Slashdot Mirror


User: blibbleblobble

blibbleblobble's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
1,228
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 1,228

  1. Re:The answer is on Are You Annoying? · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "And your periods and commas belong inside the quotation marks."

    Not if you're a programmer -- see the hackers' dictionary. If the period wasn't in your quote, it would be inaccurate to quote it.

    For example, telling someone that a command is "cd ../." would be more confusing if you didn't realise that the final period was a full-stop, and unrelated to the thing you need to type.

  2. Re:So much for my faked photo of Rumsfeld & Sa on Detecting Faked Photographs Gets Easier · · Score: 1

    "Now they'll be able to prove that my photo of Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam in 1983 is a fake."

    Hopefully my photo of Governor Arnie shaking hands with Arial Sharon won't be detected...

  3. Re:The Issue on Cash Value 1/10 of a Cent · · Score: 1, Funny

    "neighbors must be notified when some sex offenders move into an area"

    Weird... politicians always seem to notify their neighbours when they move into an area too...

  4. Re:Seriously though... on White House Website Limits Iraq-Related Crawling · · Score: 1

    "possibly to prevent people from finding changes to past statements and information when archived elsewhere"

    Time to look at the files I guess...

    So: they did a list of directories on the site, then appended "/Iraq/" to the end of each and every directory. Even down to "/history/whtour/china/iraq" and "/infocus/dontcall/iraq". Rather odd thing to put in a robots file. ("~/text/" is used as well as "/Iraq" for each, b.t.w.)

    The files of course, don't exist. 0 files at 0 bytes for each in wget, or a "404 not found" error if you point your browesr at them. So not exactly something to be kept secret.

    Front page looks normal. Last modified at the moment it was requested... their clock is a few minutes faster than mine... page set to expire in 8 minutes, so nice n'dynamic.

    Not much in the way of scripts, not even any cookies from the main page, and no malicious oddities. Renders fine on Mozilla.

    Being served from an Apache server on Linux, nothing weird there. However, 80.15.236.62 is registered to Akami technologies, and is in London, UK according to the GeoIP database. Best replace those stars and stripes with Unionist Jack then..

    Are we done now? Is there actually anything interesting whatever on that site?

  5. Re:Drawing farfetched conclusions on White House Website Limits Iraq-Related Crawling · · Score: 1

    "possibly to prevent people from finding changes to past statements and information when archived elsewhere"

    Ahem. Not even the most clueless of clueless ones would try that!

    EMACS: could you prepend the following to each line: "wget --random-wait -r --page-requsisites "

  6. Re:the kitchen sink too? on C# 2.0 Spec Released · · Score: 1

    "Java supports chinese variable names. Don't ask me how I know this. Don't ask my coworkers, either."

    Perl also supports unicode variable names (i.e. any language), and some whisper that Perl 6 will even have unicode operators.

    That's what you get when you have a linguist for a language designer...

  7. Re:Help Sodipodi and Gimp become good alternatives on Adobe Makes Products Harder to Use, More Expensive · · Score: 1
    From the documentation:
    What does Sodipodi mean?

    The same thing as 'sigrimigri'. In English it should be 'mishmesh', 'hotchapotcha', 'zigzag' ... you got the idea.

    How do you pronounce it?

    Like it is written in Estonian. If you happen to not to speak Estonian, then Finnish will do.

  8. Re:hum... on Adobe Makes Products Harder to Use, More Expensive · · Score: 1

    "If you need CMYK so bad, why don't you just hack it in yourself?"

    Or even better, just buy CMYK support.

    Adobe photoshop costs $650. There are several people on this forum who've indicated that they buy at least 10-30 copies, per upgrade cycle, in a commercial environment.

    I don't know the Gimp developers personally, but has anyone asked them whether they'd consider adding CMYK support, and all the other features you want, if you paid that $10,000 to Gimp developers instead of to Adobe?

    After all, you know if you give the money to Adobe, they won't use it to implement any cool features: they've proved that much in the last few versions. But if you want more control over the features being developed, and if you want a system ideally tailored to your needs, you could do worse than getting involved with the development of programs that you can use indefinitely without restriction, on all of your machines.

  9. Re:IANAL but ... on RIAA Threatens More Music-Lovers · · Score: 1

    "wouldn't it be cheaper for them to threaten/subpoena/sue the whole US population as an entity (since everybody with a computer and a little experience does P2P)?"

    It's known as compulsory licensing. The canadians have it, the english pretend to have it, and the EFF seems to be advocating it (weird, huh?)

  10. Re:Mac is activation free on Adobe Makes Products Harder to Use, More Expensive · · Score: 1

    "is os x drm resillient? now, that'd be sweet."

    More like, the users of OsX are DRM-resiliant. They're not stupid. In the same way that the best, most expensive shops won't search your bags on the way out, whereas certain cheap and nasty shops have no such qualms. Apple, I assume, values the trust of its customers.

  11. Re:It's not the "hero bashing" on Diebold Issues Cease and Desist to Indymedia · · Score: 1

    Now show us the stuff about "calling for the deaths of Jews". Please.

    Howabout calling for the deaths of arabs. Does that count?

  12. Re:Cringely's view on security -- log analysis is on Bruce Schneier on What He Knows Best · · Score: 2, Funny

    "You need to log:... disk I/O"

    Isn't that recursive?

    I just want to put on file that I put on file that I put on file that I put on file that I put on file that I put on file that I saw somebody read a file on disk. Damn, now I need to report myself.

  13. Re: C&D on Diebold Issues Cease and Desist to Indymedia · · Score: 1

    "But, apparently, they [emails] are "Property". Whatever that means."

    Okay then, I'll take out a mortgage on my last 20 emails and some other copyrighted text I just scribbled down...

    What? You mean you can only mortgage property?

  14. Re: Diebold machines on Diebold Issues Cease and Desist to Indymedia · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Quote from the leaked email
    "It is possible to put a secret password on the .mdb file to prevent Metamor from opening it with Access. I've threatened to put a password on the .mdb before when dealers/customers/support have done stupid things with the GEMS database structure using Access. Being able to end-run the database has admittedly got people out of a bind though. Jane (I think it was Jane) did some fancy footwork on the .mdb file in Gaston recently. I know our dealers do it. King County is famous for it. That's why we've never put a password on the file before.

    Note however that even if we put a password on the file, it doesn't really prove much. Someone has to know the password, else how would GEMS open it. So this technically brings us back to square one: the audit log is modifiable by that person at least (read, me). Back to perception though, if you don't bring this up you might skate through Metamor.

    There might be some clever crypto techniques to make it even harder to change the log (for me, they guy with the password that is). We're talking big changes here though, and at the moment largely theoretical ones. I'd doubt that any of our competitors are that clever."

    Oh come on! It's as if the last 30 years of cryptographic knowledge never happened. Of course it's possible to digitally sign electronic data, and nobody with a clue about electronic voting would even consider not doing it.

    These people are supplying voting machines, and they don't even know how to create tamper-evident databases? They even have the gall to assume their competitors are using the same simpleton technology as they are.

    I suggest that anyone involved with these systems read Peter Wayner's Translucent Databases for a primer on how databases can be made secure, even against those who know the root password. [not that Diebold machines seem to have a root password]

    For further reading, Diebold might want to read some of Bruce Schnier's books, which are an interesting read on what can be done with cryptography, and what are its limitations. They might even consider hiring a competant expert, e.g. some of Schneier's peers.

    p.s. I claim the quote above as fair use, under english copyright law.
  15. Re: C&D on Diebold Issues Cease and Desist to Indymedia · · Score: 1

    "It has recently come to our clients' attention that you appear to be hosting a web site that contains information location tools that refer or link users to one or more online location containing Diebold Property."

    Earth to Diebold: Emails are not property

    I trust that the community will have a full set of mirrored locations available today, as we seem to do each time a C&D letter is sent...

  16. Re:Hmm on Taipei 101 Now World's Tallest Building · · Score: 2, Funny

    "How about if they just made a really big pole, would that be the new biggest building in the world?"

    Music-industry accounting?

    "Well, it's about 30 times wider than a very thin tower, so we'll just say it's 60 times as high."

  17. Re:Idiocy - bluetooth just taking off on Is Bluetooth Dead? · · Score: 1

    "Most of the medium to high-end phones sold now have Bluetooth capabilities."

    And some of the people in my office were only just discovering that the other bluetooth users could browse their unprotected phone books and call records just by connecting to a "normal" phone that the owners didn't even realise it was sharing such info.

    Is this normal for bluetooth?

  18. Re:Already patched ........ on Yet Another Critical Windows Flaw · · Score: 1

    "From a 9.1 install you most likely have openssl updates to perform....oops."

    Right. As opposed to a Windows install, where you have a few upgrades of your own to perform.

    The people running university computing labs have noticed that if you leave a default Windows2000 installation connected to the internet for long enough to download the upgrades, you're likely to have already been infected by one of several Win2K worms which can install without user interaction using the messenger service. Some people had so much trouble keeping new Windows PCs working for long enough to update (during the peak of these viruses) that they had to download the upgrades from other peoples' computers.

    (The people who knew how to switch Windows Messenger off and install the firewall or already had the update CDs, these people are probably administering other peoples' Windows computers, not using their own)

    In comparaison, somebody using an old version of Mandrake could get a denial-of-service if they use SSL connections and the server they connect to specifically attacks them. So I can probably just about manage to upgrade the packages without having to worry about the system rebooting.

    Looks like OpenSSL upgrades it is then...

  19. Re:Already patched ........ on Yet Another Critical Windows Flaw · · Score: 1

    "Already patched... But I pity the victims of a forthcoming worm"

    Already patched... with Mandrake 9.1

  20. Re:ISC at fault? Not likely. on BIND Patches Make Bad Situation Worse · · Score: 1

    "I find it strange that I be coming to the aid of the authors of BIND as a loyal djbdns user, but in this case I strongly believe it is Verisign who are to be hung, drawn and quartered over this one."

    Exactly. Verisign deliberately broke the systems of everyone using the .com and .net domains, and peoples' reaction to try and stem the resulting flows of additional spam, lost emails, broken applications, and unnecessary traffic have broken some other domains.

    Yet Verisign, still unrepentant, waited weeks to cease their actions, even now talking about their commercial interests trumping everything as if they were not running a system in public trust.

    Direct your complaints to those who allow Verisign to run the .com zone. They've admitted that it's incompatible with their commercial aspirations, so what better way to solve that than by taking it away from them.

  21. Re:Reasons for the slowness on Three New Releases (And Other News) From Mozilla · · Score: 1

    "we're no longer able to get oodles of bandwidth like we used to. Please be understanding while the servers undergo a slashdotting :)"

    BitTorrent
    Konspire
    GNUNet

  22. Re:Daniel Lyons on The FSF, Linux's Hit Men · · Score: 1

    "Remember "What SCO wants, SCO gets"? Same author."

    Same author, same 220-pixel (7 cm) wide text.

    On some websites, you can take advantage of advances in computer technology within the last 40 years, using monitor resolutions a whole 8 times larger than the ones Forbes seem to have done their typesetting on...

  23. Re:Power Cord - monstercable!!! on What's the Oldest Hardware You are Still Using? · · Score: 1

    I've got a friend who's high-end stereo system has a $1000 power cord.
    > Your friend is an idiot.Wait..... I have a $2000 power cord I'd love to sell your friend. It's twice as good! Really!!


    You're referring to the EMPower Modulator?

  24. Re:Lack of alternatives on MS Dissatisfaction High, Users Consider Switching · · Score: 1

    "and it's hard to find a good x86 box with Linux preloaded"

    Some would say that this was the result of criminal action by a convicted monopolist, and that it's up to the government to properly protect free trade and competition by putting a stop to such behaviour.

  25. Re:Let calculate Pi! on New Seti@Home Client to be Open to Other Projects · · Score: 1

    "If by "find a repeat" you mean "find a sequence of digits that repeats itself ad infinitum", or if you mean "a non-negligible sequence of digits that repeats itself at least once", then I'm afraid you'll be out of luck no matter how many times the age of the universe you want to spend looking, since pi is irrational.

    The perspicacious will have noticed the sleight of hand covered by the use of "non-negligible". I leave the selection of a more exact phrase as an exercise for the reader (who clearly has plenty of time on his hands, since he's reading slashdot...).
    "

    Your phrase "non-negligible" is defined as anything less than infinitely long.

    The linux source-code is a number, thus Pi contains an infinite number of copies of the linux kernel. Unfortunately, it also contains a lot of Windows code.