Instead of using SPAM filters (accept everything by default, deny some mails according to filters), a new and very efficient approach is to do like firewalls :
Deny everything by default
Only accept mails from known sources.
Software like TMDA implements this. When a mail comes from an known source, an automatic confirmation mail is sent by the script. If the sender acknowledges, his address will be added to the 'whitelist'. No more confirmation will be needed.
This is extremely efficient, and it basically reduces the SPAM actually delivered to your mailbox to zero.
Just don't forget to manually add mailing-lists you're subscribed to, to the 'whitelist'.
would be someone that simply want the project (or the network, or the database, according to what's your supposed to do) to *work* regardless of the *ways* it works.
Lousy PHBs often want you to design something the way they want. Because they read an article about C# and.Net in a magazine, they want you do use it even if three lines of shell would achieve a similar (and bug-free) result. They have pre-established ideas like "Linux is unreliable", "MySQL is better", "Apache is supported, use nothing else", "Always design your project with UML first", etc. And they don't even want you to prove them that something else can also work.
Geeks are efficient with the tools they know. Not with what you force them to use. If an employee wants to complete a project using QNX + WN + Python, give him the opportunity to do so. Don't judge him according to the tools he's using. Just wait for the result. It works? It has been finished on time? It looks bug-free? Ok. So why yell because the guy used his favorite tools instead of arbitrary recommended ones?
A geek will be bored, and inefficient if you force him to use software he doesn't like. The key here is : motivation.
A language can be both 'safe' and 'unsafe'. Take a look at Perl. You can do a lot of insecure things with it. But as soon as you launch with the -T switch, your script will run in a special mode. Values coming from an insecure source will be refused by potentially dangerous functions, unless you explicitely mangle them before the call. This is extremely powerful and prevents a lot of classical security flaws.
I don't know much about C#. But a taint mode for it would make the language pretty safe, despite the presence of pointers.
I'm surprised to see that a new feature of that release is... syncookies. Doesn't Linux (and probably a lot of other OS) have that for years? Syn floods is a very old attack, and I can't understand why FreeBSD only implements syncookies now.
There is a 'Receive info form', for Windows users, and another form for Linux and FreeBSD users. The funny part is that the HTML title of that form is 'Receive info about the system (Linux/NetBSD Form)' . FreeBSD? NetBSD? I'm confused.
A native Windows is still mandatory for musicians
on
Wired Talks Wine
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The only reason I need Windows for (until I get a Mac) is music. There are excellent Windows/Mac apps with poor OSS alternatives yet.
So I tried various versions of Wine and VMWare.
Success was poor on Wine except with sample editors.
It was way better with VMWare except for one thing : latency. Although software was properly working, the sound card output had far too much latency. I guess the problem would be the same with any Windows emulator. The emulation part involves latency, especially when it comes to delivering signal to hardware.
So music makers will have to stick with a native Windows partition:(
A really great thing with Linux (and NetBSD, and OpenBSD) is *portability* . These OS can run the same way on a variety of hardware.
Something designed on Linux x86 can run on Linux PPC with almost no change.
The master key to make it possible is GCC. Because GCC can compile (and even cross-compile) code for a lot of architectures.
Projects using Borlanc C++ specific features will work on Intel Linux. Nowhere else. This is pity. An opensource Operating System should be open to everyone.
A small fan turning very fast are noisy. Most PCs have a couple of them.
A small fan turning slowly is quiet but inefficient.
A large fan turning slowly is quiet and efficient.
So, what about having boxes with two slow, but very large fans (one on a side to inject air, another one on the other side to reject it)? It would probably be cheap and quiet.
IIS and Apache aren't the only one in the market. There are a lot of other very interesting web servers, especially Zeus.
Zeus is a non-forking server (at least for static pages). It's extremely fast, it performs even better than thttpd, while being more secure and with plenty of features. A single server running Zeus can easily replace 3 servers running Apache with the same content.
Zeus has an excellent web-based administration interface. The only fact that you can group sites can make you save a lot of time (group them by customers, then to disable all sites of a customer, one click is enough. No need to parse an ugly httpd.conf file) .
Zeus is designed for clustering (to add a machine to a cluster, one click is enough) .
Zeus works on a lot of operating systems (still waiting for the OpenBSD 3.0 version, though) .
Zeus supports frontpage, php, perl, etc. There's also a perl script to convert an existing Apache configuration to Zeus.
Ah yeah, Zeus isn't free software, though. Neither is IIS.
LSB is an excellent initiative. But the bad thing is the "L" ("Linux") in it.
This standard is designed for Linux, and only Linux.
Standardization of the filesystem namespace is needed on *ALL* Unices. And an unique document that would apply to *ALL* Unices would be a big win, both for developpers and for end-users.
DJB's packaging system isn't that bad. The only trouble is that only DJB promotes it and very few software are packaged that way because it totally changes the traditionnal namespace layout.
The streaming test made by the BBC is definitely a good thing. It brings credibility to open source projects. Ogg Vorbis is really an amazing format, but nobody uses it because of the lack of advertisement.
Succesful experiences like the BBC one can change this.
This post is probably redundant, but the more post like this, the more hope we get in seeing something sooner or later.
Ogg Vorbis rocks. But the reason MP3 is widely used is that nowadays, *hardware* support it : cd players, portable players, handhelds, and even sound mixers.
Making these work with Ogg Vorbis is probably very simple, moreover Ogg Vorbis source code is free. So why don't hardware manufacturers provide support for Ogg Vorbis? Should we start a petition?
Most projects are developped on spare time, not during the daily work time. Even if your free software projects are used by the company you are working for, pointy hair bosses won't let you improve it as a part of your regular job. They just enjoy their network works with cheap software. They enjoy to have the app developper in their employees because they know who will be the responsible if the software goes wrong with that app.
If you want to help developpers, write to the company they are working for and tell that you enjoy the software. PHBs will be happy ("ah? some potential customer? He heard about us in a tiny piece of software that one of our employees is working on, on his spare time?) and maybe they will allow the developper to spend some time on the project during the regular job time...
The developper will be paid for his work, the PHB will be happy and users will get new versions of the product...
Really, as a developper, being granted to work on free software on my daily job time would be a dream. Right now, coding is only possible after 11pm and before 8am... The boss wants me to add specific stuff to a free software project, even demanding deadlines, but he does want this to be done only at home, on spare time ("developping free software is a game for teenagers, let them play but we don't pay them for that. We pay them to make profit from free software, not to help it.") . I'm sure this situation is very, very, veyr common.
I just installed Turboprint, and it's definitively a nice product.
My HPDJ970C is supposed to work with cups and lpd, but I only had it work with text documents so far. Printing photographs worked, but the result was very ugly (not something that you can call a photograph) .
Turboprint seems to print photographs as well as windows, and that's something I've been waiting for a long time.
Plus it has a "printer toolbox" to align and clean printing heads. No more need for a Windows partition any more.
Just one thing : what's the best piece of Linux software to use in order to properly scale photographs before printing them?
Slashdot Mirror
No, recipients you are writing to can be automatically added to your whitelist.
Software like TMDA implements this. When a mail comes from an known source, an automatic confirmation mail is sent by the script. If the sender acknowledges, his address will be added to the 'whitelist'. No more confirmation will be needed.
This is extremely efficient, and it basically reduces the SPAM actually delivered to your mailbox to zero.
Just don't forget to manually add mailing-lists you're subscribed to, to the 'whitelist'.
would be someone that simply want the project (or the network, or the database, according to what's your supposed to do) to *work* regardless of the *ways* it works.
.Net in a magazine, they want you do use it even if three lines of shell would achieve a similar (and bug-free) result. They have pre-established ideas like "Linux is unreliable", "MySQL is better", "Apache is supported, use nothing else", "Always design your project with UML first", etc. And they don't even want you to prove them that something else can also work.
Lousy PHBs often want you to design something the way they want. Because they read an article about C# and
Geeks are efficient with the tools they know. Not with what you force them to use. If an employee wants to complete a project using QNX + WN + Python, give him the opportunity to do so. Don't judge him according to the tools he's using. Just wait for the result. It works? It has been finished on time? It looks bug-free? Ok. So why yell because the guy used his favorite tools instead of arbitrary recommended ones?
A geek will be bored, and inefficient if you force him to use software he doesn't like. The key here is : motivation.
This is roughly equivalent to a briding firewall with no assigned IP address. No one can ever connect remotely.
A bridging firewall as the advantage of still being administrable from the local console.
A language can be both 'safe' and 'unsafe'. Take a look at Perl. You can do a lot of insecure things with it. But as soon as you launch with the -T switch, your script will run in a special mode. Values coming from an insecure source will be refused by potentially dangerous functions, unless you explicitely mangle them before the call. This is extremely powerful and prevents a lot of classical security flaws.
I don't know much about C#. But a taint mode for it would make the language pretty safe, despite the presence of pointers.
So that pages that can properly be read by any browser comes first.
Then, maybe webmasters will stop doing IE-only pages.
And thanks a lot for your amazing work. I hope you'll be back in some years, when people will have understood that Linux != free beer.
I'm surprised to see that a new feature of that release is... syncookies. Doesn't Linux (and probably a lot of other OS) have that for years? Syn floods is a very old attack, and I can't understand why FreeBSD only implements syncookies now.
I used Desqview (not /X) for its multitasking capabilities to run a BBS. Worked like a charm. It was a truly multitasking OS way before Windows 95.
There is a 'Receive info form', for Windows users, and another form for Linux and FreeBSD users. The funny part is that the HTML title of that form is 'Receive info about the system (Linux/NetBSD Form)' . FreeBSD? NetBSD? I'm confused.
The only reason I need Windows for (until I get a Mac) is music. There are excellent Windows/Mac apps with poor OSS alternatives yet. :(
So I tried various versions of Wine and VMWare.
Success was poor on Wine except with sample editors.
It was way better with VMWare except for one thing : latency. Although software was properly working, the sound card output had far too much latency. I guess the problem would be the same with any Windows emulator. The emulation part involves latency, especially when it comes to delivering signal to hardware.
So music makers will have to stick with a native Windows partition
A really great thing with Linux (and NetBSD, and OpenBSD) is *portability* . These OS can run the same way on a variety of hardware.
Something designed on Linux x86 can run on Linux PPC with almost no change.
The master key to make it possible is GCC. Because GCC can compile (and even cross-compile) code for a lot of architectures.
Projects using Borlanc C++ specific features will work on Intel Linux. Nowhere else. This is pity. An opensource Operating System should be open to everyone.
I just submitted a pr for an update of pure-ftpd to 1.0.8, in hope that would be merged before 4.5 was released. :(
Too late
So, what about having boxes with two slow, but very large fans (one on a side to inject air, another one on the other side to reject it)? It would probably be cheap and quiet.
Hardware is still getting faster and faster for the same price.
:)
This is neat for developpers. Soon, source code will be recompiled in real time at every key stroke.
No more need for interpreters
Actually, Word and Excel were running pretty well on Windows 3.x and a 386.
:)
I was really amazed by Excel. For everything else, my Atari ST was way better
IIS and Apache aren't the only one in the market. There are a lot of other very interesting web servers, especially Zeus.
Zeus is a non-forking server (at least for static pages). It's extremely fast, it performs even better than thttpd, while being more secure and with plenty of features. A single server running Zeus can easily replace 3 servers running Apache with the same content.
Zeus has an excellent web-based administration interface. The only fact that you can group sites can make you save a lot of time (group them by customers, then to disable all sites of a customer, one click is enough. No need to parse an ugly httpd.conf file) .
Zeus is designed for clustering (to add a machine to a cluster, one click is enough) .
Zeus works on a lot of operating systems (still waiting for the OpenBSD 3.0 version, though) .
Zeus supports frontpage, php, perl, etc. There's also a perl script to convert an existing Apache configuration to Zeus.
Ah yeah, Zeus isn't free software, though. Neither is IIS.
LSB is an excellent initiative. But the bad thing is the "L" ("Linux") in it.
This standard is designed for Linux, and only Linux.
Standardization of the filesystem namespace is needed on *ALL* Unices. And an unique document that would apply to *ALL* Unices would be a big win, both for developpers and for end-users.
DJB's packaging system isn't that bad. The only trouble is that only DJB promotes it and very few software are packaged that way because it totally changes the traditionnal namespace layout.
The streaming test made by the BBC is definitely a good thing. It brings credibility to open source projects. Ogg Vorbis is really an amazing format, but nobody uses it because of the lack of advertisement.
Succesful experiences like the BBC one can change this.
This post is probably redundant, but the more post like this, the more hope we get in seeing something sooner or later.
Ogg Vorbis rocks. But the reason MP3 is widely used is that nowadays, *hardware* support it : cd players, portable players, handhelds, and even sound mixers.
Making these work with Ogg Vorbis is probably very simple, moreover Ogg Vorbis source code is free. So why don't hardware manufacturers provide support for Ogg Vorbis? Should we start a petition?
A very neat thing would be to support the Parrot interpreter in web browsers.
It would be a nice replacement for Java. I'd just love to write client-side web applications in Perl.
Can anyone explain the real (concrete) benefits that such a technology will provide?
This is nice, but it protects a single point of failure. If you want to take these servers down, just attack the provider they depend on...
Most projects are developped on spare time, not during the daily work time. Even if your free software projects are used by the company you are working for, pointy hair bosses won't let you improve it as a part of your regular job. They just enjoy their network works with cheap software. They enjoy to have the app developper in their employees because they know who will be the responsible if the software goes wrong with that app.
... The boss wants me to add specific stuff to a free software project, even demanding deadlines, but he does want this to be done only at home, on spare time ("developping free software is a game for teenagers, let them play but we don't pay them for that. We pay them to make profit from free software, not to help it.") . I'm sure this situation is very, very, veyr common.
If you want to help developpers, write to the company they are working for and tell that you enjoy the software. PHBs will be happy ("ah? some potential customer? He heard about us in a tiny piece of software that one of our employees is working on, on his spare time?) and maybe they will allow the developper to spend some time on the project during the regular job time...
The developper will be paid for his work, the PHB will be happy and users will get new versions of the product...
Really, as a developper, being granted to work on free software on my daily job time would be a dream. Right now, coding is only possible after 11pm and before 8am
I just installed Turboprint, and it's definitively a nice product.
My HPDJ970C is supposed to work with cups and lpd, but I only had it work with text documents so far. Printing photographs worked, but the result was very ugly (not something that you can call a photograph) .
Turboprint seems to print photographs as well as windows, and that's something I've been waiting for a long time.
Plus it has a "printer toolbox" to align and clean printing heads. No more need for a Windows partition any more.
Just one thing : what's the best piece of Linux software to use in order to properly scale photographs before printing them?