I've resigned myself to the fact that there's no such real thing as privacy, only perceived privacy. It's easy enough for someone to connect my presence in any media to my real person. So, I don't go to obscenely obscure lengths to try to cover my tracks; it'd be fruitless.
What this trouble is about, however, is security. Not national security, but information security. On most UNIX systems, passwords are stored as 56-bit DES, and there's always a way that one can somehow get the password file, from which point it's almost always painfully simple to get a root shell. From there they can access any information on the servers, and if it's encrypted - and 512-bit RSA is pretty standard for such sensitive information - it's not too hard to crack that anymore, either.
I still feel comfortable in sending my credit card information to online retailers who use 64-bit RSA and the like. There's just too much information out there for someone to effectively snatch my info, and it's certainly more secure than using a phone or mail or whatever to send that information to them. What I'm concerned about is the information when it's on the other server.
As has been stated before, 1024-bit RSA and 128-bit blowfish are still plenty secure, and likely will be for a long time. I'm not concerned about my ssh connections being cracked. And, honestly, I'm not too concerned if someone else gets my bank information, since banks have insurance for my money (up to $10,000 anyway) and although it'd be a hassle for me, it's the one stealing the money who would eventually suffer, not me.
But my privacy isn't really something I clutch with my big guns blazing. It's a false premise anyway. I mean, hell, I even give Too Much Information on my slashdot user info, and anyone on the various MUCKs I'm on would have an easy time to find out anything they want about me. That coupled with many websearches and the like would easily find plenty of dirt on me, things I've done or said in the past I'm ashamed of but which I've pretty much put behind me, since it was before I decided to grow up instead of being a trite little punk hacker wannabe.
Though if you do find out enough, there's no reason to use it against me; after all, I do deserve my privacy. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
By "the paperclip" I think people mean all the office assistants, not just the default paperclip. I can't stand the OA stuff since even if I turn it off, it takes up a shitload of memory and CPU and loves to pop up at inopportune moments to let me know that the wavy lines mean I misspelled something...
Yet another reason I don't use Office. I just do all my word processing in HTML, myself. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
You forgot First Contact, which, although munges things up a LOT, still has the Borg. Who aren't in Generations. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
This is, of course, why the 10.x.x.x and 192.168.x.x networks are there to begin with; they're specifically setup as non-routeable addresses for firewalls (NAT/IPMasq or otherwise). --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Yeah. My only real grief with the dependency tree right now is with Mesa, GGI, and all these other things where dselect keeps on insisting I want mesag3+ggi when I don't. It seems such a foreign concept to it that since I have GGI installed and I have MesaG3 installed, I must therefore want MesaG3+GGI instead of plain MesaG3 (which, of course, then breaks other stuff, such as xscreensaver and other things that depend on MesaG3).
Why the G3, anyway? I've never quite figured that out... I thought it was called 'Mesa' or 'Mesa3D'. It's v3.x right now. Maybe that has somethng to do with it. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
No, I'm talking about the newer Celerons, which have two levels of cache, vs. the P3, which has 3 levels of cache. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
The cache isn't faster, but it's got one less level, so although it thrashes more often, its thrashes are much lower-latency. Depending on the code, this can be anywhere between much faster and much slower. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
...has nothing to do with configuration of packages. It's a nice (if not sometimes aggrivating with certain packages on the bleeding-edge release) "GUI" frontend to the various package management tools, namely dpkg and apt.
Thus, your response had nothing to do with the message you were responding to.:) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
The C-128D wasn't exactly a predecessor to the IBM PC, though. The C64, however, was, and although the system didn't say "personal computer" on it, I am fairly certain that the box it came in did. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
This is the second nVidia chipset in a row for which the best card's manufacturer has to, for some reason or another, stop making their card. The Canopus Spectra 2500 is still considered the absolute best TNT card, and now it looks like Hercules's TNT2 card will have a similar place on hardware review sites.
Maybe this should be taken as a piece of advice for anyone wanting to get in the 3D accelerator market: don't have the best nVidia-based card.:)
I digress, however. My first x86-based PC (an 8MHz 286) had a Hercules monochrome card (HGC). It's too bad this card was unappreciated; people seemed to think that CGA's slow and crappy 320x200x4 color and 640x200x2 monochrome modes could hold a candle to HGC's awesomely fast 720x384 (IIRC - god it's been a long time). It's not like CGA's color mode was normally used for anything more than quasi-grayscale images anyway, seeing as how it had such a horrible choice of palettes. (Of course, the even-slower but neat 160x100x16 mode was nice, but almost never used.)
Hercules has always had the fastest, if not overlooked, graphics cards on the market. Their engineers actually knew what they were doing, rather than just churning out cheap knockoff boards, and later (when it became more effective to use someone else's chipset) reference board after reference board.
This is a sad day indeed. A legacy is ending. Of course, there's other good video card manufacturers out there, but aside from Asus and Elsa, they're all basically reference designs, and the only real comparison between the boards is cost. Hercules cards were more expensive, but when the deciding factor was pure speed, Hercules was always there.
It's too bad that in the late 80s and even early 90s, nobody realized that Hercules was still around, and nearly everyone who'd heard of them equated Hercules with "crappy monochrome graphics" and couldn't believe that they had, say, the fastest ET4000/W32-based accelerator on the market.
The few games that were put out with HGC support (most Sierra adventure games, most Broderbund games, most notably Prince of Persia) looked *so* much better in Hercules than in CGA. Prince of Persia had a very nice 'cinematic' view (long before that was popular) and very sweet-looking dithering whereas the CGA version just looked crude. The Sierra programmers put a nice feature in their games for the HGC version which didn't go into the "mainstream" view until much later with their point-and-click interface; while typing a command, a dialog box would pop up and the game would freeze. (In CGA, the game would just keep on going, and so many scenes in King's Quest and Leisure Suit Larry became more of a speed-typing challenge than puzzle-solving.)
It's too bad that they apparently never got out of their "didn't they do that crappy monochrome graphics card back in the 80s?" brandname funk. They will be missed. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Re:Fun facts and ironies about the first programme
on
ENIAC Story on NPR
·
· Score: 2
He was depressed because the British government decided to do the "favor" of "curing" him of his homosexuality. Namely they put him on lotsa hormones and psychoactive chemicals intended (by some odd bit of "logic") to make him desire women instead of men. Instead, they just caused much dysphoria, which led to depression, which led to suicide. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
The joystick was actually invented at MIT so that the hackers could play Spacewar without mangling their fingers on the PDP's input switches. (Read "Hackers" by Steven Levy.) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I re-read GEB every two or three years; it's part of my religion. I get quines.
You too, huh?:) I was just covering the bases (and some AC also asked about what a quine is, so I'm glad I explained it there anyway).
Okay, so it's not really a quine itself (though it's sort of quiney), but it sets up the next one: a quine consisting entirely of forms of the word "quine". No, actually just a sentence containing a quine of "quined" and consisting of forms of "quine".
Hehe, yeah, LISP, which, as we all know, stands for (cons 'processor '(list)). Quines made practical. Sorta.:) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Depends on your definition of "fine," I suppose, and whether you're on 10baseT, 100baseT, gigabit, etc. Anyway, I wasn't saying that Quake2 doesn't support remote display, but it generally is a bunch of suck. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I realize this. However, when at such a high frequency, you have quite a bit more bandwidth, so whether it's using FM or not, it'll have much better quality than FM radio. I could have been a bit more specific, though, and said I was referring to FM radio as defined by the FCC for the purpose of publicly-broadcast transmission. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
A 'quine' is a self-similar (and usually true) expression, such as "'is a statement without a subject' is a statement without a subject." Read Douglas Hofstadter's "Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" for more info (or you can look it up in Everything). The "Quine 'quine'?" is a separate statement. Basically, it reads like this:
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine. The statement "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is, in fact, a quine, being a self-similar repetition.
Quine "quine?" An attempt at just quining the word "quine," thus making it a self-referential self-similar statement, and also being a challenge for the next statement;
"'Quined' quined" quines "quined." That is, the statement "'quined' quined" quines the word "quined," though admittedly it's not a very good quine since it's not grammatically-correct.
As for the topic at-hand, which is itself off-topic (thus its topicality or lack thereof is self-referential - ah, to go in circles, what joy:) I can see your reasoning behind the self-contradictory definition of "nerd." It's all connotation, however; such is the same reason that the word "witch" can mean different things, as can "bitch" and "stud" depending on who's saying it to whom regarding what.
As for the/. slogan, well, "news for geeks" just doesn't have the same ring to it.:) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
since geeks don't necessarily have the skill level to qualify as "true" hackers (I myself don't quite claim to be worthy of that title)
Your.sig indicates otherwise.:)
Aside from that, though, yes, I'd say your connotative definitions are more or less right, though your 'nerd' is a bit flaky; IMO, it can also mean what you mean by 'dork'. I still don't see how 'dork' can be taken as a compliment in any connotation, though, which was what I was originally responding to...
I'm the exact opposite. Instead of spending $250 for 'really good' computer speakers I spent $200 on a complete stereo system (Sony Pro Logic receiver, Yamaha front speakers, the receiver came with a free set of surround/center channel satellites - new years sales rock) and have much better sound quality, many many switched audio inputs (as well as video source switching) and other fun routing stuff for somewhat less than Altec Lansings with their semi-decent quality. This setup slowly migrated from being computer speakers to being an actual home theater; I'd like to see your 'whoppin good speaker system' do that (and yes, I do have my computer still hooked up to this system - *nice* for Quake:) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I don't know what they're using, but it's likely not FM, and regardless, it's in the 2.6GHz frequency area, so it has a LOT more bandwidth to play with than normal FM (which is between 89.1 (I think) and 107.9 MHz) or even television signals (which are split in two bands, the higher one going up to 500MHz IIRC, though I can't remember the lower band or the bottom end of the upper band). Try reading the article someday; you might learn something. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I remember when 5meg hard drives were $1500. Speaking of which, since when do these free PCs cost as much as 'a nice television set'? My 35" Sony TV cost quite a bit more than your average decent system (about $1k for the TV, as opposed to $500 for a pretty high-powered PC if you build it yourself - not counting monitor, of course - and only $100 or so for a "free" PC). --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Pedantic and preachy, but agreeable
on
Is X The Future?
·
· Score: 2
I agree with most of what the author is saying. However, certain things (such as him insisting we not require the use of shared memory and lots of bandwidth) are a bit pedantic, since certain things just don't work the way X was intended. For example, I'd really hate to try running Quake2, even through GLX, on a remote display. The latency would be absolutely *horrible*...
Also, just sticking to Xlib and Xt is not a Good Thing. Do we really want everything looking crappy and having the reinvented-wheel look all the time? Not to mention that raw Xlib coding is a *bitch*. There's a reason for Motif and GTK and Qt and CDE, which he feels perfectly justified in extolling at the beginning of his essay.
Even his "do it with X" mandate doesn't always make sense. Again, games don't always benefit from X, particularly ones involving realtime rendering. Even scientific visualization applications tend to suck like that, particularly if they require zbuffered rendering (since there's absolutely no way to do that server-side without relying on GLX, which, if it doesn't exist on the server, needs to be done in software on the client leading to - guess what - bandwidth! AND horrific CPU/memory usage!).
His last preachy bit is just plain laughable...
X is here for a reason. It is an excellent standard. It is by far the best graphical system available. An ingeniously designed, expertly implemented system, X has served Linux for years.
I agree that it's an excellent standard, but there's far too much baggage. Yes, it's already got plenty of acceptance, but any extensions - which this guy is proposing we do, instead of a rewrite - lead to the exact same situation, namely a shitload of X servers which won't be able to run these programs. It's not ingenious, any moreso than telnet or, at an extreme stretch, NFS, and although the implementation of the current specification could be considered expert, the current specification itself isn't. When was the last time you saw an X9 or X10 program in actual use?
I'm all for consistent, open standards, but this article is just too preachy and has an extreme case of tunnel vision, not to mention quite a bit of self-contradiction (you can't expect someone to use X11 to its fullest and use Xlib at the same time, and you can't talk about its total acceptance and suggest making new protocol extensions either). --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Slashdot Mirror
What this trouble is about, however, is security. Not national security, but information security. On most UNIX systems, passwords are stored as 56-bit DES, and there's always a way that one can somehow get the password file, from which point it's almost always painfully simple to get a root shell. From there they can access any information on the servers, and if it's encrypted - and 512-bit RSA is pretty standard for such sensitive information - it's not too hard to crack that anymore, either.
I still feel comfortable in sending my credit card information to online retailers who use 64-bit RSA and the like. There's just too much information out there for someone to effectively snatch my info, and it's certainly more secure than using a phone or mail or whatever to send that information to them. What I'm concerned about is the information when it's on the other server.
As has been stated before, 1024-bit RSA and 128-bit blowfish are still plenty secure, and likely will be for a long time. I'm not concerned about my ssh connections being cracked. And, honestly, I'm not too concerned if someone else gets my bank information, since banks have insurance for my money (up to $10,000 anyway) and although it'd be a hassle for me, it's the one stealing the money who would eventually suffer, not me.
But my privacy isn't really something I clutch with my big guns blazing. It's a false premise anyway. I mean, hell, I even give Too Much Information on my slashdot user info, and anyone on the various MUCKs I'm on would have an easy time to find out anything they want about me. That coupled with many websearches and the like would easily find plenty of dirt on me, things I've done or said in the past I'm ashamed of but which I've pretty much put behind me, since it was before I decided to grow up instead of being a trite little punk hacker wannabe.
Though if you do find out enough, there's no reason to use it against me; after all, I do deserve my privacy.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Yet another reason I don't use Office. I just do all my word processing in HTML, myself.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
That's just so sad...
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
You forgot First Contact, which, although munges things up a LOT, still has the Borg. Who aren't in Generations.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
This is, of course, why the 10.x.x.x and 192.168.x.x networks are there to begin with; they're specifically setup as non-routeable addresses for firewalls (NAT/IPMasq or otherwise).
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Why the G3, anyway? I've never quite figured that out... I thought it was called 'Mesa' or 'Mesa3D'. It's v3.x right now. Maybe that has somethng to do with it.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
No, I'm talking about the newer Celerons, which have two levels of cache, vs. the P3, which has 3 levels of cache.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
The cache isn't faster, but it's got one less level, so although it thrashes more often, its thrashes are much lower-latency. Depending on the code, this can be anywhere between much faster and much slower.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Thus, your response had nothing to do with the message you were responding to. :)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
The C-128D wasn't exactly a predecessor to the IBM PC, though. The C64, however, was, and although the system didn't say "personal computer" on it, I am fairly certain that the box it came in did.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Maybe this should be taken as a piece of advice for anyone wanting to get in the 3D accelerator market: don't have the best nVidia-based card. :)
I digress, however. My first x86-based PC (an 8MHz 286) had a Hercules monochrome card (HGC). It's too bad this card was unappreciated; people seemed to think that CGA's slow and crappy 320x200x4 color and 640x200x2 monochrome modes could hold a candle to HGC's awesomely fast 720x384 (IIRC - god it's been a long time). It's not like CGA's color mode was normally used for anything more than quasi-grayscale images anyway, seeing as how it had such a horrible choice of palettes. (Of course, the even-slower but neat 160x100x16 mode was nice, but almost never used.)
Hercules has always had the fastest, if not overlooked, graphics cards on the market. Their engineers actually knew what they were doing, rather than just churning out cheap knockoff boards, and later (when it became more effective to use someone else's chipset) reference board after reference board.
This is a sad day indeed. A legacy is ending. Of course, there's other good video card manufacturers out there, but aside from Asus and Elsa, they're all basically reference designs, and the only real comparison between the boards is cost. Hercules cards were more expensive, but when the deciding factor was pure speed, Hercules was always there.
It's too bad that in the late 80s and even early 90s, nobody realized that Hercules was still around, and nearly everyone who'd heard of them equated Hercules with "crappy monochrome graphics" and couldn't believe that they had, say, the fastest ET4000/W32-based accelerator on the market.
The few games that were put out with HGC support (most Sierra adventure games, most Broderbund games, most notably Prince of Persia) looked *so* much better in Hercules than in CGA. Prince of Persia had a very nice 'cinematic' view (long before that was popular) and very sweet-looking dithering whereas the CGA version just looked crude. The Sierra programmers put a nice feature in their games for the HGC version which didn't go into the "mainstream" view until much later with their point-and-click interface; while typing a command, a dialog box would pop up and the game would freeze. (In CGA, the game would just keep on going, and so many scenes in King's Quest and Leisure Suit Larry became more of a speed-typing challenge than puzzle-solving.)
It's too bad that they apparently never got out of their "didn't they do that crappy monochrome graphics card back in the 80s?" brandname funk. They will be missed.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
He was depressed because the British government decided to do the "favor" of "curing" him of his homosexuality. Namely they put him on lotsa hormones and psychoactive chemicals intended (by some odd bit of "logic") to make him desire women instead of men. Instead, they just caused much dysphoria, which led to depression, which led to suicide.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
The joystick was actually invented at MIT so that the hackers could play Spacewar without mangling their fingers on the PDP's input switches. (Read "Hackers" by Steven Levy.)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
You too, huh? :) I was just covering the bases (and some AC also asked about what a quine is, so I'm glad I explained it there anyway).
Okay, so it's not really a quine itself (though it's sort of quiney), but it sets up the next one: a quine consisting entirely of forms of the word "quine". No, actually just a sentence containing a quine of "quined" and consisting of forms of "quine".
Yeah, basically.
(lambda (x) (list (list 'lambda '(x) x) (list 'quote x))) '(list (list 'lambda '(x) x) (list 'quote x)))
Hehe, yeah, LISP, which, as we all know, stands for (cons 'processor '(list)). Quines made practical. Sorta. :)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Read my other response regarding my .sig. :)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Depends on your definition of "fine," I suppose, and whether you're on 10baseT, 100baseT, gigabit, etc. Anyway, I wasn't saying that Quake2 doesn't support remote display, but it generally is a bunch of suck.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I realize this. However, when at such a high frequency, you have quite a bit more bandwidth, so whether it's using FM or not, it'll have much better quality than FM radio. I could have been a bit more specific, though, and said I was referring to FM radio as defined by the FCC for the purpose of publicly-broadcast transmission.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine. The statement "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is, in fact, a quine, being a self-similar repetition.
Quine "quine?" An attempt at just quining the word "quine," thus making it a self-referential self-similar statement, and also being a challenge for the next statement;
"'Quined' quined" quines "quined." That is, the statement "'quined' quined" quines the word "quined," though admittedly it's not a very good quine since it's not grammatically-correct.
As for the topic at-hand, which is itself off-topic (thus its topicality or lack thereof is self-referential - ah, to go in circles, what joy :) I can see your reasoning behind the self-contradictory definition of "nerd." It's all connotation, however; such is the same reason that the word "witch" can mean different things, as can "bitch" and "stud" depending on who's saying it to whom regarding what.
As for the /. slogan, well, "news for geeks" just doesn't have the same ring to it. :)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Your .sig indicates otherwise. :)
Aside from that, though, yes, I'd say your connotative definitions are more or less right, though your 'nerd' is a bit flaky; IMO, it can also mean what you mean by 'dork'. I still don't see how 'dork' can be taken as a compliment in any connotation, though, which was what I was originally responding to...
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I'm the exact opposite. Instead of spending $250 for 'really good' computer speakers I spent $200 on a complete stereo system (Sony Pro Logic receiver, Yamaha front speakers, the receiver came with a free set of surround/center channel satellites - new years sales rock) and have much better sound quality, many many switched audio inputs (as well as video source switching) and other fun routing stuff for somewhat less than Altec Lansings with their semi-decent quality. This setup slowly migrated from being computer speakers to being an actual home theater; I'd like to see your 'whoppin good speaker system' do that (and yes, I do have my computer still hooked up to this system - *nice* for Quake :)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I don't know what they're using, but it's likely not FM, and regardless, it's in the 2.6GHz frequency area, so it has a LOT more bandwidth to play with than normal FM (which is between 89.1 (I think) and 107.9 MHz) or even television signals (which are split in two bands, the higher one going up to 500MHz IIRC, though I can't remember the lower band or the bottom end of the upper band). Try reading the article someday; you might learn something.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Um, no. 'Geek' means a carnival freak who bites the head off chickens. 'Nerd' means... well, nerd.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I remember when 5meg hard drives were $1500. Speaking of which, since when do these free PCs cost as much as 'a nice television set'? My 35" Sony TV cost quite a bit more than your average decent system (about $1k for the TV, as opposed to $500 for a pretty high-powered PC if you build it yourself - not counting monitor, of course - and only $100 or so for a "free" PC).
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Also, just sticking to Xlib and Xt is not a Good Thing. Do we really want everything looking crappy and having the reinvented-wheel look all the time? Not to mention that raw Xlib coding is a *bitch*. There's a reason for Motif and GTK and Qt and CDE, which he feels perfectly justified in extolling at the beginning of his essay.
Even his "do it with X" mandate doesn't always make sense. Again, games don't always benefit from X, particularly ones involving realtime rendering. Even scientific visualization applications tend to suck like that, particularly if they require zbuffered rendering (since there's absolutely no way to do that server-side without relying on GLX, which, if it doesn't exist on the server, needs to be done in software on the client leading to - guess what - bandwidth! AND horrific CPU/memory usage!).
His last preachy bit is just plain laughable...
X is here for a reason. It is an excellent standard. It is by far the best graphical system available. An ingeniously designed, expertly implemented system, X has served Linux for years.
I agree that it's an excellent standard, but there's far too much baggage. Yes, it's already got plenty of acceptance, but any extensions - which this guy is proposing we do, instead of a rewrite - lead to the exact same situation, namely a shitload of X servers which won't be able to run these programs. It's not ingenious, any moreso than telnet or, at an extreme stretch, NFS, and although the implementation of the current specification could be considered expert, the current specification itself isn't. When was the last time you saw an X9 or X10 program in actual use?
I'm all for consistent, open standards, but this article is just too preachy and has an extreme case of tunnel vision, not to mention quite a bit of self-contradiction (you can't expect someone to use X11 to its fullest and use Xlib at the same time, and you can't talk about its total acceptance and suggest making new protocol extensions either).
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Maybe because "dork" means "penis."
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.