And don't forget, the Europeans have lost their fair share of mars probes
Really? I don't doubt our (Europeans) abilities to loose probes(!), its just that I didn't think we'd launched any to Mars before.
Joking aside, its not really about NASA and the US vs. ESA/Europe/UK. NASA is just a classic example of a government run project. The UK won't fund any manned space missions and I believe they're pretty tight with any other space research, so the Beagle2 mission happens purely out of the commitment of the people running it. If the UK government was 110% behind it, pushing in money, then there'd be more people trying to make there cut, it would cost more, be more elaborate, more ministers try to cover they're arses and so spending more money to make sure it could not fail.
An interesting thought is, if Beagle2 was publicly funded with more money available, would it be more likely to fail?
But exactly how much does it cost NASA to do this?
On a similar note, exactly how many NASA engineers does it take ot change a light bulb! (sorry -- that sounds really trollish... its not meant to be!!)
Have you tried runing Bochs? Certainly not as friendly as VMware and harder to actually get it running in the first place but it is 100% emulated. Its less good for running user applications though, 1) because the video drivers are "less special" and 2) because its s-l-o-w!
Agree with your overall point, but equally if the web site itself is out of spec, then there are likely to be rendering issues? Hmmmm, its all debatable I s'pose!
Except that FireBird is vulnerable to the exploit as well.
Erm, no I don't think it is! It displays the full URL. This is what it is supposed to do as a web browser. IE on the otherhand has a large bug in it that means that the user will think they are at one web site when they are in fact at another!
Respect to Opera however for actually high-lighting when the user is going to a web address with an @ in it. But Firebird is not flawed and does not contain a bug. IE contains a large array of bugs.
Its because Mozilla-Firebird and Mozilla-Thunderbird are "pre-release" versions. Although in practice they are very very stable, they do contain a few minor bugs that might upset non-technical users.
Mozilla-Suite is currently the stable version and thats why it includes an installer.
Not saying I agree with this, but thats how it is!!
and you click on it (regardless of the email client even!), your default web browser will open it.
If you default browser is IE, then it will open the home page of www.dodgyhackers.org *bug* the address bar will *only* show www.yourbank.com
You do not need JavaScript at all. I know unescaping has been mentioned, and this could help the hacker hide their activities (otherwise most email clients and browsers will show the full target address in the status bar) but the fact is you don't need it! In any case, how many people check the URL in the status bar is valid?
I think he means the middle east. Although, I'm a bit suprised by the snow. And saying things like "we're having a heck of a weekend", which is not you're typical middle-east speak.
No, DNS is an internet protocol. It usually goes over UDP port 53 (some servers also support TCP port 53. I think the nslookup client defaults to using a TCP connection). Geez, it would've taken you about 10 seconds to find that with a search engine. Are you trolling? :D
Not trolling -- honest! But, yeah, you might possibly be right about UDP port 53... possibly [hangs head in shame at own stupidity]!
If you only see UDP traffic with IE, you probably have both of your browsers set up to use an HTTP proxy. That way the DNS lookups are done by the proxy server. The extra IE-specific UDP traffic could be something like an attempt at a NetBIOS host lookup... like I said, run Windump!
Nope, definately both browsers are set to connect directly to the internet. I guess Firebird is doing its DNS lookups via on of the Windows services (the name of which escapes me), but this isn't being affected by Kerio -- probably because I had allow this OS service to use UDP.
Regardless though, I can't Windump it (I'll pretend I know what Windump is and have used it on numerous occasions!) as I don't have the machine I'm refering to available right at the minute!!
Anyway I've not got the machine I was using available at the mo for testing, so no-can-do!
But the problem with Kerio and IE was one I experienced and why it stuck in my mind. Runing Mozilla Firebird didn't cause the same problems, so Firebird was able to resolve the addresses find without needing UDP.
I'd like to think IE was doing something sinister like sending a tracking packet to Microsoft of the web sites I'm looking at.... but I expect its something really dull like trying to find a PDC for some obscure reason!
I found the same with Kerio + IE on XP. I *think* but haven't fully tested, that its because IE needs to use UDP. When you try to open a web page through IE, it first does "something" under UDP (Kerio picked it up), and then it does the usual TCP request as you'd expect.
Sooo, *I think* (sorry about being vague!) if you allow full IO via UDP for IE then it'll work fine. Without this, it just times out.
I think!?!:)
I'm sure someone will confirm this or prove me wrong.... any takers?
Last I heard a modem does not actually have a static MAC address in firmware like a network card.
Don't modems use "phone numbers" instead?
Re:What are you talking about?
on
Effective XML
·
· Score: 1
F*ck -- and a point I forgot to make was about XML being text files. Text files are XML DOM's in a serialised form (sort of). Text is good because you can read and write text on anything, so it makes interoperating with legacy systems easy without needing anything complex.
But say what you're doing involves opening XML text files, parsing them, extracting something and closing, well, there's nothing to stop you just dumping the parsed, binary tree structure from memory to disk and using that. Obviously you can't use this for interchange, and you'd have additional issues to deal with if you change the XML data structure latter on, but you are allowed to implement things how you like. People do of course already do this, e.g. storing pre-loaded/parsed XML DOM's as session objects on web servers.
The point I meant to make in my first post (duh - me), was that XML being a text file isn't (or shouldn't be) a barrier to using XML. Don't get hung up on the text thing, as the text thing is only important for data interchange!
Re:The main issue with XML is performance
on
Effective XML
·
· Score: 1
Appologies a weird cross linking thing, but I've replied to this comment: "I share your opinion regarding XML, and have yet to find a great reason to use it, other than feeding data to our vendors systems through their proprietary file layouts."
Re:What are you talking about?
on
Effective XML
·
· Score: 1
Agree totally. But just to pick out one point here and comment on that: XML is just text!
Thats the main complaint about XML. And its true that storing information as text is most likely to use more resources than a complete binary implementation. So why use XML? Because its easy to implement. Lots of the hard problems like data extensibility and internationlisation have been solved.
Use the right tools for the right jobs. XML is great for a lot of things, and thanks to Moore's Law, it being less efficient doesn't make a jot of difference. If it did, then we'd be coding everything in pure assembler!!
Even where XML isn't the solution (a database with more than one concurrent user or more than 200 records might be an example), use a proprietary binary solution but provide XML interfaces where the inefficiencies are not an issue.
A previous comment was: I share your opinion regarding XML, and have yet to find a great reason to use it, other than feeding data to our vendors systems through their proprietary file layouts.
With XML you can validate a file. You don't have to have previously written code to validate the file -- you can validate it as it is (with a schema). If we take the example of a config file, I can validate the contents of the config file without knowing anything about the application that uses it. Furthermore, I could relatively easily write an XForm to manipulate the contents of that config file and know, absolutely, for a fact, that I haven't stuffed up the contents of the file.
And thats quite easy to do. But its only an example. The best bit really is not being able to do this, its being able to do it quickly, easily and cost effectively. Therefore, this is exploiting Moore's Law to best effect.
I think the PR problem with XML is that it *is true* that XML in less efficient in most cases when compared to an existing solution. But such a comparision ignores the benefits of being able to quickly and easily change and extend such a solution. If we just take the namespacing part of XML, this alone make integration with other existing XML based solutions easier.
The key to appreciating XML is understanding *why* it is good, and *where and when* to use it!
Anyway, if you want inefficiency, just look at GUI's compared with traditional terminal based applications!! (walks way mumbling about Java and scripting....)
Open office is a 3 year out of date copy of MS Office.
MS Office hasn't changed that much since Office 95! There *are* changes but since most people use Bold, Italic, select fonts, maybe insert pictures sometimes and save, email, print, any changes make little difference to most people. [snip].. or don't want to pay for MS Office.
Seems like a good reason to me!
I'll say it again -- most people use a small number of features which OpenOffice more than caters for. So, yeah you *can* pay MS if you're charitable, but really OpenOffice does make a lot of sense.
But all the timed ones and such are blocked...so not ALL popups are A-Okay once the page has loaded (unless you want to suggest that a timed event represents a not-completely-loaded page).
Yeah... thinking about it, you're probably right! Certainly, pop-ups a not a problem at all. The only (very) slight issue is if a page is loading and I click a link that opens a new window, this doesn't happen and I have to re-click once the page has loaded.
Its not a big problem and is far preferable to having to endure pop-ups.
I think this happens when the page hasn't finished loading and you click the link. Moz seems to just stop new windows being opened whilst the page is being loaded, but once it has completed loading, then new windows are A-Okay.
..which is maybe not the best implementation, but I still like Moz.
Re:Not surprised
on
Kylix in Limbo
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I think part of the problem was that Delphi=Pascal=educational-language *therefore* not professional. Thats from a professionals perspective.
From a noob perspective, Delphi would've been okay except that the learning curve was much much steeper than for VB. Delphi has very strong type checking, which is hard for people new to coding to grasp, so getting things to compile is difficult, so there's no immediate feedback, so the user is discouraged. VB doesn't suffer in this respect since by default you didn't have to declare anything and pretty much everything is a variant, so anything the user writes will probably work... albeit it may be buggy and is very unlikely to scale, but they don't care. They wrote a program, it runs, they've got the feedback of seeing it run, so they like it.
Its a huge shame that Delphi wasn't more successful. It was the correct language for writting business apps in terms of performance vs. skills required to use it. In a strange way, I do wish Microsoft had released it since at least it would've been more popular..... but then I guess that is C#!
You can run xine-check as a normal user to test the installation/hardware. This will likely point out that the DVD is not using DMA which causes poor performance. To fix this, enter the following in to a console (I think you must be root):
hdparm -d1/dev/hdc
At present I haven't figured out how/where to put this in the system boot sequence.
To start Xine, just open a console and type xine.
Obviously you'll have to find and download the above RPM's, but I don't think any of them are large or hard to find.
Yeah, but if you check the MS examples you'll note that they're using nice FontSize attributes rather than CSS. Thats really clever isn't it! I mean, why build a UI in code, when you can use markup to describe it, and then stuff the whole concept up by gluing presentation directly to the interface.
DO NOT USE THIS -- USE XUL.
XUL is cross platform, open, and available now. It is stable and secure. Personally, I don't trust MS to develop an entirely "new" technology using new code, and actually have it all work perfectly with no security flaws first go.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh don't take it so seriously!!!
And don't forget, the Europeans have lost their fair share of mars probes
Really? I don't doubt our (Europeans) abilities to loose probes(!), its just that I didn't think we'd launched any to Mars before.
Joking aside, its not really about NASA and the US vs. ESA/Europe/UK. NASA is just a classic example of a government run project. The UK won't fund any manned space missions and I believe they're pretty tight with any other space research, so the Beagle2 mission happens purely out of the commitment of the people running it. If the UK government was 110% behind it, pushing in money, then there'd be more people trying to make there cut, it would cost more, be more elaborate, more ministers try to cover they're arses and so spending more money to make sure it could not fail.
An interesting thought is, if Beagle2 was publicly funded with more money available, would it be more likely to fail?
They always have to show off don't they!
But exactly how much does it cost NASA to do this?
On a similar note, exactly how many NASA engineers does it take ot change a light bulb! (sorry -- that sounds really trollish... its not meant to be!!)
Have you tried runing Bochs? Certainly not as friendly as VMware and harder to actually get it running in the first place but it is 100% emulated. Its less good for running user applications though, 1) because the video drivers are "less special" and 2) because its s-l-o-w!
But hey, its free!
Agree with your overall point, but equally if the web site itself is out of spec, then there are likely to be rendering issues? Hmmmm, its all debatable I s'pose!
Except that FireBird is vulnerable to the exploit as well.
Erm, no I don't think it is! It displays the full URL. This is what it is supposed to do as a web browser. IE on the otherhand has a large bug in it that means that the user will think they are at one web site when they are in fact at another!
Respect to Opera however for actually high-lighting when the user is going to a web address with an @ in it. But Firebird is not flawed and does not contain a bug. IE contains a large array of bugs.
Hope thats cleared it up for you!
Its because Mozilla-Firebird and Mozilla-Thunderbird are "pre-release" versions. Although in practice they are very very stable, they do contain a few minor bugs that might upset non-technical users.
Mozilla-Suite is currently the stable version and thats why it includes an installer.
Not saying I agree with this, but thats how it is!!
Damn. I got the dorky dude! And I'm using Firebird 0.7 -- thats not fair!!!
Errr no. If the email contains a link:
/
http://www.yourbank.com%01@www.dodgyhackers.org
and you click on it (regardless of the email client even!), your default web browser will open it.
If you default browser is IE, then it will open the home page of www.dodgyhackers.org *bug* the address bar will *only* show www.yourbank.com
You do not need JavaScript at all. I know unescaping has been mentioned, and this could help the hacker hide their activities (otherwise most email clients and browsers will show the full target address in the status bar) but the fact is you don't need it! In any case, how many people check the URL in the status bar is valid?
Seems fairly big problem to me!
I think he means the middle east. Although, I'm a bit suprised by the snow. And saying things like "we're having a heck of a weekend", which is not you're typical middle-east speak.
Global warming has a *lot* to answer for!
I'm having the same problem. I would've thought this could easily be fixed by modifing the theme to hide unused parts of the tree?
I guess you'd also need code to allow the user to hide unused bits + create "move" filters. Surely someone must've already done this?!
No, DNS is an internet protocol. It usually goes over UDP port 53 (some servers also support TCP port 53. I think the nslookup client defaults to using a TCP connection). Geez, it would've taken you about 10 seconds to find that with a search engine. Are you trolling?
:D
Not trolling -- honest! But, yeah, you might possibly be right about UDP port 53... possibly [hangs head in shame at own stupidity]!
If you only see UDP traffic with IE, you probably have both of your browsers set up to use an HTTP proxy. That way the DNS lookups are done by the proxy server. The extra IE-specific UDP traffic could be something like an attempt at a NetBIOS host lookup... like I said, run Windump!
Nope, definately both browsers are set to connect directly to the internet. I guess Firebird is doing its DNS lookups via on of the Windows services (the name of which escapes me), but this isn't being affected by Kerio -- probably because I had allow this OS service to use UDP.
Regardless though, I can't Windump it (I'll pretend I know what Windump is and have used it on numerous occasions!) as I don't have the machine I'm refering to available right at the minute!!
Doesn't DNS run via ARP?
Anyway I've not got the machine I was using available at the mo for testing, so no-can-do!
But the problem with Kerio and IE was one I experienced and why it stuck in my mind. Runing Mozilla Firebird didn't cause the same problems, so Firebird was able to resolve the addresses find without needing UDP.
I'd like to think IE was doing something sinister like sending a tracking packet to Microsoft of the web sites I'm looking at.... but I expect its something really dull like trying to find a PDC for some obscure reason!
I found the same with Kerio + IE on XP. I *think* but haven't fully tested, that its because IE needs to use UDP. When you try to open a web page through IE, it first does "something" under UDP (Kerio picked it up), and then it does the usual TCP request as you'd expect.
:)
Sooo, *I think* (sorry about being vague!) if you allow full IO via UDP for IE then it'll work fine. Without this, it just times out.
I think!?!
I'm sure someone will confirm this or prove me wrong.... any takers?
Last I heard a modem does not actually have a static MAC address in firmware like a network card.
Don't modems use "phone numbers" instead?
F*ck -- and a point I forgot to make was about XML being text files. Text files are XML DOM's in a serialised form (sort of). Text is good because you can read and write text on anything, so it makes interoperating with legacy systems easy without needing anything complex.
But say what you're doing involves opening XML text files, parsing them, extracting something and closing, well, there's nothing to stop you just dumping the parsed, binary tree structure from memory to disk and using that. Obviously you can't use this for interchange, and you'd have additional issues to deal with if you change the XML data structure latter on, but you are allowed to implement things how you like. People do of course already do this, e.g. storing pre-loaded/parsed XML DOM's as session objects on web servers.
The point I meant to make in my first post (duh - me), was that XML being a text file isn't (or shouldn't be) a barrier to using XML. Don't get hung up on the text thing, as the text thing is only important for data interchange!
Appologies a weird cross linking thing, but I've replied to this comment:
"I share your opinion regarding XML, and have yet to find a great reason to use it, other than feeding data to our vendors systems through their proprietary file layouts."
Here: LINKY
Agree totally. But just to pick out one point here and comment on that:
XML is just text!
Thats the main complaint about XML. And its true that storing information as text is most likely to use more resources than a complete binary implementation. So why use XML? Because its easy to implement. Lots of the hard problems like data extensibility and internationlisation have been solved.
Use the right tools for the right jobs. XML is great for a lot of things, and thanks to Moore's Law, it being less efficient doesn't make a jot of difference. If it did, then we'd be coding everything in pure assembler!!
Even where XML isn't the solution (a database with more than one concurrent user or more than 200 records might be an example), use a proprietary binary solution but provide XML interfaces where the inefficiencies are not an issue.
A previous comment was:
I share your opinion regarding XML, and have yet to find a great reason to use it, other than feeding data to our vendors systems through their proprietary file layouts.
With XML you can validate a file. You don't have to have previously written code to validate the file -- you can validate it as it is (with a schema). If we take the example of a config file, I can validate the contents of the config file without knowing anything about the application that uses it. Furthermore, I could relatively easily write an XForm to manipulate the contents of that config file and know, absolutely, for a fact, that I haven't stuffed up the contents of the file.
And thats quite easy to do. But its only an example. The best bit really is not being able to do this, its being able to do it quickly, easily and cost effectively. Therefore, this is exploiting Moore's Law to best effect.
I think the PR problem with XML is that it *is true* that XML in less efficient in most cases when compared to an existing solution. But such a comparision ignores the benefits of being able to quickly and easily change and extend such a solution. If we just take the namespacing part of XML, this alone make integration with other existing XML based solutions easier.
The key to appreciating XML is understanding *why* it is good, and *where and when* to use it!
Anyway, if you want inefficiency, just look at GUI's compared with traditional terminal based applications!! (walks way mumbling about Java and scripting....)
Open office is a 3 year out of date copy of MS Office.
MS Office hasn't changed that much since Office 95! There *are* changes but since most people use Bold, Italic, select fonts, maybe insert pictures sometimes and save, email, print, any changes make little difference to most people.
[snip].. or don't want to pay for MS Office.
Seems like a good reason to me!
I'll say it again -- most people use a small number of features which OpenOffice more than caters for. So, yeah you *can* pay MS if you're charitable, but really OpenOffice does make a lot of sense.
But all the timed ones and such are blocked...so not ALL popups are A-Okay once the page has loaded (unless you want to suggest that a timed event represents a not-completely-loaded page).
Yeah... thinking about it, you're probably right! Certainly, pop-ups a not a problem at all. The only (very) slight issue is if a page is loading and I click a link that opens a new window, this doesn't happen and I have to re-click once the page has loaded.
Its not a big problem and is far preferable to having to endure pop-ups.
I think this happens when the page hasn't finished loading and you click the link. Moz seems to just stop new windows being opened whilst the page is being loaded, but once it has completed loading, then new windows are A-Okay.
..which is maybe not the best implementation, but I still like Moz.
I think part of the problem was that Delphi=Pascal=educational-language *therefore* not professional. Thats from a professionals perspective.
From a noob perspective, Delphi would've been okay except that the learning curve was much much steeper than for VB. Delphi has very strong type checking, which is hard for people new to coding to grasp, so getting things to compile is difficult, so there's no immediate feedback, so the user is discouraged. VB doesn't suffer in this respect since by default you didn't have to declare anything and pretty much everything is a variant, so anything the user writes will probably work... albeit it may be buggy and is very unlikely to scale, but they don't care. They wrote a program, it runs, they've got the feedback of seeing it run, so they like it.
Its a huge shame that Delphi wasn't more successful. It was the correct language for writting business apps in terms of performance vs. skills required to use it. In a strange way, I do wish Microsoft had released it since at least it would've been more popular..... but then I guess that is C#!
OT but anyway... these are my (very very brief) notes for getting DVD play back running on SuSE 8.2 Pro:
/dev/hdc
First install libdvdcss from a console using (whilst logged in as root!):
rpm -i libdvdcss-1.2.2-1.i386.rpm
Then using Konqueror or something similar, click on and install the following using YaST2:
* libxine1-1_rc0a-0.pm.0.i686.rpm
* libxine1-dvd-1_rc0a-0.pm.0.i686.rpm
* xine-ui-0.9.22-0.pm.0.i686.rpm
You can run xine-check as a normal user to test the installation/hardware. This will likely point out that the DVD is not using DMA which causes poor performance. To fix this, enter the following in to a console (I think you must be root):
hdparm -d1
At present I haven't figured out how/where to put this in the system boot sequence.
To start Xine, just open a console and type xine.
Obviously you'll have to find and download the above RPM's, but I don't think any of them are large or hard to find.
Best regards, Z.
Yeah, but if you check the MS examples you'll note that they're using nice FontSize attributes rather than CSS. Thats really clever isn't it! I mean, why build a UI in code, when you can use markup to describe it, and then stuff the whole concept up by gluing presentation directly to the interface.
DO NOT USE THIS -- USE XUL.
XUL is cross platform, open, and available now. It is stable and secure. Personally, I don't trust MS to develop an entirely "new" technology using new code, and actually have it all work perfectly with no security flaws first go.
fjiords
OT - didn't Slartybartfast win an award for those?