I stopped buying computer magazines when they started becoming more about advertising and superficial reviews. I remember in the "old days" magazines used to have courses on programming, and really much more thorough reviews. Even the letter sections have decreased in size/technical content.
Now they look prettier, but the content is severely watered down compared to things you can find online.
Its a shame, because I do appreciate having something physical to read in my hands, but the peak of content has passed.
(I remember I used to buy some magazines just for the cover-disc contents when I was much younger and had just discovered +fravia. Nowadays I have little interest in decompilation, and I can find new "targets" online easily enough. Often pre-cracked!)
I have the same fear, and by way of example I'm going to present the Dune Prequels.
Good authors (apparently; I've not read their independant books) including the son of Frank Herbert, but the novels were just.. flat. Or outright "wrong".
In fact it is hard to think of a good example of an estate/relative finishing off novels once the primary creator had died. The only one I can think of is Christopher Tolkien - and he faired only poorly in some areas. (Mind you the amount of papers that J.R.R Tolkien left behind I think he was damn lucky to get anything coherant out of them - so this isn't meant as a criticism of him.)
I'll not much of a Java fan, but in all fairness the last time that I saw a Java based GUI "pause" due to garbage collection was at least 3-4 years ago while IDEA in this case.
I'm not a huge Java fan either, but I have to agree. Things there have gotten much better.
There is only one program/environment which I can see "freeze" due to (I assume) garbage collection these days, and that is GNU Emacs!
Although Emacs has gotten much better too, it still has some weirdness in the 21.x releases (mostly relating to cursor redesplay issues, and freezes due to GC)
One thing which I just remembered - so I'll post it now even if it is a little late - the single biggest speedup/optimisation I made to my site was to disable DNS lookups in the Apache logfiles.
In the normal course of things this isn't a big deal, but try surving under a/. attack whilst you're getting a ton of incoming connections and your bandwidth is saturated - suddenly theres nothing "spare" to do the DNS lookups for logging purposes.
Nowadays I disable DNS lookups for the logfiles as a matter of policy, and just process the logfiles once/twice a day and do the lookups then.
There are many different ways you can optimise Apache from the simple to the complex, but that was the single biggest win for me.
I run a community website which is written in Perl with a MySQL back end.
Despite having just under 5000 users I had 3million hits last month, and shifted 13 Gb of traffic. Not bad for a single (dedicated) host!
There are two things that I'd suggest above all:
Mimimize database queries
Caching, caching, and more caching
I use Danga's memcached which has a perl interface, but there are PHP ones too. This allows me to sensibly cache database queries (don't forget to test things to make sure you expire the cache appropriately!)
A combination of minimising queries and caching has kept me going even under a slashdotting.
If you have written the site code yourself I'd urge you to add a test suite. My site runs a full test suite every day, and I run it manually whenever I make changes - this allows me to be sure that I'm not breaking things when I make changes.
Of course the standard development model of having a "live" site and a "test" site help here too. I develop the code on a laptop and store it under version control (CVS in my case, but it doesn't matter which system you use as long as you pick one) and only when it has passed the test suite do I push it to the live site.
Adding extra hardware can be an option for bigger sites, but I'm not at that point now. I had my biggest strain when the site reached around 1000 users, since then things keep ticking over nicely, and although it is growing it isn't growing terribly quickly which suits me fine. (There are a lot of users who visit the site via google searches and never register/return; I'd like to fix that, but I don't mind too much!)
There are other companies who will offer support too. I offer Debian support on a paid basis too, even though I prefer to point people at community resources where possible.
Had I been working there I'd have reported you for sending mass-faxes which is illegal in the UK.
Still I certainly take the point that drastic action is sometimes required to get things which are owed to you.
I started down the small-claims court several times to get refunds I was owed which never seemed to get processed in a timely manner. Never made it all the way through since the companies settled early, but it definitely woke them up.
I'm living in Leith and have the 30 quid package, mostly because the previous owner/tenants had all the cabling already installed. I can max out the incoming connection too.
I can't say I've ever had to call their customer support, so I dont know how good they are. But I guess saying that I've had no problems in two years is something.
They have occaisional outages. I think I've seen maybe two mornings where I had no internet in the past 18 months. Frustrating since my neighbours open wireless link also went down;)
The Debian Administration website is written in Perl, and the code is available. Might be tricky for people to install, especially on non-Debian hosts, but it is simple, secure, and reliable.
It is also insanely easy to manage.
It doesn't have different payment types, but it does support community adverts, user accounts, articles, polls, weblogs, etc.
You're using those terms in exactly the opposite way to that which everybody else has done.
Virus: Program which as code contained inside itself which will copy itself to other binaries when executed. Optionally contains payload of badness. Requires user-action to spread.
Worm: Spreads over a network/environment with no user action.
Trojan: Code which pretends to be one thing, but contains hidden code of badness to run too.
I dunno about you guys, buy I consider malicious foreign code executing on my machine without my permission a security hole.
But this is the root of the problem. Viruses do not appear by magic! The malicious code only runs when somebody receives an infected binary by some means, and then executes it themselves. Implicitly with their permission!
Sure there have been bugs which have lead to auto-execution via vectors such as Outlook, but those bugs have been fixed.
What you say about deep-freeze, etc, is interesting and I'd love to see it too for those times when I have friends running Windows. However the absense of such a thing does not make user-executed code doing "bad things" an exploit in any sensible fashion.
Default deny would solve this problem fairly nicely. Perhaps embed digital signatures in files and only allow signed files to run?
However then you're going to have to protect the system and you're getting into DRM territory - something most people seem to hate!
For Linux systems google "Trusted Path Execution", thats a nice simple compromise system which allows you to only run something on a "trusted path", eg. "/bin", "/sbin", "/usr/local/bin". The downside is that you can't run scripts from "~/bin/"...
A proactive system would patch the holes that are being exploited.
The problem here is that virus don't typically exploit any hole. They are simply programs that run with the privileges of the user who executes them.
A typical (old school) virus would do three things:
When executed find files that can be written to - pick one at random.
Update that program to append itself to the end of it. Patch the header so that execution starts at the newly appended code.
Work out where the currently infected program should have started execution from - jump to it.
There are only two things you can do to protect against this, in general:
Don't run infected programs.
Don't allow the current user to modify binary files.
In Windows it is the second issue which allows viruses to spread - typically the local user would have write access to the system binaries, so eventually Notepad.exe would get infected, etc. Under Linux/Unix root generally is the only person who can write to system binaries, so a typical user can't infect them.
However Linux viruses do exist, and are trivial to write. The reason they don't spread is partly because users are used to getting their binaries from trusted sources, partly because they download things from source, and partly because most users don't run with the ability to modify system files. (Sure you might be able to infect ~/bin - but there isn't a big gain)
Windows is getting better at allowing non-Administrators to work properly, so sooner or later the ability of joe-random-desktop user to modify system binaries will disapear and at that point viruss will stop. Still there will be worms, trojans, and all the other nasties left!
I've gone on a bit much, but I wanted to drive the point home : Viruses do not exploit security holes. (In general)
I find it amazing that the Editors can take the time to scan the comments, create a decent summery of the discussion (illustrated with quotes), and yet repeatedly fail to do grammer and spelling checks on "normal" articles.
These backslashes have been consistently well-written and interesting, even though they are rehashes of older discussions which I've most likely already seen.
It happened once in 2003, but I can't recall any other incidents. That time it was a previously unkown Linux kernel hole which was used to gain root along with a sniffed password.
This time it looks like another kernel hole - but we've not had public confirmation. Could have been been an exploit for CVE-2006-2451...
On the one hand I want to have a small phone since I do want to keep it with me easily on those days I want to be contacted.
On the other hand phones can be so small they are painful to use for some things. For example my previous phone had a keypad which was so small it was physically hard to press the buttons with my big thumb! Not a big deal for dialling simple numbers, but a real pain when it came to sending text/sms messages.
So yes, I can see that a phone being too small could be a con, but I guess it depends on how big your fingers are, and what you use the phone for.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed.
I stopped buying computer magazines when they started becoming more about advertising and superficial reviews. I remember in the "old days" magazines used to have courses on programming, and really much more thorough reviews. Even the letter sections have decreased in size/technical content.
Now they look prettier, but the content is severely watered down compared to things you can find online.
Its a shame, because I do appreciate having something physical to read in my hands, but the peak of content has passed.
(I remember I used to buy some magazines just for the cover-disc contents when I was much younger and had just discovered +fravia. Nowadays I have little interest in decompilation, and I can find new "targets" online easily enough. Often pre-cracked!)
Or very small values of 5.
Speak for yourself - I've not used shampoo in years!
Instead I've burnt my way through hundreds of razors and blades ..
I have the same fear, and by way of example I'm going to present the Dune Prequels.
Good authors (apparently; I've not read their independant books) including the son of Frank Herbert, but the novels were just .. flat. Or outright "wrong".
In fact it is hard to think of a good example of an estate/relative finishing off novels once the primary creator had died. The only one I can think of is Christopher Tolkien - and he faired only poorly in some areas. (Mind you the amount of papers that J.R.R Tolkien left behind I think he was damn lucky to get anything coherant out of them - so this isn't meant as a criticism of him.)
How about only being able to go online with AOL dialup?
But if you want to you can install Xorg/X11 and access it remotely via VNC.
Here is one guide on how to do that. (Adding an SSH tunnel would make a lot of sense for remote connections, but should be simple.)
I'm not a huge Java fan either, but I have to agree. Things there have gotten much better.
There is only one program/environment which I can see "freeze" due to (I assume) garbage collection these days, and that is GNU Emacs!
Although Emacs has gotten much better too, it still has some weirdness in the 21.x releases (mostly relating to cursor redesplay issues, and freezes due to GC)
One thing which I just remembered - so I'll post it now even if it is a little late - the single biggest speedup/optimisation I made to my site was to disable DNS lookups in the Apache logfiles.
In the normal course of things this isn't a big deal, but try surving under a /. attack whilst you're getting a ton of incoming connections and your bandwidth is saturated - suddenly theres nothing "spare" to do the DNS lookups for logging purposes.
Nowadays I disable DNS lookups for the logfiles as a matter of policy, and just process the logfiles once/twice a day and do the lookups then.
There are many different ways you can optimise Apache from the simple to the complex, but that was the single biggest win for me.
I run a community website which is written in Perl with a MySQL back end.
Despite having just under 5000 users I had 3million hits last month, and shifted 13 Gb of traffic. Not bad for a single (dedicated) host!
There are two things that I'd suggest above all:
I use Danga's memcached which has a perl interface, but there are PHP ones too. This allows me to sensibly cache database queries (don't forget to test things to make sure you expire the cache appropriately!)
A combination of minimising queries and caching has kept me going even under a slashdotting.
If you have written the site code yourself I'd urge you to add a test suite. My site runs a full test suite every day, and I run it manually whenever I make changes - this allows me to be sure that I'm not breaking things when I make changes.
Of course the standard development model of having a "live" site and a "test" site help here too. I develop the code on a laptop and store it under version control (CVS in my case, but it doesn't matter which system you use as long as you pick one) and only when it has passed the test suite do I push it to the live site.
Adding extra hardware can be an option for bigger sites, but I'm not at that point now. I had my biggest strain when the site reached around 1000 users, since then things keep ticking over nicely, and although it is growing it isn't growing terribly quickly which suits me fine. (There are a lot of users who visit the site via google searches and never register/return; I'd like to fix that, but I don't mind too much!)
Debian has a list of consultants / commercial support people on its site.
There are other companies who will offer support too. I offer Debian support on a paid basis too, even though I prefer to point people at community resources where possible.
Sarcasm doesn't need rolling eyes, or a particular tone of voice; those are just clues for the slow ..
It only needs to check the Release file, since that contains the hashes of the "Packages" files, which in turn contain the hashes of the .deb files.
If the checksums file apt will give errors.
Had I been working there I'd have reported you for sending mass-faxes which is illegal in the UK.
Still I certainly take the point that drastic action is sometimes required to get things which are owed to you.
I started down the small-claims court several times to get refunds I was owed which never seemed to get processed in a timely manner. Never made it all the way through since the companies settled early, but it definitely woke them up.
I'm living in Leith and have the 30 quid package, mostly because the previous owner/tenants had all the cabling already installed. I can max out the incoming connection too.
I can't say I've ever had to call their customer support, so I dont know how good they are. But I guess saying that I've had no problems in two years is something.
They have occaisional outages. I think I've seen maybe two mornings where I had no internet in the past 18 months. Frustrating since my neighbours open wireless link also went down ;)
The Debian Administration website is written in Perl, and the code is available. Might be tricky for people to install, especially on non-Debian hosts, but it is simple, secure, and reliable.
It is also insanely easy to manage.
It doesn't have different payment types, but it does support community adverts, user accounts, articles, polls, weblogs, etc.
You're using those terms in exactly the opposite way to that which everybody else has done.
Virus: Program which as code contained inside itself which will copy itself to other binaries when executed. Optionally contains payload of badness. Requires user-action to spread.
Worm: Spreads over a network/environment with no user action.
Trojan: Code which pretends to be one thing, but contains hidden code of badness to run too .
But this is the root of the problem. Viruses do not appear by magic! The malicious code only runs when somebody receives an infected binary by some means, and then executes it themselves. Implicitly with their permission!
Sure there have been bugs which have lead to auto-execution via vectors such as Outlook, but those bugs have been fixed.
What you say about deep-freeze, etc, is interesting and I'd love to see it too for those times when I have friends running Windows. However the absense of such a thing does not make user-executed code doing "bad things" an exploit in any sensible fashion.
Default deny would solve this problem fairly nicely. Perhaps embed digital signatures in files and only allow signed files to run?
However then you're going to have to protect the system and you're getting into DRM territory - something most people seem to hate!
For Linux systems google "Trusted Path Execution", thats a nice simple compromise system which allows you to only run something on a "trusted path", eg. "/bin", "/sbin", "/usr/local/bin". The downside is that you can't run scripts from "~/bin/"...
The problem here is that virus don't typically exploit any hole. They are simply programs that run with the privileges of the user who executes them.
A typical (old school) virus would do three things:
There are only two things you can do to protect against this, in general:
In Windows it is the second issue which allows viruses to spread - typically the local user would have write access to the system binaries, so eventually Notepad.exe would get infected, etc. Under Linux/Unix root generally is the only person who can write to system binaries, so a typical user can't infect them.
However Linux viruses do exist, and are trivial to write. The reason they don't spread is partly because users are used to getting their binaries from trusted sources, partly because they download things from source, and partly because most users don't run with the ability to modify system files. (Sure you might be able to infect ~/bin - but there isn't a big gain)
Windows is getting better at allowing non-Administrators to work properly, so sooner or later the ability of joe-random-desktop user to modify system binaries will disapear and at that point viruss will stop. Still there will be worms, trojans, and all the other nasties left!
I've gone on a bit much, but I wanted to drive the point home : Viruses do not exploit security holes. (In general)
I find it amazing that the Editors can take the time to scan the comments, create a decent summery of the discussion (illustrated with quotes), and yet repeatedly fail to do grammer and spelling checks on "normal" articles.
These backslashes have been consistently well-written and interesting, even though they are rehashes of older discussions which I've most likely already seen.
Maybe they were just examples..?
But there are programs designed to detect weak passwords, which could have been what was used. Essentially they try to bruteforce passwords, and if they find one it was weak!
It happened once in 2003, but I can't recall any other incidents. That time it was a previously unkown Linux kernel hole which was used to gain root along with a sniffed password.
This time it looks like another kernel hole - but we've not had public confirmation. Could have been been an exploit for CVE-2006-2451...
OK I'll bite.
In which ways specifically isn't it as good?
Rendering? Standards compliance? Customization? Stability? Features?
Not true.
It was available in Windows 2000, but required a registry edit to turn on.
In Windows XP it became on-by-default.
On the one hand I want to have a small phone since I do want to keep it with me easily on those days I want to be contacted.
On the other hand phones can be so small they are painful to use for some things. For example my previous phone had a keypad which was so small it was physically hard to press the buttons with my big thumb! Not a big deal for dialling simple numbers, but a real pain when it came to sending text/sms messages.
So yes, I can see that a phone being too small could be a con, but I guess it depends on how big your fingers are, and what you use the phone for.