I got my introduction to the Internet -- email, Usenet, FTP, you name it -- on a VAX running VMS. I dearly missed the versioning filesystem when I moved to Unix, especially when I discovered that when you type 'rm' you had better by damn mean it.
Then I discovered that Unix actively encourages exploration and experimentation, whereas VMS seems to place many obstacles in the way. I never looked back.:-)
You don't do coding, do you? We need this!
on
Deja For Sale
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· Score: 5
I highly doubt that anyone will want to pay for an archive of usenet postings. Frankly, they are of limited use - most post threads offer very little useful information.
Most of the books in the public library are crap, too, IMO, but I wouldn't once suggest that libraries are of limited use.
Almost every single coding problem I've come up against, or configuration problem, or hardware problem, or VCR-clock-setting problem, has been asked already. All I need to do is a Deja Power Search, some thoughtful keywords, and I have my answer, courtesy of someone the previous year.
Deja's archives may be of interest to an educational institution looking at the historical value of the posts, but the useful market value of the posts is zilch.
Market value? Yeah, probably not. Usenet isn't there for market value; it's there to facilitate a huge meeting of the minds. And we need to preserve that information, so that those of us trying to write code and support the rest of you aren't forever asking the same questions.
As for Deja as a product review site - what can you say?
How about "It blew goats!"? Deja should have stuck to what it did best -- archiving Usenet -- and left that "portal" crap to places that believe in such things.
I always get names of my favorite authors screwed up. I have a few novels and collections by both of those guys on my shelves and was reading some of Bear's stuff yesterday.
Thanks for pointing that out. I will now go stick my head in a hole in the ground...
A lot of the entries on the list have been well covered by good authors in the field of 'hard' science fiction (as opposed to 'soft' sci-fi like Star Schleck Technobabble). Their novels are amazingly informed and informative as to what could happen.
Okay, everybody eventually takes a shot at explaining the Tunguska meteor, from Doctor Who at the 'soft' end to Larry Niven at the 'hard physcis' end, you name it. (Ironically, it's never actually a simple meteor; it's always Something Else.) So I won't go there.
Gamma-ray bursts are interesting. Greg Bear did some similar stuff in Diaspora, which should be interesting to/. readers anyhow.
Is there a good program (preferably open-source) available to do as much scrubbing as possible of a "tainted" hard drive or portion thereof, given the physical limits of a typical hard drive writing mechanism as described in the aforementioned article?
Measure the mass of the hard drive. Expose the drive to an equal mass of antimatter. (Dunno whether this qualifies as open source or not.)
I thought it was evident that I *had* already read the fucking story. Nowhere in the fucking story is my question addressed. Lots of stuff about why they need a multi-person core, and what the core does, and how the core relates to the rest of the development team, but nothing about why a new core was needed is described in the fucking story.
Maybe I'm missing something. (I don't follow very closely the "people-related" aspects of projects that I'm not involved in.)
Why did they need a new core? Do they have a term of office which expired? Was there a popular uprising and overthrow of the oppressive bourgeoisie? (Considering that some of the former members are on the list of new members, probably not...)
The first class I took in digital design as a freshman -- you know, when you first learn things like Grey code and NAND gates and spend your time breadboarding with TTL chips -- once involved some really hairy bit patterns.
My roommates told me one morning that I had spent a couple minutes reciting strings of binary in my sleep, finishing with, "It just won't add up!"
Peter Gutmann wrote an outstanding paper on recovering data from various media, especially hard drives. Bottom line: once it's written, you can almost always get it back eventually.
Favorite fact: Freezing your RAM (like, -60 degrees C) makes the data easier to recover. Yeah, that's right, I said the RAM, not just the drives. Go read the paper.:-)
Because it was easier to write than the Slightly Libertarian All-Government-Is-Evil If You Disagree With Anything We Say You Are Obviously A Tool Of {RIAA,Microsoft,BigMoney,Satan} Party Line.
...that "Since I can't see into the future, I'm not going to guess how I might react to any of an infinite number of possibilities, especially in a public forum famous for roasting alive anybody who doesn't swear by the Linux Party Line."
Don't you think that what action he takes might, just might depend on exactly what kind of "inappropriate control" is exercised?
Seemed a fair answer to me. What were you expecting? "I shall immediately flood the DoJ with complaints even though I haven't read the edited report!"??
That program actually exists. Or rather, existed (past tense). A couple years after J.P. came out, I downloaded the source from SGI's anon-ftp site and tried to build it. It's an SGI-specific program (duh), but the SGI-specifc code relied on stuff that had changed over the years. It didn't even compile.
Hollywood picked a fairly old program when they grabbed that one.:-)
...a "2.96" version of GCC, one which GNU would obviously like to see waiting until a more publicly acceptable major release
Let me try to clear this up a bit. Taking a snapshot, heavily testing it, and releasing it with a slightly changed version string ("experimental" -> "RH 7.0") isn't a major problem by itself. Yeah, it's binary incompatible, but GCC 3.0 was going to be so anyway.
What annoys many of us on the gcc-bugs mailing list is that RH did not also change the bug reporting email address, or anything else, to indicate that this is a technically unstable release. So the list gets all these messages complaining about an unstable release that should have gone to Bugzilla instead. The GCC team is not RedHat's front-line helpdesk system.
Second problem, from the article itself:
Pfiefer could not be reached for clarification on which specific distributions the announcement addressed.
*boggle* Which ones do you think they were addressing?!? There's only been one distribution so far to do this...
Hear hear for a working pancreas! Injections are annoying.
Anyhow, it's amazing where different groups draw the line at Interfering With God's Will. For example, having a tooth filled.
Also, I'm not sure what exectly you mean by "Middle East religions." If you're talking about religions that started in that area, then Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all fall under that category. If you're talking about religions currently practiced there, the same goes.
I apologize for any misspellings, my fingers are cold and I can't type right. (Damn diabetes again.:-)
Dr. Levine is also the moderator of the comp.compilers newsgroup, and the author of _Linkers and Loaders_, which is one of the few well-written books out there dealing with linkers and run-time loaders. (If you ever wanted to know all the fsck-ed up things with the Windows.EXE and.DLL format, read this book.:-)
I'm starting the process of being appointed as a Notary Public for my state[*], just because it's such a useful thing to be. Maybe we need something similar for the Internet -- volunteer witnesses who can be trusted. Possibly even professional witnesses (think the Fair Witness from Stranger In A Strange Land).
[*] That would be the state of Ohio, not the state of confusion or state of delirium, thank you.
That's why I dropped my ICANN @Large membership
on
ICANN Voting Begins
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· Score: 3
I don't know why Taco feels that you had to be a "lucky one" to get registered. I waited until the/. slowed down, and then when I did register, I made sure I wasn't clicking on an ICANN link that was on a/. page (that is, they wouldn't see a referring page of "slashdot.org" and know to ignore me.
I registered, got on the little announcement list, and then my password and The Rules showed up in the snailmail. And then I took my time reading over those Rules...
Fsck that. It's just like flatpack wrote here: customer-driven capitalism has fallen by the wayside to be
replaced for producer-driven capitalism in which we are to be treated as "customers" rather than as
citizens. No matter who is voted in in these elections, the corporations will still control ICANN, and
they're not out to help anyone but themselves.
Face it, guys. As soon as they were given authority, it was all over. They've won; the Internet has lost.
Very little of how/.'s moderation and meta-moderation works is documented. How come my karma never goes above 64 even though I get moderated up? Why is it that occasionally it just drops a few points even though I haven't been moderated down? (Does karma age?)
Why can't we talk about moderation somewhere on Slashdot? If it gets brought up in a normal discussion, it's -1, Offtopic. I've never tried to submit a Slashdot article that concerns Slashdot itself, but the people who have say those are rejected.
How about a new category: -1, Herdthink, for those posters who just spew the party line about "and this is why Linux is so much better." At the very least they shouldn't be getting Insightful points for copy'n'pasting stuff from the FSF or OSI's webpage verbatim.
If we had a better FAQ, it would at least contribute to more "Insightful, Interesting, and Informative" discussion about moderation.
Everything I've heard about the Windows 2000 filesharing protocol says that it's proprietary and breaks Samba. So much for networking.
I personally use NT as a very nice X-terminal for my *nix boxes. The window manager actually works with my mouse's funky features, and it frees me up from having to configure the fsck out of the Linux window managers. (I'll probably end up switching anyhow. One more flavor of *nix can't hurt.)
And legality is all that's being discussed. Calm down; I'm no security risk.
My point in writing is not to show off nor to make the OSI nervous. It's to point out the fallacy that most of/. has; that somehow as soon as you get a clearance, you're somehow one of Them, opposed to all matters of privacy.
I'll return to the Hanger now; it's my week to feed the space aliens.
Slashdot Mirror
I got my introduction to the Internet -- email, Usenet, FTP, you name it -- on a VAX running VMS. I dearly missed the versioning filesystem when I moved to Unix, especially when I discovered that when you type 'rm' you had better by damn mean it.
Then I discovered that Unix actively encourages exploration and experimentation, whereas VMS seems to place many obstacles in the way. I never looked back. :-)
Most of the books in the public library are crap, too, IMO, but I wouldn't once suggest that libraries are of limited use.
Almost every single coding problem I've come up against, or configuration problem, or hardware problem, or VCR-clock-setting problem, has been asked already. All I need to do is a Deja Power Search, some thoughtful keywords, and I have my answer, courtesy of someone the previous year.
Market value? Yeah, probably not. Usenet isn't there for market value; it's there to facilitate a huge meeting of the minds. And we need to preserve that information, so that those of us trying to write code and support the rest of you aren't forever asking the same questions.
How about "It blew goats!"? Deja should have stuck to what it did best -- archiving Usenet -- and left that "portal" crap to places that believe in such things.
s/Bear/Egan/
I always get names of my favorite authors screwed up. I have a few novels and collections by both of those guys on my shelves and was reading some of Bear's stuff yesterday.
Thanks for pointing that out. I will now go stick my head in a hole in the ground...
A lot of the entries on the list have been well covered by good authors in the field of 'hard' science fiction (as opposed to 'soft' sci-fi like Star Schleck Technobabble). Their novels are amazingly informed and informative as to what could happen.
Okay, everybody eventually takes a shot at explaining the Tunguska meteor, from Doctor Who at the 'soft' end to Larry Niven at the 'hard physcis' end, you name it. (Ironically, it's never actually a simple meteor; it's always Something Else.) So I won't go there.
Gamma-ray bursts are interesting. Greg Bear did some similar stuff in Diaspora, which should be interesting to /. readers anyhow.
Order the pizza. Ask for a second box. When it arrives, take half the pizza and put it in the second box. Mail both.
Okay, it's not as easy as sending a voucher, but it's equally fair to both code parties...
The first paragraph needs to be in the article itself. :-) It answers my questions and fills in all the blanks. Thanks, nxsy, for the note!
Is there a good program (preferably open-source) available to do as much scrubbing as possible of a "tainted" hard drive or portion thereof, given the physical limits of a typical hard drive writing mechanism as described in the aforementioned article?
Measure the mass of the hard drive. Expose the drive to an equal mass of antimatter. (Dunno whether this qualifies as open source or not.)
I thought it was evident that I *had* already read the fucking story. Nowhere in the fucking story is my question addressed. Lots of stuff about why they need a multi-person core, and what the core does, and how the core relates to the rest of the development team, but nothing about why a new core was needed is described in the fucking story.
Maybe I'm missing something. (I don't follow very closely the "people-related" aspects of projects that I'm not involved in.)
Why did they need a new core? Do they have a term of office which expired? Was there a popular uprising and overthrow of the oppressive bourgeoisie? (Considering that some of the former members are on the list of new members, probably not...)
Some of us non-FreeBSD users are curious.
You just needed to tell the compiler to Do What I Mean...
The first class I took in digital design as a freshman -- you know, when you first learn things like Grey code and NAND gates and spend your time breadboarding with TTL chips -- once involved some really hairy bit patterns.
My roommates told me one morning that I had spent a couple minutes reciting strings of binary in my sleep, finishing with, "It just won't add up!"
I have no recollection whatsoever. :-)
Peter Gutmann wrote an outstanding paper on recovering data from various media, especially hard drives. Bottom line: once it's written, you can almost always get it back eventually.
His paper is http://www.fish.com/security/secure _de l.html and is a good read.
Favorite fact: Freezing your RAM (like, -60 degrees C) makes the data easier to recover. Yeah, that's right, I said the RAM, not just the drives. Go read the paper. :-)
Because it was easier to write than the Slightly Libertarian All-Government-Is-Evil If You Disagree With Anything We Say You Are Obviously A Tool Of {RIAA,Microsoft,BigMoney,Satan} Party Line.
...that "Since I can't see into the future, I'm not going to guess how I might react to any of an infinite number of possibilities, especially in a public forum famous for roasting alive anybody who doesn't swear by the Linux Party Line."
Don't you think that what action he takes might, just might depend on exactly what kind of "inappropriate control" is exercised?
Seemed a fair answer to me. What were you expecting? "I shall immediately flood the DoJ with complaints even though I haven't read the edited report!"??
Usually those kinds of servers have more processing power than they have transmission capability.
That program actually exists. Or rather, existed (past tense). A couple years after J.P. came out, I downloaded the source from SGI's anon-ftp site and tried to build it. It's an SGI-specific program (duh), but the SGI-specifc code relied on stuff that had changed over the years. It didn't even compile.
Hollywood picked a fairly old program when they grabbed that one. :-)
First, in your statement:
Let me try to clear this up a bit. Taking a snapshot, heavily testing it, and releasing it with a slightly changed version string ("experimental" -> "RH 7.0") isn't a major problem by itself. Yeah, it's binary incompatible, but GCC 3.0 was going to be so anyway.What annoys many of us on the gcc-bugs mailing list is that RH did not also change the bug reporting email address, or anything else, to indicate that this is a technically unstable release. So the list gets all these messages complaining about an unstable release that should have gone to Bugzilla instead. The GCC team is not RedHat's front-line helpdesk system.
Second problem, from the article itself:
*boggle* Which ones do you think they were addressing?!? There's only been one distribution so far to do this...Hear hear for a working pancreas! Injections are annoying.
Anyhow, it's amazing where different groups draw the line at Interfering With God's Will. For example, having a tooth filled.
Also, I'm not sure what exectly you mean by "Middle East religions." If you're talking about religions that started in that area, then Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all fall under that category. If you're talking about religions currently practiced there, the same goes.
I apologize for any misspellings, my fingers are cold and I can't type right. (Damn diabetes again. :-)
Dr. Levine is also the moderator of the comp.compilers newsgroup, and the author of _Linkers and Loaders_, which is one of the few well-written books out there dealing with linkers and run-time loaders. (If you ever wanted to know all the fsck-ed up things with the Windows .EXE and .DLL format, read this book. :-)
Really? Using what version of Samba? I wonder what changed... This is good to hear!
I'm starting the process of being appointed as a Notary Public for my state[*], just because it's such a useful thing to be. Maybe we need something similar for the Internet -- volunteer witnesses who can be trusted. Possibly even professional witnesses (think the Fair Witness from Stranger In A Strange Land).
[*] That would be the state of Ohio, not the state of confusion or state of delirium, thank you.
I don't know why Taco feels that you had to be a "lucky one" to get registered. I waited until the /. slowed down, and then when I did register, I made sure I wasn't clicking on an ICANN link that was on a /. page (that is, they wouldn't see a referring page of "slashdot.org" and know to ignore me.
I registered, got on the little announcement list, and then my password and The Rules showed up in the snailmail. And then I took my time reading over those Rules...
Fsck that. It's just like flatpack wrote here: customer-driven capitalism has fallen by the wayside to be replaced for producer-driven capitalism in which we are to be treated as "customers" rather than as citizens. No matter who is voted in in these elections, the corporations will still control ICANN, and they're not out to help anyone but themselves.
Face it, guys. As soon as they were given authority, it was all over. They've won; the Internet has lost.
Very little of how /.'s moderation and meta-moderation works is documented. How come my karma never goes above 64 even though I get moderated up? Why is it that occasionally it just drops a few points even though I haven't been moderated down? (Does karma age?)
Why can't we talk about moderation somewhere on Slashdot? If it gets brought up in a normal discussion, it's -1, Offtopic. I've never tried to submit a Slashdot article that concerns Slashdot itself, but the people who have say those are rejected.
How about a new category: -1, Herdthink, for those posters who just spew the party line about "and this is why Linux is so much better." At the very least they shouldn't be getting Insightful points for copy'n'pasting stuff from the FSF or OSI's webpage verbatim.
If we had a better FAQ, it would at least contribute to more "Insightful, Interesting, and Informative" discussion about moderation.
Enh, just my two timeslices.
Everything I've heard about the Windows 2000 filesharing protocol says that it's proprietary and breaks Samba. So much for networking.
I personally use NT as a very nice X-terminal for my *nix boxes. The window manager actually works with my mouse's funky features, and it frees me up from having to configure the fsck out of the Linux window managers. (I'll probably end up switching anyhow. One more flavor of *nix can't hurt.)
And legality is all that's being discussed. Calm down; I'm no security risk.
My point in writing is not to show off nor to make the OSI nervous. It's to point out the fallacy that most of /. has; that somehow as soon as you get a clearance, you're somehow one of Them, opposed to all matters of privacy.
I'll return to the Hanger now; it's my week to feed the space aliens.