I was hoping to see something more technical, along the lines of:
January: support for architecture X included in 2.4
Febuary: driver tulip.o expands support for cards X, Y, Z
March: stratjakt's HP deskjet finally works like TFA says it will.
April: ATI drivers that don't suck come along
etc etc
I have a short list of hardware that I'm really eager to see supported under linux (mostly Hauppages PVR-500MCE so I can have dual-tuner MythTV goodness for ~the same price as the 250), and that can be some hard info to find when you have to google a million forums, and most of the hits are just other people asking "Does this card work in linux?"
Changelogs are too esoteric. They say stuff like "added support for Conexant B52387fdf-X341 encoder chip".
It appears that the overall quality of code, and more importantly, the amount of QA, on various browsers touted as "secure", is not up to par with MSIE; the type of a test I performed requires no human interaction and involves nearly no effort. Only MSIE appears to be able to consistently handle [*] malformed input well, suggesting this is the only program that underwent rudimentary security QA testing with a similar fuzz utility.
I wonder why I don't remember reading about that one here on slashdot.
Every smartphone I've used has been a pile of shit.
I have a Kyocera 7135 with Palm OS. Sometimes it crashes when the phone rings, you go to answer it and see "seg fault" and the thing frozen up.
The battery life is absolute shit. I'll charge it all day at my office, leave today about 6PM, and the battery will be nearly dead by the time I get in tomorrow at 9(ish).
For the first couple of days I had fun playing with it. But realistically, it's not useful for anything. I write notes and schedule on paper, and I carry a little black book since not even the fucking phone directory works right.
Oh, and the phone "application" can't use the touch screen. Well, it can, but it wont. If you touch the screen, a modal dialog (meaning you cant do anything, even answer the phone) will pop up telling you you cant touch the screen. You have to clear it with the undersized OK button.
Jack of all trades, master of none.
Besides, people want tiny cell phones (razor phones), and they want big bright hi-res screens on their PDAs (VGA or higher).
They also want a keyboard option, or at least enough touchpad surface to be able to form letters, another gripe I have with my phone.
Even if I got the hang of graffiti, there's a scratchpad about the size of a pygmy's thumbnail on which to form the letters. Absolutely uselsss.
I can't get it to behave as a wireless modem for my laptop for the life of me, hell it's nearly impossible to do anything 'net enabled with it. This is probably more a criticism of Verizon than Kyocera, but who knows. My point is, my boss pissed away 650 bucks per employee for these things, thinking they'd be useful to a bunch of techies who are constantly travelling. I'm the only one still using it, being too poor to replace it on my own dime.
Nah, if you want a shitty camera, a shitty phone, a shitty pda, and a shitty gaming platform, buy a "next-gen" N-Gage. Me, I can't wait until this thing dies, and they discontinue it, so I can expense out a real phone that actually makes phone calls, and a real "Personal Digital Assistant" that actually assists in doing stuff.
Another poster pointed out that it was Disraeli who said it, though it's forever attributed to Twain.
Another I've seen wrongfully attributed to Twain (and my personal favorite) is this one:
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts' for support rather than illumination."
-Andrew Lang (1844-1912)
BTW, Here's Twains quote:
Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics." - Autobiography of Mark Twain
He said it, but he was attributing it to Disraeli.
Re:Science numbers? What about business numbers?
on
Newsy Numbers
·
· Score: 1
It's the old, if I sold 1 unit last year, and 10 units this year, I have achieved 1000% growth per annum!
w00t! Bullshit like that raises a lot of VC. The WSJ knows not to rock the boat, since they source much of the bullshit.
Re:The actual meaning of lossless ?? Any clues?
on
Audio Compression Primer
·
· Score: 2, Informative
If it's lossless, you should be able to take digital file A, compress it into compressed file B, and then if you uncompress B to get A', then A' = A.
That is, the checksums for A and A' should match, etc.
That's how I define mathematically lossless.
Whatever this asshat is on about double blind and testing and all that, has more to do with the ability of his FLAC playing equipment to sound the same as his CD player, which is a whole 'nother ball of wax altogether.
128K isn't sampling frequency, that would be a ridiculously high smapling frequency (capturing tones up to 64k, way higher than you or your dog could even hear).
128K is the bitrate, sampling (on a CD) would be 44.1khz, which can reproduce up to 22.05khz tones (the upper end of our ability to hear).
Some guy has a law that says you need to sample at a rate twice as frequent as the signal your sampling. Makes sense if you think about it.
I'll go stereo to mono and reencode at 22khz for my tv captures. It sounds the same to me.
As for mp3s, etc, the only time I ever listen to it in the car, and there's so much ambient noise, it's not worth bothering. Hell, 128k joint stereo sounds like the CD to me, I don't know any better.
I don't listen to much music anymore. All the bullshit and RIAA and this is legal and blah blah blah, it's all killed music as an artform for me. I used to play guitar in bands, and love playing music. It's just dead to me now. White noise.
You forgot this: "And I can't restore files from my backup solution.
Oh yeah, the first two archives I maid dissappeared for reasons I don't understand."
Now I remember why we don't use linux in the office. Asshats like this guy write a moronic article like this, and my PHB reads it, and says "You can't even restore files from a backup on linux!!!!"
Mondo/Mindi for your home/personal system restores (Norton Ghost-like), AMANDA for your enterprise or networked stuff, and tar/rsync for everything in between.
Re:Crippling DNS? How much does DNS suck?
on
Spammers' Upend DNS
·
· Score: 1
in the case where a site is legitimately advertised before existing (by a stupid person who hits 'send' before hitting 'register me a domain')
That's not a problem, a site that doesn't exist yet is not "legitimately advertised".
BIND caches misses.
It sounds to me like the spam filter should be doing the caching though, not DNS.
Re:Crippling DNS? How much does DNS suck?
on
Spammers' Upend DNS
·
· Score: 1
That is the crux of the problem, not the DNS load.
Then why is the article suggesting that spam is bringing DNS to it's knees and the sky is falling?
Sounds like a problem with the spam filter.
If the spam filter encounters an non-existent domain, then IT should cache it, and not bother DNS with subsequent requests. If it delivers it fine, the user marks it as spam, and bayesian algorithm doesn't allow "stratjaktshotsexviagramortgagesite.com" again.
He plugs in a USB drive, runs KDar to fill it with stuff.
Now, when his system borks, how does he restore? Or did he think that far ahead?
I skimmed the article, and nothing about restoring. Your backup is useless if you can't restore it.
Does he have to install and configure linux, X, and KDE just to be able to access KDar?
Forget all this jibberjabber, and emerge or apt-get or type whatever command you use to get Mondo/Mindi. Just perfect for home boxes, and most other use.
Burn yourself a bootable CD that can recreate your box, just like Norton Ghost for Linux. I have it write out the iso files and boot disk for/bin/usr, etc, which I then burn onto a couple of DVD9-Rs. I can run this to recreate my system.
I run a seperate job to backup/home.
Whats important, is to seperate system from user data when it comes to backups. This also forms my "archiving" system, since old "/home" backups stick around, so if I want to take a look at the version of foo.c I was writing 6 months ago, it's easy enough to find.
As much as I love Mondo/Mindi, it's not the be-all and end-all. AMANDA is a better choice for a corporate (more elaborate) environment. It's a PITA and not worth getting involved with for a simple user box.
Re:So which is going to come first...
on
Spammers' Upend DNS
·
· Score: 2, Funny
A fax machine.
Re:Crippling DNS? How much does DNS suck?
on
Spammers' Upend DNS
·
· Score: 1
Only once, then their cached with some sort of default timeout (ie; check again in a few hours), or does this vary from implementation to implementation?
What I'm thinking, is that this is a big problem for (since this is slashdot) Microsoft ActiveDNS 2005, but not for BIND or OSS implementations, which have no such flaws.
Is this the case, or is it an inherent problem that DNS is just a shitty outdated protocol, like SMTP?
The send the spam, then register the domain. That way there's no way they can be filtered based on their return address, or any hyperlinks in the message (since the domain doesnt exist, how could it be in a blacklist?)
What I don't understand is how this breaks DNS. DNS should be able to handle non-existent domains without issue.
I don't get it. If this is true, it sounds like a MAJOR MAJOR design flaw in DNS.
Surely it allows for invalid domain requests, or did they just assume everyone on the net will correctly type the domain name every time?
Or, is it not the email or DNS itself, but the anti-spam filters that are hammering the DNS servers?
I don't understand the problem. It sounds like a made up non-issue by the anti-spam crowd, frankly.
Crippling DNS? How much does DNS suck?
on
Spammers' Upend DNS
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I don't get it.
So I send out a million spams, all saying "go to www.stratjaktsmadeupdomainname.com for hot viagra and lower mortgage payments."
The domain doesn't exist, and people click on it, which "cripples" dns because the dns servers have to respond with a "no such domain name" reply?
How does this cripple them? Was DNS not designed to handle fat-fingered domains gracefully?
What happens, do all the requests for my domain get propogated up the chain, is that the crux of the problem? If so, doesn't DNS update like, quite often (several times a day) now? There's no need to kick all requests up to the top, right?
Slashdot Mirror
I was hoping to see something more technical, along the lines of:
January: support for architecture X included in 2.4
Febuary: driver tulip.o expands support for cards X, Y, Z
March: stratjakt's HP deskjet finally works like TFA says it will.
April: ATI drivers that don't suck come along
etc etc
I have a short list of hardware that I'm really eager to see supported under linux (mostly Hauppages PVR-500MCE so I can have dual-tuner MythTV goodness for ~the same price as the 250), and that can be some hard info to find when you have to google a million forums, and most of the hits are just other people asking "Does this card work in linux?"
Changelogs are too esoteric. They say stuff like "added support for Conexant B52387fdf-X341 encoder chip".
My favorite was this one:
http://lwn.net/Articles/107110/
It appears that the overall quality of code, and more importantly, the amount of QA, on various browsers touted as "secure", is not up to par with MSIE; the type of a test I performed requires no human interaction and involves nearly no effort. Only MSIE appears to be able to consistently handle [*] malformed input well, suggesting this is the only program that underwent rudimentary security QA testing with a similar fuzz utility.
I wonder why I don't remember reading about that one here on slashdot.
None of that has anything to do with linux. DeCSS has nothing to do with OSS, it has to do with your right to descramble your own DVDs.
Actually, a lot of this list has nothing to do with linux, some just barely have to do with OSS in general, like the DeCSS stuff.
Hell, news on OSS apps like GIMP doesn't have anything to do with linux. I've always used GIMP on Windows.
What does the Sun/MSFT settlement have to do with linux?
I guess without the cruft, the timeline would just be:
January: Kernel version X released
April: Kernel version X.1 released
Novermber: Kernel version X.2 released
Every smartphone I've used has been a pile of shit.
I have a Kyocera 7135 with Palm OS. Sometimes it crashes when the phone rings, you go to answer it and see "seg fault" and the thing frozen up.
The battery life is absolute shit. I'll charge it all day at my office, leave today about 6PM, and the battery will be nearly dead by the time I get in tomorrow at 9(ish).
For the first couple of days I had fun playing with it. But realistically, it's not useful for anything. I write notes and schedule on paper, and I carry a little black book since not even the fucking phone directory works right.
Oh, and the phone "application" can't use the touch screen. Well, it can, but it wont. If you touch the screen, a modal dialog (meaning you cant do anything, even answer the phone) will pop up telling you you cant touch the screen. You have to clear it with the undersized OK button.
Jack of all trades, master of none.
Besides, people want tiny cell phones (razor phones), and they want big bright hi-res screens on their PDAs (VGA or higher).
They also want a keyboard option, or at least enough touchpad surface to be able to form letters, another gripe I have with my phone.
Even if I got the hang of graffiti, there's a scratchpad about the size of a pygmy's thumbnail
on which to form the letters. Absolutely uselsss.
I can't get it to behave as a wireless modem for my laptop for the life of me, hell it's nearly impossible to do anything 'net enabled with it. This is probably more a criticism of Verizon than Kyocera, but who knows. My point is, my boss pissed away 650 bucks per employee for these things, thinking they'd be useful to a bunch of techies who are constantly travelling. I'm the only one still using it, being too poor to replace it on my own dime.
Nah, if you want a shitty camera, a shitty phone, a shitty pda, and a shitty gaming platform, buy a "next-gen" N-Gage. Me, I can't wait until this thing dies, and they discontinue it, so I can expense out a real phone that actually makes phone calls, and a real "Personal Digital Assistant" that actually assists in doing stuff.
Hey, instead of worrying about it, why don't you just spam slashdot with some lame-assed "free iPaq" ponzi scheme?
Fuck you and your "free mac mini" offer.
I'm tired of cartoons being associated with geeks. They have nothing whatsoever to do with geek culture, it takes no brains or though to read them.
Cartoons and comic books are entirely within the domain of the Spaz, Knob, Bozo, and/or Retard.
Another poster pointed out that it was Disraeli who said it, though it's forever attributed to Twain.
Another I've seen wrongfully attributed to Twain (and my personal favorite) is this one:
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts' for support rather
than illumination."
-Andrew Lang (1844-1912)
BTW, Here's Twains quote:
Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."
- Autobiography of Mark Twain
He said it, but he was attributing it to Disraeli.
It's the old, if I sold 1 unit last year, and 10 units this year, I have achieved 1000% growth per annum!
w00t! Bullshit like that raises a lot of VC. The WSJ knows not to rock the boat, since they source much of the bullshit.
If it's lossless, you should be able to take digital file A, compress it into compressed file B, and then if you uncompress B to get A', then A' = A.
That is, the checksums for A and A' should match, etc.
That's how I define mathematically lossless.
Whatever this asshat is on about double blind and testing and all that, has more to do with the ability of his FLAC playing equipment to sound the same as his CD player, which is a whole 'nother ball of wax altogether.
Well, you were always wrong!
How about that!
CD is 16 bit stereo PCM at 44.1khz, no more no less.
Err, that would be error codes and positional information.
There's even a little more room, in the subcode channels where one can hide the data for CD+G (karaoke) or CD-TEXT.
441000hz*16bits*2 channels = 1411200 bits per second, 1400 kb/s
The 150KB number is for CD-ROM data storage, the gap between the two data rates is for the extra error detection and correction.
128K isn't sampling frequency, that would be a ridiculously high smapling frequency (capturing tones up to 64k, way higher than you or your dog could even hear).
128K is the bitrate, sampling (on a CD) would be 44.1khz, which can reproduce up to 22.05khz tones (the upper end of our ability to hear).
Some guy has a law that says you need to sample at a rate twice as frequent as the signal your sampling. Makes sense if you think about it.
Most of us aren't exactly audiophiles.
I'll go stereo to mono and reencode at 22khz for my tv captures. It sounds the same to me.
As for mp3s, etc, the only time I ever listen to it in the car, and there's so much ambient noise, it's not worth bothering. Hell, 128k joint stereo sounds like the CD to me, I don't know any better.
I don't listen to much music anymore. All the bullshit and RIAA and this is legal and blah blah blah, it's all killed music as an artform for me. I used to play guitar in bands, and love playing music. It's just dead to me now. White noise.
You forgot this:
"And I can't restore files from my backup solution.
Oh yeah, the first two archives I maid dissappeared for reasons I don't understand."
Now I remember why we don't use linux in the office. Asshats like this guy write a moronic article like this, and my PHB reads it, and says "You can't even restore files from a backup on linux!!!!"
Mondo/Mindi for your home/personal system restores (Norton Ghost-like), AMANDA for your enterprise or networked stuff, and tar/rsync for everything in between.
in the case where a site is legitimately advertised before existing (by a stupid person who hits 'send' before hitting 'register me a domain')
That's not a problem, a site that doesn't exist yet is not "legitimately advertised".
BIND caches misses.
It sounds to me like the spam filter should be doing the caching though, not DNS.
That is the crux of the problem, not the DNS load.
Then why is the article suggesting that spam is bringing DNS to it's knees and the sky is falling?
Sounds like a problem with the spam filter.
If the spam filter encounters an non-existent domain, then IT should cache it, and not bother DNS with subsequent requests. If it delivers it fine, the user marks it as spam, and bayesian algorithm doesn't allow "stratjaktshotsexviagramortgagesite.com" again.
He plugs in a USB drive, runs KDar to fill it with stuff.
/bin /usr, etc, which I then burn onto a couple of DVD9-Rs. I can run this to recreate my system.
/home.
Now, when his system borks, how does he restore? Or did he think that far ahead?
I skimmed the article, and nothing about restoring. Your backup is useless if you can't restore it.
Does he have to install and configure linux, X, and KDE just to be able to access KDar?
Forget all this jibberjabber, and emerge or apt-get or type whatever command you use to get Mondo/Mindi. Just perfect for home boxes, and most other use.
Burn yourself a bootable CD that can recreate your box, just like Norton Ghost for Linux. I have it write out the iso files and boot disk for
I run a seperate job to backup
Whats important, is to seperate system from user data when it comes to backups. This also forms my "archiving" system, since old "/home" backups stick around, so if I want to take a look at the version of foo.c I was writing 6 months ago, it's easy enough to find.
As much as I love Mondo/Mindi, it's not the be-all and end-all. AMANDA is a better choice for a corporate (more elaborate) environment. It's a PITA and not worth getting involved with for a simple user box.
A fax machine.
Only once, then their cached with some sort of default timeout (ie; check again in a few hours), or does this vary from implementation to implementation?
What I'm thinking, is that this is a big problem for (since this is slashdot) Microsoft ActiveDNS 2005, but not for BIND or OSS implementations, which have no such flaws.
Is this the case, or is it an inherent problem that DNS is just a shitty outdated protocol, like SMTP?
Will moving to IPv6 change anything?
The send the spam, then register the domain. That way there's no way they can be filtered based on their return address, or any hyperlinks in the message (since the domain doesnt exist, how could it be in a blacklist?)
What I don't understand is how this breaks DNS. DNS should be able to handle non-existent domains without issue.
I don't get it. If this is true, it sounds like a MAJOR MAJOR design flaw in DNS.
Surely it allows for invalid domain requests, or did they just assume everyone on the net will correctly type the domain name every time?
Or, is it not the email or DNS itself, but the anti-spam filters that are hammering the DNS servers?
I don't understand the problem. It sounds like a made up non-issue by the anti-spam crowd, frankly.
I don't get it.
So I send out a million spams, all saying "go to www.stratjaktsmadeupdomainname.com for hot viagra and lower mortgage payments."
The domain doesn't exist, and people click on it, which "cripples" dns because the dns servers have to respond with a "no such domain name" reply?
How does this cripple them? Was DNS not designed to handle fat-fingered domains gracefully?
What happens, do all the requests for my domain get propogated up the chain, is that the crux of the problem? If so, doesn't DNS update like, quite often (several times a day) now? There's no need to kick all requests up to the top, right?
Sure it is. Automatic transmissions, electronic fuel injection. Have you looked at a car made this year vs one made in the 1970s?
I can't figure out what the hell is going on under the hood anymore. It's all in black boxes.
Since when are linux zealots and Apple astroturfers "intelligent people"?