoot the planes down? Until Tuesday, nobody ever thought that planes would be used as missiles.
You're absolutely right. Someone pointed out this flaw in my logic tonight at dinner. It's amazing how much this event has colored my perception. If we had shot down all four planes before they reached their targets, people would be screaming to have Bush impeached (and I would have been one of them)!
Now my attitude is: if a plane is hijacked, you probably don't want to take the time to send up a plane if a cruise missile is available. If I'm on board, I'll understand.
I simply had not thought about it that way until now.
This is a touchy topic, so stop reading here if speculation about the legal implications will bother you.
Time and again, I hear politicians from the mayor of NY to congress to the president refering to this as an act of war (see the president's most recent remarks).
There's a problem with this. If this was an act of war, it cannot, by definition be a federal crime, no?
What's more, if this was an act of war, anyone we "capture" is a prisoner of war, and we must obey the terms of the Geneva Convention and other international treaties. They will have to be re-patriated after the conflict, or brought before an international court for war crimes, NOT tried for federal crimes in the U.S.
Now, I can see the attack on the WTC being called out as a war crime, but if we treat this as an act of war, the Pentagon was a valid military target, and the attack on that building was legal (the point could even be made that Bin Laden had made it quite clear that he had declared war on the U.S. before the attack, unlike the Japanese who had tried but failed to do so before Pearl Harbor). The use of a commercial airline to do it is obviously not acceptable, but I'm not sure how much weight that will carry in a war crimes tribunal.
What I'm trying to say is that we've painted ourselves a very restrictive map here. There's no such thing as "murder" in the criminal sense in an act of war. There's only international treaty on the rules of war.
Now, I'm not a lawyer (I hate the acronym), and I could be wildly off-base here, but is this just short-sightedness or have we decided that the support that we get from the international community as a result of an act of war outweighs our desire to bring these criminals (soldiers?) to trial? Or, are we just planning to ignore international law, and bring anyone we capture to trial anyway?
Let's go with the firewall analogy. I think firewalls are all well and good. However, if my ISP starts installing a firewall that logs what sites I visit so that they can profile me and determine if I might be a cracker, I will immediately terminate service with that ISP.
Likewise I will vote against any politician who thinks that invading my privacy in real life will help national security.
Heck, we already had enough information on these guys that we should have known there were suspected terrorists on the flight. Simply connecting that info with "planes off of their flight plans" would have revealed that we had a problem with about 20-30 minutes to get our attack jets in the air.
What, exactly, is carnivore going to do about the fact that we ignore the data we already have?!
Most of us in the U.S. say, rather glibly, that we're willing to "pay the price" for our freedom. Well, tragic though it was, here it is. If we lived in a police state, this would not be possible. Then again, I don't think there would be much of a country left.
Many have called for a "response". Our responses are, of course, already under way and I have faith that no matter how much I may push back against the expanding power of our TLAs and millitary, they are more than able to flush out the culprits for this attack, and remove their threat. If not, our tax dollars are ill-spent.
However, if we sacrifice one shred of our heritage of freedom because of this, then no matter how much we "respond", we've already lost. In times of peace, it's easy to stand up for our freedom. Today, it takes something more, and I ask all of you to rise to the occasion.
Defend the rights of those who will be attacked because they share skin color with those claiming responsibility. Don't give up fights for our freedom on the Net. Cherish your privacy and even your anonymity. If we can keep level heads through this, we will prove ourselves worthy of our nation and the sacrifice of those before us.
How did this get modded up? Isn't this obvious troll material.
Please, someone bounce it back down.
Now, getting to what the article actually says: I'm getting closer and closer to the opinion that we're in the middle of a war on privacy (to use a US-world-view phrase). It started out with the usual garbage about how companies needed to know how good their advertising was (to which I ask "why?").
But, this clearly crosses the line. No one needs to know that on a page with 7 stories, I spent more time looking at the one on penguins. There is no good excuse for this.
I'm missing something. Why would the fact that length(time()) just jumped from 9 to 10 matter? I take it as a matter of faith that anyone who can write Perl code that would care can write Python, C++, Java or Pascal that will fail in all sorts of interesting ways as well.
You can code "shoot self in foot" in any language. Python just makes you use a particular caliber gun which Guido feels is the only right way that one should shoot one's own foot.
Larry, on the other hand feels that assembly is too restrictive in its foot-shooting options.
To each his own.
So called "delays" are often clarifications in the time-line (where no dates were previously available). This may or may not be an inaccuracy, depending on how you look at it, but is clearly a misrepresentation of the state of Mozilla development.
Mozilla is, for the record, the browser/mail agent that I've been using as my sole browser for the last six months. So far, I've had less crashes than IE, and far fewer bug-related complaints than with NS4. And yet, according to MozillaQuest, Mozilla is still too buggy for anyone to use....
First off, isn't it obvious? Second, she says so in an interview with Bill Moyers on the DVD release of the PBS production.
It's sort of interesting as a Dick tribute. It's like Dick in reverse. Reality is decaying, yes, but the aliens are clued in and trying to help. The main character ends up essentially whole and sane.
Her work is always amazing to me because of its casual brilliance. Little things like the complexity of the relationship between the doctor and the patient in this book. It's a very deep relationship, and yet has simple motivation that just about any reader can understand.....
For those of you who were not around for it: HP bought Apollo in the early 90s. Apollo had what I stand firm in calling the coolest OS in history (totally network-aware, UNIX-like environment, odd-but-compelling GUI with X support, stable network filesystem, etc). They also marketed the world's first networked workstation (followed quickly by Sun).
When HP bought them, they 86'd all of Apollo's technology (except for the critical RISC tech they wanted in the first place) and as soon as they were allowed to by the terms of the "merger", fired most of the Apollo staff. They even had the gall to go to all of the Apollo customers (who were running an OS that you simply could not beat at the time) and tell them that their "upgrade path" was to transition over to HP/UX (one of the world's most brain-damaged versions of UNIX).
Please, don't assume that HP is going to do anything more sane in buying Compaq. The iPaq will probably suffer and/or be removed. I expect to see the final death-blow to the alpha. All of DEC's old technology will likely be scrapped. HP may have changed, and if they have, more power to them. But, I'll reserve judgement....
I'd forgotten about her children's books. Yes, I was refering to things like The Lathe of Heaven and The Left Hand of Darkness
I've never read any of her stories for younger readers. Should check them out (though I'm a little out of the age range now).
What I'm really hoping for is a resurgance of speculative fiction at all levels from TV's mass-market appeal to children's books to hard-core SF novels. If Harry Potter is the doorway to a younger generation of readers to start demanding quality sotry telling, I say more power to it!
Asimov and Clarke were about as deep as I could go, and no offense to those craftsmen, but LeGuin is a diffferent kind of animal. I'd liken her work to Philip K. Dick (Lathe of Heaven was a tribute to Dick, actually) and more recently folks like Johnathan Lethem. All great authors, but not really what I would point your average kid at.
Potter is great stuff, and I associate it (as fantasy) with kids SF like A Wrinkle in Time, which I have no end of respect for.
I speak and read english. If someone sends me Japanese, it's SPAM. This won't be the case for everyone, but it is for me (and the sheer volume of foreign-language spam I get is astounding).
Nope. SPAM. The lot of it. Doesn't matter how long it takes for me to write filters to catch it all. Unsolicited commercial email is still unsolicited and commercial.
What's more I get about 20-100 pieces of spam a day (and that's just what my filters which took months to perfect catch).
This represents a huge use of bandwidth and my personal time. Just identifying it as spam and deleting takes enough time that I could spend hours each month. I will not tolerate that.
- Bounce subject-less mail
- Bounce anything where the initial headers indicate content-type charset containing: ks_c|b2312|DEFAULT_CHARSET|iso-2|euc
- Bounce anything with a content-type starting with: text/html|application/|image/|x-.*
- A content-type header somehwere in the headers or body, but no content-type: text/plain anywhere in the headers or body.
- Match a few case-sensitive things in subjects like, FREE!|LOSE WEIGHT
- A bunch of simple regular expressions on the body including
- =?charset
- HR 3113 and S. 1618 references
- !!!
- SirCam signature, EAALoQAA4ftAnNIbgBTM0hkJBUaG
- Bounce some pesky domains that are often mentioned in SPAM or by pushy recruiters
- Bounce some bulk mailer signatures
I actually send a reply, assuming that: a) most spammers will never read it and b) my name is already on their lists and c) Someone unfairly caught by my filters will know why I didn't reply in person.NOTE: This is only for the initial header. If you have an attachment of one of those types, I allow it.
This is almost entirely true. I "specify", but we have others who input into the process (who will all feel the same way about non-supported hardware). This is a "we don't want customers who run Linux, *BSD or other XFree-based platforms" decision.
main () { fork(); main(); }
;-)
Not as efficient as it could be...
Let's see, to avoid exess stack extension from infinite recursion of the exponentially growing process-count:
main() { for(;;){ fork(); } }
There we have a nice little system-killer. But, it's still not quite good enough becuase of that icky branch. If we fork n times, per loop, that's 2^n more processes before they all have to branch again....
main() { for(;;){ fork(); fork(); fork(); } }
Dancing in the dark... to the radio of love!
Basically, yeah. But Sun's choice for GNOME was not because of the quality of either object model. It was based on the pain that their customers experience every day (remember Sun supports a C++ compiler, the poor bastards) trying to develop portable applications in C++.
Sun has basically thrown in the towel on C++ in favor of C and Java. Like it or not, I think the C++ community needs to face the fact that in the quest for the niftier dynamic, run-time, thread-safe, GUI-friendly, type-aware, wiz-bang language, they frittered away a decade of user pain. Now, 10 years after C++ started to get wide non-accedemic press, we're all suprised that no one's buying the "it's ok now, C++ is standardized!"
Wake up and smell the assembly folks!
Most of the follow-ups have missed your point, I think. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you were asking if anyone had looked at the NSA's code to determine if it had... problems?
I've taken a quick look (very quick) and am convinced that it's exactly how I'd build a set of Linux patches if I wanted to be sure that a hidden flaw (either now or later) would be hard to detect. Basically, you have a set of "security operations" handlers which are dynamically assigned by modules. The question is, of course, when are these handlers set, and how good is the security around setting them.
I've not reviewed the second half (majority?) of their code, which is the modules themselves. We should really get a gorup together and discuss the internals of this thing. If it's really good, and we find no fault with the implementation, perhaps it should be come mainstream. However, for now I think paranoia is wise.
Someone already pointed out the inanity of choosing the midwest to start form, but here's a thought: WHAT did they advertize?
Mononoke is very hard to advertize correctly to the US, becuase what Anime fans like about it is 10 years beyond were most folks in the US sit on animation. If you think back ten years, what hooked the first wave of anime fandom (not the real early birds who were into Astro Boy and the wave of 80s movies like Yamatto, known in the US as the bastardized TV show Star Blazers).... I recall it being the fact that Akira was the first movie I'd ever seen that had serious, gritty action AND the freedom that comes from animation. I recall (now I feel like Kaga) some of the folks with me thinking that this was the future of US animation, and when you explained it to someone else that way, they really bit into it.
So, how to advertize future anime? How about this (using Mononoke as an example):
[black screen]
V.O.: Remember the golden days of animation?
[pause for a beat]
[fade in still of woods from the beginning]
V.O.: That's about to change!
[quick cut to the same woods, with demon leaping out]
[cut to Mononoke looking up, blood on her face, ping sound is heard, as her earring flashes]
V.O.: From the east comes the story of nature's wrath...
[cut to boars charging]
[cut to riflemen fireing]
V.O.: and human frailty
[cut to Mononoke in any of the scenes where she's confused and looking for an answer around her]
V.O.: The story of a princess of the forest
[cut to Mononoke pulling down her mask, preparing to charge]
V.O.: like you've never seen before!
[music cuts in. something with strong precussion on each cut]
[cut through many scenes of violence, leaping on rooftops, decapitation by archery. about 10-20 seconds]
[music stops suddenly, or drops to something quiet]
[fade in nightwalker walking through the treetops, silent for a moment, and then, quietly but forcefully]
V.O.: This is where animated film grows up. Are you ready?
[quick flash of Mononoke dropping from a roof, into a crouch]
[end]
I've never seen an ad for Mononoke (though, of course, I own the DVD). It's interesting that Disney's compaining about sales but has never really pushed the film....