don't understand this Score:4 Insightful comment. Can someone explain?
Even though your name does look quite suspicious, I'll try to explain anyway.
The parent is showing how fuzzing works:
Using random 'data' to test the various functions of software, so we can find out if a certain piece of input triggers undesirable behavior.
In this case you could say that he's not only giving an example, but is testing the slashdot user comments code as well.
These things are really saving lives by not slamming into trees when your car would suddenly start spinning on a slippery surface, as it would when you did not have ESC installed.
(Anti-lock braking is an older technology, which also needs computing power, but this thing is actually needed to achieve ESC. My car only has this ABS, since it's a fairly cheap model)
I wouldn't be suprised if there are more very usefull things in a modern car that need that kind of computing power.
What's so difficult to understand about the fact that new products don't last as much as they used to? Back in the days the production and design processes were not as advanced as today, so a lot of margin of error was needed to produce equipment that worked the way it needed.
Today, there are a lot of different price categories for a lot of goods. So to give the people what they really want (cheap stuff), the components that are used in today's products are mostly the cheap ones that are produced without big margins of error for reliability purposes. This obviously means that they won't last forever, but boy are they cheap! Why should someone buy a very expensive TV that's garanteed to work for 50 years when in 15 years time there would be new models with a lot of new functionality anyway?
Sometimes I don't understand why some people are saying that that old equipment was so much better because it lasted forever, but I think the explanation to that is so simple.
Part of the problem is that she did not understand it's possible to configure internet access without that Verizon cdrom, and she could easily work with OpenOffice instead of Word. Verizon even offered to send a technician to help with the connection, and the school said it has no problems with people using different software when following their couses.
Too bad the woman did not look for answers but simply blamed Dell instead out of ignorance.:(
Re:Wow, great news
on
Qt Becomes LGPL
·
· Score: 5, Informative
You could start with making a Qt version of The GIMP.
A lot of people don't know this, but GTK stands for 'The GIMP Toolkit', and Gnome used this toolkit. Not the other way around!:-)
Let's hope that a lot of businesses try this out right now, and get a little bit familiar with linux and the open source community. I hope the economic crisis will help with this aspect.
Otherwise a lot of them will wait till Windows 7 is there, and simple use that since it will be so much better than vista. And they'll know how to use 7 better, all their previous investments can be reused.
The amount of stories about businesses, individuals and education institutions trying out open source seems to be growing, at least It seems so. Go linux!:)
I found it odd that it took 1.8 MB of source code to compile to an interpreter that used to fit in 8K of ROM space
Don't forget that the commodore cpu was 8 bit and current cpu's are 32 or 64 bit: Most of the commands were 8 bit and their equivalents are bigger nowadays. That explains the 8KB of ROM
And they did not need fancy memory protection stuff, they hacked straight into the hardware. No dll's, so's to use or API's to follow. Even if it is a lot assembly code, there are a lot more bytes in assembly source than in binary executables.
It seems that dns queries have become much slower. With opera I can see what urls are being requested (main page, images/flash or ads).I can see that for every new page the first thing opera does is doing the dns queries for all the urls. And this has become very slow from time to time.
I've read somewhere that the randomization really slows down bind, but that the team is working on a patch to solve that. (I also don't understand why opera need to execute dns queries every time I click a link, why can't opera have a tiny cache for the ip addresses? They don't chance that often, do they? I'm not very paranoid about the security implication, either.)
When will regular users notice that they are being denied of access with certain software or hardware? I know very well what the consequences of DRM are at the moment, but it seems that regular users don't know, care or notice the badness of DRM.
The sooner people start noticing they are being held back, the more they might want to use open alternatives.:-)
... but I'm still dissapointed that most of those laptops are promoted with XP on it anyway.
Here in Belgium I saw an ad voor an asus EEE last week, but with shiny happy 'Windows XP' logo and specification besides it.
I'm afraid too many users (and stores) over here are too lazy to try something new. It makes sense that supermarkets (the ad was from one) might try to sell XP rather than linux, so they can sell some other software that's needed.
With linux, a lot needed software is installed by default, and that does not translate in money to earn.:-(
(The day when proprietary software wil be perfect against piracy will be a day to rejoice: Empty your wallets, or stop being lazy and try something like open source for a while, it's not that bad when you only need basic stuff done!)
I'm from Belgium, and I went to a little festival last weekend, in the village next to mine. (I live in Retie and I went to Arendonk, for those from around here.) That place to pee stood there, and was pretty fun to watch.
The game I saw was a guy skiing down a slope, the aiming part was needed to guide the player.
At first only little children tried to enter that thing, but as the party went on the 'adults' got more drunk and tried it out. To have fun for a long time you'll have to dose your stream though.:-)
I guess Adobe is doing this to try to stop silverlight getting too much attention.
Since Microsoft seems to want a new way of control of new web enabled devices with silverlight, I guess this is a good thing. (And obviously this way gnash can implement better compatibility more easily!)
This also means they need to make their 'Windows Genuine Advantage' checking really good: When they want monthly payments for all the separate modules, they sure can't let piracy happen.
This time it's not once that they need to check for validity but they constantly need to keep checking. (I do know WGA does this at the moment.)
That must be quite horrific to code though, they had enough trouble with XP and Vista. Now they need to start checking those modules in multiple configurations
Does this also mean the end of specific 'roles' of windows such as home premium, business and ultimate?
So as usual, something ten times better than we have now is going to be available in five years.
Sure, in five years the available chips will be a lot better than the stuff that's here now. But when this technique has matured enough, it could be applied to the chips in 5 years and we'll still get a 10 fold improvement! (Or something like that:-P)
This seems to be a complete other kind of advancement than regular chip evolution we've seen so far.
Monolithic kernels ain't the answer hence MinWin.
To be more exact, it's not the kernel itself that's so bloated, but the multiple layers around it to provide a 'basic' operating system, API's for userland apps to run, DRM management in sound and video subsystems, probably lots of code to make truly important software to run (like they did various other times),... that make Vista so slow on 2+ year old hardware.
FTA:
"The other thing we are seeing is some interesting patterns evolving here," he said. "It starts with a very small company looking at Linux, and then there are really large companies that are starting out small with 500 [Linux desktop] users, then moving up to 2,000 or more. That is the pattern we are seeing."
Although some industry experts have been proclaiming for the last six years that Linux on the corporate desktop was finally ready, IBM thinks that this year, it will happen.
Hooray!
Jonathan Schwartz's Blog
on
Sun Buys MySQL
·
· Score: 5, Informative
This is quite interesting news! Check out what Jonathan Schwartz has to say about this:
Slashdot Mirror
What about http://www.youtube.com/subscription_manager?feature=feed?
don't understand this Score:4 Insightful comment. Can someone explain?
Even though your name does look quite suspicious, I'll try to explain anyway.
:-)
The parent is showing how fuzzing works:
Using random 'data' to test the various functions of software, so we can find out if a certain piece of input triggers undesirable behavior.
In this case you could say that he's not only giving an example, but is testing the slashdot user comments code as well.
But it's perhaps more an attempt at humor.
Things like controls for the air conditioning, but more importantly: Electronic stability control
These things are really saving lives by not slamming into trees when your car would suddenly start spinning on a slippery surface, as it would when you did not have ESC installed.
(Anti-lock braking is an older technology, which also needs computing power, but this thing is actually needed to achieve ESC. My car only has this ABS, since it's a fairly cheap model)
I wouldn't be suprised if there are more very usefull things in a modern car that need that kind of computing power.
This video explains quite clearly how these leaks and the reactions on it should be placed in their correct context:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nnVQ2fROOg
What's so difficult to understand about the fact that new products don't last as much as they used to? Back in the days the production and design processes were not as advanced as today, so a lot of margin of error was needed to produce equipment that worked the way it needed.
Today, there are a lot of different price categories for a lot of goods. So to give the people what they really want (cheap stuff), the components that are used in today's products are mostly the cheap ones that are produced without big margins of error for reliability purposes. This obviously means that they won't last forever, but boy are they cheap! Why should someone buy a very expensive TV that's garanteed to work for 50 years when in 15 years time there would be new models with a lot of new functionality anyway?
Sometimes I don't understand why some people are saying that that old equipment was so much better because it lasted forever, but I think the explanation to that is so simple.
Part of the problem is that she did not understand it's possible to configure internet access without that Verizon cdrom, and she could easily work with OpenOffice instead of Word. Verizon even offered to send a technician to help with the connection, and the school said it has no problems with people using different software when following their couses.
:(
Too bad the woman did not look for answers but simply blamed Dell instead out of ignorance.
You could start with making a Qt version of The GIMP.
:-)
A lot of people don't know this, but GTK stands for 'The GIMP Toolkit', and Gnome used this toolkit. Not the other way around!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gtk
Let's hope that a lot of businesses try this out right now, and get a little bit familiar with linux and the open source community. I hope the economic crisis will help with this aspect.
:)
Otherwise a lot of them will wait till Windows 7 is there, and simple use that since it will be so much better than vista. And they'll know how to use 7 better, all their previous investments can be reused.
The amount of stories about businesses, individuals and education institutions trying out open source seems to be growing, at least It seems so. Go linux!
I found it odd that it took 1.8 MB of source code to compile to an interpreter that used to fit in 8K of ROM space
;-)
Don't forget that the commodore cpu was 8 bit and current cpu's are 32 or 64 bit: Most of the commands were 8 bit and their equivalents are bigger nowadays. That explains the 8KB of ROM
And they did not need fancy memory protection stuff, they hacked straight into the hardware. No dll's, so's to use or API's to follow. Even if it is a lot assembly code, there are a lot more bytes in assembly source than in binary executables.
Context, people, context!
Here in Belgium, I use Scarlet as my ISP.
It seems that dns queries have become much slower. With opera I can see what urls are being requested (main page, images/flash or ads).I can see that for every new page the first thing opera does is doing the dns queries for all the urls. And this has become very slow from time to time.
I've read somewhere that the randomization really slows down bind, but that the team is working on a patch to solve that.
(I also don't understand why opera need to execute dns queries every time I click a link, why can't opera have a tiny cache for the ip addresses? They don't chance that often, do they? I'm not very paranoid about the security implication, either.)
This makes me think:
:-)
When will regular users notice that they are being denied of access with certain software or hardware? I know very well what the consequences of DRM are at the moment, but it seems that regular users don't know, care or notice the badness of DRM.
The sooner people start noticing they are being held back, the more they might want to use open alternatives.
Carrefour.
I made a screenshot (The text on it is Dutch):
http://muts.sin.khk.be/asuseee.jpg
... but I'm still dissapointed that most of those laptops are promoted with XP on it anyway.
:-(
Here in Belgium I saw an ad voor an asus EEE last week, but with shiny happy 'Windows XP' logo and specification besides it.
I'm afraid too many users (and stores) over here are too lazy to try something new. It makes sense that supermarkets (the ad was from one) might try to sell XP rather than linux, so they can sell some other software that's needed.
With linux, a lot needed software is installed by default, and that does not translate in money to earn.
(The day when proprietary software wil be perfect against piracy will be a day to rejoice: Empty your wallets, or stop being lazy and try something like open source for a while, it's not that bad when you only need basic stuff done!)
Some extra info and thoughts in this article: http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20080523052458101
I'm from Belgium, and I went to a little festival last weekend, in the village next to mine. (I live in Retie and I went to Arendonk, for those from around here.) That place to pee stood there, and was pretty fun to watch.
:-)
For the interested, this is their official site: http://www.actur.be/placetopee/?p=Home%20(EN)
The game I saw was a guy skiing down a slope, the aiming part was needed to guide the player.
At first only little children tried to enter that thing, but as the party went on the 'adults' got more drunk and tried it out. To have fun for a long time you'll have to dose your stream though.
I guess Adobe is doing this to try to stop silverlight getting too much attention.
Since Microsoft seems to want a new way of control of new web enabled devices with silverlight, I guess this is a good thing.
(And obviously this way gnash can implement better compatibility more easily!)
In the dorm I stayed 2 years ago, at the university of Antwerp (Belgium), we all had 100Mbit straight to internet connections.
:-( )
:-P
(Torrent and other 'possible' illegal protocols were effectively blocked though.
I did my linux installs over the network, since 9MB/sec was faster than the speed of my dvd-drive.
Zonk, next time, try to use the preview button.
This also means they need to make their 'Windows Genuine Advantage' checking really good: When they want monthly payments for all the separate modules, they sure can't let piracy happen.
This time it's not once that they need to check for validity but they constantly need to keep checking. (I do know WGA does this at the moment.)
That must be quite horrific to code though, they had enough trouble with XP and Vista. Now they need to start checking those modules in multiple configurations
Does this also mean the end of specific 'roles' of windows such as home premium, business and ultimate?
Biofeedback?
That reminds me of this comic:
Perry Bible Fellowship
So as usual, something ten times better than we have now is going to be available in five years.
:-P)
Sure, in five years the available chips will be a lot better than the stuff that's here now. But when this technique has matured enough, it could be applied to the chips in 5 years and we'll still get a 10 fold improvement! (Or something like that
This seems to be a complete other kind of advancement than regular chip evolution we've seen so far.
To be more exact, it's not the kernel itself that's so bloated, but the multiple layers around it to provide a 'basic' operating system, API's for userland apps to run, DRM management in sound and video subsystems, probably lots of code to make truly important software to run (like they did various other times),
So wait...
Microsoft is crying about this, this is not fair?
Are they... losing this battle? Is this their last defence?
I sure hope so!
FTA:
"The other thing we are seeing is some interesting patterns evolving here," he said. "It starts with a very small company looking at Linux, and then there are really large companies that are starting out small with 500 [Linux desktop] users, then moving up to 2,000 or more. That is the pattern we are seeing."
Although some industry experts have been proclaiming for the last six years that Linux on the corporate desktop was finally ready, IBM thinks that this year, it will happen.
Hooray!
This is quite interesting news! Check out what Jonathan Schwartz has to say about this:
http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/