How hard would it be develop a system (we are talking about digital via-satelite broadcasting multimedia after all) that would automaticly count the songs recorded by any given user and then split a number X proportionally to the number of listenings/recordings ratio (weighted averages) where X would be a monthly license fee. This is a satelite radio that might potentionally interfere with global radio field spanning across multiple juristictions so it is fair to exclude it from the god given rights to listen/record that would otherwise be unalienable in the case of plain old radio.
We and most importantly the RIAA members have to understand that satelite is not a local ground radio station. Both the technical, economical and legal implications are completely different and our collective attitude towards that technology must be as rational as it possibly can.
We have to explain it to our less savvy peers, for they are the ones who make the difference when it comes to voting. That is how a pure democracy works.
A quick search on KeyKOS makes one wonder: Does it have anything in common with GNU's microkernel efforts?
Anyone cares to post a brief overview of KeyKOS, possibly in connection and/or comparison to Mach/HURD?
Short answer: yes it does,
and it is actually one of the main reasons why I look forward to use
Debian GNU/Hurd
in the future.
Let me quote
my old post from January with some background
and interesting links to more informations about KeyKOS:
Still, you can't block every hole in security. Sometimes you just have to hope, right?
Yes, you can. No you don't. Software is just an applied form of discrete mathematics. "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it," as Donald Knuth once said. It is possible to present a formal proof of correctness for any algorithm. It is nearly impossible and certainly impractical when you have a big mess of spaghetti code like with most of software that is utter crap, but it is possible nonetheless when you know what are you doing and design appropriately, with very clean, small and isolated parts of your system responsible for enforcing its security policies. Take a look at such operating systems as KeyKOS and EROS. E.g. read Verifying Operating System Security paper by J. S. Shapiro and S. Weber: "This paper presents a proof of correctness of the EROS operating system architecture with respect to confinement." Read some essays by Norman Hardy, especially those on Capability Theory. This is hardly a new idea, see GNOSIS: A Prototype Operating System for the 1990s paper by Bill Frantz, Norm Hardy, Jay Jonekait and Charlie Landau, written more than 25 years ago. The bottom line is: it is certainly possible to have a 100% secure system, but developers don't bother because users don't care.
When the first programs run, it is just a matter of time before there is a functional L4 port of Debian GNU/Hurd (or just Debian GNU?). I really like the design of the Hurd, but what I'd like to see the most are not the "POSIX capabilities" but the real capabilities as described in the 1975 paper by Jerome Saltzer and Michael Schroeder, The Protection of Information in Computer Systems. (For those who don't know what am I talking about, I recommend starting from the excellent essay What is a Capability, Anyway? by Jonathan Shapiro, and then reading the capability theory essays by Norman Hardy. As a sidenone I might add that I find it amusing that people who say that there are other advantages than only Digital Restrictions Management of using TCPA/Palladium-like platforms usually quote security fe
"I believe that the time is ripe for significantly better documentation of programs, and that we can best achieve this by considering programs to be works of literature. Hence, my title: "Literate Programming."
"Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.
"The practitioner of literate programming can be regarded as an essayist, whose main concern is with exposition and excellence of style. Such an author, with thesaurus in hand, chooses the names of variables carefully and explains what each variable means. He or she strives for a program that is comprehensible because its concepts have been introduced in an order that is best for human understanding, using a mixture of formal and informal methods that reinforce each other." -- Donald Knuth. "Literate Programming (1984)" in Literate Programming. CSLI, 1992, pg. 99.
More quotes:
"The philosophy behind CWEB is that an experienced system programmer, who wants to provide the best possible documentation of his or her software products, needs two things simultaneously: a language like TeX for formatting, and a language like C for programming. Neither type of language can provide the best documentation by itself; but when both are appropriately combined, we obtain a system that is much more useful than either language separately.
"The structure of a software program may be thought of as a "WEB" that is made up of many interconnected pieces. To document such a program we want to explain each individual part of the web and how it relates to its neighbors. The typographic tools provided by TeX give us an opportunity to explain the local structure of each part by making that structure visible, and the programming tools provided by languages like C make it possible for us to specify the algorithms formally and unambiguously. By combining the two, we can develop a style of programming that maximizes our ability to perceive the structure of a complex piece of software, and at the same time the documented programs can be mechanically translated into a working software system that matches the documentation.
"Besides providing a documentation tool, CWEB enhances the C language by providing the ability to permute pieces of the program text, so that a large system can be understood entirely in terms of small sections and their local interrelationships. The CTANGLE program is so named because it takes a given web and moves the sections from their web structure into the order required by C; the advantage of programming in CWEB is that the algorithms can be expressed in "untangled" form, with each section explained separately. The CWEAVE program is so named because it takes a given web and intertwines the TeX and C portions contained in each section, then it knits the whole fabric into a structured document." -- Donald Knuth. The CWEB System of Structure Documentation. Addison-Wesley. 1994. pg. 1.
In other words, paraphrasing Henry Spencer, "Those who do not understand the ideas of Donald Knuth are condemned to reinvent them, poorly."
Yeah Bill, we know computers and software are going to keep evolving and all sorts of cool things are going to happen. But does the average desk jockey need a 3GHz processor, 160Gb hard drive and 19-inch LCD monitor to send email, run Excel and Word, and surf the web? No. That's all Carr was really saying.
But he will with Longhorn. That's what Bill was really saying.
[...] this is the same sort of crap that was used a few years ago to sell similar stickers to users of cell phones, to protect against deadly RF emissions! But several other readers spotted yet another Equally Stupid Sticker Scam for us:
This is advertised as a new "money-saving" device for your car, the "MPT SmogBuster Fuel Disc," a quarter-size piece of simple plastic being promoted internationally through multilevel marketing, the sales technique that relies on layers of distributors. The stickers retail for US$299 each, but those who persuade others to sell them get a discount! Upper-level members of the scheme have to buy a minimum of ten SmogBusters for about US$1,400.
This thing is supposed to be taped or glued to the bottom of your cars gas tank, after which, they say, you'll find a significant increase in gas mileage and an improvement in air quality. They claim it "sends holographic frequencies into the gas tank and changes the molecular structure of the gasoline." Ah, I was wondering at the deep scientific background for this wonder. How could I have doubted that it was there? I'm sure audiophiles who buy super-science power cords and speaker leads, will also invest in these stickers.
A suggestion: we should prepare a set of our own stickers, to be permanently applied to the forehead of anyone who is naïve enough to use either of these scam products.
I couldn't agree more. Now we know that the magic sticker doesn't really work, but is it really surprising for anyone?
In answer to your length of the keys array of a hash question, just use (keys %hash) in a scalar context, or (keys %hash).length.
Wouldn't it be nicer if you could do
%hash.keys.length..or would that be too much sens^H^H^H^H like Ruby?
As Larry said in Apocalypse 12, "The length() function is gone" because "[it] has been deemed to be an insufficiently specified concept, because it doesn't specify the units."
In other words, is $x.length the length of $x in characters and @x.length the number of elements in @x? What if $x is an array reference? What if we want to know the number of characters in @x, as is often useful when the array in question is the output of other program, or stdin? We could use a hyper version of the length method or junctions, or map, or loop, or...
But simple things should be easy, and the length method would be ambiguous.
So there is no %hash.keys.length in Perl 6. There is %hash.keys.chars and %hash.keys.elems, or just %hash.elems. The references to container data types are automatically dereferenced, so $hashref.elems does what you need without the need to explicitly dereference anything.
Summarising,
the correct version of (keys %hash).length in grandparent post should be %hash.elems and (keys $hash{"key"}).length should be %hash{"key"}.elems which seems quite straightforward if you ask me.
If it makes too much sense then you certainly shouldn't read the rest of Apocalypses, Exegeses and Synopses. You have been warned.
All I now need is the Postgres-R (replication) stuff to work out of the box (like it does for mysql). I don't know if transaction speeds might be hit by replication or not.
One other question that I would like to answer is replication, because I get this question all the time: unlike some other database systems within PostgreSQL, replication is an add-in. It's a separate application. That isn't an accident. It's done on purpose.
There are several reasons for that. One is that replication is actually not a single feature. It is a set of four or five different related implementations, which serve four or five different needs. As a result, we don't want to bundle one particular kind of replication with the main database, because that's not suitable to all users. Our leading replication project, in terms of popularity, is something called Slony-I, lead by Jan Wieck, who is also on the Core Team. That has actually been quite popular as one of the leading master-slave high availability replication systems of any kind. Jan is currently working on Slony-II, which will be synchronous multi-master replication for database server clusters. Based on the pace of his past work, I would anticipate that it would be available in about a year or so. But don't look for that information in the main release notes for PostgreSQL, because it will always be a separate parallel project. [emphasis added]
Slony-I was born from an idea to create a replication system that was not tied
to a specific version of PostgreSQL, and allowed to be started and stopped on
an existing database with out the need for a dump/reload cycle.
Slony-I is a "master to multiple slaves" replication system with cascading and
slave promotion. The big picture for the development of Slony-I is a
master-slave system that includes all features and capabilities needed to
replicate large databases to a reasonably limited number of slave systems.
Slony-I is a system for data centers and backup sites, where the normal mode
of operation is that all nodes are available.
Slony-I, the first iteration of the project, is an asynchronous replicator of a single master database to multiple replicas, which in turn may have cascaded replicas. It will include all features required to replicate large databases with a reasonable number of replicas. Jan has targeted Slony-I toward data centers and backup sites, implying that all nodes in the network are always available.
The master is the primary database with which the applications interact. Replicas are replications, or copies of the primary database. Since the master database is always changing, data replication is the system that enables the updates of secondary, or replica, databases as the master database updates. In synchronous replication systems, the master and the replica are consistent exact copies. The client does not receive a commit until all replicas have the transaction in question. Asynchronous replication loosens that binding and allows the replica to copy transactions from the master, rolling forward, at its own pace. The server issues a commit to the master client based on the state of the master database tra
A) How in the hell can they read zeroes? Perhaps if you *deleted* the data (i.e. on an OS level) they can read it, but I doubt that if you filled the drive with zeros they could do anything.
In short, there are no "ones" or "zeroes" on your hard drive, but only certain signals that represent them. Somewhat oversimplifying, when you write 1 over 1, the value is slightly larger than 1 written over 0.
It doesn't matter for the hard drive as long as both are well over certain threshold and will never get confused with 0. But when you subtract a perfect 1 from all of the "ones" on the hard drive (and leave the "zeroes" alone), then you will get a weak signal which is a shadow of the previous data. Amplify it and you have more or less the same signal that was there before the overwriting.
You can do it once more and get the data before that, and repeat it until you hit the limitation of your equipment sensitivity and the noise of the signal itself, but recovering few generations of data is usually possible, and recovering the previous data is trivial, especially when you deleted it with zeroes, so you don't even have to bother with removing the 1s.
That is why I always run:
shred -vz/dev/hda
before I stop using any hard drive.
B) Assuming they can, destroy it in some other way.
From info shred:
The best way to remove something irretrievably is to destroy the
media it's on with acid, melt it down, or the like. For cheap
removable media like floppy disks, this is the preferred method.
However, hard drives are expensive and hard to melt, so the `shred'
utility tries to achieve a similar effect non-destructively.
This uses many overwrite passes, with the data patterns chosen to
maximize the damage they do to the old data. [...]
Abstract:
With the use of increasingly sophisticated encryption systems, an attacker wishing to gain access to sensitive data is forced to look elsewhere for information. One avenue of attack is the recovery of supposedly erased data from magnetic media or random-access memory. This paper covers some of the methods available to recover erased data and presents schemes to make this recovery significantly more difficult. [emphasis added]
Introduction:
[...] In the 1980's some work was done on the recovery of erased data from magnetic media, but to date the main source of information is government standards covering the destruction of data. There are two main problems with these official guidelines for sanitizing media. The first is that they are often somewhat old and may predate newer techniques for both recording data on the media and for recovering the recorded data. For example most of the current guidelines on sanitizing magnetic media predate the early-90's jump in recording densities, the adoption of sophisticated channel coding techniques such as PRML, the use of magnetic force microscopy for the analysis of magnetic media, and recent studies of certain properties of magnetic media recording such as the behaviour of erase bands. The second problem with official data destruction standards is that the information in them may be partially inaccurate in an attempt to fool opposing intelligence agencies (which is probably why a great many guidelines on sanitizing media are classified). By deliberately under-stating the requirements for media sanitization in publicly-available guides, intelligence agencies can preser
One in five console gamers robs and plunders at sea without a commission from a recognised sovereign nation? Seriously, couldn't we call piracy piracy and copyright infringement copyright infringement? We might as well call them terrorists or communists, count and publish some meaningless percentage value, but it wouldn't really matter as long as we keep confusing the very things that we are supposed to count. Please stop using BSA propaganda terms.
It is important to note that you cannot really violate the GNU General Public License per se. You can only violate the copyright law by not accepting the GPL and doing anything that is otherwise prohibited by the copyright. The GPL is not an EULA but a real copyright license. That is why the GPL doesn't really have to be "tested" in court because we already know that the copyright infringement is illegal and tested to no end, and it doesn't really matter whether the protected work in question is Microsoft Windows or GNU/Linux, because without accepting and following the GPL, you don't have any license at all. Of course it doesn't make you a "thief" (unless you also wrongfully took or used someone else's property with the intent to permanently deprive the owner or the person with rightful possession of that property or its use), neither does it make you a "pirate" (unless you also rob or plunder at sea without a commission from a recognised sovereign nation) but it makes you the copyright law violator, and that is something to worry about, especially under the jurisdictions with draconian copyright laws. That is why instead of talking about GPL violations, we should really talk about copyright infringement, because if you don't want to follow the GPL, you might illegally use Microsoft software just as well.
Also here's their press release if you can read Japanese.
And here's the Babelfish translation if you can't:
, high durable LAN cable for outside wiring
The thin-shaped LAN cable sale which can pass the opening of the sash
corporation (head office: The Osaka city Chuo Ku, president: Leaf rice field sequential Osamu), LAN cable LD-VAPF/BK series and correspond to opening wiring LD-VAPF/SV05 and outside wiring which correspond to outside wiring are considered and the relay connector LD-VAPF/RJ45WP which the waterproof tape bundled is done is sold.
As for the LD-VAPF/BK series adopting the high durable polyethylene for the external sheath. Weather resistance made outside wiring high possible. The cable corresponds to category 5, it is enabled with giga bit ethernet 1000BASE-T.
LD-VAPF/SV05 is the thin-shaped LAN cable whose it is possible to pass through the opening of the sash. The LAN cable is pulled from the outside and it is not necessary to construct on a large scale e.g., when it is packed, the hole is bored through the wall. While strengthening with the aluminum tape, actualizing scantness 1.4mm. It is conformed to category 5 with this scantness.
LD-VAPF/RJ45WP is the LAN relay connector where the waterproof tape belongs. It is optimum to the LD-VAPF/BK series and to connect LD-VAPF/SV05. Anyone can do the outside wiring of LAN simply by using combining these products.
Furthermore, sale has planned the middle of March.
The active high durable polyethylene sheath was adopted even with the outside
category 5 LAN cable. Outside corresponding type CAT5E LAN cable(single line specification [ 24AWG ]) LD-VAPF/BK series (10BASE-T 100BASE-TX 1000BASE-T) LD-VAPF/BK10 (10m) LD-VAPF/BK100 (100m) - The high durable polyethylene was adopted for the external sheath, furthermore by the fact that the sheath is converted doubly in order to raise weather resistance wiring with the outside was made possible - category 5 correspondence - Giga bit ethernet 1000BASE-T correspondence and FTTH/ADSL/CATV correspondence * Both ends connector attaching LD-VAPF/BK10 (10m) XXYEN 3,780 (including tax)substance price XXYEN 3,600
LD-VAPF/BK30 (30m) XXYEN 8,925 (including tax)substance price XXYEN 8,500 * The RJ45 connector part does not correspond to the outside. By all means after waterproofing, please use with the outside * Only cable LD-VAPF/BK100 (100m) XXYEN 25,200 (including tax)substance price XXYEN 24,000 - Only cable of LD-VAPF series type - Cable stripper attaching of simplicity type Using the opening of the sash window, the LAN cable from the outside It pulls to the interior and it is possible to be packed. Aluminum strengthening flat LAN cable (10BASE-T 100BASE-TX1000BASE-T) for high durable opening LD-VAPF/SV05 ¥2,520 (including tax) substance price ¥2,400 LD-VAPF/SV05 - Using the opening of the sash window, from the outside it pulls to the interior and is packed, the optimum to wiring under and the like the floor - While having strengthened with the aluminum tape, actualizing the scantness of 1.4mm - category 5 conformity - Giga bit ethernet 1000BASE-T correspondence and FTTH/ADSL/CATV correspondence - Length 50cm (aluminum strengthening part 20cm) - Both ends connector attaching slim connector adoption mold process twist specification * Other than of the aluminum tape part is non waterproofing. Please be sure waterproofing concerning the part which is used with the outside, The connector which is optimum to the relay of the LAN cable and the aluminum strengthening flat LAN cable for the outside Outside corresponding RJ-45 relay connector(10BASE-T 100BASE-TX 1000BASE-T) LD-VAPF/RJ45WP ¥1,575 (including tax) substance price ¥1,500 LD-VAPF/SV05 - Optimum to LD-VAPF/BK series and the relay of LD-VAPF/SV05 -
You need some simple script driving mkisofs and cdrecord. When you Google for cdrecord mkisofs backup, the first result is scdbackup:
Simplified Backup on CD or DVD for Linux
Purpose: backup large amounts of data on one or more CDs or DVDs, simple (therefore no excuse not to do the backup), no special tool needed for reading the backup
Sounds exactly like what you need. There are many more tools like that. Good luck.
Kudos to Volker Lendecke. We certainly need more people like that. Why? Because when I talk to the Big Boss I can say: I suggest buying solutions from SerNet GmbH to cut costs and increase long term stability. It is much more likely to get through than: I suggest stop buying solutions from Microsoft or anyone else and doing everything ourselves instead. Sometimes in Big Business, "free" is a synonym for "cheap" and you never want to sound "cheap" on a strategy meeting, trust me. I wonder what will be the reaction from Microsoft.
There is really nothing Yahoo can do. The question is, does Yahoo have to compete with Google? The answer is no, they don't, nor should they. Both of them have different target audience, different services, different strategies. They can peacefully coexist. To successfully compete with Google, Yahoo would have to "do no evil" and that would kill their bottom line. For example, Yahoo couldn't afford getting banned in China only to get a statement like Google did so the obvious solution was helping China's communist government in censoring its citizens and they did an amazing job from the technical standpoint, even if morally questioned by some. On that example alone we can see that they couldn't possible compete in this and many similar areas. So the answer is: there is nothing they can do, and there is nothing they should do. Those are two different companies, with two different markets and two completely different sets of principles: "do no evil" and "do no evil to shareholders," respectively.
Just use GAIM (available on Windows, Linux et al). That way you won't have to accept AIM EULA which reserves the right to change the conditions without notice so it doesn't really matter that they cannot spy on you today if you can never be sure what they add to the TOS tommorow. Don't use their software, don't accept their EULA. As a side effect have no intrusive advertisements and gain real network- and OS-independence. Problem solved.
because you can use quantum cryptography on the transport OSI layer (unlike electrons in copper, photons in fiber show quantum effects that you can exploit to have 100% secure channel). This is the most important advantage of fiber networks, and it is also the most interesting one. For anyone who has no time to read essays by Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Max Born, Paul Dirac, Wolfgang Pauli and others, I recommend starting from A Lazy Layman's Guide to Quantum Physics by James Higgo, but you should really read at least some papers by Planck, Bohr and Schrödinger as soon as possible. It was not clearly stated in the article but in fact the quantum cryptography is one of the most important features of fiber networks that make them so exciting these days.
Please keep in mind that Canadian privacy laws are very different than those in both US and EU, so I recommend reding PrivacyInfo.ca by Professor Michael Geist (University of Ottawa's Faculty of Law). Knowing the most important differences is essential to fully understand the issues in question so you will save a lot of time if you read about both Federal Privacy Legislation and Provincial Privacy Legislation first. The article linked in this story makes much less sense without appropriate background.
Before anyone points out that now we'll find out the truth about the infamous NSAKEY in Windows or some dirty little secrets of Bush administration, I would like to remind you that according to Bruce Schneier "algorithms from the NSA are considered a sort of alien technology: They come from a superior race with no explanations." The most important implication of declassifying NSA would be a better understanding of the mysterious rationale of many of NSA decisions in crypto algorithms, because even many aspects of DES remain a mystery to this day. So please stop the explosion of crackpot conspiracy theories and focus on the most important issue: cryptoanallysis.
I have been waiting for the results for quite some time and they surely look impressive. I might add that the underlying concept is not very hard to understand and one could even make a simple 3-D model of distant objects (like e.g. buildings in your city) using only two eyes, paper, pencil and some basic trigonometry.
Look at this model: A---B |\/| | C | |/ \| D---E
Where D and E are your two eyes, two cameras, or two positions from which you look at the object C that appears to be eclipsing A and B respectively. The distance between any of those points and their relative 3-D positions can be calculated when you know some of the distances (e.g. DE and AD) with very high precision.
Novell launched a major new release of its ZENworks Linux Management software at CeBIT on Friday, with the aim of bringing management of Linux desktops and servers on par with that of Windows desktops and servers.
Am I the only one who has been trying for years to finally bring management of Windows desktops and servers on par with that of Linux desktops and servers? I'm sure that "full life-cycle management suite" may be very interesting to anyone who employ cutting edge proactive paradigm shifts, but in the Real World administrators have much more problems with remote administrating of Windows than Linux (or BSD, or Mac, or Solaris... you name it) boxen. (Don't trust Microsoft when they tell you about Linux TOC. They lie.) So the question is: is Novell really relevant in the Un*x world? Hasn't TCP/IP won with Novell's proprietary networking technology? Don't get me wrong, Novell networks were great in MS-DOS world but the Un*x culture is much older than that, the Internet is much older than that. The most important question is: what does it really mean for Linux users, administrators and developers? And by "really" I mean without the marketspeak buzzwords. Which tools is it supposed to render irrelevant? (Because if it is useful, then it must be used in place of some other, standard, existing tool, for all of those areas have been pretty much covered for decades.) All in all, the choice is good, but I will remain sceptical until I see any Real World examples of the supposed superiority of those new ideas. (I am not holding my breath, though.) I believe that we should look at Windows if we want to make Linux ready for the desktop, but as far as the management of Linux desktops and servers goes, here the Windows should learn from us.
Slashdot Mirror
You can find a lot of useful informations here. Enjoy.
1: change default ssh port
Security through obscurity doesn't work. A port scan would find your sshd soon enough.
But an automated worm would miss you. And that's the point.
This is an interesting moral question. Check out this article, you may find it interesting.
How hard would it be develop a system (we are talking about digital via-satelite broadcasting multimedia after all) that would automaticly count the songs recorded by any given user and then split a number X proportionally to the number of listenings/recordings ratio (weighted averages) where X would be a monthly license fee. This is a satelite radio that might potentionally interfere with global radio field spanning across multiple juristictions so it is fair to exclude it from the god given rights to listen/record that would otherwise be unalienable in the case of plain old radio.
We and most importantly the RIAA members have to understand that satelite is not a local ground radio station. Both the technical, economical and legal implications are completely different and our collective attitude towards that technology must be as rational as it possibly can.
We have to explain it to our less savvy peers, for they are the ones who make the difference when it comes to voting. That is how a pure democracy works.
I think that sms is definitely not making me nearly blind enough.
Short answer: yes it does, and it is actually one of the main reasons why I look forward to use Debian GNU/Hurd in the future. Let me quote my old post from January with some background and interesting links to more informations about KeyKOS:
And here is a newer post of mine asking exactly your question about KeyKOS capabilities in connection to the recent development of The Hurd, in the First Program Executed on L4 Port of GNU/HURD discussion two months ago:
It sounds like yet another reinventing of Literate Programming and The CWEB System of Structured Documentation by Donald E. Knuth. See also: www.literateprogramming.com. Some quotes:
More quotes:
In other words, paraphrasing Henry Spencer, "Those who do not understand the ideas of Donald Knuth are condemned to reinvent them, poorly."
But he will with Longhorn. That's what Bill was really saying.
The great Linux guru winner: no one.
After the 96 hours, the machine was still safe and sound.
Distro on the target machine: Adamantix.
What was proved: nothing.
Time: wasted.
As Larry said in Apocalypse 12, "The length() function is gone" because "[it] has been deemed to be an insufficiently specified concept, because it doesn't specify the units."
In other words, is $x.length the length of $x in characters and @x.length the number of elements in @x? What if $x is an array reference? What if we want to know the number of characters in @x, as is often useful when the array in question is the output of other program, or stdin? We could use a hyper version of the length method or junctions, or map, or loop, or...
But simple things should be easy, and the length method would be ambiguous. So there is no %hash.keys.length in Perl 6. There is %hash.keys.chars and %hash.keys.elems, or just %hash.elems. The references to container data types are automatically dereferenced, so $hashref.elems does what you need without the need to explicitly dereference anything.
Summarising, the correct version of (keys %hash).length in grandparent post should be %hash.elems and (keys $hash{"key"}).length should be %hash{"key"}.elems which seems quite straightforward if you ask me.
If it makes too much sense then you certainly shouldn't read the rest of Apocalypses, Exegeses and Synopses. You have been warned.
From the interview:
In other words, just use Slony-I. From the overview:
See also the basic documentation. For more technical details dewnload the design document (PDF). For an excellent introduction make sure to read Introducing Slony by A. Elein Mustain on ONLamp:
In short, there are no "ones" or "zeroes" on your hard drive, but only certain signals that represent them. Somewhat oversimplifying, when you write 1 over 1, the value is slightly larger than 1 written over 0.
It doesn't matter for the hard drive as long as both are well over certain threshold and will never get confused with 0. But when you subtract a perfect 1 from all of the "ones" on the hard drive (and leave the "zeroes" alone), then you will get a weak signal which is a shadow of the previous data. Amplify it and you have more or less the same signal that was there before the overwriting.
You can do it once more and get the data before that, and repeat it until you hit the limitation of your equipment sensitivity and the noise of the signal itself, but recovering few generations of data is usually possible, and recovering the previous data is trivial, especially when you deleted it with zeroes, so you don't even have to bother with removing the 1s.
That is why I always run:
shred -vz /dev/hda
before I stop using any hard drive.
From info shred:
Shred is available in GNU fileutils.
See also Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory paper by Peter Gutmann, first published in the Sixth USENIX Security Symposium Proceedings, San Jose, California, July 22-25, 1996.
One in five console gamers robs and plunders at sea without a commission from a recognised sovereign nation? Seriously, couldn't we call piracy piracy and copyright infringement copyright infringement? We might as well call them terrorists or communists, count and publish some meaningless percentage value, but it wouldn't really matter as long as we keep confusing the very things that we are supposed to count. Please stop using BSA propaganda terms.
It is important to note that you cannot really violate the GNU General Public License per se. You can only violate the copyright law by not accepting the GPL and doing anything that is otherwise prohibited by the copyright. The GPL is not an EULA but a real copyright license. That is why the GPL doesn't really have to be "tested" in court because we already know that the copyright infringement is illegal and tested to no end, and it doesn't really matter whether the protected work in question is Microsoft Windows or GNU/Linux, because without accepting and following the GPL, you don't have any license at all. Of course it doesn't make you a "thief" (unless you also wrongfully took or used someone else's property with the intent to permanently deprive the owner or the person with rightful possession of that property or its use), neither does it make you a "pirate" (unless you also rob or plunder at sea without a commission from a recognised sovereign nation) but it makes you the copyright law violator, and that is something to worry about, especially under the jurisdictions with draconian copyright laws. That is why instead of talking about GPL violations, we should really talk about copyright infringement, because if you don't want to follow the GPL, you might illegally use Microsoft software just as well.
And here's the Babelfish translation if you can't:
Sounds exactly like what you need. There are many more tools like that. Good luck.
Kudos to Volker Lendecke. We certainly need more people like that. Why? Because when I talk to the Big Boss I can say: I suggest buying solutions from SerNet GmbH to cut costs and increase long term stability. It is much more likely to get through than: I suggest stop buying solutions from Microsoft or anyone else and doing everything ourselves instead. Sometimes in Big Business, "free" is a synonym for "cheap" and you never want to sound "cheap" on a strategy meeting, trust me. I wonder what will be the reaction from Microsoft.
There is really nothing Yahoo can do. The question is, does Yahoo have to compete with Google? The answer is no, they don't, nor should they. Both of them have different target audience, different services, different strategies. They can peacefully coexist. To successfully compete with Google, Yahoo would have to "do no evil" and that would kill their bottom line. For example, Yahoo couldn't afford getting banned in China only to get a statement like Google did so the obvious solution was helping China's communist government in censoring its citizens and they did an amazing job from the technical standpoint, even if morally questioned by some. On that example alone we can see that they couldn't possible compete in this and many similar areas. So the answer is: there is nothing they can do, and there is nothing they should do. Those are two different companies, with two different markets and two completely different sets of principles: "do no evil" and "do no evil to shareholders," respectively.
Just use GAIM (available on Windows, Linux et al). That way you won't have to accept AIM EULA which reserves the right to change the conditions without notice so it doesn't really matter that they cannot spy on you today if you can never be sure what they add to the TOS tommorow. Don't use their software, don't accept their EULA. As a side effect have no intrusive advertisements and gain real network- and OS-independence. Problem solved.
because you can use quantum cryptography on the transport OSI layer (unlike electrons in copper, photons in fiber show quantum effects that you can exploit to have 100% secure channel). This is the most important advantage of fiber networks, and it is also the most interesting one. For anyone who has no time to read essays by Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Max Born, Paul Dirac, Wolfgang Pauli and others, I recommend starting from A Lazy Layman's Guide to Quantum Physics by James Higgo, but you should really read at least some papers by Planck, Bohr and Schrödinger as soon as possible. It was not clearly stated in the article but in fact the quantum cryptography is one of the most important features of fiber networks that make them so exciting these days.
Please keep in mind that Canadian privacy laws are very different than those in both US and EU, so I recommend reding PrivacyInfo.ca by Professor Michael Geist (University of Ottawa's Faculty of Law). Knowing the most important differences is essential to fully understand the issues in question so you will save a lot of time if you read about both Federal Privacy Legislation and Provincial Privacy Legislation first. The article linked in this story makes much less sense without appropriate background.
Before anyone points out that now we'll find out the truth about the infamous NSAKEY in Windows or some dirty little secrets of Bush administration, I would like to remind you that according to Bruce Schneier "algorithms from the NSA are considered a sort of alien technology: They come from a superior race with no explanations." The most important implication of declassifying NSA would be a better understanding of the mysterious rationale of many of NSA decisions in crypto algorithms, because even many aspects of DES remain a mystery to this day. So please stop the explosion of crackpot conspiracy theories and focus on the most important issue: cryptoanallysis.
I have been waiting for the results for quite some time and they surely look impressive. I might add that the underlying concept is not very hard to understand and one could even make a simple 3-D model of distant objects (like e.g. buildings in your city) using only two eyes, paper, pencil and some basic trigonometry.
/|
Look at this model:
A---B
|\
| C |
|/ \|
D---E
Where D and E are your two eyes, two cameras, or two positions from which you look at the object C that appears to be eclipsing A and B respectively. The distance between any of those points and their relative 3-D positions can be calculated when you know some of the distances (e.g. DE and AD) with very high precision.
Recommended Wikipædia reading for anyone interested: Parallax, Triangulation, Stationary point, Pythagorean theorem, Euclidean geometry, Astrometry, Binocular vision, Stereoscopy. Have fun.
Novell launched a major new release of its ZENworks Linux Management software at CeBIT on Friday, with the aim of bringing management of Linux desktops and servers on par with that of Windows desktops and servers.
Am I the only one who has been trying for years to finally bring management of Windows desktops and servers on par with that of Linux desktops and servers? I'm sure that "full life-cycle management suite" may be very interesting to anyone who employ cutting edge proactive paradigm shifts, but in the Real World administrators have much more problems with remote administrating of Windows than Linux (or BSD, or Mac, or Solaris... you name it) boxen. (Don't trust Microsoft when they tell you about Linux TOC. They lie.) So the question is: is Novell really relevant in the Un*x world? Hasn't TCP/IP won with Novell's proprietary networking technology? Don't get me wrong, Novell networks were great in MS-DOS world but the Un*x culture is much older than that, the Internet is much older than that. The most important question is: what does it really mean for Linux users, administrators and developers? And by "really" I mean without the marketspeak buzzwords. Which tools is it supposed to render irrelevant? (Because if it is useful, then it must be used in place of some other, standard, existing tool, for all of those areas have been pretty much covered for decades.) All in all, the choice is good, but I will remain sceptical until I see any Real World examples of the supposed superiority of those new ideas. (I am not holding my breath, though.) I believe that we should look at Windows if we want to make Linux ready for the desktop, but as far as the management of Linux desktops and servers goes, here the Windows should learn from us.