Microsoft is claiming to have patents on ideas which software included in Linux distros use, and therefore claims to have a patent infringement case. The general consenus on/. seems to be that Microsoft is lying partially because they refuse to actually specify what their patent claims are.
You mean it works on 64-bit hardware running in 32-bit mode. You can simply run Linux/*nix in 32-bit mode or just FireFox 32-bit and it works fine. If you want 64-bit FireFox, then you have to use nspluginwrapper as someone else mentioned which allow 32-bit plugins to be used on 64-bit browsers.
The only console game I can think of that acts like NetHack in that regard is Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. Neither save constantly for that effect. All they have to do is do a write when the save is loaded so it can only be loaded once.
You are right. It would be easy. In fact, someone wrote a patch for it called plugsched. It was not accepted into the kernel due to the fact that it would supposedly discourage the idea of simply making a scheduler which worked well for everyone.
The good news is, at least YouTube seems to have somewhat resurrected music videos!;-)
I am not sure exactly how meaningful that is. I have a friend who does not have an especially large personal music collection... and instead just searches YouTube for a music video of whatever song she wants to listen to and leaves it playing in the background.
Wait... that was intentional? I thought that was a design flaw in Window's driver model. You are saying it's not a bug, it's a feature? (I recently bought a new computer and kept my Windows XP install... wasn't easy.)
True, I realized after posting that that "line" and "surface" in the strict mathematical sense are not correct. I was trying to cover the possibility of curved borders seeing as borders are rarely straight.
instead of patrolling a two-dimentional line it has to patrol a 3d surface You seem to have a little problem there with your dimensions. Hmm? Borders in two dimensions are lines. Borders in three dimensions are surfaces.
I mean what good would it do to have Slashdot go over SSL? It's all public. You could intercept this post in transit, or you could wait 2 seconds and just read it. I will agree that encryption Slashdot seems a bit extraneous, but using HTTPS would be meaningful. An HTTP connection can be easily man-in-the-middle attacked if you have access to the connection between the client and the server, which, admittedly, is not a trivial conditional to fulfill. Such an attack would allow someone to hijack you session and... post flamebait to drive down your karma... Yeah. That really does not sound very serious, but it is something.
Single sign-on is possible, you just have to stop with the bad idea that logging in gives the server enough information to impersonate you. Some sort of public key auth like SSH uses makes much more sense. It has the minor privacy downside that if you use the same key everywhere, then your identities could be linked together for data mining, but that can be trivially worked around by having multiple keys, just like people use multiple usernames to avoid that now.
Man-in-the-middle attacks are a serious concern. Of course, HTTPS handles them, so we are only talking about unencrypted HTTP. As far as I can tell, any HTTP-only auth mechanism existing can be trivially attacked with a man-in-the-middle attack. SSH handles them by showing the user the server fingerprint and leaving it up to the user to confirm it. Realistically for web auth, server keys would have to either be validated the way they are now, by CAs + auth over HTTPS, or via web of trust which could be used for a more flexible auth mechanism.
OpenID is also a good idea because it moves the authentication process away from the server being logged into. Eliminating the entire problem, although likely adding others.
Java and.Net are JIT compiled. C++ is a normal compiled language. I assume the extensions are helpful to JIT compilers because they would allow the compilers to recompile the code with different optimizations based on the data they get.
Hmmm... I just did a Google search and found FireGPG and Gmail S/MIME. FireGPG looks like what I want, although both are missing drafts support. That is, GMail autosaves drafts, and the proper thing to do, if possible, would be to encrypt the draft addressed to the user, but FireGPG ignores this problem (for now) and Gmail S/MIME disables autosaving entirely (for now). I will setup FireGPG and see how it works.
Although a supporter of encryption, I fit mostly in the "dropped the ball" category. I do not use e-mail encryption in part because I do all of my e-mail through the GMail web client and I do not know of any way to use encryption with that. Hints welcome; nothing like digital signatures at the end of e-mails to get friends to ask about encryption. Yes, I know I could use Thunderbird (err... Icedove;) and POP/SMTP access, but I actually use GMail's labels and find Thunderbird a greatly inferior client compared to GMail.
I have tried to get my friends to use encryption for IM (gaim-encryption or gaim-otr; now pidgin-) with very limited success. Although, I have gotten people to switch to Gaim/Pidgin due to considering it a superior program, they mostly think it is a waste of effort to setup encryption. A few times a have looked around for a good essays or set of essays on why encryption is good idea even when one has nothing to hide, but I have not found anything.
Also, unfortunately, there are no IM encryption protocols with web of trust support that I know of. I believe the long-dead gaim-e project used GPG keys. The pidgin-encryption project suggests this is by design.
As for encouraging the use of web of trust, I wondering if key signatures could possibly be made easier to remember by a natural language encoding. That is, use the signature as a random seed for generating (grammatical) nonsense that some people may find easier to remember (and therefore share) than a string of hex digits.
Also, among the apps allowed by a large WoT are self-signed HTTPS keys, so it would not cost extra to encrypt your website, although there may be processing power issues there as well.
Java does do that. Another poster has pointed out that this code gets around my making a window larger than the screen. I think allowing windows like that is clearly a bug in the Java implementation, although a subtle one.
If it is an actual bug, why don't they just submit the patch upstream? If is it a proper bugfix, shouldn't it get accepted and be included within the next version or so?
This is news to me. Could you please provide a link? My personal knowledge and Wikipedia agree that MAC addresses are globally unique.
Re:We have everything we need... almost
on
The DRM Scorecard
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Wow, once again showing some truth to the meme that all technology is better in Japan. Winny (and its successors Share and Perfect Dark) appear to be far more advanced than any p2p popular in the US, although Wikipedia points out that they assume high speed connections which are most common in Japan.
What I find really interesting about those programs though is that they are all closed-source Windows programs. Is Windows really that overwhelmingly pervasive in Japan? Or is it just too difficult to write a cross-platform app which looks pretty and has good Japanese language / Unicode support? And why would a p2p app be closed source? That seems very strange to me.
Obviously you have never run gksudo. It is a graphical sudo app which, at least on my system, is modal. It has okay and close buttons, and the rest of the screen is grayed out. This is a really awful design since if I do not know why an app needs root privledges, I may not want to kill it just yet; I probably want to open up a browser window and look it up. Oh, wait, it's modal over the entire X session. To top it off, while opening gksudo so I could write this post about it, I tried switching VTs so I could possibly do something on a terminal... and my computer froze (even magic sysrq key did nothing), probably not gksudo's fault, but still not good.
I use Debian, not Ubuntu, and I usually use command line for configuration, so I do not normally see gksudo, but it is how Ubuntu does sudo (to my knowledge) for its graphic configuration apps.
I think a large part of FreeNet's slowness comes from anonymity being one of its goals. Although it is a good feature, anonymous communications tend to be very slow. In general, I do not think anonymity is required for anonymous communications and a system like FreeNet could be used when necessary, taking the performance it associated with it. I think you could probably design a protocol such that content gets signed so you always know who it is from and then knowing an IP address they have used as well is not a big deal.
Wow, that is a really roundabout way to change the Windows boot loader settings. The proper way to do so is to go to Control Panel --> System --> Advanced (Tab) --> Startup and Recovery (section) Settings (button). That brings up a GUI dialog for setting up the boot loader (only allows you to choose default OS and set timeouts, not delete or edit OS entries) and has an "Edit" button to bring up boot.ini in a text editor.
Windows (Aero Glass), Mac OS X (Aqua/Quartz), and Linux (X w/ Compiz/Beryl) are all moving toward resolution independence ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resolution_independen ce ). They do not seem to be there quite yet, but hopefully within a few years, it will be a standard feature. Particularly, your example of a 1000x1000 icon is silly: the icon would be vector graphics (ex. SVG) like many of the icons on my Linux system already are. Some people claim vector graphics are difficult to make pixel perfect for very low resolutions and prefer raster icons for small sizes, but for large icons, vector graphics are the way to go.
I think the point is that that fact is well-known, so it may be assumed that the real secrets are in a hidden partition, even though its existence cannot be proved mathematically, it may be assumed that it is reasonable that it would exist.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft is claiming to have patents on ideas which software included in Linux distros use, and therefore claims to have a patent infringement case. The general consenus on /. seems to be that Microsoft is lying partially because they refuse to actually specify what their patent claims are.
You mean it works on 64-bit hardware running in 32-bit mode. You can simply run Linux/*nix in 32-bit mode or just FireFox 32-bit and it works fine. If you want 64-bit FireFox, then you have to use nspluginwrapper as someone else mentioned which allow 32-bit plugins to be used on 64-bit browsers.
The only console game I can think of that acts like NetHack in that regard is Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. Neither save constantly for that effect. All they have to do is do a write when the save is loaded so it can only be loaded once.
Thank you for clarifying that. I had forgotten that it had been Kolivas's patch.
You are right. It would be easy. In fact, someone wrote a patch for it called plugsched. It was not accepted into the kernel due to the fact that it would supposedly discourage the idea of simply making a scheduler which worked well for everyone.
I am not sure exactly how meaningful that is. I have a friend who does not have an especially large personal music collection... and instead just searches YouTube for a music video of whatever song she wants to listen to and leaves it playing in the background.
Wait... that was intentional? I thought that was a design flaw in Window's driver model. You are saying it's not a bug, it's a feature? (I recently bought a new computer and kept my Windows XP install... wasn't easy.)
True, I realized after posting that that "line" and "surface" in the strict mathematical sense are not correct. I was trying to cover the possibility of curved borders seeing as borders are rarely straight.
Single sign-on is possible, you just have to stop with the bad idea that logging in gives the server enough information to impersonate you. Some sort of public key auth like SSH uses makes much more sense. It has the minor privacy downside that if you use the same key everywhere, then your identities could be linked together for data mining, but that can be trivially worked around by having multiple keys, just like people use multiple usernames to avoid that now.
Man-in-the-middle attacks are a serious concern. Of course, HTTPS handles them, so we are only talking about unencrypted HTTP. As far as I can tell, any HTTP-only auth mechanism existing can be trivially attacked with a man-in-the-middle attack. SSH handles them by showing the user the server fingerprint and leaving it up to the user to confirm it. Realistically for web auth, server keys would have to either be validated the way they are now, by CAs + auth over HTTPS, or via web of trust which could be used for a more flexible auth mechanism.
Two separate projects exist for making OpenPGP based HTTP auth systems: enigform (and mod_auth_openpgp) and gpgAuth.
OpenID is also a good idea because it moves the authentication process away from the server being logged into. Eliminating the entire problem, although likely adding others.
He only said they could get sued, not that the group suing them would win. ;)
Java and .Net are JIT compiled. C++ is a normal compiled language. I assume the extensions are helpful to JIT compilers because they would allow the compilers to recompile the code with different optimizations based on the data they get.
Hmmm... I just did a Google search and found FireGPG and Gmail S/MIME. FireGPG looks like what I want, although both are missing drafts support. That is, GMail autosaves drafts, and the proper thing to do, if possible, would be to encrypt the draft addressed to the user, but FireGPG ignores this problem (for now) and Gmail S/MIME disables autosaving entirely (for now). I will setup FireGPG and see how it works.
Although a supporter of encryption, I fit mostly in the "dropped the ball" category. I do not use e-mail encryption in part because I do all of my e-mail through the GMail web client and I do not know of any way to use encryption with that. Hints welcome; nothing like digital signatures at the end of e-mails to get friends to ask about encryption. Yes, I know I could use Thunderbird (err... Icedove ;) and POP/SMTP access, but I actually use GMail's labels and find Thunderbird a greatly inferior client compared to GMail.
I have tried to get my friends to use encryption for IM (gaim-encryption or gaim-otr; now pidgin-) with very limited success. Although, I have gotten people to switch to Gaim/Pidgin due to considering it a superior program, they mostly think it is a waste of effort to setup encryption. A few times a have looked around for a good essays or set of essays on why encryption is good idea even when one has nothing to hide, but I have not found anything.
Also, unfortunately, there are no IM encryption protocols with web of trust support that I know of. I believe the long-dead gaim-e project used GPG keys. The pidgin-encryption project suggests this is by design.
As for encouraging the use of web of trust, I wondering if key signatures could possibly be made easier to remember by a natural language encoding. That is, use the signature as a random seed for generating (grammatical) nonsense that some people may find easier to remember (and therefore share) than a string of hex digits.
Also, among the apps allowed by a large WoT are self-signed HTTPS keys, so it would not cost extra to encrypt your website, although there may be processing power issues there as well.
Java does do that. Another poster has pointed out that this code gets around my making a window larger than the screen. I think allowing windows like that is clearly a bug in the Java implementation, although a subtle one.
If it is an actual bug, why don't they just submit the patch upstream? If is it a proper bugfix, shouldn't it get accepted and be included within the next version or so?
This is news to me. Could you please provide a link? My personal knowledge and Wikipedia agree that MAC addresses are globally unique.
Wow, once again showing some truth to the meme that all technology is better in Japan. Winny (and its successors Share and Perfect Dark) appear to be far more advanced than any p2p popular in the US, although Wikipedia points out that they assume high speed connections which are most common in Japan.
What I find really interesting about those programs though is that they are all closed-source Windows programs. Is Windows really that overwhelmingly pervasive in Japan? Or is it just too difficult to write a cross-platform app which looks pretty and has good Japanese language / Unicode support? And why would a p2p app be closed source? That seems very strange to me.
Obviously you have never run gksudo. It is a graphical sudo app which, at least on my system, is modal. It has okay and close buttons, and the rest of the screen is grayed out. This is a really awful design since if I do not know why an app needs root privledges, I may not want to kill it just yet; I probably want to open up a browser window and look it up. Oh, wait, it's modal over the entire X session. To top it off, while opening gksudo so I could write this post about it, I tried switching VTs so I could possibly do something on a terminal... and my computer froze (even magic sysrq key did nothing), probably not gksudo's fault, but still not good.
I use Debian, not Ubuntu, and I usually use command line for configuration, so I do not normally see gksudo, but it is how Ubuntu does sudo (to my knowledge) for its graphic configuration apps.
BTW, is there any way to make it non-modal?
I think a large part of FreeNet's slowness comes from anonymity being one of its goals. Although it is a good feature, anonymous communications tend to be very slow. In general, I do not think anonymity is required for anonymous communications and a system like FreeNet could be used when necessary, taking the performance it associated with it. I think you could probably design a protocol such that content gets signed so you always know who it is from and then knowing an IP address they have used as well is not a big deal.
Wow, that is a really roundabout way to change the Windows boot loader settings. The proper way to do so is to go to Control Panel --> System --> Advanced (Tab) --> Startup and Recovery (section) Settings (button). That brings up a GUI dialog for setting up the boot loader (only allows you to choose default OS and set timeouts, not delete or edit OS entries) and has an "Edit" button to bring up boot.ini in a text editor.
Windows (Aero Glass), Mac OS X (Aqua/Quartz), and Linux (X w/ Compiz/Beryl) are all moving toward resolution independence ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resolution_independen ce ). They do not seem to be there quite yet, but hopefully within a few years, it will be a standard feature. Particularly, your example of a 1000x1000 icon is silly: the icon would be vector graphics (ex. SVG) like many of the icons on my Linux system already are. Some people claim vector graphics are difficult to make pixel perfect for very low resolutions and prefer raster icons for small sizes, but for large icons, vector graphics are the way to go.
I think the point is that that fact is well-known, so it may be assumed that the real secrets are in a hidden partition, even though its existence cannot be proved mathematically, it may be assumed that it is reasonable that it would exist.
Thank you. I installed it.