Go lookup "database" in any mainstream dictionary. No, wait. I'll do it for you. Here's what Princeton's wordnet thinks a database is:
Noun
S: (n) database (an organized body of related information)
Note a lack of references to indexes, attributes, varchars, or any other SQL-specific artifact. Here's what my deadtree edition Webster's unabridged dictionary thinks a database is:
data base, data bank, a large collection of data in a computer, organized so it can be expanded, updated, and retrieved rapidly for various uses: also written database, databank.
Again note a lack of 'attributes', and a few moments of careful thought will prove that a structured text file matches the definition of database precisely. You, sir, are the one inventing your own definitions.
By the way: When YOU can write such a program, YOURSELF MIND YOU (& make it do ALL THAT I NOTE ABOVE) & not just "use others' tools" as I suspect you are only capable of, & faster than mine? Well, then?? Then, you can talk... otherwise, you're a windbag b.s. artist, period. A talker/wannabe...
Let's consider specifications: * Remove trailing blanks * Translate 127.0.0.1, 0.0.0.0, and 0 entries to a specific value (for argument's sake, say '0'). * Remove duplicate entries * Sort alphabetically
If this is correct, then I can write, and have written, a piece of shellscript that accomplishes all these tasks which runs in under a minute. What possible reason could there be to re-implement the wheel in this case? Surely if you are as established a programmer as that collection of unverifiable citations and forum posts would be intended to support, then you understand the value of relying on code re-use. And it takes no thought at all to consider a <1min script as vastly superior to the >1hr (but entirely hand-written and optimized!) code. I could give you my credentials as a programmer, but you wouldn't believe them, and my past employers certainly wouldn't be willing to divulge sensitive information to a wild-eyed forum troll. So I'm sure you understand why I'd rather just let you think whatever you like about my abilities and education, rather than open up another line of pointless flamewar.
But that's gone rather far afield. The argument, which you seem to've forgotten, is that a HOSTS database is an unsupported and poorly-chosen kludge that a simple AdBlocking extension makes a far superior replacement for, and that if DNS security is your concern, that a local DNS server can be run with heightened security and rendered nigh impervious to Dan Kaminsky's attack. Your religious mania, your ersatz multiple degrees, your claimed work history, they are no more than argumentum ad verecundiam, and mean nothing. Please stay on topic, flamewars are so much more fun that way.
Oh, and:
I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away
You would do well to avoid aggrandizing yourself with that particular reference. Unless you mean to imply you are a washed-up and useless wreck.
1) Tell me: Does performing a lookup into a one-million-entry list require more or less CPU than performing a lookup into an empty list? The page will be parsed no matter what you do. 4) Dan Kaminsky's work is important. But the flaw he found is non-trivial to exploit, has never been discovered in the wild, and on a private DNS server is trivial to protect against. (Like, oh, say, using Source Port Randomization) 6) Okay, my mistake. Let's try that, open notepad, open some 30MB file. Oh, look at that. It's locked up. Two minutes later, it's loaded the file. That's certainly easier than the three clicks required to block an entire adserver with AdBlock. 7) What profanity? Is WebSense blocking me? Untwist your panties, grandpa. And again, Dan Kaminsky. One flaw renders the entirety of DNS unusable? I suppose you throw your car away when it runs out of gas, too.
As for your PS, I don't care what you call it. A file containing a series of organized entires in a regular structure is a database. The fact that it's not SQL matters not in the slightest. The fact that it takes you an hour to process this "not a database" with only a million entries is shameful, and the shell script I provided you would likely perform the same task in under a minute. Why so defensive?
1 is flat-out false. 2 is technically correct. 3 is true. 4, while true, is pointless. A far better (and simpler, easier) job of this can be done with a local caching DNS server. 5 is the same as 4. 6 is stupid and wrong. Text editors that can easily handle 30MB of text are rare under Windows, and nobody should ever do that anyways. 7 is completely stupid. There might be bugs in Window's HOSTS implementation. If there are, they will never be corrected. An AdBlock bug, or a DNS server bug, will be corrected within hours at the longest. 8 is vacuously true. 9 is completely false. Any malware that doesn't have admin access can get it trivially, under any Windows platform. It is impossible to lockdown the HOSTS file to the point that an admin-level malware cannot interfere with it. 10 is entirely wrong. See 6), and inspect any modern ad blocker. They've had 3-click-to-block for years now. 11 is flat-out wrong. See 9).
It takes you over an hour to process one million db entries? That's shameful. What are you doing that takes 4ms per entry? And why wouldn't "cat HOSTS | sed -e 's/[\t ]+//g' -e 's/[ ]+$//g' | sort -dfu" be faster and easier than processing text in assembler?
It is harder to debug than to code. Logically, if you write something as creatively as possible, you are not smart enough to debug it. If you are a smart programmer, your 'clever' code can be so impossible to debug by others that it must be entirely replaced to be corrected. Write legibly and clearly. Your compiler can optimize just fine, as long as you follow the general rules of legibility and reuse of code.
In a world where 2GB of ram on a desktop is standard, it's nothing more than intellectual masturbation to compete on how small a program can be made. You're not designing embedded codes or programming a TRS-80 anymore.
If you trust a single byte on the possibly-infected disk, you're not scanning for viruses: You're asking pretty please for the virus to show itself. Most are polite enough, but why take the chance? Use a known-clean read-only media to boot from, and scan the entire drive.
When legalizing an act will result in fewer deaths, it should be a strong incentive to legalize it. (cf. marijuana and alcohol prohibition) Legalizing theft and murder would logically only increase the number of deaths, as businesses would begin hiring violent guards to protect their profits. The same women still have abortions as when it was illegal, but with safe treatments those women now don't die in an alley. Count up the positives, weigh against the negatives, and make allowances for what people will do regardless of the legality. Robberies and other violent criminal acts also differ from abortion in a very specific way: They affect a separate and whole actualized person. One can argue that an unborn fetus is a whole person, but to do so requires upsetting the whole of legal and societal history for what is essentially a navel-gazing philosophical point.
Well, please do invent the absolute worst kinds of inhumane treatment to prove that women must have no control over their own bodies. A shockingly vast majority of abortions are performed in the first trimester, and if you can make out an expression on a fetus that's less than 12 weeks old, you've got an imagination too vivid to be anonymously yelling on the internet. Of the vanishingly small percentage of abortions that are performed when the baby has passed the normal age of viability, the vast majority of those are performed to save the life of the mother, or to prevent the infant from having a short, brutish, and pointless life. The misogynistic organizations are attacking a strawman that was never relevant in the slightest.
The abuses you've imagined are not because a mother suddenly decided, two weeks before her due date, that she didn't want a baby. Late term abortions are performed to save lives and limit suffering. We find it sane to put down a dog that's been grievously injured, but for some reason ending the suffering of a child born without a brain is some gross unjust cruelty, and you somehow believe that a child cursed to die before their first birthday should be forced to live through a year of brutish suffering, rather than being given the only kindness we have.
Finally, statistics demonstrate that women will still get abortions, regardless of how stringent the theocracy is that you place them under. Legalized abortions mean fewer women die. Which do you want, brassy moral superiority and thousands of women dead, or an unpleasant feeling and those women still alive? That's the only 'choice' offered.
Comfortable and inviting coffee shops don't need to market to college students bearing macbooks. Merely by existing they become a mecca for someone who wants to study and has plenty of disposable income.
Libertarians also hold the completely rational belief that people incapable or unwilling to work hard enough--and here only the Libertarian is allowed to define how hard--should die when they meet hardship.
A regulation can easily be made revenue-neutral by imposing fines on those who violate the regulation. Those who hold the black-and-white view that all regulations result in higher taxes, and are for that reason a priori 'bad', are too simple-minded to consider debating.
There are people I would kill if I knew I wouldn't face punishment for it. Most of them are public figures whose crimes will never be legally punished.
I genuinely think this mindset is fairly common, and looking at the looting that breaks out every time cops go on strike is only one example of why.
The fact that you can listen to any popular (by which I mean RIAA-backed) song for free on the radio did nothing to push the apparent value down, now did it? Why pay for it if it's already streamed into my bedroom for free 24/7?
Acai berry is provably a less potent antioxidant than cheaper and more prevalent foods. Not to mention that antioxidants have no proven benefits. None. Your anecdote notwithstanding, antioxidants are bogus. On the other hand, vitamin D is really fucking important, so taking 0.25mg a day is probably a good idea. There's not much of a link between it and the immune system, but you'll be safe from rickets. How about the following to protect from illness: Wash your hands. Don't touch your face. Get enough rest. Drink lots of fluids. Eat healthy. Exercise a little. Most sick people haven't been doing those, and I can trace every illness I've ever gotten to skipping more than one. Expensive supplements are a waste of money. Stupid Americans want a miracle pill that doesn't exist...take care of yourself, you pussies!
It wasn't a stupid mistake. It was a blatantly malicious hijacking of an uninvolved piece of software, and it should have resulted in his being blacklisted across the entire Mozilla site. Instead, he apologized for infecting thousands of computers, and he's re-welcomed with open arms and zero punishment. What prevents him from doing it again, but being even more sneaky about it? Nothing at all.
Even if his contrition is genuine, which I don't doubt, his actions required severe punishment. I'll live with having to manually turn on and off javascript when necessary.
And there was as much bitch-slapping as ever occurs when any OSS developer does something blindingly stupid. The Internet's huddled masses screamed incoherently at them for a few days, and they realized that they weren't going to get away with it. Many, myself included, vowed to never again let Giorgio Maone's code run on any machine under our control.
The first entry is not entirely true. Non-root processes are restricted from using low port numbers(1024, iirc). Also, if there's a correctly configured firewall on the machine, a non-root process is incapable of going around it. Not that it would actually prevent any malware I know of from wreaking havoc, high port numbers are perfectly fine for sending email and talking to bot herders.
Who was claiming Vista superior to XP? I bet you'll find "they" had a vested interest in selling the latest and greatest. Microsoft wouldn't have needed to publish the 'Mojave' ads if there wasn't a widespread belief that Vista sucked. And as for Windows ME, I've been using windows since 3.1 was new and exciting, so I know better. Don't try to push some revisionist belief that anybody but Microsoft and their fanboys liked windows ME.
The earth has a giant magnetic field. Induce a powerful opposing magnetic field in your satellite/space tether system that "pushes" against the earth's field. There's no reaction mass, but your satellite can then control its position in orbit. Most satellites don't use the space tether system, although I don't know whether that's because it's inherently impractical or merely too new/expensive/fancy.
The iPhone bit was a hook to draw eyeballs. The smartphones are no more or less susceptible than any other machine running SSH, all of whom should have a more sensible password policy.
It's difficult to say whether or not a given system is infected, even if you inspect a complete packet log. Your checksum plan is one of the few ways to guarantee a lack of infection. Actually even that isn't always a guarantee, depending on where the hack is hiding. It could be in the MBR or even burned into the BIOS.
Luckily, in most cases the hackers aren't clever enough to hide their steps that well. There'll be oddly-named files in/var/www, ps and top will disagree about running processes, or you'll suddenly find yourself locked out of some system management tool.
HAM requires two people with equipment that can be hidden inside of a large suitcase. The Internet, I'm reasonably assured, takes rather more space to store. Even in the doomsday scenario where the tubes are completely closed, and all HAM licenses are revoked, there will still be amateurs using the airwaves. Good luck communicating over IP when the backbones have been cut.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, now you're being boring. Nothing but banal insults? So jejune. Farewell, grandpa.
Go lookup "database" in any mainstream dictionary. No, wait. I'll do it for you. Here's what Princeton's wordnet thinks a database is:
Note a lack of references to indexes, attributes, varchars, or any other SQL-specific artifact.
Here's what my deadtree edition Webster's unabridged dictionary thinks a database is:
Again note a lack of 'attributes', and a few moments of careful thought will prove that a structured text file matches the definition of database precisely. You, sir, are the one inventing your own definitions.
Let's consider specifications:
* Remove trailing blanks
* Translate 127.0.0.1, 0.0.0.0, and 0 entries to a specific value (for argument's sake, say '0').
* Remove duplicate entries
* Sort alphabetically
If this is correct, then I can write, and have written, a piece of shellscript that accomplishes all these tasks which runs in under a minute. What possible reason could there be to re-implement the wheel in this case? Surely if you are as established a programmer as that collection of unverifiable citations and forum posts would be intended to support, then you understand the value of relying on code re-use. And it takes no thought at all to consider a <1min script as vastly superior to the >1hr (but entirely hand-written and optimized!) code. I could give you my credentials as a programmer, but you wouldn't believe them, and my past employers certainly wouldn't be willing to divulge sensitive information to a wild-eyed forum troll. So I'm sure you understand why I'd rather just let you think whatever you like about my abilities and education, rather than open up another line of pointless flamewar.
But that's gone rather far afield. The argument, which you seem to've forgotten, is that a HOSTS database is an unsupported and poorly-chosen kludge that a simple AdBlocking extension makes a far superior replacement for, and that if DNS security is your concern, that a local DNS server can be run with heightened security and rendered nigh impervious to Dan Kaminsky's attack. Your religious mania, your ersatz multiple degrees, your claimed work history, they are no more than argumentum ad verecundiam, and mean nothing. Please stay on topic, flamewars are so much more fun that way.
Oh, and:
You would do well to avoid aggrandizing yourself with that particular reference. Unless you mean to imply you are a washed-up and useless wreck.
1) Tell me: Does performing a lookup into a one-million-entry list require more or less CPU than performing a lookup into an empty list? The page will be parsed no matter what you do.
4) Dan Kaminsky's work is important. But the flaw he found is non-trivial to exploit, has never been discovered in the wild, and on a private DNS server is trivial to protect against. (Like, oh, say, using Source Port Randomization)
6) Okay, my mistake. Let's try that, open notepad, open some 30MB file. Oh, look at that. It's locked up. Two minutes later, it's loaded the file. That's certainly easier than the three clicks required to block an entire adserver with AdBlock.
7) What profanity? Is WebSense blocking me? Untwist your panties, grandpa. And again, Dan Kaminsky. One flaw renders the entirety of DNS unusable? I suppose you throw your car away when it runs out of gas, too.
As for your PS, I don't care what you call it. A file containing a series of organized entires in a regular structure is a database. The fact that it's not SQL matters not in the slightest. The fact that it takes you an hour to process this "not a database" with only a million entries is shameful, and the shell script I provided you would likely perform the same task in under a minute. Why so defensive?
1 is flat-out false.
2 is technically correct.
3 is true.
4, while true, is pointless. A far better (and simpler, easier) job of this can be done with a local caching DNS server.
5 is the same as 4.
6 is stupid and wrong. Text editors that can easily handle 30MB of text are rare under Windows, and nobody should ever do that anyways.
7 is completely stupid. There might be bugs in Window's HOSTS implementation. If there are, they will never be corrected. An AdBlock bug, or a DNS server bug, will be corrected within hours at the longest.
8 is vacuously true.
9 is completely false. Any malware that doesn't have admin access can get it trivially, under any Windows platform. It is impossible to lockdown the HOSTS file to the point that an admin-level malware cannot interfere with it.
10 is entirely wrong. See 6), and inspect any modern ad blocker. They've had 3-click-to-block for years now.
11 is flat-out wrong. See 9).
It takes you over an hour to process one million db entries? That's shameful. What are you doing that takes 4ms per entry? And why wouldn't "cat HOSTS | sed -e 's/[\t ]+/ /g' -e 's/[ ]+$//g' | sort -dfu" be faster and easier than processing text in assembler?
The minarets were not banned out of a desire to make the country homogeneous for naive tourists.
It is harder to debug than to code. Logically, if you write something as creatively as possible, you are not smart enough to debug it. If you are a smart programmer, your 'clever' code can be so impossible to debug by others that it must be entirely replaced to be corrected. Write legibly and clearly. Your compiler can optimize just fine, as long as you follow the general rules of legibility and reuse of code.
In a world where 2GB of ram on a desktop is standard, it's nothing more than intellectual masturbation to compete on how small a program can be made. You're not designing embedded codes or programming a TRS-80 anymore.
You haven't really PvPed until you launch 0.8c rocks at your enemy's home planet from a neighboring star.
If you trust a single byte on the possibly-infected disk, you're not scanning for viruses: You're asking pretty please for the virus to show itself. Most are polite enough, but why take the chance? Use a known-clean read-only media to boot from, and scan the entire drive.
When legalizing an act will result in fewer deaths, it should be a strong incentive to legalize it. (cf. marijuana and alcohol prohibition) Legalizing theft and murder would logically only increase the number of deaths, as businesses would begin hiring violent guards to protect their profits. The same women still have abortions as when it was illegal, but with safe treatments those women now don't die in an alley. Count up the positives, weigh against the negatives, and make allowances for what people will do regardless of the legality.
Robberies and other violent criminal acts also differ from abortion in a very specific way: They affect a separate and whole actualized person. One can argue that an unborn fetus is a whole person, but to do so requires upsetting the whole of legal and societal history for what is essentially a navel-gazing philosophical point.
Well, please do invent the absolute worst kinds of inhumane treatment to prove that women must have no control over their own bodies. A shockingly vast majority of abortions are performed in the first trimester, and if you can make out an expression on a fetus that's less than 12 weeks old, you've got an imagination too vivid to be anonymously yelling on the internet. Of the vanishingly small percentage of abortions that are performed when the baby has passed the normal age of viability, the vast majority of those are performed to save the life of the mother, or to prevent the infant from having a short, brutish, and pointless life. The misogynistic organizations are attacking a strawman that was never relevant in the slightest.
The abuses you've imagined are not because a mother suddenly decided, two weeks before her due date, that she didn't want a baby. Late term abortions are performed to save lives and limit suffering. We find it sane to put down a dog that's been grievously injured, but for some reason ending the suffering of a child born without a brain is some gross unjust cruelty, and you somehow believe that a child cursed to die before their first birthday should be forced to live through a year of brutish suffering, rather than being given the only kindness we have.
Finally, statistics demonstrate that women will still get abortions, regardless of how stringent the theocracy is that you place them under. Legalized abortions mean fewer women die. Which do you want, brassy moral superiority and thousands of women dead, or an unpleasant feeling and those women still alive? That's the only 'choice' offered.
Comfortable and inviting coffee shops don't need to market to college students bearing macbooks. Merely by existing they become a mecca for someone who wants to study and has plenty of disposable income.
Libertarians also hold the completely rational belief that people incapable or unwilling to work hard enough--and here only the Libertarian is allowed to define how hard--should die when they meet hardship.
A regulation can easily be made revenue-neutral by imposing fines on those who violate the regulation. Those who hold the black-and-white view that all regulations result in higher taxes, and are for that reason a priori 'bad', are too simple-minded to consider debating.
There are people I would kill if I knew I wouldn't face punishment for it. Most of them are public figures whose crimes will never be legally punished.
I genuinely think this mindset is fairly common, and looking at the looting that breaks out every time cops go on strike is only one example of why.
"Oh, well, uhh...I lurked. Yeah, that's it. I lurked for years. Man, I was reading when Taco posted with his uid 1 account. I'm original geek, man!"
The fact that you can listen to any popular (by which I mean RIAA-backed) song for free on the radio did nothing to push the apparent value down, now did it? Why pay for it if it's already streamed into my bedroom for free 24/7?
Acai berry is provably a less potent antioxidant than cheaper and more prevalent foods. Not to mention that antioxidants have no proven benefits. None. Your anecdote notwithstanding, antioxidants are bogus. On the other hand, vitamin D is really fucking important, so taking 0.25mg a day is probably a good idea. There's not much of a link between it and the immune system, but you'll be safe from rickets.
How about the following to protect from illness: Wash your hands. Don't touch your face. Get enough rest. Drink lots of fluids. Eat healthy. Exercise a little. Most sick people haven't been doing those, and I can trace every illness I've ever gotten to skipping more than one.
Expensive supplements are a waste of money. Stupid Americans want a miracle pill that doesn't exist...take care of yourself, you pussies!
It wasn't a stupid mistake. It was a blatantly malicious hijacking of an uninvolved piece of software, and it should have resulted in his being blacklisted across the entire Mozilla site. Instead, he apologized for infecting thousands of computers, and he's re-welcomed with open arms and zero punishment. What prevents him from doing it again, but being even more sneaky about it? Nothing at all.
Even if his contrition is genuine, which I don't doubt, his actions required severe punishment. I'll live with having to manually turn on and off javascript when necessary.
Citation: http://hackademix.net/2009/05/04/dear-adblock-plus-and-noscript-users-dear-mozilla-community/
And there was as much bitch-slapping as ever occurs when any OSS developer does something blindingly stupid. The Internet's huddled masses screamed incoherently at them for a few days, and they realized that they weren't going to get away with it. Many, myself included, vowed to never again let Giorgio Maone's code run on any machine under our control.
The first entry is not entirely true. Non-root processes are restricted from using low port numbers(1024, iirc). Also, if there's a correctly configured firewall on the machine, a non-root process is incapable of going around it.
Not that it would actually prevent any malware I know of from wreaking havoc, high port numbers are perfectly fine for sending email and talking to bot herders.
Who was claiming Vista superior to XP? I bet you'll find "they" had a vested interest in selling the latest and greatest. Microsoft wouldn't have needed to publish the 'Mojave' ads if there wasn't a widespread belief that Vista sucked. And as for Windows ME, I've been using windows since 3.1 was new and exciting, so I know better. Don't try to push some revisionist belief that anybody but Microsoft and their fanboys liked windows ME.
The earth has a giant magnetic field. Induce a powerful opposing magnetic field in your satellite/space tether system that "pushes" against the earth's field. There's no reaction mass, but your satellite can then control its position in orbit. Most satellites don't use the space tether system, although I don't know whether that's because it's inherently impractical or merely too new/expensive/fancy.
The iPhone bit was a hook to draw eyeballs. The smartphones are no more or less susceptible than any other machine running SSH, all of whom should have a more sensible password policy.
It's difficult to say whether or not a given system is infected, even if you inspect a complete packet log. Your checksum plan is one of the few ways to guarantee a lack of infection. Actually even that isn't always a guarantee, depending on where the hack is hiding. It could be in the MBR or even burned into the BIOS.
Luckily, in most cases the hackers aren't clever enough to hide their steps that well. There'll be oddly-named files in /var/www, ps and top will disagree about running processes, or you'll suddenly find yourself locked out of some system management tool.
HAM requires two people with equipment that can be hidden inside of a large suitcase. The Internet, I'm reasonably assured, takes rather more space to store. Even in the doomsday scenario where the tubes are completely closed, and all HAM licenses are revoked, there will still be amateurs using the airwaves. Good luck communicating over IP when the backbones have been cut.