Yeah, this is mildly offtopic. I'll probably check the "no score +1 bonus" thingy. Anyhow...
Google's new usenet search engine lacks one key feature, much in the same way as you described their web search engine. You cannot view the Message-ID of an article once you've found it.
Oh, their Advanced Search page allows searching on a Message-ID. That would be useful if we knew the Message-ID ahead of time. Unfortunately, the only way we know that is to already have the article from a pre-Google search, or an original copy. (Deja, for example, had its "view original Usenet text" which would display the entire article, full headers and all, as plaintext. Wonderful. Why oh why did Google drop that?)
So, for Usenet articles that get posted in the present day, you can't retrieve the Message-ID any other way. So you can't know what it is to search for it. So if you do manage to hunt it down, you have to refer others to it by either:
Posting the 19-line URL that repeats the search and jumps to the correct article, or
List the exact search criteria and add, "then jump to result number 24". Not effing likely.
So, all you can do is search, and it's next to impossible to repeat a search. Can't cite articles by providing a direct link. Can't look up the ONE SIGNLE UNIQUE THING guaranteed to be present in every article. It's like a bookstore or a library refusing to show you the ISBN numbers. Fucking ridiculous.
Sorry, just needed to get that out of my system.
Re:Security fixes
on
Linux 2.4.13
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· Score: 3, Funny
Since I am not in the US, I will take the liberty of posting them here:
So if it's comprimised, the blame should be placed on UUnet even though the traffic will look like it's coming from our company.
That's why we have lawyers. UUnet would be responsible for paying the 1.7e49 dollars, once you proved this in court.
This will be treated as flamebait on/. but there are good uses for the justice system.
They're getting it earlier... by about nine days.
on
LOTR Campout Begins
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· Score: 2
Well, perhaps not the Danes, but the Brits. (And a flight to London is cheap. *grin*)
It opens on the 10th, I believe, in England, and on the 19th on this side of the pond. My girlfriend will happen to be in the Netherlands at the time, and will be flying to London to catch the earlier showing.
I am tremendously envious. I am a major fan of Prof. Tolkien's works.
So, do we get a 2.2.20 from this?
on
Linux Kernel Bugs
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Or do I need to deploy these patches myself? What's the policy for ass-nasty bugs in superstable kernels which have already reached their official end-of-development?
Huh. Most of my procmail-using friends started their antispam recipes by downloading one of the fifty or so publicly available ones, recommended for such a purpose. Then they tweaked as necessary -- I think some of them never needed to tweak. The resource collection you speak of already exists.
(I had to start from scratch, because I started using procmail way early.)
...except I can already hear nothing (because your message is lost in the thousands of spam emails in my mailbox) and say nothing (because the line is clogged with traffic).
When we're trying to hold a useful meeting, and everybody's yelling and screaming to try and make themselves heard, the guy at the front pounding the gavel isn't trying to deprive me of the First. He's trying to insure that I still have the right to speak and not be drowned out. He's asking for silence to restore order, so that we can resume speaking.
The mailing lists hosted by the FSF don't use any spam filters. At all. Now, go look at
this month's archives of the binutils bug-reporting list and wonder how they manage to get any work done. (I have to hope the individual developers use filters.)
...is one from Jerry Pournelle (who IIRC is/was the president of the citizen's space advisory council -- for a while they actually had people in Washington listening to them):
I always knew I would live to see the first man on the moon. I never dreamed I would see the last.
The bill that Congress passed after 8.4 milliseconds of debate -- I forget its name, the one that basically gave the blank check to Dubya -- apparently is no different with respect to the Constitution from a declaration of war.
At least, that's what the talking heads have been saying.
Somewhere there's a nifty little quote pointing out that "*BSD's are for people who love Unix. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft."
It's kinda like the ol' maxim about money: if you wanna be rich, hey, that's great, no problem. It's when you wanna be richer than everybody else that problems start happening.
Linus knows the difference. It's all about making the kernel better. Not better than some perceived enemy, just better. If we take care of better, then better than will take care of itself.
Your title says *nix, but you seem to be asking specifically about the libre OSes.
The Air Force Research Labs makes heavy use of Solaris, including Trusted Solaris, for internal routing, firewalling, nameservers, etc. (For external talk-to-the-world connections, more task-specific stuff is used instead; I have no idea what it's called and wouldn't tell it here anyhow.)
Most of the Unix sysadmins have at least one Linux box on the desktop.
Engineers who have to use funky or EOL'd hardware often ask about Linux, both because of the source code availability, and because funky hardware eats up about 97% of their budget.
Does that help, or were you thinking along other lines?
(I can argue just about any side of anything. Here I'll argue the opposite side, just because you seem to be unaware of its arguments.)
As technology advances, we increase our ability to kill more people, at a faster rate.
No, not "more," just "faster." In every major combat in which America has been involved, fewer people have been killed each time. Desert Storm and Kosovo weren't nearly as bloody as our civil war's Chippamauga (however the heck it's spelled).
Pick one of those wars, any one. How many people, combatants and civilians alike, died as a result of infected wounds? Notice how the numbers drop off as you move towards the present?
That's the whole point. We make the war shorter. We end it sooner, with fewer deaths and no diseases lingering amongst the innocent bystanders.
(That's why I have a love/hate feeling about these sorts of discussions. Both sides are right.)
I can't get to the article right now, but I'd be surprised if MS isn't trying to recover its stance from insurance companies starting to charge a higher premium and rate for "hacker coverage" if you run IIS.
...is that, for the Unix vulnerabilities, most of them have long since been replaced by better, more secure alternatives. Where I work, nobody has used the word "telnet" or "rexec" for years. Nobody here runs sendmail, or sadmind, or SNMP stuff. It's basically a list of "don't ever use this ancient crap" tools.
But for the Windows vulnerabilities, they're all related to current, recent, flagship, "this is what you should be using" products. No alternatives within the Windows world.
i'm pretty sure that this statement is untrue, [...] unfortunately, the mailman documentation leaves something to be desired
Okay. I'm willing to be corrected.
why bother explaining majordomo/whatever commands to a newbie when you can just point him/her to a web page?
Primarily, they do; for GCC at least. The page describing the mailing lists has a little sub/unsub form. Type in the address, select a list from a drop-down, etc, one click (whoa! amazon patent infringement! *grin*) and a server-size form assembles the empty email command.
For non-newbies, however, it's also wonderful. When I go on vacation for long stretches of time, I have a shell script which sends empty emails to the "command" addresses, suspending my subscription. And at one point, I used an at(1) job to send the renewal command emails, so that the list mail would start arriving at the same time I returned.:-) Then the airline industry allowed their schedules to become totally stochastic and nondeterministic, so I don't try to predict the return time anymore.
Heck, that's not unique to Russians. It's alive and well in the West, that's fer damnsure.
Go to the Jargon File (www.jargon.org), and look up "job security".
Why ezmlm+qmail is used for gcc.gnu.org lists
on
Managing Mailing Lists
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· Score: 3, Informative
Some have wondered why GCC -- arguably the GNU project's flagship, after the Emacs operating system^W^Weditor -- doesn't use Mailman as a list manager.
Because Mailman has an annoying tendency to be web-based. You have to do the little password thing to do anything interesting, like subscribe.
ezmlm, on the other hand, is near totally administered via email commands. Which is damn handy for automating tasks. [Un]Subscribing, retrieving archives, even banning individual users, is all done by sending an email message to the software. Actually, the commands are all part of the address itself, you don't have to pay special attention to the formatting and contents of the subject line and message body.
And qmail can handle a metric buttload of message in parallel, which is quite handy.
A friend of mine was a grad student there for a time, working with this prof. He said that the amount of power you could pump through a cubic meter of these puppies was serious impressive.
Agreed, to an extent. Whenever I see coders beginning to argue about "secure languages" and programming languages that "don't allow" security holes, I have to laugh and recall what Bjarne Stroustrup said about C++'s (and C's) approach to such things.
I assume that a sufficiently skilled programmer can do anything not explicitly prohibited by hardware.
(I'm quoting from memory.) The "protections" of the C family of languages are meant to prevent accidents, not fraud. Y'all might check out something like
libsafe, originally from Bell Labs, and released under the LGPL.
Don't leave it up to the imagination of the/. editors, or we'll get another SPAM icon, going against the wishes of trademark holders.
You might consider going to the Tolkien estate and asking them for icon suggestions. Betcha they've already come up with some good ones... the small one with his initials all merged together is really really nice, but of course that's the official estate logo.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, this is mildly offtopic. I'll probably check the "no score +1 bonus" thingy. Anyhow...
Google's new usenet search engine lacks one key feature, much in the same way as you described their web search engine. You cannot view the Message-ID of an article once you've found it.
Oh, their Advanced Search page allows searching on a Message-ID. That would be useful if we knew the Message-ID ahead of time. Unfortunately, the only way we know that is to already have the article from a pre-Google search, or an original copy. (Deja, for example, had its "view original Usenet text" which would display the entire article, full headers and all, as plaintext. Wonderful. Why oh why did Google drop that?)
So, for Usenet articles that get posted in the present day, you can't retrieve the Message-ID any other way. So you can't know what it is to search for it. So if you do manage to hunt it down, you have to refer others to it by either:
So, all you can do is search, and it's next to impossible to repeat a search. Can't cite articles by providing a direct link. Can't look up the ONE SIGNLE UNIQUE THING guaranteed to be present in every article. It's like a bookstore or a library refusing to show you the ISBN numbers. Fucking ridiculous.
Sorry, just needed to get that out of my system.
(Score +1; Ballsy)
:-)
That's why we have lawyers. UUnet would be responsible for paying the 1.7e49 dollars, once you proved this in court.
This will be treated as flamebait on /. but there are good uses for the justice system.
Well, perhaps not the Danes, but the Brits. (And a flight to London is cheap. *grin*)
It opens on the 10th, I believe, in England, and on the 19th on this side of the pond. My girlfriend will happen to be in the Netherlands at the time, and will be flying to London to catch the earlier showing.
I am tremendously envious. I am a major fan of Prof. Tolkien's works.
Or do I need to deploy these patches myself? What's the policy for ass-nasty bugs in superstable kernels which have already reached their official end-of-development?
Huh. Most of my procmail-using friends started their antispam recipes by downloading one of the fifty or so publicly available ones, recommended for such a purpose. Then they tweaked as necessary -- I think some of them never needed to tweak. The resource collection you speak of already exists.
(I had to start from scratch, because I started using procmail way early.)
...except I can already hear nothing (because your message is lost in the thousands of spam emails in my mailbox) and say nothing (because the line is clogged with traffic).
When we're trying to hold a useful meeting, and everybody's yelling and screaming to try and make themselves heard, the guy at the front pounding the gavel isn't trying to deprive me of the First. He's trying to insure that I still have the right to speak and not be drowned out. He's asking for silence to restore order, so that we can resume speaking.
The mailing lists hosted by the FSF don't use any spam filters. At all. Now, go look at this month's archives of the binutils bug-reporting list and wonder how they manage to get any work done. (I have to hope the individual developers use filters.)
...is one from Jerry Pournelle (who IIRC is/was the president of the citizen's space advisory council -- for a while they actually had people in Washington listening to them):
I'm right in the middle of writing one. Hopefully I'll get free time to go back and work some more on it, after GCC 3.0.2 gets released (in a week).
Why? Because I can, and it's fun.
The bill that Congress passed after 8.4 milliseconds of debate -- I forget its name, the one that basically gave the blank check to Dubya -- apparently is no different with respect to the Constitution from a declaration of war.
At least, that's what the talking heads have been saying.
Somewhere there's a nifty little quote pointing out that "*BSD's are for people who love Unix. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft."
It's kinda like the ol' maxim about money: if you wanna be rich, hey, that's great, no problem. It's when you wanna be richer than everybody else that problems start happening.
Linus knows the difference. It's all about making the kernel better. Not better than some perceived enemy, just better. If we take care of better, then better than will take care of itself.
Sheesh. I keep trying to have a conversation and exchange information, and you seem determined to do nothing but have the last word with insults.
Let's try one more time, 'kay? Which source are you using for your numbers, and who compiled it?
Your title says *nix, but you seem to be asking specifically about the libre OSes.
The Air Force Research Labs makes heavy use of Solaris, including Trusted Solaris, for internal routing, firewalling, nameservers, etc. (For external talk-to-the-world connections, more task-specific stuff is used instead; I have no idea what it's called and wouldn't tell it here anyhow.)
Most of the Unix sysadmins have at least one Linux box on the desktop.
Engineers who have to use funky or EOL'd hardware often ask about Linux, both because of the source code availability, and because funky hardware eats up about 97% of their budget.
Does that help, or were you thinking along other lines?
Nope. Don't think so. Look at the numbers again.
(Oh, and no need for the attitude, either.)
(I can argue just about any side of anything. Here I'll argue the opposite side, just because you seem to be unaware of its arguments.)
No, not "more," just "faster." In every major combat in which America has been involved, fewer people have been killed each time. Desert Storm and Kosovo weren't nearly as bloody as our civil war's Chippamauga (however the heck it's spelled).
Pick one of those wars, any one. How many people, combatants and civilians alike, died as a result of infected wounds? Notice how the numbers drop off as you move towards the present?
That's the whole point. We make the war shorter. We end it sooner, with fewer deaths and no diseases lingering amongst the innocent bystanders.
(That's why I have a love/hate feeling about these sorts of discussions. Both sides are right.)
I can't get to the article right now, but I'd be surprised if MS isn't trying to recover its stance from insurance companies starting to charge a higher premium and rate for "hacker coverage" if you run IIS.
...is that, for the Unix vulnerabilities, most of them have long since been replaced by better, more secure alternatives. Where I work, nobody has used the word "telnet" or "rexec" for years. Nobody here runs sendmail, or sadmind, or SNMP stuff. It's basically a list of "don't ever use this ancient crap" tools.
But for the Windows vulnerabilities, they're all related to current, recent, flagship, "this is what you should be using" products. No alternatives within the Windows world.
Okay. I'm willing to be corrected.
Primarily, they do; for GCC at least. The page describing the mailing lists has a little sub/unsub form. Type in the address, select a list from a drop-down, etc, one click (whoa! amazon patent infringement! *grin*) and a server-size form assembles the empty email command.
For non-newbies, however, it's also wonderful. When I go on vacation for long stretches of time, I have a shell script which sends empty emails to the "command" addresses, suspending my subscription. And at one point, I used an at(1) job to send the renewal command emails, so that the list mail would start arriving at the same time I returned. :-) Then the airline industry allowed their schedules to become totally stochastic and nondeterministic, so I don't try to predict the return time anymore.
Heck, that's not unique to Russians. It's alive and well in the West, that's fer damnsure.
Go to the Jargon File (www.jargon.org), and look up "job security".
Some have wondered why GCC -- arguably the GNU project's flagship, after the Emacs operating system^W^Weditor -- doesn't use Mailman as a list manager.
Because Mailman has an annoying tendency to be web-based. You have to do the little password thing to do anything interesting, like subscribe.
ezmlm, on the other hand, is near totally administered via email commands. Which is damn handy for automating tasks. [Un]Subscribing, retrieving archives, even banning individual users, is all done by sending an email message to the software. Actually, the commands are all part of the address itself, you don't have to pay special attention to the formatting and contents of the subject line and message body.
And qmail can handle a metric buttload of message in parallel, which is quite handy.
A friend of mine was a grad student there for a time, working with this prof. He said that the amount of power you could pump through a cubic meter of these puppies was serious impressive.
The Universal Position System would sound really cool, but there's a certain kickass delivery company that already has dibs on any decent acronym.
chmod a+x
Okay, yes, it's geeky, but it wasn't my creation... :-)
Agreed, to an extent. Whenever I see coders beginning to argue about "secure languages" and programming languages that "don't allow" security holes, I have to laugh and recall what Bjarne Stroustrup said about C++'s (and C's) approach to such things.
(I'm quoting from memory.) The "protections" of the C family of languages are meant to prevent accidents, not fraud. Y'all might check out something like libsafe, originally from Bell Labs, and released under the LGPL.
Don't leave it up to the imagination of the
You might consider going to the Tolkien estate and asking them for icon suggestions. Betcha they've already come up with some good ones... the small one with his initials all merged together is really really nice, but of course that's the official estate logo.