"Another Software Spy" Really should be "Another iD software spy" because they had jepordized security and privacy before.
IIRC, certain versions of Quake 2 for Linux would let anyone from the 192.246.0.0 IP block have remote shell capabilities. If you ran the server as root, you gave someone at iD software your computer on a platter. I read this on a page that listed possible remote exploits and security concerns for Linux a while back, and can't find the link at the moment (it was back in April that I read it).
If true, then iD, while good gaming wise, is certainly not to be trusted. Time to recheck the firewall rules, as having a CM makes it far too easy to let lots of data through. ---
"The end of anonymity, coming soon to a Web near you."
Digital ID already exists. PGP, and the certificates used for SSL (from Verisign). A good digital ID should let you send email "signed" (PGP fingerprint, anybody?). How is this bad? As Rob said in the last version of "Geeks in Space" I listened: "alright -- no more stupid faxing!" (regarding a law relating to digital ids). A digital signature should (in practice) be even harder to forge than a signature, unless you choose something like single DES;-)
Conversly, it'll only be a problem like the PIII serial number issues if you use things like closed source software that can't be verified to not send along important digital ID relating things to sites. I know Opera and Netscape aren't in the habit of sending my name, email address, and street address along to every site I visit. But if I said something bad enough, and someone went and got a court order, it sure wouldn't be hard for the system admins of a public board to dig through their logs, find my IP, and get my info from my ISP.
So really, how is this a change from the status quo, except for a change towards popular support for digital ids?
Either way, I wouldn't mind if we had less "31337" first posting *censored*s;-)
"But I don't (personally) believe we should ever apologize for running legitimate news, including speculations made in public forums by Open Source celebrities. And Bruce Perens is not only a legitimate public figure in the Open Source context, but is one largely because of his own actions. Bruce is not a reticent person. " (Emphasis mine)
"Fast-forward to now: there are days when Slashdot does well over one million pageviews. Reporters from The Wall Street Journal (Hi Lee!), CNN (Hi, Ian!) and even Al Gore campaign staffers (Hi, Ben!), read Slashdot regularly. Stories that break here are often picked up by general-interest media or serve as inspiration (we say politely) for their own reporting." (Emphasis mine)
Stories that break here? Alright. We have stories that appear on the Slashdot mainpage, as well as features, articles, polls, etc. What happens next? Slashdot is an open, public discussion board. Thanks to Rob's wonderful leadership, we can have this as uncensored as we want, too. It's not a news service, and any background checking and points are generally made by the people who post to these forums.
Admittedly, some of the more vapouristic rumours should have some Slashdot staff background checking, but they have to wade through a lot of story submissions each day, not to mention general server maintenance, etc. They post stuff, we discuss and perhaps even reach a conclusion. This is not the news, this is information that Slashdot readers find interesting. Using Slashdot as a basis for a New York Times or Wall Street Journal article, is like writing a story based on some subway bum's ramblings.
Speculation in online forums should not be used as inspiration for the news. ---
I did some Apache load testing on my server. It doesn't have the bandwidth to handle heavy traffic.
It's a Pentium 225 w/ 128mb of ram (it was 200Mhz, with only 96mb of ram when I benched). On static and SSI pages, it would certainly flood the pipe (512 simultanious requests, total of 8192 or so in Ab). On phtml (PHP3 page), the load went up to 65 for a while (heheh);-) Took 16 minutes to do the same load dynamic, that took 6 seconds static.
Lesson to be learned: if you have dynamic content, have an Apache module to regenerate dynamic page X every N minutes. Serve up said generated page. This is what Slashdot does (IIRC), as well as other "serious" dynamic content sites (Yahoo patent comes to mind). I'm not sure if said module exists, but it'd be great if it did exist (instead of using cron scripts). ---
I know he's backed off now, but I agree with his actions. Corel must be held accountable.
Corel has dropped the ball so much recently. They must have some lawyers -- did it ever occur to them to consult with these lawyers? If they did, why did the lawyers not stop them?
First, they break the GPL by trying to be the same old closed-source company. Why did we accept this? Because they were new, and a mistake is OK the first time.
Next, they decided to link in GPLed code with code that does not share a similar licence. Why? There was no excuse for this one, but we forgave them because they were well intentioned. Heck, I've worked on a GPL program that uses libraries that are not GPLed. However, I did check to see if the licence permitted it (it did).
And now, they seem to have decided that only people who can be held responsible for using a free as in freedom operating system shall have it. IT IS FREE! FREEDOM! Who do they think they are? How do they think they can dictate fair usage of FREE, OPEN code?
I'm Canadian, and so are they. Corel makes me feel ashamed to be in the same country. Why? Because they are too apathetic to even get a Linux distribution done correctly. Hopefully Linux One, and a similar slew of "We have a distro, too!" companies won't make the same screwups, otherwise we're in for a hellish new year. ---
Perhaps you should think of motivation. Every crime needs three criterea fullfilled: means, motive, and opportunity. Means? Car. Opportunity? Every time it drives. Motive? None. Unlike us biologicals, an AI wouldn't have a lot of our impulses (curiosity, fear, anger, love) that came about because they were important to our survival. This makes me think that AIs would be reasonably happy (in a sense of them not being sad) bunch. Once we add emotions to them (perhaps a subset of emotions, ie: the ones that are usefull in today's society), they may become "dissfunctional" in the way you specify. How can we punish such a creature? Disolution. EMP will stop any electronic device that hasn't been hardened, and nothing can be hardened enough to deal with multiple, powerful bursts at close range. But (cue evil music), we must also think of the logic. Have you seen The Matrix? (Who hasn't?:-)).. The AIs sent out to stop "rogues" were programmed with a specific pre-motivations. To them, humans smell. They wish only to do their jobs and be terminated, so they can be away from the smell. That is the kind of urge that would control the AIs we would create. How could this be bad? Well, if the AI is "coldly logical," it could reach the conclusion that the bottom feeders of humanity aren't worth the effort. Robot machines going along the street, culling the homeless. It could happen. However, you would only have to teach it that a single anything does not survive (ie: single genotype crops, single company behind an OS or product). Natural forces (competition, punctured equilibrium, etc), will cause constant change (the universe is entropy). Any intelligent person or creature cannot argue with that. In the end, the AI will only be as good as the creator. It must be given proper base urges (think Asimov's robot laws), and proper knowledge. After that, it will look after itself. Remember that voice in your head that says, "Ah-ah-ah! Turning your car into oncoming traffic is counter productive!" -- that voice will also be with the AI if it is created correctly, just like it is with children if they are raised correctly:-) ---
Think of it this way. Russia was securing its borders, in the same way that France and Spain were for most of the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s. During this time, they stopped being closed off to the rest of the world, and tried to grow themselves into an economic power, instead of just a monorachy (started by Peter the Great, IIRC). The reason they are still so large, is similar to the reason why Canada and the US are so large: with the size they already had, they were a formidable opponent. When they were attacked, the cold Russian winters drove away the troops (Napoleon sieged Moscow, as did Hitler). The Russians, naturally, became paranoid. They used other countries as a shield after WW2 (on direction of Stalin, not the most kind of rulers). Lenin, Trotsky, and the other inteligencia of the Russian revolution wanted piece and prosperity, whereas Stalin and Barai saw it as a power grab. If you were the leader of a country who was invaded from the west on average once every 50 years, with a determined push every 100 years or so, would you not get "friendlies" around you? The US certainly made the countries west of Germany friendly with the NATO pact. The problem with pointing fingers, as you have done, is that it leads to problems. People will only build up a military if they feel they can't trust their neighbours. Canada and the US seem to not be afraid of each other (see the free, open border), whereas Pakistan and India are developing Nuclear Weapons to use in case "the other side" strikes first ("they may strike first, but we will WIN and make them PAY"). It's juivinile (sp) to always seek revenge, it only leads to more bloodshed.
Or not. I recall that the "Jam Echelon" day wasn't a success (also reported by CNN). Could this just be creative misinformation to try and make the US gov't re-evaluate their "new" encryption stance, or otherwise lull us into a false sense of security? Digital data is not harder to work with than analog; it's easier! By its nature, it's easier to examine things bit-by-bit and score it with simple AI programs (and don't tell me there aren't a few Lisp/Prolog or Perl hackers in the NSA). ---
That wasn't the NSA, that was the US military. And the HIDAR balls (aka "Dew line" or "Golf balls") are not located in Europe, they are located in Canada. They are located there to detect incoming Russian missiles (which are going the short way, right over the N pole). The Canadian PM of the time (probably John Diefenbaker or Mackenzie King) let the US build their dew line on our soil because Roosovelt (sp is wrong) promised to protect Canada if it was ever invaded.
As a Canadian, I value the good will of the US military in protecting Canada (after some of the military exposures here) over our own military.. But I don't thnk the dew line was much of a deterent to the Russians (who were just paranoid about/ANOTHER/ invasion [Hitler, Napoleon, WW1, etc]).
"One problem: most people lack the technical skills to make a well founded technical judgement of what this chip has to offer. Most users are not aware of the differences between a PII, a PII and a K7."
One of these things is not like the others, two of these things are the same. Can you tell me which one doesn't belong?
The NRA says, "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." It is interesting to note that People without guns kill a lot less people.
Think of cracking DVD encryption. People can pirate DVDs by directly bit copying from one disc to another. However, it's made a lot easier by cracking the encryption.
If you make a program to check security (satan, nmap), there are those who will miss use it.
The point I'm trying to make is, technology is neutral. If you use it for good, it'd good. If you use it for evil, it's bad. Technology that make some bad things easier should have a counter-technology or deployment to offset the effects (criminals get guns, so officers get guns, etc). ---
Has anyone noticed AOL also mooking around with their other darling, ICQ?
If you read the source from licq (and other ICQ-compatible *nix clients), you'll find that ICQ 99a and 99b don't really adhere to their protocol v5. ICQ 99b, for example, seems to want its bytes swapped around (endianness bug, or purposefull?).
What would be really good are: 1) Standard communication (clients can talk to clients), with standard back-end communication (I can make up my own ICQ server, and this can go and connect with the ICQ network). ^ This is a general thing to benefit everyone
2) A migration program for the different client databases. I'd love it if there was something like alien (package format converter) that I could use to let licq and ICQ 98 (99 is a bloated P-O-S) share the same history database. ^ This is more specific, and would mainly be a benefit for people migrating from Windows to Linux (a good browser, like Opera, would also be a must).
The standards aren't going to come about unless we can come up with a good protocol, have GPLed source (no AOL "bait and switch" tactics are possible then), and get a fair number of people using it. A good internal client with plugins for different OS specific display (like licq) would be great for this. Why would I want to use ICQ98 if I can use Licq-Win32, contact friends on the new Open network, as well as keep in touch with the older ICQ people? Not to mention the fact that this would remove the main barrier (data in one OS, but not the other) that people have to switching from one to another. ---
"The more changes you can make between versions the better, you don't want users to become bored with the same old API or user interface year after year. Finally, if you can make this change without the users noticing, this is better still - it will keep them on their toes, and keep them from becoming complacent."
From this line, it becomes quite clear that they've started to document some of their common practices. They're not a monoply, they're just following their ISO 9001 certified business standard for programming:-) (Proof that ISO certification is just a piece of paper saying people do that they say they do). ---
This OS is all about what you want! More communist programmers, more indignant code, and less code tyops!
We have forked the code, and are in the process of patching in more rude comments! Yeah!
On top of that, we have an exclusive (but GPLed) program for finding and fixing common tyops in the code. This is already hard at work on our copy of the kernel for ICO.
On top of that, to make sure no-one can steal our One True OS, we are making it completely incompatible! HAhah! Red Hat, your pathetic efforts to make your distro un-de-forkable are NOTHING compared to our pissing on Linux(r) standards! Want the source to the kernel? No problem, go look in/src/usr/kernel (haha!). Lots of sed time must be spent to fix a dir name like that, and we have many more dir names that also violate the LSB, as well as general common sense (much like our IPO plans). Not to mention our amazing new package format -- but we won't even tell you about it, as you'll never be able to use it (and you thought RPM's false dependency messages were evil).
As a sign of our affection for our users, we have posted this to Slashdot. We wait for you to abandon Linux(r) for ICO!
Btw, we are IPOing in a few months. As we have the assorted quota of buzzwords (slashdot, GPL, Linux(r), fork, Red Hat, kernel), we expect to have a strong opening price (around 100$ a share).
IPO keyword highlighting via Silly_Linux_IPO_Bot v1.3 ---
But that's the problem. I've downloaded and compiled and tried to use the RPM source from rpm.org with Slackware 4.0, and I also tried the precompiled one with Slackware 7.0.
"Failed -- dependancy/bin/sh" Which DOES exist (symlink to/bin/bash) "Failed -- dependancy/usr/bin/perl" It's another DOES EXIST dependancy.
So I tried installing with --nodeps. Then I decide I want to remove it. "This package has never been installed"
The UN/Geneva conventions have set out rules for things like biological warfare, and nuclear weapons. Why don't we get off our duffs and do something about cyber warfare? The US has admitted to using cyber warefare as a means to an end during the Yugaslavia conflict. I'm sure China will also do so if it feels threatened.
The problem is that some people might not notice that, yes, there is a problem with it. It's not "clean" warfare -- what if your mission critical computer that is 'net connected goes down? This same system could be responsible for life support for hospital patients, or perhaps tracking the course of some satalites (the Shuttle doesn't stand up to well to colissions).
Can we really take the risk of letting people distrupt, either directly or indirectly, the infrastructure that a lot of people rely on? Something that could lead to deaths? ---
"Due to the Linux kernel, you can benefit already from a large number of applications."
No. The Linux kernel is just an ELF loader, and just provides a few functions (the ones that make Linux apps non-portable:-). They'll also need to have glibc2.1 or libc5 & pthreads, libgr, etc, to provide Linux app compatibility.
What someone should do is fire off an email requesting source. The GPL sorta specifies that they have to give you a copy, and only charge cost of shipment. ---
Does anyone with a burner, a bunch of blank CDs, a large-ish MP3 collection, an urge to piss off both the RIAA and CDNow feel like setting up a little webpage where people can select the songs they want, pass this off to a CGI that will start the burn (or just email the page owner), and then have the burnt CD sent out to the customer? I'm sure a small fee would be alright per CD, as the person will likely have lawyers circling:-)
Why must all the browsers we see be huge C++ monstrosities? If IE has taught us anything (besides the fact that MS can't play nicely), it's that modularity can have benefits (IE seems faster on a 486 compared to NS).
Methinks a few common library routines would make it easier for everyone. IE: pass a URI of http type to a module which returns the page parsed with SGML tags (to replace HTML tags and make work of layout components less) + a list of images and related things that need to be grabbed (frames would work well with this, too). This allows nice centralization of the HTML understanding (to add support for HTML 6.0, just stick this SGML doc spec in your/usr/lib/sgmlengine dir and run "newsgml").
This little library function would likely require internal functionality WRT HTTPS (SSL library, perhaps), proxy settings (yay! Global proxy settings), and some other functionality I've forgotten. Scripting languages could be left unparsed for a higher level to deal with.
Given a nice little interface routine, Lynx would become little more than an SGML interpreter and layout engine (yay simplicity), or perhaps something like Mozilla would take these meta pages and use their NGLayout (which would likely need more monkeying ot work with SGML:-) This would drop the memory reqs of each browser, make it easier to write a new browser (well, just nice new wrapper for the library), etc. Linux supports modularity for a reason, let's take advantage of it.
libbrowser stuff: httpgetandparse() -> SGML parsing routine httpget() -> Gets URL info and returns it unformatted (for images which would then be handled via the appropriate libs)
Also req'd: Libs for scripting language parsing would probably be required. ---
Slashdot Mirror
"Another Software Spy"
Really should be "Another iD software spy" because they had jepordized security and privacy before.
IIRC, certain versions of Quake 2 for Linux would let anyone from the 192.246.0.0 IP block have remote shell capabilities. If you ran the server as root, you gave someone at iD software your computer on a platter. I read this on a page that listed possible remote exploits and security concerns for Linux a while back, and can't find the link at the moment (it was back in April that I read it).
If true, then iD, while good gaming wise, is certainly not to be trusted. Time to recheck the firewall rules, as having a CM makes it far too easy to let lots of data through.
---
"The end of anonymity, coming soon to a Web near you."
;-)
;-)
Digital ID already exists. PGP, and the certificates used for SSL (from Verisign). A good digital ID should let you send email "signed" (PGP fingerprint, anybody?). How is this bad? As Rob said in the last version of "Geeks in Space" I listened: "alright -- no more stupid faxing!" (regarding a law relating to digital ids). A digital signature should (in practice) be even harder to forge than a signature, unless you choose something like single DES
Conversly, it'll only be a problem like the PIII serial number issues if you use things like closed source software that can't be verified to not send along important digital ID relating things to sites. I know Opera and Netscape aren't in the habit of sending my name, email address, and street address along to every site I visit. But if I said something bad enough, and someone went and got a court order, it sure wouldn't be hard for the system admins of a public board to dig through their logs, find my IP, and get my info from my ISP.
So really, how is this a change from the status quo, except for a change towards popular support for digital ids?
Either way, I wouldn't mind if we had less "31337" first posting *censored*s
---
Well, that would explain why I saw Tux the last time I was at Source Adult.
:-)
I just assumed I was halucinating
---
"But I don't (personally) believe we should ever apologize for running legitimate news, including speculations made in public forums by Open Source celebrities. And Bruce Perens is not only a legitimate public figure in the Open Source context, but is one largely because of his own actions. Bruce is not a reticent person. "
(Emphasis mine)
"Fast-forward to now: there are days when Slashdot does well over one million pageviews. Reporters from The Wall Street Journal (Hi Lee!), CNN (Hi, Ian!) and even Al Gore campaign staffers (Hi, Ben!), read Slashdot regularly. Stories that break here are often picked up by general-interest media or serve as inspiration (we say politely) for their own reporting."
(Emphasis mine)
Stories that break here? Alright. We have stories that appear on the Slashdot mainpage, as well as features, articles, polls, etc. What happens next? Slashdot is an open, public discussion board. Thanks to Rob's wonderful leadership, we can have this as uncensored as we want, too. It's not a news service, and any background checking and points are generally made by the people who post to these forums.
Admittedly, some of the more vapouristic rumours should have some Slashdot staff background checking, but they have to wade through a lot of story submissions each day, not to mention general server maintenance, etc. They post stuff, we discuss and perhaps even reach a conclusion. This is not the news, this is information that Slashdot readers find interesting. Using Slashdot as a basis for a New York Times or Wall Street Journal article, is like writing a story based on some subway bum's ramblings.
Speculation in online forums should not be used as inspiration for the news.
---
I did some Apache load testing on my server. It doesn't have the bandwidth to handle heavy traffic.
;-) Took 16 minutes to do the same load dynamic, that took 6 seconds static.
It's a Pentium 225 w/ 128mb of ram (it was 200Mhz, with only 96mb of ram when I benched). On static and SSI pages, it would certainly flood the pipe (512 simultanious requests, total of 8192 or so in Ab). On phtml (PHP3 page), the load went up to 65 for a while (heheh)
Lesson to be learned: if you have dynamic content, have an Apache module to regenerate dynamic page X every N minutes. Serve up said generated page. This is what Slashdot does (IIRC), as well as other "serious" dynamic content sites (Yahoo patent comes to mind). I'm not sure if said module exists, but it'd be great if it did exist (instead of using cron scripts).
---
I know he's backed off now, but I agree with his actions. Corel must be held accountable.
Corel has dropped the ball so much recently. They must have some lawyers -- did it ever occur to them to consult with these lawyers? If they did, why did the lawyers not stop them?
First, they break the GPL by trying to be the same old closed-source company. Why did we accept this? Because they were new, and a mistake is OK the first time.
Next, they decided to link in GPLed code with code that does not share a similar licence. Why? There was no excuse for this one, but we forgave them because they were well intentioned. Heck, I've worked on a GPL program that uses libraries that are not GPLed. However, I did check to see if the licence permitted it (it did).
And now, they seem to have decided that only people who can be held responsible for using a free as in freedom operating system shall have it. IT IS FREE! FREEDOM! Who do they think they are? How do they think they can dictate fair usage of FREE, OPEN code?
I'm Canadian, and so are they. Corel makes me feel ashamed to be in the same country. Why? Because they are too apathetic to even get a Linux distribution done correctly. Hopefully Linux One, and a similar slew of "We have a distro, too!" companies won't make the same screwups, otherwise we're in for a hellish new year.
---
Perhaps you should think of motivation. Every crime needs three criterea fullfilled: means, motive, and opportunity. Means? Car. Opportunity? Every time it drives. Motive? None. Unlike us biologicals, an AI wouldn't have a lot of our impulses (curiosity, fear, anger, love) that came about because they were important to our survival. :-)).. The AIs sent out to stop "rogues" were programmed with a specific pre-motivations. To them, humans smell. They wish only to do their jobs and be terminated, so they can be away from the smell. That is the kind of urge that would control the AIs we would create. How could this be bad? Well, if the AI is "coldly logical," it could reach the conclusion that the bottom feeders of humanity aren't worth the effort. Robot machines going along the street, culling the homeless. It could happen. However, you would only have to teach it that a single anything does not survive (ie: single genotype crops, single company behind an OS or product). Natural forces (competition, punctured equilibrium, etc), will cause constant change (the universe is entropy). Any intelligent person or creature cannot argue with that. :-)
This makes me think that AIs would be reasonably happy (in a sense of them not being sad) bunch. Once we add emotions to them (perhaps a subset of emotions, ie: the ones that are usefull in today's society), they may become "dissfunctional" in the way you specify. How can we punish such a creature? Disolution. EMP will stop any electronic device that hasn't been hardened, and nothing can be hardened enough to deal with multiple, powerful bursts at close range.
But (cue evil music), we must also think of the logic. Have you seen The Matrix? (Who hasn't?
In the end, the AI will only be as good as the creator. It must be given proper base urges (think Asimov's robot laws), and proper knowledge. After that, it will look after itself. Remember that voice in your head that says, "Ah-ah-ah! Turning your car into oncoming traffic is counter productive!" -- that voice will also be with the AI if it is created correctly, just like it is with children if they are raised correctly
---
Think of it this way. Russia was securing its borders, in the same way that France and Spain were for most of the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s. During this time, they stopped being closed off to the rest of the world, and tried to grow themselves into an economic power, instead of just a monorachy (started by Peter the Great, IIRC). The reason they are still so large, is similar to the reason why Canada and the US are so large: with the size they already had, they were a formidable opponent. When they were attacked, the cold Russian winters drove away the troops (Napoleon sieged Moscow, as did Hitler). The Russians, naturally, became paranoid. They used other countries as a shield after WW2 (on direction of Stalin, not the most kind of rulers). Lenin, Trotsky, and the other inteligencia of the Russian revolution wanted piece and prosperity, whereas Stalin and Barai saw it as a power grab. If you were the leader of a country who was invaded from the west on average once every 50 years, with a determined
;-)
push every 100 years or so, would you not get "friendlies" around you? The US certainly made the countries west of Germany friendly with the NATO pact. The problem with pointing fingers, as you have done, is that it leads to problems. People will only build up a military if they feel they can't trust their neighbours. Canada and the US seem to not be afraid of each other (see the free, open border), whereas Pakistan and India are developing Nuclear Weapons to use in case "the other side" strikes first ("they may strike first, but we will WIN and make them PAY"). It's juivinile (sp) to always seek revenge, it only leads to more bloodshed.
Note: Now this thread is really OT
---
Or not. I recall that the "Jam Echelon" day wasn't a success (also reported by CNN). Could this just be creative misinformation to try and make the US gov't re-evaluate their "new" encryption stance, or otherwise lull us into a false sense of security? Digital data is not harder to work with than analog; it's easier! By its nature, it's easier to examine things bit-by-bit and score it with simple AI programs (and don't tell me there aren't a few Lisp/Prolog or Perl hackers in the NSA).
---
That wasn't the NSA, that was the US military. And the HIDAR balls (aka "Dew line" or "Golf balls") are not located in Europe, they are located in Canada. They are located there to detect incoming Russian missiles (which are going the short way, right over the N pole). The Canadian PM of the time (probably John Diefenbaker or Mackenzie King) let the US build their dew line on our soil because Roosovelt (sp is wrong) promised to protect Canada if it was ever invaded.
/ANOTHER/ invasion [Hitler, Napoleon, WW1, etc]).
As a Canadian, I value the good will of the US military in protecting Canada (after some of the military exposures here) over our own military.. But I don't thnk the dew line was much of a deterent to the Russians (who were just paranoid about
---
"One problem: most people lack the technical skills to make a well founded technical judgement of what this chip has to offer. Most users are not aware of the differences between a PII, a PII and a K7."
One of these things is not like the others, two of these things are the same. Can you tell me which one doesn't belong?
;-)
---
The NRA says, "Guns don't kill people, people kill people."
It is interesting to note that People without guns kill a lot less people.
Think of cracking DVD encryption. People can pirate DVDs by directly bit copying from one disc to another. However, it's made a lot easier by cracking the encryption.
If you make a program to check security (satan, nmap), there are those who will miss use it.
The point I'm trying to make is, technology is neutral. If you use it for good, it'd good. If you use it for evil, it's bad. Technology that make some bad things easier should have a counter-technology or deployment to offset the effects (criminals get guns, so officers get guns, etc).
---
Housing prices:
Toronto: 300,000
Vancouver: 500,000
Saskatoon: 60,000
Calgary: 180,000
:-) The prairies may suck, but they are cheap to live in.
---
The last odd timestamp will be:
;-)
19:59:59 19-11-1999
I am 2h, 59m, 9s away from that
---
"NAME
primes - generate primes
...
BUGS
primes won't get you a world record."
Oh well. There's always OGR.
---
That was the day I was born (an odd occurance that).. :-) Perhaps not as odd as the appearance of the Devon Rex cat, though.
---
Damnit, they already work 20 hours a day! How on Earth could you do that to them!
What we need are a bunch of clones! "CmdTco #4452 here, MS needs more Hemoses. The NT code keeps making them commit suicide."
:-)
---
Has anyone noticed AOL also mooking around with their other darling, ICQ?
If you read the source from licq (and other ICQ-compatible *nix clients), you'll find that ICQ 99a and 99b don't really adhere to their protocol v5. ICQ 99b, for example, seems to want its bytes swapped around (endianness bug, or purposefull?).
What would be really good are:
1) Standard communication (clients can talk to clients), with standard back-end communication (I can make up my own ICQ server, and this can go and connect with the ICQ network).
^ This is a general thing to benefit everyone
2) A migration program for the different client databases. I'd love it if there was something like alien (package format converter) that I could use to let licq and ICQ 98 (99 is a bloated P-O-S) share the same history database.
^ This is more specific, and would mainly be a benefit for people migrating from Windows to Linux (a good browser, like Opera, would also be a must).
The standards aren't going to come about unless we can come up with a good protocol, have GPLed source (no AOL "bait and switch" tactics are possible then), and get a fair number of people using it. A good internal client with plugins for different OS specific display (like licq) would be great for this. Why would I want to use ICQ98 if I can use Licq-Win32, contact friends on the new Open network, as well as keep in touch with the older ICQ people? Not to mention the fact that this would remove the main barrier (data in one OS, but not the other) that people have to switching from one to another.
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"The more changes you can make between versions the better, you don't want users to become bored with the same old API or user interface year after year. Finally, if you can make this change without the users noticing, this is better still - it will keep them on their toes, and keep them from becoming complacent."
:-)
From this line, it becomes quite clear that they've started to document some of their common practices. They're not a monoply, they're just following their ISO 9001 certified business standard for programming
(Proof that ISO certification is just a piece of paper saying people do that they say they do).
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This OS is all about what you want!
/src/usr/kernel (haha!). Lots of sed time must be spent to fix a dir name like that, and we have many more dir names that also violate the LSB, as well as general common sense (much like our IPO plans).
More communist programmers, more indignant code, and less code tyops!
We have forked the code, and are in the process of patching in more rude comments! Yeah!
On top of that, we have an exclusive (but GPLed) program for finding and fixing common tyops in the code. This is already hard at work on our copy of the kernel for ICO.
On top of that, to make sure no-one can steal our One True OS, we are making it completely incompatible! HAhah! Red Hat, your pathetic efforts to make your distro un-de-forkable are NOTHING compared to our pissing on Linux(r) standards! Want the source to the kernel? No problem, go look in
Not to mention our amazing new package format -- but we won't even tell you about it, as you'll never be able to use it (and you thought RPM's false dependency messages were evil).
As a sign of our affection for our users, we have posted this to Slashdot. We wait for you to abandon Linux(r) for ICO!
Btw, we are IPOing in a few months. As we have the assorted quota of buzzwords (slashdot, GPL, Linux(r), fork, Red Hat, kernel), we expect to have a strong opening price (around 100$ a share).
IPO keyword highlighting via Silly_Linux_IPO_Bot v1.3
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But that's the problem. I've downloaded and compiled and tried to use the RPM source from rpm.org with Slackware 4.0, and I also tried the precompiled one with Slackware 7.0.
/bin/sh" /bin/bash) /usr/bin/perl"
.tgz
.. I hate them.
"Failed -- dependancy
Which DOES exist (symlink to
"Failed -- dependancy
It's another DOES EXIST dependancy.
So I tried installing with --nodeps.
Then I decide I want to remove it.
"This package has never been installed"
AGH!!!!!!!!!!!
rpm2tgz
installpkg
removepg
Yay! It's gone! Wooohooo!
RPMs
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The UN/Geneva conventions have set out rules for things like biological warfare, and nuclear weapons. Why don't we get off our duffs and do something about cyber warfare? The US has admitted to using cyber warefare as a means to an end during the Yugaslavia conflict. I'm sure China will also do so if it feels threatened.
The problem is that some people might not notice that, yes, there is a problem with it. It's not "clean" warfare -- what if your mission critical computer that is 'net connected goes down? This same system could be responsible for life support for hospital patients, or perhaps tracking the course of some satalites (the Shuttle doesn't stand up to well to colissions).
Can we really take the risk of letting people distrupt, either directly or indirectly, the infrastructure that a lot of people rely on? Something that could lead to deaths?
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"Due to the Linux kernel, you can benefit already from a large number of applications."
:-). They'll also need to have glibc2.1 or libc5 & pthreads, libgr, etc, to provide Linux app compatibility.
No. The Linux kernel is just an ELF loader, and just provides a few functions (the ones that make Linux apps non-portable
What someone should do is fire off an email requesting source. The GPL sorta specifies that they have to give you a copy, and only charge cost of shipment.
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Does anyone with a burner, a bunch of blank CDs, a large-ish MP3 collection, an urge to piss off both the RIAA and CDNow feel like setting up a little webpage where people can select the songs they want, pass this off to a CGI that will start the burn (or just email the page owner), and then have the burnt CD sent out to the customer? I'm sure a small fee would be alright per CD, as the person will likely have lawyers circling :-)
Note: if anyone does do this, good luck..
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Why must all the browsers we see be huge C++ monstrosities? If IE has taught us anything (besides the fact that MS can't play nicely), it's that modularity can have benefits (IE seems faster on a 486 compared to NS).
/usr/lib/sgmlengine dir and run "newsgml").
:-) This would drop the memory reqs of each browser, make it easier to write a new browser (well, just nice new wrapper for the library), etc. Linux supports modularity for a reason, let's take advantage of it.
Methinks a few common library routines would make it easier for everyone. IE: pass a URI of http type to a module which returns the page parsed with SGML tags (to replace HTML tags and make work of layout components less) + a list of images and related things that need to be grabbed (frames would work well with this, too).
This allows nice centralization of the HTML understanding (to add support for HTML 6.0, just stick this SGML doc spec in your
This little library function would likely require internal functionality WRT HTTPS (SSL library, perhaps), proxy settings (yay! Global proxy settings), and some other functionality I've forgotten. Scripting languages could be left unparsed for a higher level to deal with.
Given a nice little interface routine, Lynx would become little more than an SGML interpreter and layout engine (yay simplicity), or perhaps something like Mozilla would take these meta pages and use their NGLayout (which would likely need more monkeying ot work with SGML
libbrowser stuff:
httpgetandparse() -> SGML parsing routine
httpget() -> Gets URL info and returns it unformatted (for images which would then be handled via the appropriate libs)
Also req'd:
Libs for scripting language parsing would probably be required.
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