Re:"Under The Radar" looks like toilet paper
on
The Red Hat Diaries
·
· Score: 1
I heard Bob Young speak at a meeting of LXNY (the New York Linux user group he's a member of) about a month ago. (And then went for dinner with him and others.) He answered a lot of questions during the meeting. He said then that the book wouldn't be worth buying for most Linux users, and we (the attendees) shouldn't bother with it.
Look at the mac and windows: click-click. They don't require the user to know what the packaging format is, or what programs are used to install them.
And they don't work, either. They write a load of shit outside their own private directory and often to the system directory, some of which may be incompatible with old versions, sometimes even without checking version numbers. Microsoft's installers are particularly bad at this. Witness how service packs have to be re-applied after installing new components/extensions of an application.
In principle, this sounds like a good thing. In practice, enabling Windows Update opens a big security hole:
ActiveX controls can be marked "safe for scripting," meaning that a script on any HTML page can activate them without requesting permission or giving notification. And the controls turn out to have holes. So far, Microsoft has identified two buffer overruns and one case of improper filesystem access among Microsoft-supplied, marked-safe controls (Security Bulletins MS0099-33, 37, and 40).
...
For now, Microsoft recommends turning off ActiveScripting. Unfortunately, that breaks a good many Web sites, including most of Microsoft's. A less draconian solution suggested to me by a Microsoft developer is to deny permission to run "safe for scripting" controls. But even this breaks a lot of sites, including Windows Update, which is most Windows 98 users' best hope of installing security patches.
(from a mail to the RISKS mailing list by Steve Wildstrom ).
Debian's system doesn't rely on this sort of stuff - you have to actively ask for packages. However, it still relies on your trusting the FTP server you get them from. Official packages will be signed - but do you know that all Debian developers with the key will keep it safe?
There are many remaining problems and unanswered questions about the SVG spec. The author of Gill (Gnome Illustrator) has made a detailed criticism of the font handling; the main problem is the difficult of specifying fonts exactly. I posed a question about where scientific notation could be used, and have not received a concrete answer. Unfortunately, although the SVG editor does make an effort to reply to queries on the public mailing list, the discussion that counts is going on in private, as is normal for W3C. Non-members only see changes made when a new draft is issued (which occurs at irregular intervals).
Why are there 1024MB in a GB of RAM, but only 1000MB in a GB of Hard Disk space, but there are 1024KB in one MB for either?
Uh, there aren't. The HD manufacturers correctly use the definition 1GB = 10^9 bytes. Only "1.44MB" and "2.88MB" floppy disks uses the stupid 1MB = 1024000 bytes definition.
PReP and CHRP have been around for years. LinuxPPC does run on them, but it appears to be difficult to install and LinuxPPC Inc doesn't seem to care since they have plenty of happy Mac-owning customers.
DGA is really handy for running Windows games that use DirectDraw. Unfortunately this requires running them as root. If you aren't root, WINE's DirectDraw implementation can be really slow (hundreds of times slower in some cases).
Of course the M2-300 is cheap. Cyrix has no brand recognition, and it was forced to undercut its competitors by a long way. In fact, it has been selling them at a loss.
That was not a joke, but Hoover assumed that most buyers would not take up the offer (because of restrictions on the flights, I think). In fact, large numbers of people bought Hoover appliances mainly so that they could get the free flights!
Even DOS lets you use forward slashes, though most commands won't allow them at the beginning of a path. However, canonical path names use back slashes.
Yes. This calculation only works with "average" values.
Now suppose that the cleartext is not known, and is compressed. Then no assumptions can be made about what byte values will appear in it. Those chips would have to be quite a bit more complex - and slower - to do decompression before checking whether the result contains only ASCII printable character codes.
I think there were Agnes and Veronica, among others, that handled special tasks.
The A500, A1000 and A2000 had these:
Agnus (for Address GeNerator) - contains blitter, graphics coprocessor (copper) and carries out all memory-register transfers for custom chips
Denise (for Display ENabler?) - handles video output (including colour lookup, HAM (Hold-And-Modify) mode, and sprites), collision detection, and game control interfaces (including ADC)
Paula (for Ports and AUdio) - handles serial, disk and audio I/O
Gary (for Gate ARraY) - contains various board-specific logic and chip selection
Later Amigas had various extra or replacement chips with names including Ramsey, Buster, Alice, Akiko, Lisa, and Gayle.
But under HTTP/1.1, it looks more like
GET / HTTP/1.1 HOST www.example.com
That should actually be "Host: www.example.com"
With HTTP/1.1 we get MD5 encoding.
Are you thinking of Digest authentication? Unfortunately I have yet to see a browser that implements it. I have implemented it in my own client that uses the PUT command, but I cannot yet switch the server to use it because no other client knows how to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
I heard Bob Young speak at a meeting of LXNY (the New York Linux user group he's a member of) about a month ago. (And then went for dinner with him and others.) He answered a lot of questions during the meeting. He said then that the book wouldn't be worth buying for most Linux users, and we (the attendees) shouldn't bother with it.
And they don't work, either. They write a load of shit outside their own private directory and often to the system directory, some of which may be incompatible with old versions, sometimes even without checking version numbers. Microsoft's installers are particularly bad at this. Witness how service packs have to be re-applied after installing new components/extensions of an application.
Oops, that's Steve Wildstrom <steve_wildstrom@businessweek.com>.
Oops, that's Steve Wildstrom <steve_wildstrom@businessweek.com>.
In principle, this sounds like a good thing. In practice, enabling Windows Update opens a big security hole:
(from a mail to the RISKS mailing list by Steve Wildstrom ).
Debian's system doesn't rely on this sort of stuff - you have to actively ask for packages. However, it still relies on your trusting the FTP server you get them from. Official packages will be signed - but do you know that all Debian developers with the key will keep it safe?
And this proves that Slashdot provides enough eyeballs.
There are many remaining problems and unanswered questions about the SVG spec. The author of Gill (Gnome Illustrator) has made a detailed criticism of the font handling; the main problem is the difficult of specifying fonts exactly. I posed a question about where scientific notation could be used, and have not received a concrete answer. Unfortunately, although the SVG editor does make an effort to reply to queries on the public mailing list, the discussion that counts is going on in private, as is normal for W3C. Non-members only see changes made when a new draft is issued (which occurs at irregular intervals).
I can already run Red Alert on Linux thanks to WINE, but it takes a bit of struggling (and can screw up the X server :-().
Uh, there aren't. The HD manufacturers correctly use the definition 1GB = 10^9 bytes. Only "1.44MB" and "2.88MB" floppy disks uses the stupid 1MB = 1024000 bytes definition.
PReP and CHRP have been around for years. LinuxPPC does run on them, but it appears to be difficult to install and LinuxPPC Inc doesn't seem to care since they have plenty of happy Mac-owning customers.
DGA is really handy for running Windows games that use DirectDraw. Unfortunately this requires running them as root. If you aren't root, WINE's DirectDraw implementation can be really slow (hundreds of times slower in some cases).
Of course the M2-300 is cheap. Cyrix has no brand recognition, and it was forced to undercut its competitors by a long way. In fact, it has been selling them at a loss.
VBXs are Win16 shite. Of course you can't use them in 32-bit programs.
Well, based on the same logic Linux must be DOS because it also has a command line and I can use some DOS commands (like `dir' and `echo') there.
That was not a joke, but Hoover assumed that most buyers would not take up the offer (because of restrictions on the flights, I think). In fact, large numbers of people bought Hoover appliances mainly so that they could get the free flights!
Ah, that's OK. I was worried that I might have missed something by leaving early.
Seriously, Joe, are you allowed to tell us what "Mitchie" is/was, yet? As far as I can remember, it was supposed to have been public by now.
Even DOS lets you use forward slashes, though most commands won't allow them at the beginning of a path. However, canonical path names use back slashes.
Right. I think they just recompiled the Release 3 driver as ELF and put it in as "experimental" because they didn't retest it. It works fine here.
Yes. This calculation only works with "average" values.
Now suppose that the cleartext is not known, and is compressed. Then no assumptions can be made about what byte values will appear in it. Those chips would have to be quite a bit more complex - and slower - to do decompression before checking whether the result contains only ASCII printable character codes.
This must be an imposter.
The A500, A1000 and A2000 had these:
Later Amigas had various extra or replacement chips with names including Ramsey, Buster, Alice, Akiko, Lisa, and Gayle.
They could make it a module, and Linus made specific exemption for binary-only modules.
Andrew Korn is clueless about almost every technical issue. He used to edit CU Amiga, and would treat PR and manufacturer benchmarks as fact.
That should actually be "Host: www.example.com"
Are you thinking of Digest authentication? Unfortunately I have yet to see a browser that implements it. I have implemented it in my own client that uses the PUT command, but I cannot yet switch the server to use it because no other client knows how to do it.