1. Turn everything on this page that is red to green for the Trident engine. How hard could that be? Sign up for a Wikipedia account and edit away! By the way, did you know the number of elephants has tripled in the last six months?
Maybe some people are now relieved to know they're not exceeding the quotas, but why doesn't Comcast just provide an exact limit? Exactly how big are these songs, pictures, and emails? Sure 250,000 sounds like a lot of photos.. but how about 250,000 1x1 spacer.gif files (10.25 MB)?
I'm asking because I want to know so I can use up 99% of my quota.
Did anyone else happen to see the "This page has moved here" with a link to goatce on the FreeDesktop.org D-BUS page!? I hit the refresh button and now it's gone!
Stop stereotyping the users of Slashdot. For all you know, the people who worked on the kernel have never illegally downloaded or distributed music on the internet. Yes, there is a double standard if the same person who writes code wants his license respected refuses to respect the license of other copyright holders; however, there is a distinction between the two opinions. It is ignorant to think that the coders on Slashdot are the same people who complain about the DCMA/RIAA/MPAA simply because they communicate on the same forum. Slashdot is not a collective conscience!
Yes, exactly. An automated home of this magnatude is just stupid and would people into dumb pigeons with credit cards (more than they already are). Besides the fact this whole thing would cause extreme inconveinance when things went wrong - bugs (I'm sure MS will have most of them ironed out before the products hit any shelfs, wink wink), power outages, security problems, and constant meddling to make it work the way you want (like Windows). Having a computer make such basic decisions for humans would leave many feeling controlled, and if not... its disgustingly lazy to have a computer do everything for you. I am sick of consumerism in America, this would just make it exponentially worse. Fast food eating fuel wasting SUV driving cell phone talking mindless slaves of the economy!
I really doubt this problem will ever go away, like how Code Red still hasn't gone away. I still get Code Red I and II infection attempts to my server despite the thing that was supposed to self-destruct on a certain date (I suppose incorrectly set clocks are to thank for this?)
Re:These types of stories need MORE publicity
on
Dow vs. Parody
·
· Score: 1
While I agree that parody and critism are important parts of our freedom of speech, home addresses and other information related to normal citizens are all available on www.whitepages.com and any phone book. While you can pay to have them removed (or hell, don't have a phone in the first place), the crime should not be publishing someone's home address or other mildy personal information. The crime would be someone stalking them or harassing or even harming them, by restricting speech that way it is analogous to not allowing publication of books about hacking networks, building bombs, or sneaking past airport security.
And don't you think that maybe if James Parker's address was published inside of a praising article about how he cleaned up the mess in India he wouldn't feel so threatened? Since his actions were instead atrocious, he better feel threatened to have his address published and he better expect to face some kind of consequences for his actions too.
When global variables are enabled, PHP will take variables from cookies, get query strings, post variables, and session data and according to the order you specify put them in global context. For instance, index.php?var=foo would set $var to "foo" in a PHP script with global variables enabled. The problem with this is that you don't really know where a variable came from and users can set any variables they want.
Lets say you set a cookie called "admin" and you only set it if the user on your site has admin privileges. If you check for admin by assuming PHP will put it in global context and do something like if (isset($admin)) {... }, users might request the page like this: index.php?admin=1 and because PHP will bring the variable from the GET string into global context, and you don't know where it came from... the user gets admin privileges and can abuse your code.
The proper way to code in PHP is to check like this: if (admin($_COOKIE["admin"])) that way you know for sure where the variable came from.
In addition to the other rebuttal post, point #2 is not a very big issue. With APC or ZendCache or whatever other methods to cache script compilation, the script is only compiled/interpreted (whatever PHP does) each time the original code changes. Furthermore, its common to cache the output of the page to a static HTML file or some other reusable cache... for instance pulling large amounts of data from a database with a complex and slow query, then formatting it with some less than efficient string parsing logic would be very slow if it had to perform this procedure every time. But if you cache the results of this operation it only happens once every so often and the most code you have to run through is checking if the output cache is still up to date.
Yes, but this is true with most software. (Especially Windows or Outlook.) You can't really say PHP is any more insecure than C... beginners are likely to use the functions that don't validate input and cause possible buffer overflows. If you code safely, your PHP applications can be just as safe as any other language. And it's pretty simple in PHP... I don't know what steps need to be taken in C or Perl but in PHP basically you just need to be careful enough to only use $_GET, $_POST, $_SERVER, etc instead of global variables.
I beleive one of the reasons MySQL is so popular as a free database engine is that it was probably the best one when PHP started to form. I think PostgreSQL had its own non-standard query language (wasn't really SQL) and I don't know about any other servers. Also, whether its true or not, I am under the impression that MySQL is less resource intensive and more light-weight than most other database servers, so its good to run on a Apache/PHP/Perl/etc integrated test machine. (Wasn't it based from mSQL which was a really tiny SQL server?) Personally, I use PostgreSQL but I find MySQL useful when programming on Windows machines (I don't need Cygwin to run MySQL server) and it seems more common on webservers so it's wise to be familiar with it if you switch web hosts.
1. How is that any better than signing a tablet input device or another form of input? From the lag you would experience over the internet with this device, it would suck.
2. This is better than any other video conferencing software because..? In fact, most video conferencing stuff sucks (especially NetMeeting) and email or phone is preferred for most people anyway.
3. Hmm... knocking someone out over the internet might be worth it, let's hope Steve Case buys one.
4. Once again, the lag is too important of a factor. If, lets say a dentist, was holding a drill in a patient's mouth and the patient sneezed, it would take too long for him to see/feel the movement and then more lag for him to move his robot hand thingy out of the patients mouth in time to prevent serious damage.
I agree it's worth playing with to see what new applications can come of it, but it's not as practical as it might seem at first.
Your post seems rather uninformed. While I'm too lazy to find the material, I've read several times that applications must have code to enable this system in order for it to have any affect. Meaning KaZaA and AudioGalaxy or whatever else could add code to enable the DRM/Palladium crap and ensure people don't distribute unauthorized files (for example). Also, legacy applications are enabled so it seems to me this would cause no problems for people who wantd to use their computer like they currently do now.
We all know Microsoft hasn't "innovated" a single thing since DOS, the GUI, Internet Explorer, etc... but are they really so uncreative that they need to copy IBM's advertising techniques?! And the whole thing about people dressed in butterfly suits rollerskating around screaming at the top of their lungs would be straight off the Comedy Central show Trigger Happy if it only had a guy in a penguin suit beating the living crap out of them... if I lived in NYC and had a penguin suit I know I would.
How about the creation of TUX? The webserver that runs in kernel space and drastically enhances the speed of serving static content? And although not recently, but in the past the invention of the TCP/IP stack was due to Unix, as well as almost all of the every day internet protocols like POP, SMTP, FTP, etc. And although I don't recall exactly but wasn't the C programming language invented to write Unix? The Linux and Unix community have contributed many innovations (although most are probably from the Unix side of the camp) compared to Microsoft.
Agreed. I just got done re-installing Win2K on a computer and I didn't have the HP Restore CD so I had to use the normal retail CD. It ended up I had to go to HP's website to download NIC, display, and sound card drivers... but the HP Restore CD would've included them. Who knows what the case would've been with the computer in the article though.
I have read some of the disadvantages already posted, but what about security? For functions like tempnam that create a new file in/tmp with a random name and then return the file handle, I thought these must be uninterrupted, or you end up doing the samet thing as:
$random = md5(microtime()); if (!file_exists("/tmp/$random") $fd = fopen("/tmp/$random", "w") ...
The problem is the symlink/race condition issue that prompted the need for a kernel-level function. Or is there a way to prevent that from being preemptable?
This is the stupidest things I have listened to since Windows' 2000 text to speech reading the swap file, but I am going to use it with XMMS Wake Up as my alarm clock, nothing could make me want to get out of bed and shut it off more than this.
vertical bar d vertical bar... f vertical bar f vertical bar f vertical bar... plus sign hyphen minus plus sign hyphen minus plus sign hyphen minus plus sign hyphen minus vertical bar vertical bar veritcal b vertical bar b verictal bar...
While what you say is usually true, it does not relate to security, which was your orignal point. Free Software usually lags behind proprietary software, although that is not always true. However, first you say that you don't beleive it is more secure and then go on to explain that it is lagged behind in features.
I personally agree with the original post because I have experience with being put under deadlines, and writing code in my spare time. When I have a deadline, I have to focus on just getting the job done instead of getting it done elegantly. This leads to problems when the requirements change because my code is a mess and now I have to change things all over the place.
When I am working on my own free time, I write the code in the most generic, abstract, and elegant way for even simple things. For example, I have a small program that downloads the slashdot.xml file, parses it, and prints out headlines. I wanted to have this cached and expire every hour... but I wrote the caching mechanism so generically that I now use it with several pages, not just the slashdot headlines.
And with regards to security, when I have a deadline I try to get the work done and think of security as a second possibility. If I take the time to build the security into the application instead of adding it afterward, I end up with a very secure, but incomplete and useless program. When I develop on my own time, I have the time to think of security before I actually code anything.
This doesn't provide any factual evidence to Free Software being more secure than proprietary software, but it does give some ideas on why it might be, if it is.
Slashdot Mirror
First New Robots Hunt Pirates and now LEGOs are targetting developers! We're all doomed!
... and don't call me surely! (sorry, had to be said)
Maybe some people are now relieved to know they're not exceeding the quotas, but why doesn't Comcast just provide an exact limit? Exactly how big are these songs, pictures, and emails? Sure 250,000 sounds like a lot of photos.. but how about 250,000 1x1 spacer.gif files (10.25 MB)? I'm asking because I want to know so I can use up 99% of my quota.
Yeah, their poll doesn't even have a Cowboy Neal option!
Did anyone else happen to see the "This page has moved here" with a link to goatce on the FreeDesktop.org D-BUS page!? I hit the refresh button and now it's gone!
Stop stereotyping the users of Slashdot. For all you know, the people who worked on the kernel have never illegally downloaded or distributed music on the internet. Yes, there is a double standard if the same person who writes code wants his license respected refuses to respect the license of other copyright holders; however, there is a distinction between the two opinions. It is ignorant to think that the coders on Slashdot are the same people who complain about the DCMA/RIAA/MPAA simply because they communicate on the same forum. Slashdot is not a collective conscience!
Yes, exactly. An automated home of this magnatude is just stupid and would people into dumb pigeons with credit cards (more than they already are). Besides the fact this whole thing would cause extreme inconveinance when things went wrong - bugs (I'm sure MS will have most of them ironed out before the products hit any shelfs, wink wink), power outages, security problems, and constant meddling to make it work the way you want (like Windows). Having a computer make such basic decisions for humans would leave many feeling controlled, and if not... its disgustingly lazy to have a computer do everything for you. I am sick of consumerism in America, this would just make it exponentially worse. Fast food eating fuel wasting SUV driving cell phone talking mindless slaves of the economy!
I really doubt this problem will ever go away, like how Code Red still hasn't gone away. I still get Code Red I and II infection attempts to my server despite the thing that was supposed to self-destruct on a certain date (I suppose incorrectly set clocks are to thank for this?)
( ) I'm unemployed, you insensitive clod!
While I agree that parody and critism are important parts of our freedom of speech, home addresses and other information related to normal citizens are all available on www.whitepages.com and any phone book. While you can pay to have them removed (or hell, don't have a phone in the first place), the crime should not be publishing someone's home address or other mildy personal information. The crime would be someone stalking them or harassing or even harming them, by restricting speech that way it is analogous to not allowing publication of books about hacking networks, building bombs, or sneaking past airport security.
And don't you think that maybe if James Parker's address was published inside of a praising article about how he cleaned up the mess in India he wouldn't feel so threatened? Since his actions were instead atrocious, he better feel threatened to have his address published and he better expect to face some kind of consequences for his actions too.
a beowulf cluster of these?
Lets say you set a cookie called "admin" and you only set it if the user on your site has admin privileges. If you check for admin by assuming PHP will put it in global context and do something like if (isset($admin)) { ... }, users might request the page like this: index.php?admin=1 and because PHP will bring the variable from the GET string into global context, and you don't know where it came from... the user gets admin privileges and can abuse your code.
The proper way to code in PHP is to check like this: if (admin($_COOKIE["admin"])) that way you know for sure where the variable came from.
In addition to the other rebuttal post, point #2 is not a very big issue. With APC or ZendCache or whatever other methods to cache script compilation, the script is only compiled/interpreted (whatever PHP does) each time the original code changes. Furthermore, its common to cache the output of the page to a static HTML file or some other reusable cache... for instance pulling large amounts of data from a database with a complex and slow query, then formatting it with some less than efficient string parsing logic would be very slow if it had to perform this procedure every time. But if you cache the results of this operation it only happens once every so often and the most code you have to run through is checking if the output cache is still up to date.
Yes, but this is true with most software. (Especially Windows or Outlook.) You can't really say PHP is any more insecure than C... beginners are likely to use the functions that don't validate input and cause possible buffer overflows. If you code safely, your PHP applications can be just as safe as any other language. And it's pretty simple in PHP... I don't know what steps need to be taken in C or Perl but in PHP basically you just need to be careful enough to only use $_GET, $_POST, $_SERVER, etc instead of global variables.
I beleive one of the reasons MySQL is so popular as a free database engine is that it was probably the best one when PHP started to form. I think PostgreSQL had its own non-standard query language (wasn't really SQL) and I don't know about any other servers. Also, whether its true or not, I am under the impression that MySQL is less resource intensive and more light-weight than most other database servers, so its good to run on a Apache/PHP/Perl/etc integrated test machine. (Wasn't it based from mSQL which was a really tiny SQL server?) Personally, I use PostgreSQL but I find MySQL useful when programming on Windows machines (I don't need Cygwin to run MySQL server) and it seems more common on webservers so it's wise to be familiar with it if you switch web hosts.
1. How is that any better than signing a tablet input device or another form of input? From the lag you would experience over the internet with this device, it would suck.
2. This is better than any other video conferencing software because..? In fact, most video conferencing stuff sucks (especially NetMeeting) and email or phone is preferred for most people anyway.
3. Hmm... knocking someone out over the internet might be worth it, let's hope Steve Case buys one.
4. Once again, the lag is too important of a factor. If, lets say a dentist, was holding a drill in a patient's mouth and the patient sneezed, it would take too long for him to see/feel the movement and then more lag for him to move his robot hand thingy out of the patients mouth in time to prevent serious damage.
I agree it's worth playing with to see what new applications can come of it, but it's not as practical as it might seem at first.
Your post seems rather uninformed. While I'm too lazy to find the material, I've read several times that applications must have code to enable this system in order for it to have any affect. Meaning KaZaA and AudioGalaxy or whatever else could add code to enable the DRM/Palladium crap and ensure people don't distribute unauthorized files (for example). Also, legacy applications are enabled so it seems to me this would cause no problems for people who wantd to use their computer like they currently do now.
We all know Microsoft hasn't "innovated" a single thing since DOS, the GUI, Internet Explorer, etc... but are they really so uncreative that they need to copy IBM's advertising techniques?! And the whole thing about people dressed in butterfly suits rollerskating around screaming at the top of their lungs would be straight off the Comedy Central show Trigger Happy if it only had a guy in a penguin suit beating the living crap out of them... if I lived in NYC and had a penguin suit I know I would.
How about the creation of TUX? The webserver that runs in kernel space and drastically enhances the speed of serving static content? And although not recently, but in the past the invention of the TCP/IP stack was due to Unix, as well as almost all of the every day internet protocols like POP, SMTP, FTP, etc. And although I don't recall exactly but wasn't the C programming language invented to write Unix? The Linux and Unix community have contributed many innovations (although most are probably from the Unix side of the camp) compared to Microsoft.
Agreed. I just got done re-installing Win2K on a computer and I didn't have the HP Restore CD so I had to use the normal retail CD. It ended up I had to go to HP's website to download NIC, display, and sound card drivers... but the HP Restore CD would've included them. Who knows what the case would've been with the computer in the article though.
$random = md5(microtime());
...
if (!file_exists("/tmp/$random")
$fd = fopen("/tmp/$random", "w")
The problem is the symlink/race condition issue that prompted the need for a kernel-level function. Or is there a way to prevent that from being preemptable?
Don't forget to add "Goverment says Internet is popular" to that
vertical bar d vertical bar... f vertical bar f vertical bar f vertical bar ... plus sign hyphen minus plus sign hyphen minus plus sign hyphen minus plus sign hyphen minus vertical bar vertical bar veritcal b vertical bar b verictal bar...
While what you say is usually true, it does not relate to security, which was your orignal point. Free Software usually lags behind proprietary software, although that is not always true. However, first you say that you don't beleive it is more secure and then go on to explain that it is lagged behind in features.
I personally agree with the original post because I have experience with being put under deadlines, and writing code in my spare time. When I have a deadline, I have to focus on just getting the job done instead of getting it done elegantly. This leads to problems when the requirements change because my code is a mess and now I have to change things all over the place.
When I am working on my own free time, I write the code in the most generic, abstract, and elegant way for even simple things. For example, I have a small program that downloads the slashdot.xml file, parses it, and prints out headlines. I wanted to have this cached and expire every hour... but I wrote the caching mechanism so generically that I now use it with several pages, not just the slashdot headlines.
And with regards to security, when I have a deadline I try to get the work done and think of security as a second possibility. If I take the time to build the security into the application instead of adding it afterward, I end up with a very secure, but incomplete and useless program. When I develop on my own time, I have the time to think of security before I actually code anything.
This doesn't provide any factual evidence to Free Software being more secure than proprietary software, but it does give some ideas on why it might be, if it is.