My new product, "Safone", is an adapted rubber preservative, designed to fit snugly over your mobile phone. There are two models, one for the standard vertical phone, and one for the flip-phones popular in Asia.
Safone(tm) comes in handy 5-packs, in a choice of colours and flavours, and for only $19.50 you can get three packets now.
It's a standard reaction on behalf of the parents and a sad one. There are kids who will go out and do terrible things, but violence is not exactly a new thing in human history. If anything, todays' societies are remarkably non-violent compared to past ones.
For the parents - especially of the killers - it's an attempt to find blame somewhere. I feel sorry for them: since Freud's time, parents have been told "you are responsible for the way your kids turn out", when in fact many studies show that parents are amazingly irrelevant to their children's character. One long twin study showed approximately 50% coming from genes, 45% from unknown sources but presumably peer influence, and 5% from parents.
There is violence in our genes, but it generally needs a certain kind of culture to bring it out. The place to look for the causes of such killings are the youth cultures these kids hung-out in. There is no evidence at all that violent games or movies influence children, but it seems clear that violent children prefer to express themselves through violent games, virtual or real.
Court cases like this resolve absolutely nothing, because they divert the discussion in meaningless directions. Let's ban all violent games and movies... OK, will that change anything? Take a look at (random selection from a large pool) Uganda, where the kids watch no movies at all, yet 10,000 young (5-12) killers roam the north.
It is very difficult to change a violent culture, but it is possible.
The first thing is to understand the way violence is propagated. Like all youth cultures, it goes from youth to youth, bypassing all adult control. You have to work at this level, thus.
The second thing is to understand how individuals get drawn into violent behaviour that reinforces itself and finally becomes habitual. Can a young man turn to authority for fair protection? If not, he is more likely to use his own force for self-protection. Can a young man who uses drugs turn to authority for help? If not, he is likely to resort to retribution and violence. Can a young man escape from a violent or oppressive environment? If not, he will eventually give up on himself and "go postal", taking his own life but first taking the lives of as many of his peers as he can, in an attempt to regain some face.
I think it's clear that the rigid and somewhat intolerant mentality of adult-youth relations in the States is a large part of the problem.
Banning violent video games goes further in the wrong direction. Now we make criminals out of those youngsters who want such games. Excellent.
You cannot earn karma for comments that are moderated as funny
Ah, but you will see that I have more karma than I can ever use, and despite this, people insist on giving me their nice mod points. Not to boast, but I think I had seven comments yesterday that were rated 5. Hey, I'm not keeping score!
And, really, I agree that jokes about lame jokes are still lame, but sometimes when you take a dried fig and squeeze it just so, a little juicy sap will run out of it.
Humour is not something you should take too seriously, my friend.
This is the scene. I'm a young boy, 8 years old, in Dar-es-Salaam, capital of Tanzania. On the horizon sits a squat building with a tall tower, belching some kind of gray-white smoke.
"Mummy, what's that?" "It's a power plant, Heirony" "What does it burn, Mummy?" "Caschew nut fruits, Heirony"
The caschew nut grows as a small nut on a huge fruit which is rich and oily. For each of those tiny caschew nuts, a fruit weighing perhaps 500gr is grown, harvested, and then discarded.
In Tanzania in 1970, and probably still today, these fruits were dried and then burnt for power. Glad to see that some third-world technology had finally made it to the rich west.
Look, my comment was a comment on the story, remarking that while an exploit in Sendmail was definitely interesting, newsworthy even, it was terrible subject matter for discussion.
Now, your comment on my comment was a metacomment. This comment is therefore a meta-meta-comment, and YH most definitely BT.
Travel booking programs are particularly complex and it appears that the two programs here share enough logic for the VB version to be infringing.
It is not unreasonable: if I sing "happy birthday" on the air, I have to pay copyright fees. So if I rewrite someone's code in another language (or even the same language), why do copyright fees not apply?
It is far better that copyright be applied to this kind of case (assuming the infringing program actually is a rewrite, not a coincidence) than patent law. At least with copyright you know that a clean-room rewrite is safe. With patents you won't know until the lawyers knock.
It was me who complained, yes, beloved, it was meeee, all meeee.
Heckle, I command thee.
And yet, strangely, I feel compelled to agree with you that Microsoft code is not the most important part of the Internet. Very true. In fact, if the only code out there was Microsoft's there would be no Internet.
A serious response to the story is too bleak. Ho-hum, upgrade sendmail, patch it, OK.
Comedy is inappropriate. "Is that sendmail dead? No, it's just sleeping. Oh, I could swear it was dead! No, it's just tired, see? Sendmail gottan exploit, sendmail gottan exploit!"
Irony is difficult. To be honest, I can't even be sure which ironic form I would employ in this case. Forget irony.
Sarcasm? "Sendmail, yeah, like we're still using that dinosaur!" What, we are? Dang. Why? "Cause it was there?" What kind of an excuse is that?!
Nihilism... "yes, another day, another exploit. ssh, now sendmail. I can just see the future, one long bitter trail of unpatched software, server after server to upgrade. brain the size of a planet, and here I am, patching sendmail. what's the use, I ask you...?"
Slashdotisms? All your sendmail overlords are 1-2-3 profit to us? Imagine? In Russia? No, no, no.
SCO! SCO! "It's not an exploit, it's a snippet!!!" Worth a try.
Damn you to the deepest depths of hell, Slsadhot edirots, this story has so little karma leverage it hurts.
It takes a few hours to entirely automate the build process for a product under Linux. You have this CVS thing at one end, a bunch of Linux distros at the other, you press a button, and ten minutes later you get a bunch of neat binary packages back.
So painful it hurts.
Ah, insult me again, I'm not doing anything special today.
No, of course performance is not the only indicator of a product's worth.
Let me list my criteria for, e.g. a database product:
1. accuracy 2. performance 3. ease of administration 4. ease of installation 5. price
Not in any specific order. I've used Oracle databases for about 12 years, and on every single one of these counts, MySQL wins. Every single one, without exception.
Oracle wins on a number of other criteria:
1. profitability 2. complexity 3. need for expensive DBAs 4. consumption of excess time 5. image 6. marketing strength 7. market share 8. number of marketing drones
But as an independent software developer, thank goodness none of these actually help me in my business. MySQL has already killed Oracle's database, and their attempt to escape that trap and move to ERP systems and clustering technologies is just another industry troll.
Sorry, you're talking to someone who has been there, seen it, and speaks from long, painful experience.
The specifics of HTTP are not vital knowledge
on
HTTP Developer's Handbook
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Every developer should be forced to write a simple HTTP server just so that they understand the basic mechanisms of the protocol. But the full details go way, way beyond what I'd expect someone on my team to know (or spend time learning) unless they were writing a server, a HTTP client, or low-level HTTP interface functions.
An efficient developer is one who is protected from the details of the technical world, and who can spend his energy and time on the functional aspects of his problem.
That's my conclusion after 20 years of (mainly successful) software projects.
I just love your sense of humour. I remember when we switched an ISAM application to Oracle in the mid 1990's, on a Unix box. A single record access by primary key was 20,000 times faster with the ISAM system than under Oracle.
I retested this with later versions of Oracle and found that the performance was worse, not better.
Now, I have a nice server under a desk here, and we reloaded an Oracle 9 database on it, it took something like 8 hours to rebuild. Since we make portable software, just for fun I reloaded the same database under MySQL. Less than 15 minutes.
Oh, but perhaps you were serious. No, you were serious? Jesus! You really were serious! Oh, that's even funnier. (wipes tear from corner of eye).
First, DLL hell on Windows, shared libraries on Linux, same headaches. Consider static linking: larger binaries but fewer headaches.
Second, it is trivial and cheap to build packages for RedHat, Debian, and SuSE as you need them, we do this automatically. See, when the OS is free, it costs you little to set-up development systems. If you're tight for hardware, use UML.
Third, there are serious arguments against delivering binary-only packages, and in favour of building from source, and these arguments are not related to the GPL. My company has always had a policy of delivering source code whenever possible, and we've not had any issues with that. In contrast, it allows our customers to get much more out of the product.
Observation: you will notice many, many packages that install and run just fine on a wide mixture of Linux systems. Someone, somewhere, is not killing themselves doing this. Perhaps Microsoft buddies just die easily. Or perhaps the problem is easily solved by the application of tools like autoconf that are unknown in the Windows world.
The fact that.com,.net,.org have no wildcard entry is surely just an implementation detail. Sure, it's been this way for a long time.
But you are saying there is a rule that disallows wild-card entries? This breaks an RFC somewhere? So, the wildcard entries on many TLDs such as.nu,.to,.tv, etc. are illegal as well?
Come on, this is not a sustainable argument. Yes, Verisgn have broken something. No, it's not religious law, just a convention we all forgot about.
Note that participating in this involves signing over your claim to Lindows. This is probably a good thing. Lindows are a major pain in the ass for the boys from Redmond, and they deserve our general support for this.
It's hard to understand the hostility some people demonstrate towards Lindows, which is a good package, well-made and well-supported. It's not ideal for pioneer Linux users, but you do have a large choice of alternatives. What Lindows has done is to demonstrate the possibility of a migration path from Windows to Linux, and for we should be grateful.
Incidentally, to those who say Lindows is "crippleware" it's very hard to cripple Debian, which classically bootstraps from a diskette. You do need to know what a shell prompt is, and how to use apt-get, but that's about it.
My buddies are being killed by supporting all the Linux variants. It is hard to build a product on top of Linux because every other user compiles his own kernel and there are many different species.
Ain't it sweet? I count five lies:
(1) people being killed by supporting (gasp) operating systems... gosh, horror and violence, not nice at all!
(2) all the Linux "variants", are in fact pretty much one standard, LSB, with several skins
(3) "hard to build a product on top of Linux", rather than, hmmm, Windows? Linux is incredibly easy to build for. I suspect the fact that it's very standard helps.
(4) "every other user compiles his kernel"... maybe at Microsoft. I suspect less than 1 in 20 Linux users ever compiled a kernel.
(5) compiling a kernel means you can't support it... WTF? The kernel is incredibly stable, since most changes are in external modules. And I can't remember a single case where a kernel change broke one of my apps.
(6) (sorry, I was not counting well), "many different species"... well, AFAICS the only difference between the Linux distributions is that they have different packaging methods, different timelines as to their versions, and different UI tools for hardware detection, configuration, etc. Nothing at all that makes life hard.
Look: I just installed Xandros, which is Debian with a nice face. On two different types of machine, and it installed without asking a single question about my hardware except whether the mouse was left or right-handed. Check my journal...
Windows never worked this nicely. Where is the support issue?
In the writing indistry we call this "to condemn with faint praise".
Yeah, Windows kinda works, I mean, it'll run Office without crashing too often, but it's just killing by buddies to have to maintain Win2K, WinXP, and even some older Win98 machines, not to mention we have a whole cupboard simply filled with driver CDs for every PC we have.
Actually, it is exactly as simple as I say, although in my code I've cached the verishit address so that the overhead is minimalized, and there are probably even easier methods, such as getting patched TCP/IP stacks that do this automatically.
I took issue with the "every" part of your statement. Please name just ten applications, ou of the millions that exist and the hundreds that you certainly use every day, that this breaks. OK, name just one. So, then, what exactly is the issue apart from general hatred of Verisgn...?
Hey, I enjoy a good stone-throwing as well as the next person, but for once I think it's really a waste of time.
The truth seems to be that Verisign have simply DoS'd themselves, hosed their own servers, since their redirection server is down.
If I look at the trends of the last decades, while disk sizes increase exponentially, the actual number of top-level objects I store on my systems increases only linearly, and quite slowly. True, I still store individual documents, but I also store AVIs, ISOs, entire photo albums that take gigabytes each.
It's still random access: I can choose and access an object, even individual photos, without scanning through large amounts of unwanted data.
...[the] computer can now no longer find out if it's due to a misconfiguration...or if it's just a temporary problem (if the other computer does exist but does not respond).
It's so trivial to do this that I'm almost embarassed to have to say it:
verishit = lookup_address ("verishit" & longrandomnumber & ".com)
if lookup_address (realhost) = verishit
then you know it's not there
What is the big deal? Since when can't software can't handle bizarre and arbitrary external conditions? Sure, it's been so long that the Internet appears to be entirely fixed in stone, but that is why we have what we call, in the jargon, "soft-ware main-ten-ance".
You are serious? So billions of applications out there suddenly stopped working? This explains why my entire business has ground to halt, and I can't even access Slashdot... oh...
There is no value in making such statements.
The change to the DNS lookups breaks applications that rely on an unprovable negative. This is a small, specific class of applications that can be fixed quite easily (as the BIND patch shows).
I'd like to see a list of those specific applications that cannot work any longer because they cannot distinguish "Not resolved" from 64.94.110.11.
Let me put it like this, here is a 2-line patch to fix any application so affected:
verishit = lookup_address ("shithappens" & datetime & ".com")
if lookup_address (realdomain) = verishit then
-- act as if not found
else
-- act as if found
endif
and I've gone and patched roughly 200,000 lines of code in the time it took me to make this comment, since all socket connections are in a single library function (as they damn well should be).
Rational discussion welcome, hysterical overreaction less so.
OK, bad form to reply to my own post, but it was a serious question, not a troll.
Granted this breaks a lot of systems that depended on getting error results for failed lookups. So, now they will have to check for 64.94.110.11. Not nice.
But as much as I dislike monopolists and their heavy-handed ways, the arguments against this action seem a little weak.
One guy complains that his printer no longer works because previously, his network configuration depended on failing to resolve some addresses in order to route the request internally.
Another person mentions that anti-spam checks based on domain names will fail. So, this is a valid check for spam? Oh, I thought spammers simply spoofed the originating host, which is why I get hundred of "returned" messages I never sent.
Someone else complains that it's an abuse of powers given to Verisign by the government. OK... but so is 75% of business. It's a tough life, yeah.
Seriously, I'm not trolling: I'm trying to understand what the actual technical problem is. How can any system rely on the absence of something? How can a "not resolved" error actually be more useful than a resolution to an IP address that does nothing useful?
1. AA batteries, not AAA or fixed rechargeable Li-ION. AAA have a terribly low capacity (~450mAh compared to up to 1900mAh for AA).
2. Cheap and robust external power supply. Batteries are expensive.
2. B&W screen, for godsake. Color is luxury, make a high-contrast large, protected B&W screen that can show decent amounts of information.
3. Little chiclet keyboard that plugs in to a mini-USB slot. Something like the old Spectrum keyboards, cheap, nasty, unbreakable.
That would make it cheaper and more useful. Imagine a computer you'd happily give to an 10-year old, no matter if it breaks.
Lastly, I'd add bluetooth because it's a tiny extra cost, only a few $, and provides unbreakable networking and connectivity better than any physical connection, and make the whole thing run on a stripped-down embedded Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
My new product, "Safone", is an adapted rubber preservative, designed to fit snugly over your mobile phone. There are two models, one for the standard vertical phone, and one for the flip-phones popular in Asia.
Safone(tm) comes in handy 5-packs, in a choice of colours and flavours, and for only $19.50 you can get three packets now.
It's time to roll on your Safone now!!
Don't phonome, Safone!
It's a standard reaction on behalf of the parents and a sad one. There are kids who will go out and do terrible things, but violence is not exactly a new thing in human history. If anything, todays' societies are remarkably non-violent compared to past ones.
For the parents - especially of the killers - it's an attempt to find blame somewhere. I feel sorry for them: since Freud's time, parents have been told "you are responsible for the way your kids turn out", when in fact many studies show that parents are amazingly irrelevant to their children's character. One long twin study showed approximately 50% coming from genes, 45% from unknown sources but presumably peer influence, and 5% from parents.
There is violence in our genes, but it generally needs a certain kind of culture to bring it out. The place to look for the causes of such killings are the youth cultures these kids hung-out in. There is no evidence at all that violent games or movies influence children, but it seems clear that violent children prefer to express themselves through violent games, virtual or real.
Court cases like this resolve absolutely nothing, because they divert the discussion in meaningless directions. Let's ban all violent games and movies... OK, will that change anything? Take a look at (random selection from a large pool) Uganda, where the kids watch no movies at all, yet 10,000 young (5-12) killers roam the north.
It is very difficult to change a violent culture, but it is possible.
The first thing is to understand the way violence is propagated. Like all youth cultures, it goes from youth to youth, bypassing all adult control. You have to work at this level, thus.
The second thing is to understand how individuals get drawn into violent behaviour that reinforces itself and finally becomes habitual. Can a young man turn to authority for fair protection? If not, he is more likely to use his own force for self-protection. Can a young man who uses drugs turn to authority for help? If not, he is likely to resort to retribution and violence. Can a young man escape from a violent or oppressive environment? If not, he will eventually give up on himself and "go postal", taking his own life but first taking the lives of as many of his peers as he can, in an attempt to regain some face.
I think it's clear that the rigid and somewhat intolerant mentality of adult-youth relations in the States is a large part of the problem.
Banning violent video games goes further in the wrong direction. Now we make criminals out of those youngsters who want such games. Excellent.
You cannot earn karma for comments that are moderated as funny
Ah, but you will see that I have more karma than I can ever use, and despite this, people insist on giving me their nice mod points. Not to boast, but I think I had seven comments yesterday that were rated 5. Hey, I'm not keeping score!
And, really, I agree that jokes about lame jokes are still lame, but sometimes when you take a dried fig and squeeze it just so, a little juicy sap will run out of it.
Humour is not something you should take too seriously, my friend.
This is the scene. I'm a young boy, 8 years old, in Dar-es-Salaam, capital of Tanzania. On the horizon sits a squat building with a tall tower, belching some kind of gray-white smoke.
"Mummy, what's that?"
"It's a power plant, Heirony"
"What does it burn, Mummy?"
"Caschew nut fruits, Heirony"
The caschew nut grows as a small nut on a huge fruit which is rich and oily. For each of those tiny caschew nuts, a fruit weighing perhaps 500gr is grown, harvested, and then discarded.
In Tanzania in 1970, and probably still today, these fruits were dried and then burnt for power. Glad to see that some third-world technology had finally made it to the rich west.
you seem to have done pretty good anyways.
Of course, there is little point posting a comment that does not interest and intrigue.
Look, my comment was a comment on the story, remarking that while an exploit in Sendmail was definitely interesting, newsworthy even, it was terrible subject matter for discussion.
Now, your comment on my comment was a metacomment. This comment is therefore a meta-meta-comment, and YH most definitely BT.
Travel booking programs are particularly complex and it appears that the two programs here share enough logic for the VB version to be infringing.
It is not unreasonable: if I sing "happy birthday" on the air, I have to pay copyright fees. So if I rewrite someone's code in another language (or even the same language), why do copyright fees not apply?
It is far better that copyright be applied to this kind of case (assuming the infringing program actually is a rewrite, not a coincidence) than patent law. At least with copyright you know that a clean-room rewrite is safe. With patents you won't know until the lawyers knock.
It was me who complained, yes, beloved, it was meeee, all meeee.
Heckle, I command thee.
And yet, strangely, I feel compelled to agree with you that Microsoft code is not the most important part of the Internet. Very true. In fact, if the only code out there was Microsoft's there would be no Internet.
OK, you can heckle now, I'm mentally prepared.
A serious response to the story is too bleak. Ho-hum, upgrade sendmail, patch it, OK.
Comedy is inappropriate. "Is that sendmail dead? No, it's just sleeping. Oh, I could swear it was dead! No, it's just tired, see? Sendmail gottan exploit, sendmail gottan exploit!"
Irony is difficult. To be honest, I can't even be sure which ironic form I would employ in this case. Forget irony.
Sarcasm? "Sendmail, yeah, like we're still using that dinosaur!" What, we are? Dang. Why? "Cause it was there?" What kind of an excuse is that?!
Nihilism... "yes, another day, another exploit. ssh, now sendmail. I can just see the future, one long bitter trail of unpatched software, server after server to upgrade. brain the size of a planet, and here I am, patching sendmail. what's the use, I ask you...?"
Slashdotisms? All your sendmail overlords are 1-2-3 profit to us? Imagine? In Russia? No, no, no.
SCO! SCO! "It's not an exploit, it's a snippet!!!" Worth a try.
Damn you to the deepest depths of hell, Slsadhot edirots, this story has so little karma leverage it hurts.
Damn, that hurt my eyes! You evil bastard!
Man, you are polite today.
It takes a few hours to entirely automate the build process for a product under Linux. You have this CVS thing at one end, a bunch of Linux distros at the other, you press a button, and ten minutes later you get a bunch of neat binary packages back.
So painful it hurts.
Ah, insult me again, I'm not doing anything special today.
No, of course performance is not the only indicator of a product's worth.
Let me list my criteria for, e.g. a database product:
1. accuracy
2. performance
3. ease of administration
4. ease of installation
5. price
Not in any specific order. I've used Oracle databases for about 12 years, and on every single one of these counts, MySQL wins. Every single one, without exception.
Oracle wins on a number of other criteria:
1. profitability
2. complexity
3. need for expensive DBAs
4. consumption of excess time
5. image
6. marketing strength
7. market share
8. number of marketing drones
But as an independent software developer, thank goodness none of these actually help me in my business. MySQL has already killed Oracle's database, and their attempt to escape that trap and move to ERP systems and clustering technologies is just another industry troll.
Sorry, you're talking to someone who has been there, seen it, and speaks from long, painful experience.
Every developer should be forced to write a simple HTTP server just so that they understand the basic mechanisms of the protocol. But the full details go way, way beyond what I'd expect someone on my team to know (or spend time learning) unless they were writing a server, a HTTP client, or low-level HTTP interface functions.
An efficient developer is one who is protected from the details of the technical world, and who can spend his energy and time on the functional aspects of his problem.
That's my conclusion after 20 years of (mainly successful) software projects.
Oh, please, keep those coming.
I just love your sense of humour. I remember when we switched an ISAM application to Oracle in the mid 1990's, on a Unix box. A single record access by primary key was 20,000 times faster with the ISAM system than under Oracle.
I retested this with later versions of Oracle and found that the performance was worse, not better.
Now, I have a nice server under a desk here, and we reloaded an Oracle 9 database on it, it took something like 8 hours to rebuild. Since we make portable software, just for fun I reloaded the same database under MySQL. Less than 15 minutes.
Oh, but perhaps you were serious. No, you were serious? Jesus! You really were serious! Oh, that's even funnier. (wipes tear from corner of eye).
More, more, more...
Just waaaay ahead of its time.
First we have to get through CTX, then DTX, then ETX, then... well, let's just say that WTX is a few decades away.
First, DLL hell on Windows, shared libraries on Linux, same headaches. Consider static linking: larger binaries but fewer headaches.
Second, it is trivial and cheap to build packages for RedHat, Debian, and SuSE as you need them, we do this automatically. See, when the OS is free, it costs you little to set-up development systems. If you're tight for hardware, use UML.
Third, there are serious arguments against delivering binary-only packages, and in favour of building from source, and these arguments are not related to the GPL. My company has always had a policy of delivering source code whenever possible, and we've not had any issues with that. In contrast, it allows our customers to get much more out of the product.
Observation: you will notice many, many packages that install and run just fine on a wide mixture of Linux systems. Someone, somewhere, is not killing themselves doing this. Perhaps Microsoft buddies just die easily. Or perhaps the problem is easily solved by the application of tools like autoconf that are unknown in the Windows world.
The fact that .com,.net,.org have no wildcard entry is surely just an implementation detail. Sure, it's been this way for a long time.
.nu, .to, .tv, etc. are illegal as well?
But you are saying there is a rule that disallows wild-card entries? This breaks an RFC somewhere? So, the wildcard entries on many TLDs such as
Come on, this is not a sustainable argument. Yes, Verisgn have broken something. No, it's not religious law, just a convention we all forgot about.
Note that participating in this involves signing over your claim to Lindows. This is probably a good thing. Lindows are a major pain in the ass for the boys from Redmond, and they deserve our general support for this.
It's hard to understand the hostility some people demonstrate towards Lindows, which is a good package, well-made and well-supported. It's not ideal for pioneer Linux users, but you do have a large choice of alternatives. What Lindows has done is to demonstrate the possibility of a migration path from Windows to Linux, and for we should be grateful.
Incidentally, to those who say Lindows is "crippleware" it's very hard to cripple Debian, which classically bootstraps from a diskette. You do need to know what a shell prompt is, and how to use apt-get, but that's about it.
Take this choice quote from the article:
My buddies are being killed by supporting all the Linux variants. It is hard to build a product on top of Linux because every other user compiles his own kernel and there are many different species.
Ain't it sweet? I count five lies:
(1) people being killed by supporting (gasp) operating systems... gosh, horror and violence, not nice at all!
(2) all the Linux "variants", are in fact pretty much one standard, LSB, with several skins
(3) "hard to build a product on top of Linux", rather than, hmmm, Windows? Linux is incredibly easy to build for. I suspect the fact that it's very standard helps.
(4) "every other user compiles his kernel"... maybe at Microsoft. I suspect less than 1 in 20 Linux users ever compiled a kernel.
(5) compiling a kernel means you can't support it... WTF? The kernel is incredibly stable, since most changes are in external modules. And I can't remember a single case where a kernel change broke one of my apps.
(6) (sorry, I was not counting well), "many different species"... well, AFAICS the only difference between the Linux distributions is that they have different packaging methods, different timelines as to their versions, and different UI tools for hardware detection, configuration, etc. Nothing at all that makes life hard.
Look: I just installed Xandros, which is Debian with a nice face. On two different types of machine, and it installed without asking a single question about my hardware except whether the mouse was left or right-handed. Check my journal...
Windows never worked this nicely. Where is the support issue?
In the writing indistry we call this "to condemn with faint praise".
Yeah, Windows kinda works, I mean, it'll run Office without crashing too often, but it's just killing by buddies to have to maintain Win2K, WinXP, and even some older Win98 machines, not to mention we have a whole cupboard simply filled with driver CDs for every PC we have.
Actually, it is exactly as simple as I say, although in my code I've cached the verishit address so that the overhead is minimalized, and there are probably even easier methods, such as getting patched TCP/IP stacks that do this automatically.
I took issue with the "every" part of your statement. Please name just ten applications, ou of the millions that exist and the hundreds that you certainly use every day, that this breaks. OK, name just one. So, then, what exactly is the issue apart from general hatred of Verisgn...?
Hey, I enjoy a good stone-throwing as well as the next person, but for once I think it's really a waste of time.
The truth seems to be that Verisign have simply DoS'd themselves, hosed their own servers, since their redirection server is down.
If I look at the trends of the last decades, while disk sizes increase exponentially, the actual number of top-level objects I store on my systems increases only linearly, and quite slowly. True, I still store individual documents, but I also store AVIs, ISOs, entire photo albums that take gigabytes each.
It's still random access: I can choose and access an object, even individual photos, without scanning through large amounts of unwanted data.
...[the] computer can now no longer find out if it's due to a misconfiguration...or if it's just a temporary problem (if the other computer does exist but does not respond).
It's so trivial to do this that I'm almost embarassed to have to say it:
verishit = lookup_address ("verishit" & longrandomnumber & ".com)
if lookup_address (realhost) = verishit
then you know it's not there
What is the big deal? Since when can't software can't handle bizarre and arbitrary external conditions? Sure, it's been so long that the Internet appears to be entirely fixed in stone, but that is why we have what we call, in the jargon, "soft-ware main-ten-ance".
You are serious? So billions of applications out there suddenly stopped working? This explains why my entire business has ground to halt, and I can't even access Slashdot... oh...
There is no value in making such statements.
The change to the DNS lookups breaks applications that rely on an unprovable negative. This is a small, specific class of applications that can be fixed quite easily (as the BIND patch shows).
I'd like to see a list of those specific applications that cannot work any longer because they cannot distinguish "Not resolved" from 64.94.110.11.
Let me put it like this, here is a 2-line patch to fix any application so affected:
verishit = lookup_address ("shithappens" & datetime & ".com")
if lookup_address (realdomain) = verishit then
-- act as if not found
else
-- act as if found
endif
and I've gone and patched roughly 200,000 lines of code in the time it took me to make this comment, since all socket connections are in a single library function (as they damn well should be).
Rational discussion welcome, hysterical overreaction less so.
OK, bad form to reply to my own post, but it was a serious question, not a troll.
Granted this breaks a lot of systems that depended on getting error results for failed lookups. So, now they will have to check for 64.94.110.11. Not nice.
But as much as I dislike monopolists and their heavy-handed ways, the arguments against this action seem a little weak.
One guy complains that his printer no longer works because previously, his network configuration depended on failing to resolve some addresses in order to route the request internally.
Another person mentions that anti-spam checks based on domain names will fail. So, this is a valid check for spam? Oh, I thought spammers simply spoofed the originating host, which is why I get hundred of "returned" messages I never sent.
Someone else complains that it's an abuse of powers given to Verisign by the government. OK... but so is 75% of business. It's a tough life, yeah.
Seriously, I'm not trolling: I'm trying to understand what the actual technical problem is. How can any system rely on the absence of something? How can a "not resolved" error actually be more useful than a resolution to an IP address that does nothing useful?
1. AA batteries, not AAA or fixed rechargeable Li-ION. AAA have a terribly low capacity (~450mAh compared to up to 1900mAh for AA).
2. Cheap and robust external power supply. Batteries are expensive.
2. B&W screen, for godsake. Color is luxury, make a high-contrast large, protected B&W screen that can show decent amounts of information.
3. Little chiclet keyboard that plugs in to a mini-USB slot. Something like the old Spectrum keyboards, cheap, nasty, unbreakable.
That would make it cheaper and more useful. Imagine a computer you'd happily give to an 10-year old, no matter if it breaks.
Lastly, I'd add bluetooth because it's a tiny extra cost, only a few $, and provides unbreakable networking and connectivity better than any physical connection, and make the whole thing run on a stripped-down embedded Linux.