Slashdot Mirror


User: emil

emil's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
1,370
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 1,370

  1. Why are we still fighting with this? on 10 Years In, Mars Rover Opportunity Suffers From Flash Memory Degradation · · Score: 1, Interesting

    If it was long-known that long-duration, low-intensity heat would revive failed flash, why did these rovers leave without the ability to do so?

    And why am I not able now to buy flash memory that will heat itself to 800 degrees and heal itself?

    And why isn't flash memory sold in ceramic housings that can stand me baking them in an oven for a few days to fix failed flash manually?

    I'd like to buy hardware that works, or that can be repaired. That's not flash.

  2. guilt is good for the soul on Sony: 'The Interview' Will Have a Limited Theatrical Release · · Score: 1

    What better to prepare you for the greatness to come that we do not deserve? What else is there to describe our present live, or for the promise of the singularity?

  3. I invite on Sony: 'The Interview' Will Have a Limited Theatrical Release · · Score: 1

    Seth Rogan and James Franco to travel to north Korea, on my dime, to North Korea, and see the people there. Perhaps some good can come of truth, for nothing comes from lies.

  4. Dear North Korea on Sony: 'The Interview' Will Have a Limited Theatrical Release · · Score: 1

    We would be happy to welcome you to the commerce of industrialized nations. If you would forgive us our wrongs, we would show you forebereance, and greatly engage you in the modern age. Your lack is starkly obvious, and we miss you greatly.

  5. Switch the roles on Sony: 'The Interview' Will Have a Limited Theatrical Release · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    If Sony made a movie with Hirohito (or Kim) lynching Obama, the condemnation would have been fast and fierce. Would Franco and Rogan have been justifiable playing happy executioners on the Trail of Tears? Turn the shoe inside out and see how it fits.

  6. Comfort Women Documentary on Sony: 'The Interview' Will Have a Limited Theatrical Release · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Sony, how about if you run documentaries on Korean Comfort Women at the same theaters?

    While you are at it, you can make it a festival and run a few films on the Rape of Nanking.

    It should have been blindingly obvious that a Japanese corporation should not have produced a film on the violent mutilation of a Korean leader. What were you thinking?

  7. Re:North Korea is one step ahead of you. on Sony Leaks Reveal Hollywood Is Trying To Break DNS · · Score: 1

    I'm not saying that I admire or approve of North Korea's internal affairs in any way, but it would hardly displease me if they turned their sights on MGM, Universal, or (dare we hope) Disney.

    North Korea has never sold rootkit-equipped CDs in the US, and they have never lobbied congress to remove the right of free speech, unlike Sony.

  8. North Korea is one step ahead of you. on Sony Leaks Reveal Hollywood Is Trying To Break DNS · · Score: 1

    And they have a better track record of enforcing the people's will than the supreme court at the moment when it comes to Sony.

  9. Welcome to the Windows Airline on Ford Ditches Microsoft Partnership On Sync, Goes With QNX · · Score: 1

    I'm dating myself, but...

    Windows [3.1] Airline ~ The airport terminal is nice and brashly colorful with friendly stewards, easy access to the plane, an uneventful takeoff ... then the plane blows up without any warning whatsoever.

    Fly NT ~ Everyone marches out onto the runway, says the password in unison, and forms the outline of an airplane. Then they all sit down and make a whooshing sound like they're flying.

    Windows Airline 95 ~ Windows Airline customers are bused to a new terminal at the far end of the airport. The plane shows up late, but everyone can watch a commercial while they wait where a sales man tells them that Windows Airline 95 is "just as good as a Mac Airways." When it arrives, most of the luggage has to be left behind, because it doesn't fit in the cargo bays. The pilot walks down the aisle, collecting an additional fee to buy fuel for the jet. Many of the passengers give up and walk back to the Windows Airline window.

    DOS Airlines ~ Everybody pushes the airplane until it glides, then they jump on and let the plane coast until it hits the ground again, then push again, jump on again, and so on.

    Mac Airways ~ All the stewards, captains, baggage handlers, and ticket agents look the same, act the same, and talk the same. Every time you ask questions about details, you are told you don't need to know, and everything will be done for you without you having to know, so just shut up

    Air OS/2 ~ To board the plane, you have your ticket stamped ten different times by standing in ten different lines. Then you fill out a form showing where you want to sit and whether the plane should look and feel like an ocean liner, a passenger train, or a bus. If you succeed in getting on board the plane and the plane succeeds in getting off the ground, you have a wonderful trip ... except for the times when the rudder and flaps get frozen in position, in which case you have time to say your prayers and get in crash position.

    Unix Airline ~ Everyone brings one piece of the plane with them when they come to the airport. They all go out on the runway and put the plane together piece by piece, arguing constantly about what kind of plane they're building.

    Mach Express ~ There is no airplane. The passengers gather and shout for an airplane, then wait and wait and wait and wait. A bunch of people come, each carrying one piece of the plane with them. These people all go out on the runway and put the plane together piece by piece, arguing about which pieces really belong together. The plane finally takes off, leaving the passengers on the ground waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting. After the plane lands, the pilot telephones the passengers at the departing airport to inform that they have arrived.

    Amiga Air ~ A small private airline with lots of in-flight movies, snacks, and other luxuries to keep the passengers happy. Unfortunately, after takeoff, the plane has nowhere to go and keeps flying in circles until it runs out of fuel and crashes. The few surviving passengers, unable to comprehend the magnitude of the disaster, ardently vow to keep flying the same plane once it's put back together.

  10. Dear Carly, no man will EVER vote for you. on Former HP CEO Carly Fiorina Considering US Presidential Run · · Score: 1, Interesting

    This wasn't used against you in your senate run (which certainly lacked any semblance of tact), but I GUARANTEE you that your past will resurface when you did things like this:

    http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1005572/how-mike-capellas-castrated-carly

    ...Carly did not tell Capellas that the sad love affair between Heloise and Abelard ended up with the man in the affair being castrated... when Capellas found out he shuddered and said: "I'm glad I didn't know".

    And this, as well as the "bad hair?"

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/09/carly-fiorina-open-mic-vi_n_606723.html

    "God, what is that hair?"

  11. inittab weaknesses on Debian Votes Against Mandating Non-systemd Compatibility · · Score: 1

    Porting an HP-UX ServiceGuard system, I collapsed 40-odd services into runlevel 3 and 4. These became aliased essentially to ON and OFF for my operations people. This worked, but I would have appreciated granular control.

    Inittab has a "respawn" function that lets init watch for your program and restart it when it dies - IF you don't daemonize. You also don't get the ability to launch as a non-root user (had to write a shim for that) or establish environment variables (had to script a shim for that).

    I also wrote an /etc/init.d script to start any oracle instance mentioned in /etc/oratab with hard links to the script. systemd is not QUITE as flexible there, requiring me to maintain a separate service instance files for each ORACLE_HOME.

    So yes, on the whole, I would have jumped all over systemd 5 years ago. As it is, I am even now looking forward to trashing all the glue I wrote.

    That said, systemd needs a BSD-licensed multi-call binary like busybox.

    p.s. Parent, it's PID 1, not zero. :)

  12. Android on Microsoft To Open Source .NET and Take It Cross-Platform · · Score: 1

    It's hard to give him the benefit of the doubt when he strangled Nokia's Android handsets.

    That was simply a bad business decision.

    Google's control of Android is very loose, and it would be quite easy to fork it, as Amazon, BN, and even Nokia already demonstrated.

    If Microsoft supported Android, and integrated it into Active Directory as a first-class mobile platform, it would immediately become the standard handset for corporate America.

    Not doing so seems a standard case of NIH hubris.

  13. cyanogenmod privacy guard on Android Co-Founder Andy Rubin Leaving Google · · Score: 1

    These are the settings that you are looking for.

    Just buy a phone with this installed.

  14. More stuff I forgot. on Ask Slashdot: Can You Say Something Nice About Systemd? · · Score: 1
    • You can check for static linkage with "file busybox" - it should say: busybox: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), statically linked, stripped
    • After you login as root above, you can "halt" to shut down the container and get back to the normal system.
  15. I forgot... on Ask Slashdot: Can You Say Something Nice About Systemd? · · Score: 1
    1. You need to "export SHELL=/bin/sh" before you start.
    2. The "exit" above should be on a line by itself.
  16. Is busybox wget vulnerable? on Dangerous Vulnerability Fixed In Wget · · Score: 1

    I can't tell from their website.

  17. OpenBSD - Android on OpenBSD Drops Support For Loadable Kernel Modules · · Score: 1
  18. Processes need to be restarted when libraries and sundry components underneath them are patched.

    When you patch openssl, you need to restart Apache, otherwise the running httpd will be using the old, unpatched libcrypto.

    When you patch glibc, any processes that you do not restart will not bring the glibc patch into the memory of a running process, and will continue to express any vulnerability that you patched.

    Ksplice seems like a really nifty thing, but as patches pile on, more and more of the running userland is out of date. Going for a long uptime means less trust over running processes.

  19. Binary blobs are a bad thing. on FTDI Reportedly Bricking Devices Using Competitors' Chips. · · Score: 2

    OpenBSD would never have let a vendor do something like this.

  20. Saying of the Bhudda on Technology Heats Up the Adultery Arms Race · · Score: 1

    One who has fifty loves, has fifty woes. One who has no loves, has no woes.

  21. Re:Can I do it on Tomato? on BitHammer, the BitTorrent Banhammer · · Score: 1

    Tomato only has 6M of free memory on my WRT54G - certainly not enough for a python runtime. I doubt everything would fit in the squashfs anyway.

  22. Can I do it on Tomato? on BitHammer, the BitTorrent Banhammer · · Score: 2

    It would be nice if this could get translated down into something that could run out of busybox on a WRT54G. I've got the latest Shibby Tomato with bandwidth limiting, and this would be a nice add-on.

  23. If Oracle wins, Bell Labs owns the world. on Google Takes the Fight With Oracle To the Supreme Court · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The full source code of the UNIX v6 kernel, as published in the Lions commentary, bore prominent copyright notices from AT&T Bell Labs.

    If the system call and C library API interface is thus still owned by Bell Labs, then that covers Oracle Linux, the POSIX standard, commercial UNIX, as well as all the phones (including QNX), routers, UNIX/Linux/BSD servers/workstations, and likely much more.

    Oracle had better pray that they lose.

  24. Nobody deserves death threats. on Systemd Adding Its Own Console To Linux Systems · · Score: 5, Insightful

    systemd managed to replace init, inetd, and some of cron in what appears to be a stable environment. This allowed systemd to work in docker and drastically improve Linux virtualization to leapfrog Solaris zones.

    What systemd did not do was provide reasonable documentation. RedHat's v7 inittab has a website for a blog post that sucks. There is no general intro for users attempting to create crontabs executed by systemd, inetd entries for common services, and runlevels that control groups of processes.

    systemd fell down hard on documentation, and the first blush with the unix admin crowd has not been kind.

    These developers delivered working code in a radically new environment, but without documentation the architecture appears to discriminate against people who have been doing things the same way for 30 years. The authors, and their software, appeared cliquish and discriminatory. Had the software and the documentation enabled a gradual migration into a more powerful architecture, things would have been quite different.

    In any case, this is no justification for people to be vile. The old crowd needs help into the new environment. This help needs to happen, and the insults and threats need to stop. Both sides need to work together to get us where we need to be.

  25. Ion Thruster on Send Your Own Radiosonde 90,000 Feet Into the Sky (Video) · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Can a balloon get an object high enough that an electrostatic ion thruster can take it out of orbit?