Oh, and tell me, where are the wxWidgets killer apps?
Audacity (audio editor) comes to mind. A fantastic piece of software, and looks and feels native both under Linux GTK and Windows. That's exactly the way it's supposed to be. Applications with wx can also be compiled standalone in pretty small place. The bare bones wx win32 apps come in at a couple hundred K
Actually, enron took many months to fall. I don't mean to sound like an ass, but a simple sell-on-stop order would have protected against catastrophic losses (same with Nortel). That doesn't excuse the management of these companies from the fraud they were involved in, but I'm pointing out that market prices for things like stocks don't spontaneously evaporate. Even though there are large 'gaps' in price sometimes, usually a catastrophic price change such as Nortel from $100 down to $1 takes months, even years to happen
Could that be true? I don't know either way. However as someone with extensive DOS assembler experience, I can say that the API calls (DOS int 0x21 and BIOS routines) that Visicalc used are very limited. This version ran on DOS 1.0 so we know it didn't even use any fancy memory management routines. The only potential for incompatibility that I see are the BIOS keyboard/video calls.
DOS emulators have to deal with far more complicated DOS applications than this one. It uses basic OS and BIOS calls, no fancy processor or hardware tricks... in fact I think this would be a nice binary to reverse engineer and play with, very straightforward x86 assembler.
I loved this... his web site includes a downloadable VisiCalc binary from 1981. It's 27 KB large (smaller than most web images, he points out) and it's a pretty powerful piece of software. Still runs on my modern dual core system, talk about longevity. Wow. All the Flash and Visual Basic in the world can't make me forget how awesome and elegant some older software is. I started out by writing in assembler myself
I really doubt there is as much digital privacy in Canada. The lines between these two countries gets blurred as internet traffic travels between routers north and south of the border. We know the US Government actively monitors all internet traffic with a huge data mining effort on the part of the NSA.
Doing this, the US government is also able to learn an unbelievable amount of info about Canadian citizens, and the government. Many Canadians have their physical servers located in the USA (myself included). There are firms in the USA who are even contracted to do jobs for the Canadian government. There is no doubt that lots of private Canadian citizens data is made available to US authorities by virtue of the fact that it is processed by service industries located in the USA.
Hell, if I did a traceroute to most of my friends' destination MX hosts I would find traffic going through the USA. There is virtually no digital privacy in Canada
You do monitor our citizens, because the RCMP and US government collaborate to "catch evil terrorists". See again the recent case of Maher Arar, and the facts exposed in a government investigation. The RCMP acts as the Canadian arm of US government spy agencies, and even handed over one of their own citizens to the USA. The man was detained and tortured. All documented by government reports
It's hard to compare between countries but for those of you getting a sense that Canada is so great for privacy... just like the USA, we have our own government and police spying on citizens. The RCMP arrested a Canadian engineer (Maher Arar, Canadian citizen), presumably after monitoring him covertly, and collaborated with the US Government. The RCMP handed him over to the USA, who then sent him to Syria. He was tortured and detained there.
After returning to Canada, the RCMP continued a smear campaign and tried to identify the man as a terrorist, even though recent documents (from a government inquiry) show that there was no evidence to this effect. The national police did not take measures to clear the man's name, either with the USA or domestically.
Just remember that, next time you think you have freedom and privacy typing away at your office. It's quite possible the national police or spy agency is monitoring your activities, and who knows maybe you too can be labeled a terrorist
I'm wondering if even they miss the point of a click. I tried out the site and the problem is unexpected things triggering when I move the pointer past them. The click is a confirmation of a selection, so the pointer selects an option (from a massive grid on our screen) but the click confirms it. Otherwise, as happens with this site, you end up going to wrong places because you have no way of confirming a selection.
I've got a 200 MHz Pentium (also slackware) doing my NAT and firewalling... easily handles 10 Mbps. I've read that even an ancient, free (100 MHz) linux router can do 50 Mbps. I think the best approach in layered network security is diversification of your defences; maybe a Linux or BSD router, but still have the desktop PCs run their own firewalls.
And you think Linux would not have bugs, trojans and worms using it as the platform of choice if it was #1 popularity? It is TRIVIAL to root a linux box once you have any user level access. It's even easier to just launch malicious processes without even getting root, since an average person type of user is never going to notice what's going on in their own system. You think the same people who are stupid enough to execute arbitrary Outlook attachments are going to get smarter about this when they're sitting on a Linux computer? No, they're still going to open all kinds of shell scripts and binaries, get stuck with root kits, uncontrollable malicious processes.
The more we turn Linux into a "convenient" desktop OS, the more exploits you're going to see. If Linux was the most popular OS, we would be blaming it today for botnets and uncontrollable zombies. There is just no profit in targeting Linux yet. Spammers (= virus authors) operate based on profit.
Developers ARE compromising security while trying to bring linux to the mainstream. How else can you explain all the messy KDE components, vulnerable libraries that go along with all this user friendly fun? Linux desktops are a complex mess
But why must Linux or FreeBSD or whatever appeal to the average person? We as open source developers don't have limitless time and resources to spend making our software usable by everyone, or EZ enough for grandma to use.
There is no problem having an OS primarly designed for experts to use (as Linux was originally). Why must compromises be made so that Linux can be prettier and easier?
Sometimes I think Linux/UNIX developers get suckered into a marketing/commercial mode of thinking, where somebody points out that the "product" will have more "popular appeal" if it (is prettier, easier, dumbed down). Well fsck that, Linux doesn't have to become a product, it does not need popular appeal. And unless you're getting paid to develop, think carefully about whose interests you're serving before you slave away for hours to make that interface EZ to use for anyone.
We're allowed to be selfish, we created this thing to begin with.
I agree, it looks like an excellent product. Most people probably use very few of the fancy features on the modern expensive phones. Myself, I buy older handsets because I think it's ridiculous to spend hundreds on a cell phone. This is just a communication device after all, the priorities (as I see them, as an engineer) should be: reception quality, talk and standby time on battery, and durability.
Remember when everyone got that bird flu? (I was coughing up feathers for weeks.)
Ha ha. But the 'news' with bird flu was NOT that you're going to get it for sure, but rather the chance of a major global infection is rising and such an outbreak would be far more serious than your average flu. I think the general population lacks an understanding of 'risk', probably because they are terrible with math and statistics. Anyway, nothing has changed on the bird flu story - the risk remains, obviously, whether or not CNN is running a headline.
News, like research, isn't black-and-white in its message or final in its conclusion. New research findings reveal new facts as they are currently known, which can change in the future. This research about testosterome illustrates a potential problem. So what do you do about this, we then see if other research follows up with the same research findings or if there are contradictory resutls. Also one should ask, what have past research (if any) found? Is there a trend?
I'm sure what she dislikes is rude, immature male attention. And she probably dislikes people ignoring her or not taking her seriously because she's a woman (a well known phenomenon of gender prejudice in academia)... but I'm sure she has no problem with compliments that point out, not only is she an intelligent and skilled researcher but she is also quite attractive. A fantastic combination IMHO
You're going to care a lot more once all those infected zombies eventually clog and spam the internet to the point where the global hostile environment impedes upon your own use. Does email spam bother you? You are getting that spam because of infected windows hosts. There are no more UNIX open relays. That spam is coming from worldwide windows installations.
Indeed, De Beers is a success based on marketing genius and supply side control (to fix prices to arbitrarily high values). The 2 months salary figure you mention was an etiquette rule created by De Beers, a wise benchmark to set the 'value' of diamonds. This 'rule' (which was a marketing creation) has been so successfully disseminated that it is now part of culture and tradition.
I think an often overlooked "intrusion detection" system is the last login time feature that you'll find in a lot of online services like web email, and banks. Monitor that value and make sure you're the only person logging on. I've also asked my bank to show the IP addresses logging in (a history) but they haven't done that. I wish they would, so simple
Absolutely, used media - CD, DVD - is the best way to go. You get the same thing ; re-use the original materials instead of creating waste ; and trade with other individuals (transferring ownership of goods) without going back and paying the marketers (RIAA, MPAA)
First of all, the comment by deraadt (Theo de Raadt) has to be taken with a grain of salt, the guy is known to be "difficult" (personality-wise). Second, Spamhaus has bandwidth bills to pay for the world using their DNSBL - anyone can query their blacklists by DNS for free, and their list is extremely popular. They put a valuable service out there for free as most small and medium sized ISPs just query the DNS blacklist.
There has been an arms race between spammers and admins, in many senses of the word. Spammers learned long ago that they will have an edge if they operate anonymously, either relaying through insecure relays in the old days, or more recently taking control of insecure PCs and servers and operating a fleet of zombie nodes. Their origin is masked. Or they might purchase services through dirty middlemen who then purchase services through dirty ISPs. Either way, spammers try to hide.
But the admins who fight spam often do not hide, usually because they are part of a reputable organization and are well respected by the community, and proud of their work. Also, the way blacklist technology is used (RBL, DNSBL) makes it difficult to conceal who you are. Unfortunately this makes organizations like Spamhaus vulnerable to DoS attacks, harassment, and frivolous lawsuits (remember that spammers call themselves 'internet marketers' and pretend they are legit businessmen). Other organizations like SPEWS are somewhat better at hiding their operation.
There are ideas floating around, however, on ways to harden blacklists agaist attacks of various sorts. The idea proposed in that 2004 paper would conceal the blacklist publisher, and use distributed resources to serve the list, kind of like how spammers use a fleet of zombies (except spammers steal those resources).
Spammers are a dirty bunch, they fight dirty. Maybe it's time we look more seriously at protecting the blacklists and their operators from various types of 'attacks'.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, enron took many months to fall. I don't mean to sound like an ass, but a simple sell-on-stop order would have protected against catastrophic losses (same with Nortel). That doesn't excuse the management of these companies from the fraud they were involved in, but I'm pointing out that market prices for things like stocks don't spontaneously evaporate. Even though there are large 'gaps' in price sometimes, usually a catastrophic price change such as Nortel from $100 down to $1 takes months, even years to happen
I know some engineers that are going to hell!
Could that be true? I don't know either way. However as someone with extensive DOS assembler experience, I can say that the API calls (DOS int 0x21 and BIOS routines) that Visicalc used are very limited. This version ran on DOS 1.0 so we know it didn't even use any fancy memory management routines. The only potential for incompatibility that I see are the BIOS keyboard/video calls.
... in fact I think this would be a nice binary to reverse engineer and play with, very straightforward x86 assembler.
DOS emulators have to deal with far more complicated DOS applications than this one. It uses basic OS and BIOS calls, no fancy processor or hardware tricks
I loved this... his web site includes a downloadable VisiCalc binary from 1981. It's 27 KB large (smaller than most web images, he points out) and it's a pretty powerful piece of software. Still runs on my modern dual core system, talk about longevity. Wow. All the Flash and Visual Basic in the world can't make me forget how awesome and elegant some older software is. I started out by writing in assembler myself
This isn't as crazy as it sounds. Someone who is trained in monitoring, but who also has OCD, would make a very good nazi security guy
I really doubt there is as much digital privacy in Canada. The lines between these two countries gets blurred as internet traffic travels between routers north and south of the border. We know the US Government actively monitors all internet traffic with a huge data mining effort on the part of the NSA.
Doing this, the US government is also able to learn an unbelievable amount of info about Canadian citizens, and the government. Many Canadians have their physical servers located in the USA (myself included). There are firms in the USA who are even contracted to do jobs for the Canadian government. There is no doubt that lots of private Canadian citizens data is made available to US authorities by virtue of the fact that it is processed by service industries located in the USA.
Hell, if I did a traceroute to most of my friends' destination MX hosts I would find traffic going through the USA. There is virtually no digital privacy in Canada
You do monitor our citizens, because the RCMP and US government collaborate to "catch evil terrorists". See again the recent case of Maher Arar, and the facts exposed in a government investigation. The RCMP acts as the Canadian arm of US government spy agencies, and even handed over one of their own citizens to the USA. The man was detained and tortured. All documented by government reports
It's hard to compare between countries but for those of you getting a sense that Canada is so great for privacy ... just like the USA, we have our own government and police spying on citizens. The RCMP arrested a Canadian engineer (Maher Arar, Canadian citizen), presumably after monitoring him covertly, and collaborated with the US Government. The RCMP handed him over to the USA, who then sent him to Syria. He was tortured and detained there.
After returning to Canada, the RCMP continued a smear campaign and tried to identify the man as a terrorist, even though recent documents (from a government inquiry) show that there was no evidence to this effect. The national police did not take measures to clear the man's name, either with the USA or domestically.
Just remember that, next time you think you have freedom and privacy typing away at your office. It's quite possible the national police or spy agency is monitoring your activities, and who knows maybe you too can be labeled a terrorist
I'm wondering if even they miss the point of a click. I tried out the site and the problem is unexpected things triggering when I move the pointer past them. The click is a confirmation of a selection, so the pointer selects an option (from a massive grid on our screen) but the click confirms it. Otherwise, as happens with this site, you end up going to wrong places because you have no way of confirming a selection.
I've got a 200 MHz Pentium (also slackware) doing my NAT and firewalling ... easily handles 10 Mbps. I've read that even an ancient, free (100 MHz) linux router can do 50 Mbps. I think the best approach in layered network security is diversification of your defences; maybe a Linux or BSD router, but still have the desktop PCs run their own firewalls.
That link is a bit off, try this for the blog
And you think Linux would not have bugs, trojans and worms using it as the platform of choice if it was #1 popularity? It is TRIVIAL to root a linux box once you have any user level access. It's even easier to just launch malicious processes without even getting root, since an average person type of user is never going to notice what's going on in their own system. You think the same people who are stupid enough to execute arbitrary Outlook attachments are going to get smarter about this when they're sitting on a Linux computer? No, they're still going to open all kinds of shell scripts and binaries, get stuck with root kits, uncontrollable malicious processes.
The more we turn Linux into a "convenient" desktop OS, the more exploits you're going to see. If Linux was the most popular OS, we would be blaming it today for botnets and uncontrollable zombies. There is just no profit in targeting Linux yet. Spammers (= virus authors) operate based on profit.
Developers ARE compromising security while trying to bring linux to the mainstream. How else can you explain all the messy KDE components, vulnerable libraries that go along with all this user friendly fun? Linux desktops are a complex mess
But why must Linux or FreeBSD or whatever appeal to the average person? We as open source developers don't have limitless time and resources to spend making our software usable by everyone, or EZ enough for grandma to use.
There is no problem having an OS primarly designed for experts to use (as Linux was originally). Why must compromises be made so that Linux can be prettier and easier?
Sometimes I think Linux/UNIX developers get suckered into a marketing/commercial mode of thinking, where somebody points out that the "product" will have more "popular appeal" if it (is prettier, easier, dumbed down). Well fsck that, Linux doesn't have to become a product, it does not need popular appeal. And unless you're getting paid to develop, think carefully about whose interests you're serving before you slave away for hours to make that interface EZ to use for anyone.
We're allowed to be selfish, we created this thing to begin with.
Good points, all of them. The accidental dialing is a problem for me too - cover would be nice.
I agree, it looks like an excellent product. Most people probably use very few of the fancy features on the modern expensive phones. Myself, I buy older handsets because I think it's ridiculous to spend hundreds on a cell phone. This is just a communication device after all, the priorities (as I see them, as an engineer) should be: reception quality, talk and standby time on battery, and durability.
Ha ha. But the 'news' with bird flu was NOT that you're going to get it for sure, but rather the chance of a major global infection is rising and such an outbreak would be far more serious than your average flu. I think the general population lacks an understanding of 'risk', probably because they are terrible with math and statistics. Anyway, nothing has changed on the bird flu story - the risk remains, obviously, whether or not CNN is running a headline.
News, like research, isn't black-and-white in its message or final in its conclusion. New research findings reveal new facts as they are currently known, which can change in the future. This research about testosterome illustrates a potential problem. So what do you do about this, we then see if other research follows up with the same research findings or if there are contradictory resutls. Also one should ask, what have past research (if any) found? Is there a trend?
Basic science stuff, boy
I'm sure what she dislikes is rude, immature male attention. And she probably dislikes people ignoring her or not taking her seriously because she's a woman (a well known phenomenon of gender prejudice in academia) ... but I'm sure she has no problem with compliments that point out, not only is she an intelligent and skilled researcher but she is also quite attractive. A fantastic combination IMHO
You're going to care a lot more once all those infected zombies eventually clog and spam the internet to the point where the global hostile environment impedes upon your own use. Does email spam bother you? You are getting that spam because of infected windows hosts. There are no more UNIX open relays. That spam is coming from worldwide windows installations.
Indeed, De Beers is a success based on marketing genius and supply side control (to fix prices to arbitrarily high values). The 2 months salary figure you mention was an etiquette rule created by De Beers, a wise benchmark to set the 'value' of diamonds. This 'rule' (which was a marketing creation) has been so successfully disseminated that it is now part of culture and tradition.
I think an often overlooked "intrusion detection" system is the last login time feature that you'll find in a lot of online services like web email, and banks. Monitor that value and make sure you're the only person logging on. I've also asked my bank to show the IP addresses logging in (a history) but they haven't done that. I wish they would, so simple
Girls locker room. Too obvious? Those lucky copper cylinders! I want to hear everything!
Absolutely, used media - CD, DVD - is the best way to go. You get the same thing ; re-use the original materials instead of creating waste ; and trade with other individuals (transferring ownership of goods) without going back and paying the marketers (RIAA, MPAA)
First of all, the comment by deraadt (Theo de Raadt) has to be taken with a grain of salt, the guy is known to be "difficult" (personality-wise). Second, Spamhaus has bandwidth bills to pay for the world using their DNSBL - anyone can query their blacklists by DNS for free, and their list is extremely popular. They put a valuable service out there for free as most small and medium sized ISPs just query the DNS blacklist.
There has been an arms race between spammers and admins, in many senses of the word. Spammers learned long ago that they will have an edge if they operate anonymously, either relaying through insecure relays in the old days, or more recently taking control of insecure PCs and servers and operating a fleet of zombie nodes. Their origin is masked. Or they might purchase services through dirty middlemen who then purchase services through dirty ISPs. Either way, spammers try to hide.
But the admins who fight spam often do not hide, usually because they are part of a reputable organization and are well respected by the community, and proud of their work. Also, the way blacklist technology is used (RBL, DNSBL) makes it difficult to conceal who you are. Unfortunately this makes organizations like Spamhaus vulnerable to DoS attacks, harassment, and frivolous lawsuits (remember that spammers call themselves 'internet marketers' and pretend they are legit businessmen). Other organizations like SPEWS are somewhat better at hiding their operation.
There are ideas floating around, however, on ways to harden blacklists agaist attacks of various sorts. The idea proposed in that 2004 paper would conceal the blacklist publisher, and use distributed resources to serve the list, kind of like how spammers use a fleet of zombies (except spammers steal those resources).
Spammers are a dirty bunch, they fight dirty. Maybe it's time we look more seriously at protecting the blacklists and their operators from various types of 'attacks'.