This is nothing but unprofessional development - the old "Oh, this is soooo good and sooo simple, how can it possibly cause troub..... ".
Any codebase, be it a program, a web site, or a router's firewall rules, should be changed IN TEST FIRST! Then you do your best to break it, and only after you and several others have had at it do you move it to production/HEAD/whatever (and hold your breath).
If you had a wonderful idea over the weekend, GREAT! Implement it in a test branch, try it out, and then move it to production. But if you merge it into the mainline without testing you are not acting professionally.
I will give the/. crew this: while their spelling may be atrocious, their grasp of grammer poor, and their fact and dup checking next to non-existent, they will put major changes to the codebase into Banjo first, then after they've been abused put them into the main/. site.
OK, so now somebody needs to make a booster pack for the Sims that:
Puts a little Windows icon on the poor sim's computer.
Shortly thereafter, replaces it with blue.
Then the Sim curses, jumps up and down, and hits the computer. The Sim's happiness goes down.
Some Sims get a little fruit, or flightless waterfowl, or demonic icon. They don't have these problems.
(/me waits for MicroAstroTurfers to respond....)
"... could be marketed as a health salt...."
on
Salt From Plants
·
· Score: 4, Funny
I could remove the salt from my own urine and market it as a "health salt" - the health food industry is one of the biggest scams out there.
All I have to do is make a few vague claims, and dream up some useful obfuscation ("... extracted from the very life process that it is intended to promote, our exclusive uri-salt promotes healthy kidneys....") and I'm rolling in money.
Yes, as far as we know, Titan has 150% the atmospheric pressure at surface level as does the Earth, and those gases are not corrosive/poisonous to human life.
However, the surface temperature of Titan is 95 Kelvin. Liquid nitrogen is 75 Kelvin at 1 atmosphere pressure. Water ice melts at 273 Kelvin at one atmosphere. Water boils at 373 Kelvin at one atmosphere.
You would need some pretty DAMN warm clothes. In fact, you would need better insulation on Titan than you would on the dark side of the Moon, as Titan's atmosphere would be conducting and convecting heat away from you at a prodigious rate.
"What if the post office refused to deliver any mail that did not have a correct return address on it."
And guess what? In this post-911, post-anthrax mail, THEY WILL! You don't put a return address on the mail, they drop it - the Post Office I use has that sign right over the drop box.
You have suggested limiting Mr. 31337's ability to send any email he wants from his ub3rb0x3n without doing any real setup, like getting a proper reverse lookup established.
FOR THE LOVE OF $DEITY MAN, DUCK AND COVER!
You are about to be flamed by all the "How DARE you limit me! I have the $deity-given right to send email from ANYTHING, and YOU are wanting to RESTRICT IT! YOU BASTARD FACIST COMMIE!" types.
Personally, I would want my mail server configured to do something like this: Get Host's name as given in EHLO. Look that name up. if (IP address from DNS != IP address talking to me)
Bugger off spammer endif reverse look up IP address talking to me if (name from DNS != name from EHLO)
Look up name from DNS
if (ip address from lookup != IP address talking to me)
Bugger off spammer
endif endif Accept mail.
(It is assumed the "bugger off spammer" state is a terminal state).
This way, even if your box's reverse lookup is foo.bar.baz.adsl.example.com rather than mybox.example.com, so long as foo.bar.baz.adsl.example.com resolves to your IP address you wouldn't be rejected.
One of the biggest problems I see with Free Software development is the problem of the blindered developer.
This is the guy who doesn't bother to raise his head from the computer to look at how his project works in any environment other than *his* system. You know, the guy who requires you to have libfoo.so.5.1.2.pl6-thursday-0741am-fred-mutant1 installed just to compile his code, and by $deity no other version of the library will work.
A concrete example: The developer of the GATOS project (a driver for the TV tuner/video capture (but not video out) functions of ATI All-in-Wonder cards) requires you to use HIS kernel module and HIS radeon driver. As a result, you may EITHER use his code XOR the DRI accelerated 3d code, but not both.
True, he does (to an extent) track the DRI development, but rather than working with DRI and XFree and coming up with a way his drivers can play nice with the standard builds (e.g. having hooks in the standard driver and having the standard driver load his modules if present) he is off on his own little branch.
He also uses libraries and packages that are not part of the standard installs of common distros - as a result just getting his code working is a real slog. So many people don't do it, and his project does not get as much support as it might.
Now, I am not picking on him - developing stuff like that is hard, since it is very poorly documented. And with DRI making changes, XFree making changes, and him making changes, you WILL have times when things don't play well together. But rather than that being a transient state of affairs it is the normal state the GATOS project w.r.t. DRI.
Unfortunately, it take time and work to stop, get a fresh install of RedHat/SUSE/Gentoo/... and see what it takes to get your code to build and install. It takes work to make sure that you really NEED the latest version of libfoo, rather than just any version. Especially when your code interoperates tightly with other people's projects it is difficult to plan interfaces that won't change frequently. If you can accept help from others this isn't so bad, but many project "leaders" have the attitude of "HOW DARE YOU IMPUNE MY PROJECT! IT IS PERFECT UNTO ITSELF! I CANNOT HELP IT IF YOU ARE NOT 31337 ENOUGH TO HAVE THE LATEST STUFF! L@M3Rz! IT IS UNDER DEVELOPMENT!"
But that is the difference between a hack and a software engineer - just "getting something to work" and "getting something to work well, under as many circumstances as possible, as smoothly as possible."
AOL pushes IPv6 client to its users - BOOM instant market.
AOL works with AlterNIC - makes AlterNIC their default DNS tree. In return, AOL gets to create <screenname>.aol domains for every (l)user's home page.
AOL creates more peering points, so that your packets don't go around the country twice because YourISP peers with OtherISP1 who peers with OtherISP2 who peers with YourFreindsISP. Instead, AOL peers up with the smaller ISPs and colos so that your IPv6 packets go straight there.
That might jumpstart both IPv6, AlterNIC, and decent routing.
Of course, to make this happen, I'll need a Bambleweeny 57 sub-meson brain , an atomic vector plotter, and a nice hot cup of tea.
My point is that this guy made the decision, he bears responsiblity for it.
Trying to excuse this by blaming the scum that sold him the equipment is wrong - Mr. HandyMoron wrote the check, Mr. HandyMoron caused the equipment to be set up, Mr. HandyMoron is to blame.
I am SO damn tired of this "It's not my fault!" society we found ourselves in - and I am trying, in my own way, to DO something about it. So every time I see somebody saying "It's not my fault - blame somebody else" I point out the STUPIDITY of that position.
Yes, of course - the eeeevile telemarketers cracked into his checking account, debited it for this instrument, and shipped it to him, whereupon it used its eeeevilemarketing mindcontrol powers to make him tell his secretary to plug it in and set it up.
Obviously, this poor man is blameless - it's not like he had any free will in this deal.
Sorry, but I don't buy the "but he was just an honest businessman who made a mistake" line.
He bought an autodialer with the expressed intent of telemarketing his business. He knew that what he was doing is held in very low regard by the general population, and he did it anyway.
The arguement you often hear of "but I was just trying to make a living" applies equally well to crack dealers as to telemarketers.
In fact:
Wowbagger's top 5 reasons why crack dealers are better than telemarketers 5) Some people actually WANT what the crack dealer sells. 4) Crack dealers don't knock on my door while I'm having dinner and say "You want to buy some crack?" 3) When you tell them you aren't interested, crack dealers leave you alone. 2) Crack dealers don't give your name and number to other people (except, perhaps, to law enforcement). 1) Crack dealers AREN'T TELEMARKETERS!
From what I am given to understand of the way the Mac OS 10.* handles such things, Apple got it more closely to right.
As I see it, the following things need to happen to really make application installation be very clean under any Unix like operating system:
All apps install in their own directory under/usr/[vender name]/[app name] - the reason for including the vender name is so that when two venders release different apps with the same name (Phoenix comes to mind) you can still dis-ambiguate it. Also allow apps to install into ~/apps/[vender name]/[app name] to allow for non-root installation.
Under an app's directory, create the following subdirs:
[arch]/bin - any binaries that are OS/CPU dependent.
bin - shell scripts to correctly pick the right [arch]/bin file.
man - man pages for the app
html - help files in HTML, suitable for browsing
[arch]/lib - any shared libraries specific to the app.
system - desktop icons and description files, perferably in a WM-agnostic format, MIME type files, magic files (for the file command, and a description of each program in the app, giving the type(s) of application for each binary (e.g. Application/Mapping; Application/Route Planning).
Shells and WMs are extended to search under/usr/*/*/bin for programs,/usr/*/*/man for man pages, etc.
Programs shall look for ~/.{vender]/[appname] for their per-user storage area, and will create this as needed.
The system must provide an API for asking if a given library/application/whatever is installed.
The system must provide an API for installing a missing component - this API should be able to *somehow* locate an appropriate package. The requesting app will provide a list of acceptable items (e.g. need libfoo.so.0.1.6,libfoo.so.0.1,libfoo.so.0)
This is the biggest item, so I'm really going to stress it:
PACKAGE CREATORS MUST BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR BEING OVERLY ANAL-RETENTIVE ABOUT WHAT PACKAGES THEY REQUIRE
Too damn many times I've tried to install FOO, only to be told by the packaging system "FOO needs BAR". But FOO doesn't *need* BAR, it just works "better" if BAR is present (e.g. the XFree packages from RedHat requiring kernel-drm to install, but working just fine (minus accelerated OpenGL) without it).
Were venders to do this, then a program install could be handled by a simple shell script - untar to/tmp, run script to install needed pre-reqs, move files to final location.
The system could provide a means to access the HTML (a simple, stupid server bound to a local port, maybe?) so that you could browse all installed apps' help files online.
As a final fanciness, you could have an automatic process to symlink apps into a/usr/apps/[application class] directory, so that if you wanted to find all word processing apps you could ls/usr/apps/WordProcessors and see them.
As I say in my journal, this poor guy "can't get no respect - no respect at all I tell ya".
Al-Sahaf "don't get no respect" - can't even get arrested! Everybody's favoriate Dis-information minister "don't get no respect - no respect at all" - He tried to turn himself in to the American forces, but they turned him down as he wasn't on their list! Story on Bloomberg,CBC News, and Sky.
Remember that Sonic Wind was all about trying to determine what would happen to a pilot who ejected at speeds greater than Mach 1 - so the occupant of Sonic Wind 1 was sitting on the front of the sled without any windscreen.
In the video, as the craft exceeds Mach 1, you can see the shock waves (a.k.a. sonic booms) forming off the craft, including one forming off the pilot himself.
If he provides DSL to each unit he is going to be in the IT business anyway.
If he does it RIGHT, uses the RIGHT tool for the job (Ethernet and switches), rather than the WRONG tool (DSL and DSLAMS, which are more for WAN than LAN), then he has an easier job of it.
(Y'know, this 2 minute between posts is a real drag when you have a lively conversation like this... But oh well, the assholes make the rest of us pay the price....)
I've always set Squid up as a transparent proxy, and used the firewall to redirect all port 80 through Squid (save for a few sites that don't like going throught a proxy).
Slashdot Mirror
This is nothing but unprofessional development - the old "Oh, this is soooo good and sooo simple, how can it possibly cause troub..... ".
/. crew this: while their spelling may be atrocious, their grasp of grammer poor, and their fact and dup checking next to non-existent, they will put major changes to the codebase into Banjo first, then after they've been abused put them into the main /. site.
Any codebase, be it a program, a web site, or a router's firewall rules, should be changed IN TEST FIRST! Then you do your best to break it, and only after you and several others have had at it do you move it to production/HEAD/whatever (and hold your breath).
If you had a wonderful idea over the weekend, GREAT! Implement it in a test branch, try it out, and then move it to production. But if you merge it into the mainline without testing you are not acting professionally.
I will give the
At least, some of the time.
(/me waits for MicroAstroTurfers to respond....)
I could remove the salt from my own urine and market it as a "health salt" - the health food industry is one of the biggest scams out there.
All I have to do is make a few vague claims, and dream up some useful obfuscation ("... extracted from the very life process that it is intended to promote, our exclusive uri-salt promotes healthy kidneys....") and I'm rolling in money.
Yes, as far as we know, Titan has 150% the atmospheric pressure at surface level as does the Earth, and those gases are not corrosive/poisonous to human life.
However, the surface temperature of Titan is 95 Kelvin. Liquid nitrogen is 75 Kelvin at 1 atmosphere pressure. Water ice melts at 273 Kelvin at one atmosphere. Water boils at 373 Kelvin at one atmosphere.
You would need some pretty DAMN warm clothes. In fact, you would need better insulation on Titan than you would on the dark side of the Moon, as Titan's atmosphere would be conducting and convecting heat away from you at a prodigious rate.
Your analogy of email to postal mail is flawed.
A better analogy would be:
"What if the post office refused to deliver any mail that did not have a correct return address on it."
And guess what? In this post-911, post-anthrax mail, THEY WILL! You don't put a return address on the mail, they drop it - the Post Office I use has that sign right over the drop box.
You have suggested limiting Mr. 31337's ability to send any email he wants from his ub3rb0x3n without doing any real setup, like getting a proper reverse lookup established.
FOR THE LOVE OF $DEITY MAN, DUCK AND COVER!
You are about to be flamed by all the "How DARE you limit me! I have the $deity-given right to send email from ANYTHING, and YOU are wanting to RESTRICT IT! YOU BASTARD FACIST COMMIE!" types.
Personally, I would want my mail server configured to do something like this:
Get Host's name as given in EHLO.
Look that name up.
if (IP address from DNS != IP address talking to me)
Bugger off spammer
endif
reverse look up IP address talking to me
if (name from DNS != name from EHLO)
Look up name from DNS
if (ip address from lookup != IP address talking to me)
Bugger off spammer
endif
endif
Accept mail.
(It is assumed the "bugger off spammer" state is a terminal state).
This way, even if your box's reverse lookup is foo.bar.baz.adsl.example.com rather than mybox.example.com, so long as foo.bar.baz.adsl.example.com resolves to your IP address you wouldn't be rejected.
One of the biggest problems I see with Free Software development is the problem of the blindered developer.
This is the guy who doesn't bother to raise his head from the computer to look at how his project works in any environment other than *his* system. You know, the guy who requires you to have libfoo.so.5.1.2.pl6-thursday-0741am-fred-mutant1 installed just to compile his code, and by $deity no other version of the library will work.
A concrete example: The developer of the GATOS project (a driver for the TV tuner/video capture (but not video out) functions of ATI All-in-Wonder cards) requires you to use HIS kernel module and HIS radeon driver. As a result, you may EITHER use his code XOR the DRI accelerated 3d code, but not both.
True, he does (to an extent) track the DRI development, but rather than working with DRI and XFree and coming up with a way his drivers can play nice with the standard builds (e.g. having hooks in the standard driver and having the standard driver load his modules if present) he is off on his own little branch.
He also uses libraries and packages that are not part of the standard installs of common distros - as a result just getting his code working is a real slog. So many people don't do it, and his project does not get as much support as it might.
Now, I am not picking on him - developing stuff like that is hard, since it is very poorly documented. And with DRI making changes, XFree making changes, and him making changes, you WILL have times when things don't play well together. But rather than that being a transient state of affairs it is the normal state the GATOS project w.r.t. DRI.
Unfortunately, it take time and work to stop, get a fresh install of RedHat/SUSE/Gentoo/... and see what it takes to get your code to build and install. It takes work to make sure that you really NEED the latest version of libfoo, rather than just any version. Especially when your code interoperates tightly with other people's projects it is difficult to plan interfaces that won't change frequently. If you can accept help from others this isn't so bad, but many project "leaders" have the attitude of "HOW DARE YOU IMPUNE MY PROJECT! IT IS PERFECT UNTO ITSELF! I CANNOT HELP IT IF YOU ARE NOT 31337 ENOUGH TO HAVE THE LATEST STUFF! L@M3Rz! IT IS UNDER DEVELOPMENT!"
But that is the difference between a hack and a software engineer - just "getting something to work" and "getting something to work well, under as many circumstances as possible, as smoothly as possible."
Some of the slogans this can use:
"We aim to please, you aim too, please!"
"The fingers that pick the cigarette butts out of the urnal also flip your burgers."
However, I hope they don't start accepting advertising on this system:
"Hey guys - want high score? ENLARGE YOUR THING!"
"You could aim higher if you got OUR GENUINE V*AGRA!"
That might jumpstart both IPv6, AlterNIC, and decent routing.
Of course, to make this happen, I'll need a Bambleweeny 57 sub-meson brain , an atomic vector plotter, and a nice hot cup of tea.
My point is that this guy made the decision, he bears responsiblity for it.
Trying to excuse this by blaming the scum that sold him the equipment is wrong - Mr. HandyMoron wrote the check, Mr. HandyMoron caused the equipment to be set up, Mr. HandyMoron is to blame.
I am SO damn tired of this "It's not my fault!" society we found ourselves in - and I am trying, in my own way, to DO something about it. So every time I see somebody saying "It's not my fault - blame somebody else" I point out the STUPIDITY of that position.
Or, possibly, he was sold an autodialer.
Yes, of course - the eeeevile telemarketers cracked into his checking account, debited it for this instrument, and shipped it to him, whereupon it used its eeeevile marketing mindcontrol powers to make him tell his secretary to plug it in and set it up.
Obviously, this poor man is blameless - it's not like he had any free will in this deal.
Or did he? We'll never know...
Sorry, but I don't buy the "but he was just an honest businessman who made a mistake" line.
He bought an autodialer with the expressed intent of telemarketing his business. He knew that what he was doing is held in very low regard by the general population, and he did it anyway.
The arguement you often hear of "but I was just trying to make a living" applies equally well to crack dealers as to telemarketers.
In fact:
Wowbagger's top 5 reasons why crack dealers are better than telemarketers
5) Some people actually WANT what the crack dealer sells.
4) Crack dealers don't knock on my door while I'm having dinner and say "You want to buy some crack?"
3) When you tell them you aren't interested, crack dealers leave you alone.
2) Crack dealers don't give your name and number to other people (except, perhaps, to law enforcement).
1) Crack dealers AREN'T TELEMARKETERS!
"WordNet (r) 1.7"
disambiguate
v : state unambiguously or remove ambiguities from; "Can you disambiguate this statement?"
I'm sorry that your vocabulary is too miniscule to encompass these terms.
I will use short words now.
Don't you see, it's all happening again!
A computer tech company, becoming irrelevant, trying to get bought out!
Can't you see what will happen next?
THEY WILL SUE IBM SAYING PARTS OF SOLARIS ARE IN LINUX!
(/me removes tongue from cheek now).
As I see it, the following things need to happen to really make application installation be very clean under any Unix like operating system:
Too damn many times I've tried to install FOO, only to be told by the packaging system "FOO needs BAR". But FOO doesn't *need* BAR, it just works "better" if BAR is present (e.g. the XFree packages from RedHat requiring kernel-drm to install, but working just fine (minus accelerated OpenGL) without it).
Were venders to do this, then a program install could be handled by a simple shell script - untar to
The system could provide a means to access the HTML (a simple, stupid server bound to a local port, maybe?) so that you could browse all installed apps' help files online.
As a final fanciness, you could have an automatic process to symlink apps into a
ls
and see them.
I am in to ham radio.
I am in to computers.
I do both for a living.
I make quite a lot of money.
If this is "taking it too far", then let's floor this puppy!
Well, I signed up for both the Linux meetup and Slashdot meetup in my area.
.5 million I'd think that there would be at least 5 (10 ppm) people who would want an excuse to go out into the Big Blue Room.
Since then, not one has gone off - not enough people can be bothered to even VOTE on a place to meet up - let alone show up.
In a town of
Yes, just what I want to do, spend even MORE time in a smelly, dirty portapotty.
I don't know about anybody else, but I do everything in my power to MINIMIZE the time I spend in those things.
The last thing I would want to do is spend more time in there.
Of course, it is not hard to imagine who would spend more time in of these - just drop your threshold to -1....
As I say in my journal, this poor guy "can't get no respect - no respect at all I tell ya".
Al-Sahaf "don't get no respect" - can't even get arrested!
Everybody's favoriate Dis-information minister "don't get no respect - no respect at all" - He tried to turn himself in to the American forces, but they turned him down as he wasn't on their list! Story on Bloomberg,CBC News, and Sky.
Even President Bush was laughing at him.
Thanks for the correction - I was running from memory.
I must be getting old.
Still, it beats the alternative.
At the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center they have the original Sonic Wind 1 rocket sled. They also have a video loop of some of the test runs of this beast.
Remember that Sonic Wind was all about trying to determine what would happen to a pilot who ejected at speeds greater than Mach 1 - so the occupant of Sonic Wind 1 was sitting on the front of the sled without any windscreen.
In the video, as the craft exceeds Mach 1, you can see the shock waves (a.k.a. sonic booms) forming off the craft, including one forming off the pilot himself.
That always gets me.
But if you DO perform CPR, and you DON'T have a certification, then you AREN'T protected under the Good Sam law.
That point was drilled into me during my multiple certification sessions.
So if you aren't certified and you break their ribs (and you will break their ribs if you are doing CPR right), you will not be protected.
If he provides DSL to each unit he is going to be in the IT business anyway.
If he does it RIGHT, uses the RIGHT tool for the job (Ethernet and switches), rather than the WRONG tool (DSL and DSLAMS, which are more for WAN than LAN), then he has an easier job of it.
(Y'know, this 2 minute between posts is a real drag when you have a lively conversation like this... But oh well, the assholes make the rest of us pay the price....)
I've always set Squid up as a transparent proxy, and used the firewall to redirect all port 80 through Squid (save for a few sites that don't like going throught a proxy).
I never said "Only one IP address per port" - if they want to hang a hub off the port and hook up multiple machines they can.
I never said "Non-routeable addresses" - I simply said filter certain ports that have no business going beyond one unit.
By "locking down unused ports" I meant PHYSICAL ports, not IP ports - as in "If Joe hasn't signed up for it the RJ-45 in his place is dead."