is "very correct" more right than just "correct" ? This one always makes me laugh. I think you need a patch:
--- english.h Thu Mar 7 17:02:19 2002 +++ english_fixed.h Thu Mar 7 17:02:28 2002 @@ -1,2 +1,2 @@ - unsigned int correct; + boolean correct;
That should fix it.
Re:Please stop writing network apps in C!
on
OpenSSH Local Root Hole
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
How did it cope with 18,000 simultaneous connections? Did you use mmap(), sendfile() and friends on linux to get the best performance possible? How did the xfer rates compare?
BTW, 24,000 lines is a hell of a lot. If you want to compare like for like, have a look at vsftpd by Chris Evans. It's written entirely in c. Have a read of the source - it's quite interesting how it has been done. I would be surprised if you could find a buffer overflow.
I actually do agree with your points mostly, but I would say "Don't use c for network apps unless you have a good reason to" and also "don't use c for network apps unless you _really_ know the hazards"
In some ways SSH is a special case anyway. It has all the intensive maths stuff to do for the session key generation etc. Not a good idea to code that in (eg.) perl imo.
BTW, out of interest, what is your "favorite modern language" ??
If you hadn't been able to download those episodes, would you have gone out and bought them? In other words, was the only reason you got them because they were free of charge? If so, then your "piracy" has done no harm because the copyright owners would not have got any money from you anyway.
.. on being the one millionth poster to point out the "preferred form" clause! You have won a "Score -1 redundant" moderation. Your prize will be delivered shortly.
Slashdot to offer a subscription service. Imminent Death of the Net Predicted. Film at 11.
Non US Citizens
on
SSSCA Hearing
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I live in the UK. I don't feel I have anything I can directly do to help here, but can anyone think of what us non-us people can do? For example, what might be the best way to help reduce the chance of this sort of misguided nonsense happening over here?
God I hate problems that I am powerless to help solve.
If this happens in the US, it's very likely the UK "government" will do their best to ensure that both they, and the rest of europe follows suit very quickly. Rather like europe is doing already with software petents for example.
There's something wrong with your comparison in my mind.
In this example, they have already put up the signs (you will not "steal" our work). Now they see that the signs are not working, but instead of realising that the law is wrong, they get worse. They're (metaphorically) building satellite tracking into all the cars so you can be fined automatically when you do things they don't like.
Incidentally, this analogy might sound very worrying to some people, but it is in fact exactly what the current UK naz^wgovernment have plans to do to our cars. (initially as a road tax replacement which we're told will "reduce congestion." The draconian fascist big-brother uses for this technology will no doubt come a little later)
Interesting. I hadn't seen vp3.2 before. I notice their license is derived from the Mozilla Public License 1.1 Can anyone comment on whether that is good or bad news? eg. will the gstreamer folks be able to include vp3.2 codec support and distribute it as a plugin?
Re:What do you expect without revision control?
on
Missing Kernel Patches
·
· Score: 2, Flamebait
And was Linus "too young and inexperienced" when he totally botched the 2.2.x series?? (arount 2.2.9 IIRC)
What kind of quality assurance is that It isn't. Read the licence. It's called the GNU GPL. I'm surprised you haven't come across it before. There is no "quality assurance" If you need someone to hold your hand, or you are using Linux for production purposes, go and talk to Redhat or another distributor who will provide the quality assurance you seem to want. They test all their kernels with test suites and simulated production workloads.
Hmm. I absolutely agree with most of what you say, but it doesn't seem to contracict the part you quoted at all. In fact it complements it if anything. Are you sure you didn't misinterpret the meaning of what the article was saying.
What I understood wasn't anything to do with tech stuff in any way replacing art(ists) but more like them beginning to complement each other in inseperable ways.
Long ago, for example we had "art ppl" doing painting, music, theatre, etc. and "tech ppl" doing science, experiments, inventions, maths.
Things these days don't clearly fit as easily into one group or the other.
Examples which fit better in the "art" group, but with some overlap: Photography, Cinema, graphic design (I think there are some of the things you talked about. Artistic talent is a requirement, but tech is involved)
Examples which fit better info the "tech" group, but with some overlap: Games/Demo programming (especially involving physics etc)
Heres another example:
You download an exe from a site and run it. It shows an animation of some simple objects bouncing around the screen.
It that art, or science?
Perhaps it is an mpeg embedded in a player that was produced by a pure artist with no tech knowledge other than hand painting each frame in some simple art package.
On the other hand, maybe its the result of some physicists research work in modelling complex interactions between macroscopic bodies obeying the laws of newtonian mechanics.
The point is - the result is the same. Only, the artist is probably more likely to want to "protect his work" and the scientist is more likely to want to "publish his results"
That's where we start seeing a conflict of interests.
It must have value since you want it in the public domain
Things can have value in more than one way.
Copyright holders often use restrictive licenses primarily to profit from their work. This is called "financial value." To prevent this profit altogether, the copyright holders often argue, would remove the incentive to produce music.
Many artists see another type of value. For example, a musician could use (or "steal" as the droids might say) a few notes from another song, or sample a bassline to use in his own work which he would otherwise not be able to complete on his own. This is valuable to the second artist and can be called something like "artistic value" To charge the artist to use the work of others reduces his ability to produce more art, especially if he can't afford it. This effect tends to make well known "artists" more financially successful and lesser known ones worse off.
The best way IMO to be rid of this great intellectual property divide is to rid ourselves completely of the concept of intellectual property.
Those who fail to understand why the world would then be a better place are sometimes scared off by this idea because it sounds anti-capitalist or "communist" as some of them call it. What nonsense, I say.
Intellectual property be gone, and let the long-lost natural creative innovation of humanity flow once more.
(and to all the "but you wouldn't be saying that if you couldn't afford to put the food on the table" bunch - spare me the bother of having to parse your nonsense this time.
Everyone has a first time to install a devel kernel and they need to know how to do it before they can. Besides, completely fscking up your system is a good "lesson" to learn along the way:-)
(BTW, "new people" ??? Aren't they called "babies"? Now they really _shouldn't_ be installing kernels at all. That would be worrying and unnatural to say the least)
I seem to remember that the crystal space people have a cross platform 3d game that runs on many platforms. They wanted very much to write a PS port, but IIRC Sony would not let them have the information they needed without signing an NDA which would have prohibited them from releasing under the GNU GPL any code they wrote based on that information. As a result they didn't do it for the PS.
There are many developer unfriendly barriers preventing home grown games for the PS1 and the PS2. One of them has been correctly pointer out. I have just highlighted another. There are probably more.
Just because you haven't seen any home written games, don't assume that a ban on modchips is not one of the many reasons. Nobody said that allowing modchips would start millions of home written games coming out, but it's a good start; a neccesary but not sufficient step in the right direction.
(PS. If I have any of the details of the story wrong in the first paragraph, please feel free to correct me. It was a while ago, but in any case the point I made in the third paragraph remains the same)
Clearly a business has to pay as much as is neccesary to hold on to their developers. In some cases though, that amount just happens to be zero and the developers are very happy with that.
The child workers you talk of are NOT happy with their level of pay. Many of the developers whose code gets used by Redhat etc earn money in other ways.
It seems (correct me if i'm wrong) that you have this idea that all useful work MUST be financially compensated else it doesn't "work"
Well, in my mind that is nonsense. Financial compensation is something that is only neccesary to provide a motive to get people to do things that otherwise nobody would do. It just happens to be the case (sadly) that this currently includes almost everything.
You don't have to "compensate" me for writing code in the same way that you don't have to for playing football with my friends. I do both for fun. It just happens that one is useful to others without any extra work from me and instead of trying to keep it all to myself and extract as much money from everyone else as possible using strict licenses etc, I chose not to be greedy.
I get on very well with my boss.
I regularly grab a beer after work with him.
I also often tell him to fsck off if he gives me work I don't like.
It's a good thing and its based on honesty and mutual respect.
If you don't have that, then you have to realise that many bosses will do whatever they can to exploit you as far as possible, and that old bullshit "putting the food on the table" is one of the buggest reasons It keeps on happening. Can't you see that if people weren't such cowards as to cave in to the "but how am I gonna pay the bills" argument then bosses would be forced to do more of what made their employees happy. All you "food on the table" bods are part of the problem allowing companies to become greedy and exploitative in the first place.
If your employer knows that you fear leaving them, they are suddenly in an extremely powerful position over you.
I don't know which elitist linux users you are talking about, but if the're like the ones I've seen then they sure as hell don't use Redhat.
Most Linux users don't seem to really want Linux to succeed
Let me guess. By "succeed" I bet you mean one or more of:
1) "Become more popular"
2) "Make more money for it's owner"
3) "Get easier to use"
In my mind linux is already a tremendous success and no one company (including either or both or RH and AOL/TW) can change that.
I just happen to want to see Redhat continue to succeed.
And in case you're wondering what I mean by "succeed" I mean:
1) continue to create products based on what their users want not based on the interests of some other division of the corporation
2) continue to allow the employees the free creativity they require to achieve that (and other) goals.
Judging on past experience I have no reason to believe for a second that (1) will happen, and judging by Alan Cox's comment, he perhaps would agree with me that (2) would be more difficult after any AOL buyout.
You have actually managed to include the word "amiga" in a post to slashdot without immediately being moderated down and told to "let the amiga die peacefully" and other equally tedious replies amiga fans usually get.
If they can compress "random" data 100:1 then they can compress _anything_ 100:1
Which begs the question: have they tried compressing the compressed data again to get 10000:1? If not, why not? If fact why not make the compression function iterate to get 100^n:1 compression?
Oh, I see. That's why. It's because this technology doesn't exist and never can. It's "ZeoSync vs Physics." I know where my money is.
Does it qualify as "news for nerds"
Does it qualify as "stuff that matters"
I think a "yes" to both is reasonable, and so I think it does belong on slashdot.
This site is not about only letting us see what the editors think is not a hoax. I believe the target audience of this site is intelligent enough to decide for themselves whether something is a hoax by reading the article. We don't need nanny editors to make decisions like that for us thanks very much.
Slashdot Mirror
Very correct.
is "very correct" more right than just "correct" ? This one always makes me laugh. I think you need a patch:
--- english.h Thu Mar 7 17:02:19 2002
+++ english_fixed.h Thu Mar 7 17:02:28 2002
@@ -1,2 +1,2 @@
- unsigned int correct;
+ boolean correct;
That should fix it.
How did it cope with 18,000 simultaneous connections? Did you use mmap(), sendfile() and friends on linux to get the best performance possible? How did the xfer rates compare?
BTW, 24,000 lines is a hell of a lot. If you want to compare like for like, have a look at vsftpd by Chris Evans. It's written entirely in c. Have a read of the source - it's quite interesting how it has been done. I would be surprised if you could find a buffer overflow.
I actually do agree with your points mostly, but I would say "Don't use c for network apps unless you have a good reason to" and also "don't use c for network apps unless you _really_ know the hazards"
In some ways SSH is a special case anyway. It has all the intensive maths stuff to do for the session key generation etc. Not a good idea to code that in (eg.) perl imo.
BTW, out of interest, what is your "favorite modern language" ??
If you hadn't been able to download those episodes, would you have gone out and bought them?
In other words, was the only reason you got them because they were free of charge?
If so, then your "piracy" has done no harm because the copyright owners would not have got any money from you anyway.
.. on being the one millionth poster to point out the "preferred form" clause! You have won a "Score -1 redundant" moderation. Your prize will be delivered shortly.
:)
Slashdot to offer a subscription service.
Imminent Death of the Net Predicted. Film at 11.
I live in the UK. I don't feel I have anything I can directly do to help here, but can anyone think of what us non-us people can do? For example, what might be the best way to help reduce the chance of this sort of misguided nonsense happening over here?
God I hate problems that I am powerless to help solve.
If this happens in the US, it's very likely the UK "government" will do their best to ensure that both they, and the rest of europe follows suit very quickly. Rather like europe is doing already with software petents for example.
There's something wrong with your comparison in my mind.
In this example, they have already put up the signs (you will not "steal" our work). Now they see that the signs are not working, but instead of realising that the law is wrong, they get worse. They're (metaphorically) building satellite tracking into all the cars so you can be fined automatically when you do things they don't like.
Incidentally, this analogy might sound very worrying to some people, but it is in fact exactly what the current UK naz^wgovernment have plans to do to our cars. (initially as a road tax replacement which we're told will "reduce congestion." The draconian fascist big-brother uses for this technology will no doubt come a little later)
Interesting. I hadn't seen vp3.2 before.
I notice their license is derived from the Mozilla Public License 1.1
Can anyone comment on whether that is good or bad news? eg. will the gstreamer folks be able to include vp3.2 codec support and distribute it as a plugin?
And was Linus "too young and inexperienced" when he totally botched the 2.2.x series?? (arount 2.2.9 IIRC)
What kind of quality assurance is that
It isn't. Read the licence. It's called the GNU GPL. I'm surprised you haven't come across it before. There is no "quality assurance" If you need someone to hold your hand, or you are using Linux for production purposes, go and talk to Redhat or another distributor who will provide the quality assurance you seem to want. They test all their kernels with test suites and simulated production workloads.
Hmm. I absolutely agree with most of what you say, but it doesn't seem to contracict the part you quoted at all. In fact it complements it if anything. Are you sure you didn't misinterpret the meaning of what the article was saying.
What I understood wasn't anything to do with tech stuff in any way replacing art(ists) but more like them beginning to complement each other in inseperable ways.
Long ago, for example we had "art ppl" doing painting, music, theatre, etc. and "tech ppl" doing science, experiments, inventions, maths.
Things these days don't clearly fit as easily into one group or the other.
Examples which fit better in the "art" group, but with some overlap: Photography, Cinema, graphic design (I think there are some of the things you talked about. Artistic talent is a requirement, but tech is involved)
Examples which fit better info the "tech" group, but with some overlap: Games/Demo programming (especially involving physics etc)
Heres another example:
You download an exe from a site and run it. It shows an animation of some simple objects bouncing around the screen.
It that art, or science?
Perhaps it is an mpeg embedded in a player that was produced by a pure artist with no tech knowledge other than hand painting each frame in some simple art package.
On the other hand, maybe its the result of some physicists research work in modelling complex interactions between macroscopic bodies obeying the laws of newtonian mechanics.
The point is - the result is the same. Only, the artist is probably more likely to want to "protect his work" and the scientist is more likely to want to "publish his results"
That's where we start seeing a conflict of interests.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4 081003,00.html
It must have value since you want it in the public domain
Things can have value in more than one way.
Copyright holders often use restrictive licenses primarily to profit from their work. This is called "financial value." To prevent this profit altogether, the copyright holders often argue, would remove the incentive to produce music.
Many artists see another type of value. For example, a musician could use (or "steal" as the droids might say) a few notes from another song, or sample a bassline to use in his own work which he would otherwise not be able to complete on his own. This is valuable to the second artist and can be called something like "artistic value" To charge the artist to use the work of others reduces his ability to produce more art, especially if he can't afford it. This effect tends to make well known "artists" more financially successful and lesser known ones worse off.
The best way IMO to be rid of this great intellectual property divide is to rid ourselves completely of the concept of intellectual property.
Those who fail to understand why the world would then be a better place are sometimes scared off by this idea because it sounds anti-capitalist or "communist" as some of them call it. What nonsense, I say.
Intellectual property be gone, and let the long-lost natural creative innovation of humanity flow once more.
(and to all the "but you wouldn't be saying that if you couldn't afford to put the food on the table" bunch - spare me the bother of having to parse your nonsense this time.
Everyone has a first time to install a devel kernel and they need to know how to do it before they can. Besides, completely fscking up your system is a good "lesson" to learn along the way :-)
(BTW, "new people" ??? Aren't they called "babies"? Now they really _shouldn't_ be installing kernels at all. That would be worrying and unnatural to say the least)
I seem to remember that the crystal space people have a cross platform 3d game that runs on many platforms. They wanted very much to write a PS port, but IIRC Sony would not let them have the information they needed without signing an NDA which would have prohibited them from releasing under the GNU GPL any code they wrote based on that information. As a result they didn't do it for the PS.
There are many developer unfriendly barriers preventing home grown games for the PS1 and the PS2. One of them has been correctly pointer out. I have just highlighted another. There are probably more.
Just because you haven't seen any home written games, don't assume that a ban on modchips is not one of the many reasons. Nobody said that allowing modchips would start millions of home written games coming out, but it's a good start; a neccesary but not sufficient step in the right direction.
(PS. If I have any of the details of the story wrong in the first paragraph, please feel free to correct me. It was a while ago, but in any case the point I made in the third paragraph remains the same)
"What kind of working business-model is that"
Clearly a business has to pay as much as is neccesary to hold on to their developers. In some cases though, that amount just happens to be zero and the developers are very happy with that.
The child workers you talk of are NOT happy with their level of pay. Many of the developers whose code gets used by Redhat etc earn money in other ways.
It seems (correct me if i'm wrong) that you have this idea that all useful work MUST be financially compensated else it doesn't "work"
Well, in my mind that is nonsense. Financial compensation is something that is only neccesary to provide a motive to get people to do things that otherwise nobody would do. It just happens to be the case (sadly) that this currently includes almost everything.
You don't have to "compensate" me for writing code in the same way that you don't have to for playing football with my friends. I do both for fun. It just happens that one is useful to others without any extra work from me and instead of trying to keep it all to myself and extract as much money from everyone else as possible using strict licenses etc, I chose not to be greedy.
the jury is still very much out on whether it can be made to work.
What do you mean by work? If the people doing the work and happy and the people using the products are happy then it works. Who else matters?
Is getting financial benefits, in and of itself, really selling out?
No.
But to suggest that moving to work for AOL/TW can be summed up as "getting financial benefits" is ridiculous in the extreme.
Getting a payrise is "getting financial benefits. I can't imagine Alan threatened to leave last time that happened.
I get on very well with my boss.
I regularly grab a beer after work with him.
I also often tell him to fsck off if he gives me work I don't like.
It's a good thing and its based on honesty and mutual respect.
If you don't have that, then you have to realise that many bosses will do whatever they can to exploit you as far as possible, and that old bullshit "putting the food on the table" is one of the buggest reasons It keeps on happening. Can't you see that if people weren't such cowards as to cave in to the "but how am I gonna pay the bills" argument then bosses would be forced to do more of what made their employees happy. All you "food on the table" bods are part of the problem allowing companies to become greedy and exploitative in the first place.
If your employer knows that you fear leaving them, they are suddenly in an extremely powerful position over you.
it will reduce the elitist factor of Linux users
I don't know which elitist linux users you are talking about, but if the're like the ones I've seen then they sure as hell don't use Redhat.
Most Linux users don't seem to really want Linux to succeed
Let me guess. By "succeed" I bet you mean one or more of:
1) "Become more popular"
2) "Make more money for it's owner"
3) "Get easier to use"
In my mind linux is already a tremendous success and no one company (including either or both or RH and AOL/TW) can change that.
I just happen to want to see Redhat continue to succeed.
And in case you're wondering what I mean by "succeed" I mean:
1) continue to create products based on what their users want not based on the interests of some other division of the corporation
2) continue to allow the employees the free creativity they require to achieve that (and other) goals.
Judging on past experience I have no reason to believe for a second that (1) will happen, and judging by Alan Cox's comment, he perhaps would agree with me that (2) would be more difficult after any AOL buyout.
Wow.
:-)
You have actually managed to include the word "amiga" in a post to slashdot without immediately being moderated down and told to "let the amiga die peacefully" and other equally tedious replies amiga fans usually get.
congratulations
If they can compress "random" data 100:1 then they can compress _anything_ 100:1
Which begs the question: have they tried compressing the compressed data again to get 10000:1? If not, why not? If fact why not make the compression function iterate to get 100^n:1 compression?
Oh, I see. That's why. It's because this technology doesn't exist and never can. It's "ZeoSync vs Physics." I know where my money is.
Does it qualify as "news for nerds"
Does it qualify as "stuff that matters"
I think a "yes" to both is reasonable, and so I think it does belong on slashdot.
This site is not about only letting us see what the editors think is not a hoax. I believe the target audience of this site is intelligent enough to decide for themselves whether something is a hoax by reading the article. We don't need nanny editors to make decisions like that for us thanks very much.
We have a finished product, but don't quite know what to do with it
Have you thought about using it to encode and decode video. video codecs a can often be quite useful in that respect. Why not give it a try?
links to downloads please?