If some user runs the virus, it will only be able to infect files that he has write permissions to and on most Linux boxes (at least the distro's I've seen), users aren't allowed to write to systemwide binaries.
There is one distribution where users are always logged in as root. It is called Lindows. In one of the reviews (search old articles on/.) they were actually able to run Outlook viruses and other Microsoft transmitted diseases on Lindows!
But yeah, you are exactly right about security of Unix vs. Windows. On Unix, regular users are simply incapable of infecting the system even if they wanted to. Windows, however, is stuck in the single-user mentality. It's really a shame cause NT does have filesystem-level security and theoretically, it could be just as secure as Unix. The problem is that most applications *expect* to have complete access to the system, making a locked-down NT largely useless. Everywhere I worked, all the users have Administrator access on their local machine, and always run executable attachments (well, the ones that don't execute automatically that is:-)
All the files in my home directory can fit on a single CD with plenty of room to spare. Restoring some files from backup is much much easier than first reinstalling the OS, and *then* restoring some files from backup.
Coke is not a file format. Open file formats are required for interoperability. Opening Coke recipe is not required for interoperability. Case closed.
Eventually, the market will demand open formats. In fact, there seems to be evidence (no, I can't cite, you'll just have to trust me or do your own research) that this is already happening.
Bullshit. When the company has a monopoly the market has no choice. The one thing most "free market" advocates fail to grasp is that the marked forces cease to work once monopoly is established. Proprietary file formats amount to an unlimited monopoly. At least with copyrights and patents the monopoly is limited in duration.
You have absolutely no clue about the copyright law. You cannot copyright an idea. Copyrights are given for expression, that is an implementation of an idea. "Software methods" cannot be copyrighted; file format specification cannot be copyrighted. However, either of the above can be "protected" by either patents or trade secrets. Most proprietary file formats and codecs are trade secrets. Repeat after me: there is no such thing as a "copyright on file format".
Secondly, patents do not last "a billion years". They last 20 years from the date of application. Trade secrets however can last indefinitely -- as long as the corporation takes care to keep them secret.
The poster of the article just assumes that filesystem must be slow when working with 1000+ files per directory and we need a database to save us. That's nonsense, from my experience.
Apart from that, there are some very important reasons why maildir is much better than a DB. With maildir you can use standard Unix tools to manipulate your email. With a DB you can't do that. Mailbox corruption is not a problem with maildir -- even if corruption were to happen it would be limited to one message, or a small number of messages (not even a mailbox). With a corrupted DB storage, you lose everything -- all the mail of all the users in all the mailboxes. Ask an Exchange admin about it some time.
You are going to run out of inodes at
exactly the same time you run out of disk space, because they are one and the same thing.
No they are not. The parent post is correct.
In
fact, I believe all the inodes are created when you create your filesystem, all space is mapped
to an inode (though of course one file can use multiple inodes).
What you believe has nothing to do with reality. I suggest you take an OS course. Or read up on how Unix filesystems work.
It's usually said that if you have 4k inodes, you'll lost 2k
(on average) per file.
There is no such thing as a "4k inode". You got your terminology wrong. You are thinking about blocks. On average, you waste 1/2 the block size for each file on your filesystem, since the last block is, on average, half-full. An inode is not the same as a block! They are two completely different things, which is why your entire post makes no sense. Think of an inode as a "file header". I don't have time or energy to post the full description but I already mentioned where you can get relevant information.
2. Mono is a project started by the GNOME guys. It has absolutely nothing to do with Microsoft.
3. Microsoft released a version of CLI and C# compiler under a license which is "free for non-commercial use only". In other words, they released nothing at all.
AOL has been busted with the same suit, also in Germany. Some AOLuser posted porn on their private web space and AOL was found liable. That case was 2-3 years old. As much as I despise AOL, I think the ruling is ridiculous. There is simply no way an ISP can monitor everything its lusers do.
Well, at least with this ruling Microsoft might be able to buy some polititians to get the law changed. But then I would have expected AOL to do that a long time ago. Any Germans care to comment?
Can you perhaps explain why KOI8 characters are out of order? This is so stupid and I'm amazed KOI8 is still in use. How do you sort stuff alphabetically if you can't just do an integer comparison? Would be really slow to use some funky custom sorting routine.
The Cyrillic alphabet was developed a long time ago by a religious man (guess what his name was), because the Russian peoples he was trying to convert had no written alphabet
That is false. Russian people had alphabet long before Cyrillic. Incidentally, that should really be proto-Russian, or Eastern Slavic since the people diverged into Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian much later.
So it could be said that "Russian Cyrillic" is redundant.
It is not. There are several "dialects" of the Cyrillic alphabet. They are mostly the same but a few letters are different. I already mentioned three of them above. There's also Bulgarian, Serbian, and I'm not sure what else.
I seriously doubt the the "c" and "o" characters mentioned in the article are unique to the K018R charset
The charset is called KOI8-R. Or are you using the l33t sp3lling?
Remember the 1 GHz P4? That was a marketing push to try to counter AMD's competition, not something the engineers wanted. In many ways, it made the P4 look bad, because the P4 was not designed to run at 1 GHz. People still remember the poor 1 GHz benchmarks; those benchmarks have done lasting damage.
Except there was never 1GHz P4. The slowest desktop P4 is 1.4GHz -- they need the MHz gap just the match the speed of P3.
In my opinion, Intel's marketing is not technically skilled, and not skilled overall.
Well, they did manage to convince people that this magic MHz thing is all that matters...
"I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The US Government will lead the American people - and the West in general - into an unbearable hell and a choking life" - Osama bin Laden
It's quite ironic how the terrorists have won the "war on terror" the moment the US government started it.
Could somebody please explain to me why software should be excluded from patenting? If it's a legitimate innovation (i.e. not Microsoft "innovation") why shouldn't it be patentable?
It is a separate matter that the vast majority of the software patents are absolute garbage (like the (in)famous one-click shopping), but so are the patents in other areas (like Rambus, and that guy who patented sideways swinging...)
That's a very good question that very few people bother to ask. There is a clause in their so-called "license" which states that they are allowed to "audit" you; and that clause, presumably, gives Microsoft the right to send in the enforcers. However, legally, it does not hold any water. Even if we assume that EULA is enforcible as a whole (a dubious assumption), that particular clause would be thrown out if the matter ever went to court.
This "auditing" clause essentially amounts to a search without a search warrant by a non-government agency. In case you didn't know, even the police cannot come to your house and search you whenever they feel like it. They must first obtain a search warrant, which is signed by a judge. And to get the warrant, police need to show that there is a likelihood of finding the desired evidence.
There are two problems with BSA/Microsoft audits. First they are not the police, so they have no authority to conduct the searches. Their "license" doesn't hold any water -- there are certain rights that you cannot sign away. Second, even if the BSA was ever annointed as the official copyright enforcement police, they would still need to show that there is some likelihood of finding unauthorised copies of software at whatever school/business they were trying to search. Random searches wouldn't be permitted. BSA admits -- nay, brags! -- that the vast majority of their tipoffs comes from disgruntled employees. In a court of law such "evidence" would be dismissed as hearsay. And that's without even getting into the issue of good-faith efforts of the companies to stay compliant with the license vs. the unauthorised installations by individual employees (or, perhaps, outright sabotage -- see note above about disgruntled employees).
So, as you can see, legally, Microsoft enforcers have no leg to stand on. BSA backed off the few companies that did decide to fight it.
Personally, I think its rather idiotic of them not to support Glide in their GeForce drivers, as Glide offers vastly superior performance in games which use it.
No, I think that's a rather idiotic suggestion. The only reason glide was faster in 3dfx cards is because it exposed 3dfx hardware. It was, by nature, tied to particular hardware. It would not be the best interface for nVidia's own hardware (or any other company's for that matter). In contrast, OpenGL and Direct3D are generic interfaces that are not hardware-specific. Some (limited) performance loss is a small price to pay for that.
IDE hard drives are pushing the 50mb/s mark. If one should place two of them on a channel and run intense I/O on both you can come fairly close to the 100mb/s barrier imposed by the interface.
Oh, for the millionth time it's NOT! IDE is a very dumb interface. Only one device per channel can work at a given time. While you are reading/writing one drive, the other one does absolutely nothing. It is not possible to get sustained transfer of anywhere near 100MB/s out of IDE. This is precisely why people report no improvement in speed when going from 2x striped IDE RAID (on 2 separate channels) to 4x. If you want the 4 drives to work at the same time, you have to use SCSI.
To sum up, anything above ATA66 is a marketing gimmick (I have yet to see an IDE drive that can have sustained transfer of over 50MB/s). ATA133 is not entirely so -- it allows you to use HDs of > 120GB, but that's it.
Re:A Story that this reminds me of
on
The Stallman Factor
·
· Score: 5, Funny
The speech culminated with RMS putting on what was supposed to be a nimbus (it was an old HD platter as far as I can tell) and proclaiming his religion. Unlike most religions, celebacy is not required. But you must use only Free Software on your computer. Like GNU/emacs. Using proprietary software is a sin.
audience: what about vi?
RMS: using vi is not a sin, it's a punishment.
Not necesserily.. the PIN is stored on the card itself (one-way encrypted or sumething.. I'm
not well-up on crypto stuff). So therefore the whole pin-processing can go on within the
POS (Point-Of-Sale) terminal which just needs to return a success or denial message.
You got one thing right: you're not well-up on crypto stuff. Or common sense. How would this magical POS know if the PIN is valid or not? If PIN is hard-coded on the card, how is it different from the card number?
First of all, that's copyright (as in the right to copy). "Copywrite" is not a word. Second, the issue of deep linking has already been decided in Ticketmaster v. Tickets.com. Linking is not copying, the judge ruled, so there is no copyright infringement. I don't think the precident is binding in the jurisdiction where this case would be tried, but it's still a Good Thing.
The copyright holders can control the distribution of their copyrighted works but nothing in the copyright law gives them the right to control how their works are used. The website owner has no legal right to require the visitors to always go through the home page, just like your cable company has no right to require that you watch all the commercials. That should be a duh issue to anyone remotely familiar with copyrights.
Re:Maybe I just don't get it..
on
WineX 2.0
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Rebooting to windows means that I have to stop everything I was doing, just to play the game. When you have a whole bunch of editor & debugging windows open it's a big pain. (+ servers, DB connections, remote logins, etc...). Playing in Linux allows me to take 30 min to relax and play the game instead of 30 min to play + 15 min to restart everything I was working on to its original state. At work, I rarely reboot or even log out. Even at home it's still a pain.
Why would you want to have any sort of audio compression taking up CPU cycles in a game that is so processesor depedent?
1. Any recent FPS is not CPU-limited. It is video card-limited. (Except for really low resolution, color depth, and detail, but nobody plays that any more).
2. On modern CPUs, MP3s take about 1% - 3% load to play. I expect ogg to be similar.
I'm pretty sure its meaning is not that a GPLed program can be distributed in binary-only form to all departments and subsidiaries of a large company, which may well comprise ten thousands of people worldwide.
That's a moot point since the company can require the employees not to distribute the company's code to any third party. In fact that's the condition you normally have to agree to as a condition of working at said company. If you write some code as part of your employment, the company owns it -- not you. That's the rule even if your employment contract does not say it explicitly. Therefore, the company is the only enitity that can authorize the distribution of the code to any third party.
Since the company does not hold copyright on the unmodified version of a GPL program, it cannot forbid you to distribute that version, but that's not particularly useful since the unmodified version is publicly available anyway. However, the company does own copyright on any and all modifications/additions made to the program. Therefore, you are not allowed to distribute those modifications without the company's permission. And if said company chooses to keep the modifications proprietary, you are not allowed to release them to third parties.
The key point is that you do not own the code you write for your employer -- this weird entity called the corporation does -- therefore you have no right to distribute that code without your employer's permission.
Slashdot Mirror
There is one distribution where users are always logged in as root. It is called Lindows. In one of the reviews (search old articles on /.) they were actually able to run Outlook viruses and other Microsoft transmitted diseases on Lindows!
But yeah, you are exactly right about security of Unix vs. Windows. On Unix, regular users are simply incapable of infecting the system even if they wanted to. Windows, however, is stuck in the single-user mentality. It's really a shame cause NT does have filesystem-level security and theoretically, it could be just as secure as Unix. The problem is that most applications *expect* to have complete access to the system, making a locked-down NT largely useless. Everywhere I worked, all the users have Administrator access on their local machine, and always run executable attachments (well, the ones that don't execute automatically that is :-)
All the files in my home directory can fit on a single CD with plenty of room to spare. Restoring some files from backup is much much easier than first reinstalling the OS, and *then* restoring some files from backup.
Eventually, the market will demand open formats. In fact, there seems to be evidence (no, I can't cite, you'll just have to trust me or do your own research) that this is already happening.
Bullshit. When the company has a monopoly the market has no choice. The one thing most "free market" advocates fail to grasp is that the marked forces cease to work once monopoly is established. Proprietary file formats amount to an unlimited monopoly. At least with copyrights and patents the monopoly is limited in duration.
You have absolutely no clue about the copyright law. You cannot copyright an idea. Copyrights are given for expression, that is an implementation of an idea. "Software methods" cannot be copyrighted; file format specification cannot be copyrighted. However, either of the above can be "protected" by either patents or trade secrets. Most proprietary file formats and codecs are trade secrets. Repeat after me: there is no such thing as a "copyright on file format".
Secondly, patents do not last "a billion years". They last 20 years from the date of application. Trade secrets however can last indefinitely -- as long as the corporation takes care to keep them secret.
The poster of the article just assumes that filesystem must be slow when working with 1000+ files per directory and we need a database to save us. That's nonsense, from my experience.
Apart from that, there are some very important reasons why maildir is much better than a DB. With maildir you can use standard Unix tools to manipulate your email. With a DB you can't do that. Mailbox corruption is not a problem with maildir -- even if corruption were to happen it would be limited to one message, or a small number of messages (not even a mailbox). With a corrupted DB storage, you lose everything -- all the mail of all the users in all the mailboxes. Ask an Exchange admin about it some time.
No they are not. The parent post is correct.
In fact, I believe all the inodes are created when you create your filesystem, all space is mapped to an inode (though of course one file can use multiple inodes).
What you believe has nothing to do with reality. I suggest you take an OS course. Or read up on how Unix filesystems work.
It's usually said that if you have 4k inodes, you'll lost 2k (on average) per file.
There is no such thing as a "4k inode". You got your terminology wrong. You are thinking about blocks. On average, you waste 1/2 the block size for each file on your filesystem, since the last block is, on average, half-full. An inode is not the same as a block! They are two completely different things, which is why your entire post makes no sense. Think of an inode as a "file header". I don't have time or energy to post the full description but I already mentioned where you can get relevant information.
1. What the fuck does this have to do with wine?
2. Mono is a project started by the GNOME guys. It has absolutely nothing to do with Microsoft.
3. Microsoft released a version of CLI and C# compiler under a license which is "free for non-commercial use only". In other words, they released nothing at all.
AOL has been busted with the same suit, also in Germany. Some AOLuser posted porn on their private web space and AOL was found liable. That case was 2-3 years old. As much as I despise AOL, I think the ruling is ridiculous. There is simply no way an ISP can monitor everything its lusers do.
Well, at least with this ruling Microsoft might be able to buy some polititians to get the law changed. But then I would have expected AOL to do that a long time ago. Any Germans care to comment?
Can you perhaps explain why KOI8 characters are out of order? This is so stupid and I'm amazed KOI8 is still in use. How do you sort stuff alphabetically if you can't just do an integer comparison? Would be really slow to use some funky custom sorting routine.
Uhhm, no. Glagolic is the alphabet that was used before Cyrill came along. It looks nothing at all like Cyrillic.
and it was used even in some of the former soviet republics and Mongolia, whose languages are very far from Slavic.
Yeah, that was really weird. You can recognize the letters but the words look like total abracadabra.
That is false. Russian people had alphabet long before Cyrillic. Incidentally, that should really be proto-Russian, or Eastern Slavic since the people diverged into Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian much later.
So it could be said that "Russian Cyrillic" is redundant.
It is not. There are several "dialects" of the Cyrillic alphabet. They are mostly the same but a few letters are different. I already mentioned three of them above. There's also Bulgarian, Serbian, and I'm not sure what else.
I seriously doubt the the "c" and "o" characters mentioned in the article are unique to the K018R charset
The charset is called KOI8-R. Or are you using the l33t sp3lling?
Except there was never 1GHz P4. The slowest desktop P4 is 1.4GHz -- they need the MHz gap just the match the speed of P3.
In my opinion, Intel's marketing is not technically skilled, and not skilled overall.
Well, they did manage to convince people that this magic MHz thing is all that matters...
"I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The US Government will lead the American people - and the West in general - into an unbearable hell and a choking life" - Osama bin Laden
It's quite ironic how the terrorists have won the "war on terror" the moment the US government started it.
Could somebody please explain to me why software should be excluded from patenting? If it's a legitimate innovation (i.e. not Microsoft "innovation") why shouldn't it be patentable?
It is a separate matter that the vast majority of the software patents are absolute garbage (like the (in)famous one-click shopping), but so are the patents in other areas (like Rambus, and that guy who patented sideways swinging...)
That's a very good question that very few people bother to ask. There is a clause in their so-called "license" which states that they are allowed to "audit" you; and that clause, presumably, gives Microsoft the right to send in the enforcers. However, legally, it does not hold any water. Even if we assume that EULA is enforcible as a whole (a dubious assumption), that particular clause would be thrown out if the matter ever went to court.
This "auditing" clause essentially amounts to a search without a search warrant by a non-government agency. In case you didn't know, even the police cannot come to your house and search you whenever they feel like it. They must first obtain a search warrant, which is signed by a judge. And to get the warrant, police need to show that there is a likelihood of finding the desired evidence.
There are two problems with BSA/Microsoft audits. First they are not the police, so they have no authority to conduct the searches. Their "license" doesn't hold any water -- there are certain rights that you cannot sign away. Second, even if the BSA was ever annointed as the official copyright enforcement police, they would still need to show that there is some likelihood of finding unauthorised copies of software at whatever school/business they were trying to search. Random searches wouldn't be permitted. BSA admits -- nay, brags! -- that the vast majority of their tipoffs comes from disgruntled employees. In a court of law such "evidence" would be dismissed as hearsay. And that's without even getting into the issue of good-faith efforts of the companies to stay compliant with the license vs. the unauthorised installations by individual employees (or, perhaps, outright sabotage -- see note above about disgruntled employees).
So, as you can see, legally, Microsoft enforcers have no leg to stand on. BSA backed off the few companies that did decide to fight it.
yvaN eht nioJ
1. Your "improved" code is much less readable than the original. Whoever has to maintain it will need more time to comprehend it.
2. You introduced a bug on line 3 (null pointer dereferencing).
Yes, I have personally seen code like it and I wanted to shoot the fucking idiot who wrote it.
No, I think that's a rather idiotic suggestion. The only reason glide was faster in 3dfx cards is because it exposed 3dfx hardware. It was, by nature, tied to particular hardware. It would not be the best interface for nVidia's own hardware (or any other company's for that matter). In contrast, OpenGL and Direct3D are generic interfaces that are not hardware-specific. Some (limited) performance loss is a small price to pay for that.
Oh, for the millionth time it's NOT! IDE is a very dumb interface. Only one device per channel can work at a given time. While you are reading/writing one drive, the other one does absolutely nothing. It is not possible to get sustained transfer of anywhere near 100MB/s out of IDE. This is precisely why people report no improvement in speed when going from 2x striped IDE RAID (on 2 separate channels) to 4x. If you want the 4 drives to work at the same time, you have to use SCSI.
To sum up, anything above ATA66 is a marketing gimmick (I have yet to see an IDE drive that can have sustained transfer of over 50MB/s). ATA133 is not entirely so -- it allows you to use HDs of > 120GB, but that's it.
The speech culminated with RMS putting on what was supposed to be a nimbus (it was an old HD platter as far as I can tell) and proclaiming his religion. Unlike most religions, celebacy is not required. But you must use only Free Software on your computer. Like GNU/emacs. Using proprietary software is a sin.
audience: what about vi?
RMS: using vi is not a sin, it's a punishment.
You got one thing right: you're not well-up on crypto stuff. Or common sense. How would this magical POS know if the PIN is valid or not? If PIN is hard-coded on the card, how is it different from the card number?
The copyright holders can control the distribution of their copyrighted works but nothing in the copyright law gives them the right to control how their works are used. The website owner has no legal right to require the visitors to always go through the home page, just like your cable company has no right to require that you watch all the commercials. That should be a duh issue to anyone remotely familiar with copyrights.
Rebooting to windows means that I have to stop everything I was doing, just to play the game. When you have a whole bunch of editor & debugging windows open it's a big pain. (+ servers, DB connections, remote logins, etc...). Playing in Linux allows me to take 30 min to relax and play the game instead of 30 min to play + 15 min to restart everything I was working on to its original state. At work, I rarely reboot or even log out. Even at home it's still a pain.
1. Any recent FPS is not CPU-limited. It is video card-limited. (Except for really low resolution, color depth, and detail, but nobody plays that any more).
2. On modern CPUs, MP3s take about 1% - 3% load to play. I expect ogg to be similar.
In short, CPU usage is a non-issue.
That's a moot point since the company can require the employees not to distribute the company's code to any third party. In fact that's the condition you normally have to agree to as a condition of working at said company. If you write some code as part of your employment, the company owns it -- not you. That's the rule even if your employment contract does not say it explicitly. Therefore, the company is the only enitity that can authorize the distribution of the code to any third party.
Since the company does not hold copyright on the unmodified version of a GPL program, it cannot forbid you to distribute that version, but that's not particularly useful since the unmodified version is publicly available anyway. However, the company does own copyright on any and all modifications/additions made to the program. Therefore, you are not allowed to distribute those modifications without the company's permission. And if said company chooses to keep the modifications proprietary, you are not allowed to release them to third parties.
The key point is that you do not own the code you write for your employer -- this weird entity called the corporation does -- therefore you have no right to distribute that code without your employer's permission.