Everyone is still using old formats like GIF and JPEG.
But there are other, more powerful formats.
For a non-descructive compression, the PNG format is fortunately getting more and more popular, although the late inclusion in Internet Explorer slows down its wide adoption.
But when it comes to a destructive compression, there's an excellent (and not new) format made by AT&T and called DjVu. It was one of the first wavelets-based format.
DjVu is really better than Jpeg. Images are better looking (more contrast, less pixels with odd colors), and files are way smaller. Plus you can smoothly zoom any DjVu image without getting big and ugly blocks.
DjVu has been available for a while as a plugin for common browsers.
There's a 100% free implementation of the format called DjVuLibre .
However, nobody uses it. I don't understand why. Some times ago, it may have been because compression was slow. But nowadays, it's no more a valid point.
People are enthusiast for Jpeg2000. But why would Jpeg2000 be adopted while DjVu has never been?
LDAP is a nice answer. Because it's simple, extensible, and supported by a lot of operating systems and daemons.
But there are exceptions. Like BSD systems, that don't provide nss_* hooks (unlike Solaris and Linux). PAM isn't enough. PAM only provides authentication. It doesn't provide home directory, shell, gecos, etc.
Does anyone know of a library (that you preload with LD_PRELOAD) that replaces getpw*() functions with LDAP lookups, and that would work on BSD systems?
Have the system automatically keep all packages up to date, when critical bugs or security flaws are found.
SuSE Linux can do that for a long time. And all automatically installed packages are signed with GPG.
Probably a lot of other distros and operating systems can do it, too. And when it's not the case, centralized system management (/usr/local/ shared with NFS, or ssh scripts to replicate the content of an up-to-date box to other boxes) makes it easy to keep everything up-to-date and secure.
Mozilla is *not* exactly like IE, Opera or Konqueror. Yes, you can browse the web with all these products.
But Mozilla is more than a browser. Mozilla is a developpment framework. It's also a graphic toolkit, and a powerful language, whoose other components are based upon.
It means that Mozilla is far more flexible than other browsers. You can write games or word processors with Mozilla without any external library. And the result will be clean, based on fully documented standards, and portable across all platforms Mozilla can run on.
So when Mozilla 1.0 will be released, it will only be the _beginning_ of the story. The framework will be there and solid, and applications will show its true power.
If you have to remotely upgrade the zlib library, be *very careful*.
Because SSH/OpenSSH depend on zlib, if you replace your current libz.so file with another version whoose API has a bit changed, your SSH server won't work any more.
So if you don't have access to the console, open a classical 'telnet' port for a few minutes, just during the upgrade. Once you've checked that SSH is still ok, you can remove the telnet daemon.
If SSH doesn't work any more after the zlib upgrade, recompile SSH.
Let's see. To be widely deployed on WAN networks, IPv6 should first be widely deployed on local LANs.
It works very well on Unix systems. My little personal network has a bunch of OpenBSD and Linux boxes, 100% IPv6, and everything works like a charm.
But what about Windows?
I tried it with Windows 2000. Because the OS doesn't support IPv6 natively, I had to download a patch (and it's not very easy to find, I can't remember the exact URL, the link was posted on a ML a while ago).
Before the patch applied I had a big fat warning "Disclaimer: this is very alpha software, your OS can become extremely unstable. Don't call the Microsoft technical support any more after that, we won't answer" (the words were different, but it was the meaning).
And indeed. The system went very unstable, even for IPv4 requests. IE worked. *some* command-line tools worked. But third party packages like Mirc, CuteFTP and Opera crashed with no further warning.
It looks like there's no effort in the Windows world to provide IPv6-enabled software. This is a major showstopper.
Re:Google doesn't accept money, but accepts cheate
on
Search Engine Payola
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The magic of search engines is that you don't need to submit 1000 links to have them referenced. You submit 10, and Google will crawl the 1000 for you.
But yes, all our domains resolve to 10 IPs among three C classes. There's probably a way for search engines to detect too many loops between different sites that resolves to the same IP, and I hope Google will implement that.
But well... It's just like any form of SPAM. We have mail filters that check RFC conformance, keywords, RBL lists, etc. but we still get more and more mail spam, because spammers use more and more sophisticated software. It's an endless fight. This is really lousy and it degrades the whole internet.
Re:Google doesn't accept money, but accepts cheate
on
Search Engine Payola
·
· Score: 2
It's not that easy.
foo.domain.com and bar.domain.com can be totally different sites. For instance my dialup provider, Claranet, gives www..claranet.fr as addresses. There's no reason for Google to differently score customers sites, because they don't have their own domain name.
Also, subdomains are just a quick way to better spam Google, but to promote one single site, my company buys 100+ _real_ domains (whoose names are combinations of keywords related to the target site) .
To fight against this, search engines should detected ping-pong loops between domains, and strong similarities between web sites. Not that easy when you index millions of web pages.
I just work there as a sysadmin, I didn't know they were spamming when I got hired. They also don't support free software although they heavily use it. I was fixing a bug in Ticketsmith (a GPL'd ticket tracking system) when the CEO said 'Hey, no. Don't fix that if "they" didn't fix it. We are not there to loose time to work for "them"' .
Porn sites make a lot of money. But watching porn movies all the day probably destroys their mind.
Google doesn't accept money, but accepts cheaters
on
Search Engine Payola
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I work for a major hosting company for adult (yes, XXX) web sites. Our sites are very well ranked on all search engines. On some search engines, this is because we gave money (sometimes to be the only one to bring answers for specific keywords) . But we're also very well ranked on Google because of mass spamming.
99% of the pages we submit to Google aren't real sites. We buy a lot of domains (with explicit keywords) . Then, out of every domain, we do tons of subdomains with other keywords. All related web sites are different. But they only have one page, automatically generated by sets of scripts. These pages have randomly chosen keywords and pictures, and every fake site have links to a dozen of other fake sites. On all sites, there's only one link to a real site. A real user will immediately catch the right link (because it's a big picture, it has a caption like "click here to access the site", etc) . But search engines are crawling.
Googles gives better ranking to web sites that have a lot of other web sites linking it. So we abuse that. All our sites have excellent scoring because fake sites are referring other fake sites. It takes 10 minutes to automatically generate hundreds of fake sites. Apache's mod_rewrite is extensively used. We have an entiere team devoted to reading mailing-lists of search engine software (like ASPSeek... Google uses a lot of ASPSeek ideas), in order to abuse search engines.
So although Google's ranking doesn't depend on money, it isn't fair. It depends on how people are cheating with it.
PS: I don't support what the company is doing, it's a shame, and I'm looking for a new job.
Nowadays, everyone is trying to sue Microsoft in order to get a few pennies.
Now, any consumer can play, saying that Windows crashes and doesn't give him satifsaction. What a progress.
I still wonder why Apache 2.0 was designed to use a strange hybrid model instead of making a non-forking server, just like thttpd, webfs or zeus, whoose performance will probably still kick Apache.
And Apache still doesn't have any integrated web administration front-end like Zeus.
There are a lot of comments saying 'Apple can't, because supporting all pieces of PC hardware is a huge task' .
Right. But after all, Darwin is based upon FreeBSD. And FreeBSD *does* support a lot of PC hardware. Given the marvellous OS Apple was able to do, merging new FreeBSD drivers shouldn't be an impossible task.
IMHO, future operating systems will tend to something like the ErOS operating system . This OS is based on multiple tiny extremely reliable components, within a strong capability model to provide a high level of security.
It's definitely a good approach, although ErOS is still quite experimental yet.
With the end of start-up dreams, times are now bad for techies. One year ago, finding a job was a easy as posting a message on Dice (or equivalent sites), and waiting 24 hours. Then, you just had to choose for the best offer.
Nowadays, finding an IT job is *difficult* , especially as opensource techies. Not a lot of company are hiring. Either they already have their technical staff, or they moved to external consultancy services.
There were plenty of new jobs because there were a lot of new companies popping up everywhere. Now, it's over.
I'm looking for a job for weeks with no success...
Wow, 328 registers. Does it mean that it will be more efficient to declare all variables in a single function than using multiple functions (due to scope of variables that restricts the efficient usage of so many registers)?
Slashdot Mirror
Yet another reason to use firewalls to filter _OUTGOING_ connections and not only incoming ones (the other reason : to avoid backdoors) .
Ever heard about the 5 volumes trilogy of the Hitchiker's guide to galaxy?
And if you want a security hardened PHP, apply the current patch from the PHP Audit Project . It's stable, but it only applies to 4.1.2 yet.
Everyone is still using old formats like GIF and JPEG.
But there are other, more powerful formats.
For a non-descructive compression, the PNG format is fortunately getting more and more popular, although the late inclusion in Internet Explorer slows down its wide adoption.
But when it comes to a destructive compression, there's an excellent (and not new) format made by AT&T and called DjVu. It was one of the first wavelets-based format.
DjVu is really better than Jpeg. Images are better looking (more contrast, less pixels with odd colors), and files are way smaller. Plus you can smoothly zoom any DjVu image without getting big and ugly blocks.
DjVu has been available for a while as a plugin for common browsers.
There's a 100% free implementation of the format called DjVuLibre .
However, nobody uses it. I don't understand why. Some times ago, it may have been because compression was slow. But nowadays, it's no more a valid point.
People are enthusiast for Jpeg2000. But why would Jpeg2000 be adopted while DjVu has never been?
LDAP is a nice answer. Because it's simple, extensible, and supported by a lot of operating systems and daemons.
But there are exceptions. Like BSD systems, that don't provide nss_* hooks (unlike Solaris and Linux). PAM isn't enough. PAM only provides authentication. It doesn't provide home directory, shell, gecos, etc.
Does anyone know of a library (that you preload with LD_PRELOAD) that replaces getpw*() functions with LDAP lookups, and that would work on BSD systems?
Discoveries patented by that fucking Thomas Edison were in fact made by John Tesla (who was a _real_ hacker at that time) .
Have the system automatically keep all packages up to date, when critical bugs or security flaws are found.
SuSE Linux can do that for a long time. And all automatically installed packages are signed with GPG.
Probably a lot of other distros and operating systems can do it, too. And when it's not the case, centralized system management (/usr/local/ shared with NFS, or ssh scripts to replicate the content of an up-to-date box to other boxes) makes it easy to keep everything up-to-date and secure.
If Unix sucks, I'll switch to Linux.
It only it didn't crash on OpenBSD... :(
Mozilla is *not* exactly like IE, Opera or Konqueror. Yes, you can browse the web with all these products.
But Mozilla is more than a browser. Mozilla is a developpment framework. It's also a graphic toolkit, and a powerful language, whoose other components are based upon.
It means that Mozilla is far more flexible than other browsers. You can write games or word processors with Mozilla without any external library. And the result will be clean, based on fully documented standards, and portable across all platforms Mozilla can run on.
So when Mozilla 1.0 will be released, it will only be the _beginning_ of the story. The framework will be there and solid, and applications will show its true power.
It's called CatOS.
If you have to remotely upgrade the zlib library, be *very careful* .
Because SSH/OpenSSH depend on zlib, if you replace your current libz.so file with another version whoose API has a bit changed, your SSH server won't work any more.
So if you don't have access to the console, open a classical 'telnet' port for a few minutes, just during the upgrade. Once you've checked that SSH is still ok, you can remove the telnet daemon.
If SSH doesn't work any more after the zlib upgrade, recompile SSH.
On Linux : add this at the beginning of your /etc/rc file and in your shell init scripts :
.
:
/etc/malloc.conf
export MALLOC_CHECK_=2
(don't forget the extra underscore at the end)
On BSD systems
ln -s ZH
It will protect both your statically and dynamically linked apps. It adds a little performance penalty, but it's really not noticeable.
What's the difference between blue, red and green lasers?
A major showstopper may be Windows.
.
.
Let's see. To be widely deployed on WAN networks, IPv6 should first be widely deployed on local LANs.
It works very well on Unix systems. My little personal network has a bunch of OpenBSD and Linux boxes, 100% IPv6, and everything works like a charm.
But what about Windows?
I tried it with Windows 2000. Because the OS doesn't support IPv6 natively, I had to download a patch (and it's not very easy to find, I can't remember the exact URL, the link was posted on a ML a while ago)
Before the patch applied I had a big fat warning "Disclaimer: this is very alpha software, your OS can become extremely unstable. Don't call the Microsoft technical support any more after that, we won't answer" (the words were different, but it was the meaning)
And indeed. The system went very unstable, even for IPv4 requests. IE worked. *some* command-line tools worked. But third party packages like Mirc, CuteFTP and Opera crashed with no further warning.
It looks like there's no effort in the Windows world to provide IPv6-enabled software. This is a major showstopper.
The magic of search engines is that you don't need to submit 1000 links to have them referenced. You submit 10, and Google will crawl the 1000 for you.
But yes, all our domains resolve to 10 IPs among three C classes. There's probably a way for search engines to detect too many loops between different sites that resolves to the same IP, and I hope Google will implement that.
But well... It's just like any form of SPAM. We have mail filters that check RFC conformance, keywords, RBL lists, etc. but we still get more and more mail spam, because spammers use more and more sophisticated software. It's an endless fight. This is really lousy and it degrades the whole internet.
It's not that easy. foo.domain.com and bar.domain.com can be totally different sites. For instance my dialup provider, Claranet, gives www..claranet.fr as addresses. There's no reason for Google to differently score customers sites, because they don't have their own domain name.
Also, subdomains are just a quick way to better spam Google, but to promote one single site, my company buys 100+ _real_ domains (whoose names are combinations of keywords related to the target site) .
To fight against this, search engines should detected ping-pong loops between domains, and strong similarities between web sites. Not that easy when you index millions of web pages.
I just work there as a sysadmin, I didn't know they were spamming when I got hired. They also don't support free software although they heavily use it. I was fixing a bug in Ticketsmith (a GPL'd ticket tracking system) when the CEO said 'Hey, no. Don't fix that if "they" didn't fix it. We are not there to loose time to work for "them"' .
Porn sites make a lot of money. But watching porn movies all the day probably destroys their mind.
I work for a major hosting company for adult (yes, XXX) web sites. Our sites are very well ranked on all search engines. On some search engines, this is because we gave money (sometimes to be the only one to bring answers for specific keywords) . But we're also very well ranked on Google because of mass spamming.
99% of the pages we submit to Google aren't real sites. We buy a lot of domains (with explicit keywords) . Then, out of every domain, we do tons of subdomains with other keywords. All related web sites are different. But they only have one page, automatically generated by sets of scripts. These pages have randomly chosen keywords and pictures, and every fake site have links to a dozen of other fake sites. On all sites, there's only one link to a real site. A real user will immediately catch the right link (because it's a big picture, it has a caption like "click here to access the site", etc) . But search engines are crawling.
Googles gives better ranking to web sites that have a lot of other web sites linking it. So we abuse that. All our sites have excellent scoring because fake sites are referring other fake sites. It takes 10 minutes to automatically generate hundreds of fake sites. Apache's mod_rewrite is extensively used. We have an entiere team devoted to reading mailing-lists of search engine software (like ASPSeek... Google uses a lot of ASPSeek ideas), in order to abuse search engines.
So although Google's ranking doesn't depend on money, it isn't fair. It depends on how people are cheating with it.
PS: I don't support what the company is doing, it's a shame, and I'm looking for a new job.
Nowadays, everyone is trying to sue Microsoft in order to get a few pennies. Now, any consumer can play, saying that Windows crashes and doesn't give him satifsaction. What a progress.
I still wonder why Apache 2.0 was designed to use a strange hybrid model instead of making a non-forking server, just like thttpd, webfs or zeus, whoose performance will probably still kick Apache.
And Apache still doesn't have any integrated web administration front-end like Zeus.
There are a lot of comments saying 'Apple can't, because supporting all pieces of PC hardware is a huge task' .
Right. But after all, Darwin is based upon FreeBSD. And FreeBSD *does* support a lot of PC hardware. Given the marvellous OS Apple was able to do, merging new FreeBSD drivers shouldn't be an impossible task.
IMHO, future operating systems will tend to something like the ErOS operating system . This OS is based on multiple tiny extremely reliable components, within a strong capability model to provide a high level of security.
It's definitely a good approach, although ErOS is still quite experimental yet.
With the end of start-up dreams, times are now bad for techies. One year ago, finding a job was a easy as posting a message on Dice (or equivalent sites), and waiting 24 hours. Then, you just had to choose for the best offer.
Nowadays, finding an IT job is *difficult* , especially as opensource techies. Not a lot of company are hiring. Either they already have their technical staff, or they moved to external consultancy services.
There were plenty of new jobs because there were a lot of new companies popping up everywhere. Now, it's over.
I'm looking for a job for weeks with no success...
Wow, 328 registers. Does it mean that it will be more efficient to declare all variables in a single function than using multiple functions (due to scope of variables that restricts the efficient usage of so many registers)?