I bet they're not really suffering a DDoS attack. With the news that the editors were removing MOG's articles from the site, I'm sure many are trying to get copies as some sort of "evidence". I know a few people on Groklaw were trying to do so. Maybe some are even just spidering the whole site(s). Add to that all the normal page views of people checking out the controversial article (regular slashdot effect), and you have some serious load on the server(s).
Still, it'll be interesting to see what Sony produce. If they have sense, they will make it a PVR, and a media jukebox
Nope, since Sony is a member of the RIAA (and MPAA?) they simply can't do anything so bold. Look at all of their "MP3" players that only play the ATRAC format. If Sony did make the PS/3 a PVR, they'd have to lock it up with DRM and proprietary codecs. But MS is already doing that with Window MCE, so you never know. It might have a shot if they tie it in with the PSP and those UMD discs. You could record shows and transfer them to your PSP to whatch on the train/plane trip. But Sony wants to keep (re)writable UMD discs off of the market in a effort to stop piracy, so I guess that idea isn't possible.
Oh yeah, GNOME and KDE. That's soooo many. And yes, I do know about XFCE and lots of window managers. But if you're using them then you're a geek and probably have a good reason (like a low-memory laptop). Any distro comes "out of the box" with either GNOME or KDE (or both) and you have to go out of your way to install the others.
Ooh, that's going back a while, I don't think I remember that part. I bought both of the highlight tapes back in the day, but I don't have the later DVD(s). Is that dialogue/rant in one of these highlight packages?
Of course, my X server is presently using 303MB, which, together is more than the amount of physical RAM that I have
That is because the X server is mmap'ing the video memory, making it look like it's using a much larger amount of memory than it really is. So you have a 256MB graphics card?
And just how do you propose the server keeps track of people and the information saved on the server? HTTP connections are essentially anonymous for the purposes of a web server. Sure, they have an IP address on the other end, but that could be a proxy or something else. There are two possibilities to accurately tracking sessions. One is to use a cookie to save a session ID of some sort, which is what you usually see nowadays. The other ways is appending a honking great ?PHPSESSION=.... string to the URL. The latter is frowned upon by the W3C and makes URL's difficult to bookmark. So yes, you do need cookies.
Erm, no. The G5 (from IBM) is power hungry. The G4 (from Motorola/Freescale) is not. The Mac mini has a 1.xGHz G4 in it and only needs one little fan, which is mostly for the Radeon graphics chip anyway. So you can put a G3/G4 in a CDROM-sized enclosure with 3.5" hard disk, or put 4 processors on a single PCI card.
New User Modifier (assign modifiers to recently created accounts)
__% (new users in the last X percentage of the userbase)
__ (modifier assigned to new user posts)
Would years registered or userid really be a better way to measure "new users"?
and in the damages section changes to "The Defendant Daniel Wallace..."
He obviously thinks he's the victim in this case and got the terms mixed up. Perhaps he should watch more movies and TV shows involving American courtrooms to catch up on the lingo. There's certainly enough of those to choose from...
Do you keep the rejected emails? My "site" is just a small family network providing email for a few people. So the number of spam/virus/phishing emails isn't that large. In fact, my honeypot address now gets far more spam than any of the real email accounts that the system handles.
After all, technical solutions have worked SOOOO well against Spam, and email worms. /dripping sarcasm
Some do, some don't. I find that most of my spam is now caught by various RBL's like Razor/Pyzor, and DCC. Plus a few of the new tests added in SpamAssassin 3.0. Bayesian scoring seems to do very little now, the spammers have found ways to obscure words so that they don't attract attention. But SA (even before 3.0) has tests for those tricks as well. Plus Clam AV appears to be adding new signatures for common phishing attacks. I sometimes see phishing emails flagged as viruses (by Clam AV) instead of spam (by SpamAssassin) because of this. I use Amavis new to tie SpamAssassin and Clam AV together into a filter system at the MTA (postfix) level.
I think you're a little mixed up there. When we criticize MS, we're often referring to the release of known buggy and badly implementated software to the general public. Instead the submitter of this article is referring to the "full potential" of the new optimization framework in GCC-4.0. It will, in theory, allow for much better optimizations to be performed on internal parse tree. But for now many of the CPU models are incomplete or non-existant, or something like that. The full potential of these optimizations will be delivered in a later release, either 4.0.x or 4.1, or perhaps a little of both. And the GCC team wouldn't have released GCC 4.0 with known, serious bugs.
Or perhaps I've just been trolled. Wouldn't be the first time. I see that this is your first comment on slashdot. Welcome. Just don't troll.
But aren't most people settling out of court? Isn't the standard threat "pay up and sign this document or we go to court and ream you out good"? Sure, there'd still be some cost. But nothing like going to court, so it's a profit for them.
Could it be possible that widely used software is more likely to be targeted than those products with a small user base?
Well duh. Only stupid zealots would claim that popularity has *no* effect. Of course black-hats tend to target more popular software, that's only natural. Firefox has gained a lot of popularity very quickly and is still relatively young. So there's going to be a sudden surge in new vulnerabilities and other bugs. The question is wether this little surge turns out to be a short termed problem or if it's just the start of a 7+ year run of problems like IE has had. Many of us have reason to believe it'll be the former rather than the latter.
But remember how long it took them to migrate Hotmail over to Windows servers? It was a major embarassment that for quite a few years their big aquisition still ran the Solaris backend/FreeBSD frontend combo.
If they have to, they will build a standards-compliant, fast, extensible browser.
But they won't. Because doing so would make it easier for people to switch to other browsers. So instead they will fix these big issues that web designers have been complaining about, forget about the rest, and add their own embraced-and-extended new "features". Thus they will be able to proclaim that they improved their standards compliance and added new features. And thousands of web sites/applications will again be locked into IE-only functionality. So basically, business as usual.
IIRC, they withdrew support for IE on the Mac shortly after Apple released Safari. The announcement was the height of hipocracy, complaining that Apple shipping a web browser with the OS was unfair. Aw, so poor little Microsoft took their bat and ball and went home.
Funny you should mention ReiserFS. Version 3 implemented efficient block allocation, much like E2fs and others have. It didn't need to be defragmented, either manually or automatically. As long as the filesystem didn't get too full then it worked fairly well. But the new Reiser4 however uses a periodic "repacker", which sounds very much like auto-defragmentation.
From the long document of the Namesys website:
Another way of escaping from the balancing time vs. space efficiency tradeoff is to use a repacker. 80% of files on the disk remain unchanged for long periods of time. It is efficient to pack them perfectly, by using a repacker that runs much less often than every write to disk. This repacker goes through the entire tree ordering, from left to right and then from right to left, alternating each time it runs. When it goes from left to right in the tree ordering, it shoves everything as far to the left as it will go, and when it goes from right to left it shoves everything as far to the right as it will go. (Left means small in key or in block number:-) ). In the absence of FS activity the effect of this over time is to sort by tree order (defragment), and to pack with perfect efficiency.
Reiser4.1 will modify the repacker to insert controlled "air holes", as it is well known that insertion efficiency is harmed by overly tight packing.
I hypothesize that it is more efficient to periodically run a repacker that systematically repacks using large IOs than to perform lots of 1 block reads of neighboring nodes of the modification points so as to preserve a balancing invariant in the face of poorly localized modifications to the tree.
Emphasis mine.
I wonder how much effort is expended allocating blocks in Reiser4. From the document it would be safe to assume the attitude is something like "put it to disk as fast as possible, leave the repacker to optimise things". If a file is only short-lived (temporary) then it's not really worth optimising its allocation and placement.
No, the telnet bit was just for dumping the data out of a BK server with the "clone" command/request. I presume that this code interprets the data and produces usable source files and diffs, or whatever format the "metadata" is in. I've never used BK (and after this little exercise, never will) so I don't know what the other metadata is all about.
My mum works at the CSU Mitchell (Bathurst) library. Just recently they caught some nutter that was cutting sections out of books. I think he was cutting out sections on poisonous animals, dunno why. The police searched his place and found lots of other pages he'd also cut out. The library workers didn't know about all of the books he'd attacked. I don't know if they're still working on these books, but my mum was saying it would take a long time to find which books the pages came from and sort out the different copies. That's right, many of the pages were from nursing textbooks, of which they have multiple copies and this nutter felt compelled to attack all of them. He might have also attacked books at the local city library. It's amazing how much of a problem can be created by a mentally-disturbed individual with a craft knife.
Slashdot Mirror
I bet they're not really suffering a DDoS attack. With the news that the editors were removing MOG's articles from the site, I'm sure many are trying to get copies as some sort of "evidence". I know a few people on Groklaw were trying to do so. Maybe some are even just spidering the whole site(s). Add to that all the normal page views of people checking out the controversial article (regular slashdot effect), and you have some serious load on the server(s).
Nope, since Sony is a member of the RIAA (and MPAA?) they simply can't do anything so bold. Look at all of their "MP3" players that only play the ATRAC format. If Sony did make the PS/3 a PVR, they'd have to lock it up with DRM and proprietary codecs. But MS is already doing that with Window MCE, so you never know. It might have a shot if they tie it in with the PSP and those UMD discs. You could record shows and transfer them to your PSP to whatch on the train/plane trip. But Sony wants to keep (re)writable UMD discs off of the market in a effort to stop piracy, so I guess that idea isn't possible.
Oh yeah, GNOME and KDE. That's soooo many. And yes, I do know about XFCE and lots of window managers. But if you're using them then you're a geek and probably have a good reason (like a low-memory laptop). Any distro comes "out of the box" with either GNOME or KDE (or both) and you have to go out of your way to install the others.
Ooh, that's going back a while, I don't think I remember that part. I bought both of the highlight tapes back in the day, but I don't have the later DVD(s). Is that dialogue/rant in one of these highlight packages?
That is because the X server is mmap'ing the video memory, making it look like it's using a much larger amount of memory than it really is. So you have a 256MB graphics card?
And just how do you propose the server keeps track of people and the information saved on the server? HTTP connections are essentially anonymous for the purposes of a web server. Sure, they have an IP address on the other end, but that could be a proxy or something else. There are two possibilities to accurately tracking sessions. One is to use a cookie to save a session ID of some sort, which is what you usually see nowadays. The other ways is appending a honking great ?PHPSESSION=.... string to the URL. The latter is frowned upon by the W3C and makes URL's difficult to bookmark. So yes, you do need cookies.
Erm, no. The G5 (from IBM) is power hungry. The G4 (from Motorola/Freescale) is not. The Mac mini has a 1.xGHz G4 in it and only needs one little fan, which is mostly for the Radeon graphics chip anyway. So you can put a G3/G4 in a CDROM-sized enclosure with 3.5" hard disk, or put 4 processors on a single PCI card.
The current preference isn't enough?
Would years registered or userid really be a better way to measure "new users"?
He obviously thinks he's the victim in this case and got the terms mixed up. Perhaps he should watch more movies and TV shows involving American courtrooms to catch up on the lingo. There's certainly enough of those to choose from...
Do you keep the rejected emails? My "site" is just a small family network providing email for a few people. So the number of spam/virus/phishing emails isn't that large. In fact, my honeypot address now gets far more spam than any of the real email accounts that the system handles.
Some do, some don't. I find that most of my spam is now caught by various RBL's like Razor/Pyzor, and DCC. Plus a few of the new tests added in SpamAssassin 3.0. Bayesian scoring seems to do very little now, the spammers have found ways to obscure words so that they don't attract attention. But SA (even before 3.0) has tests for those tricks as well. Plus Clam AV appears to be adding new signatures for common phishing attacks. I sometimes see phishing emails flagged as viruses (by Clam AV) instead of spam (by SpamAssassin) because of this. I use Amavis new to tie SpamAssassin and Clam AV together into a filter system at the MTA (postfix) level.
Yep, Astroturfing is what came to my mind as well. Just business as usual at Microsoft...
I think you're a little mixed up there. When we criticize MS, we're often referring to the release of known buggy and badly implementated software to the general public. Instead the submitter of this article is referring to the "full potential" of the new optimization framework in GCC-4.0. It will, in theory, allow for much better optimizations to be performed on internal parse tree. But for now many of the CPU models are incomplete or non-existant, or something like that. The full potential of these optimizations will be delivered in a later release, either 4.0.x or 4.1, or perhaps a little of both. And the GCC team wouldn't have released GCC 4.0 with known, serious bugs.
Or perhaps I've just been trolled. Wouldn't be the first time. I see that this is your first comment on slashdot. Welcome. Just don't troll.
But aren't most people settling out of court? Isn't the standard threat "pay up and sign this document or we go to court and ream you out good"? Sure, there'd still be some cost. But nothing like going to court, so it's a profit for them.
Well duh. Only stupid zealots would claim that popularity has *no* effect. Of course black-hats tend to target more popular software, that's only natural. Firefox has gained a lot of popularity very quickly and is still relatively young. So there's going to be a sudden surge in new vulnerabilities and other bugs. The question is wether this little surge turns out to be a short termed problem or if it's just the start of a 7+ year run of problems like IE has had. Many of us have reason to believe it'll be the former rather than the latter.
you do realise that slashdot has user settings that allow you to set your time zone?
To me, your post has this line instead:
It's the 30th on this side of the date line, mate.
Way to go changing the subject! You really are a fan boy...
But remember how long it took them to migrate Hotmail over to Windows servers? It was a major embarassment that for quite a few years their big aquisition still ran the Solaris backend/FreeBSD frontend combo.
Is there an echo in here?
But they won't. Because doing so would make it easier for people to switch to other browsers. So instead they will fix these big issues that web designers have been complaining about, forget about the rest, and add their own embraced-and-extended new "features". Thus they will be able to proclaim that they improved their standards compliance and added new features. And thousands of web sites/applications will again be locked into IE-only functionality. So basically, business as usual.
IIRC, they withdrew support for IE on the Mac shortly after Apple released Safari. The announcement was the height of hipocracy, complaining that Apple shipping a web browser with the OS was unfair. Aw, so poor little Microsoft took their bat and ball and went home.
Funny you should mention ReiserFS. Version 3 implemented efficient block allocation, much like E2fs and others have. It didn't need to be defragmented, either manually or automatically. As long as the filesystem didn't get too full then it worked fairly well. But the new Reiser4 however uses a periodic "repacker", which sounds very much like auto-defragmentation.
From the long document of the Namesys website:
Emphasis mine.
I wonder how much effort is expended allocating blocks in Reiser4. From the document it would be safe to assume the attitude is something like "put it to disk as fast as possible, leave the repacker to optimise things". If a file is only short-lived (temporary) then it's not really worth optimising its allocation and placement.
No, the telnet bit was just for dumping the data out of a BK server with the "clone" command/request. I presume that this code interprets the data and produces usable source files and diffs, or whatever format the "metadata" is in. I've never used BK (and after this little exercise, never will) so I don't know what the other metadata is all about.
My mum works at the CSU Mitchell (Bathurst) library. Just recently they caught some nutter that was cutting sections out of books. I think he was cutting out sections on poisonous animals, dunno why. The police searched his place and found lots of other pages he'd also cut out. The library workers didn't know about all of the books he'd attacked. I don't know if they're still working on these books, but my mum was saying it would take a long time to find which books the pages came from and sort out the different copies. That's right, many of the pages were from nursing textbooks, of which they have multiple copies and this nutter felt compelled to attack all of them. He might have also attacked books at the local city library. It's amazing how much of a problem can be created by a mentally-disturbed individual with a craft knife.