Somehow, all lawsuits were dropped when Microsoft robbed the name "Windows Vista" from a couple of window washing liquids manufacturers, a window making company, and the name "Vista" from a slew of other businesses.
The US law system is basically "who has the money, has everything" (for comparison, in Poland it's "who has ties to the judge, has everything" -- the ties are everywhere but its relatively hard to buy them for money). This means, your trademark doesn't matter if you can't afford the litigation.
Especially, this means you are allowed to edit away the part that displays the EULA. Copyright can't affect use, just copying (as its name says), so you don't have to agree to have your rights restricted if you haven't agreed to it before (written contract, etc). That's good, as click-wrap EULAs have always been dubious.
Driver certification means just that Microsoft received the driver, and agreed to confirm that the driver comes from one of its business partners, and not from a suspicious open-source hacker. You don't even have a guarantee that the driver is free from rootkits.
The company isn't really interested in fixing any issues with the drivers -- if you have problems with a bug, you have already paid them all the money they are going to get for that particular piece of hardware.
An example: the !@#$%^&* nVidia proprietary X driver. On some older cards, it will cause kernel oopses, within my usage patterns around once per several hours. Is there anything we can do to fix the problem? I'm not a master kernel hacker, but I do have some rudimentary skills there -- I would have at least some chances to make a fix myself; if I wouldn't succeed, reporting a data-loss bug would make us have it fixed by someone with more knowledge in no time. On my current desktop, switching to text mode the first time X is run after a boot puts the console into 80x25 mode without even doing a TIOCSWINSZ. Somehow, if I kill the X server, reset the video mode then start X again, everything is fine, until the next boot/resume. What can I do to fix this annoyance? Begging to nVidia does nyet work.
Any ISP with a clue will notice that a packet with source address outside of their network simply couldn't originate there. Allowing any spoofed traffic to leave into the world is nothing but incompetence on their part.
All it can do is disconnect it, and that just leads to support calsl and whining from the (l)user.... and to lusers leaving you like a leaky ship. They just _hate_ being educated.
In many cases, you can block the relevant ports. 135, 137-139, 445, 5000 are among those that can be shut without any users even noticing. Blocking 25 would help, but you can't do that unless you're a monopoly. But, there is a trick out here -- count outgoing mails (-p tcp --dport 25 --tcp-flags SYN,ACK,FIN,RST SYN) and enact a block once they reach a certain threshold. At that point, if the user complain, you'll tell the user it's a virus what's breaking their e-mail. This won't be as nice on the rest of the network as we would wish (as 100 first pieces of spam will get out), but it will provide the user with an incentive to clean up their box. And, if the user uses webmail, they will sleep with their worm silently, without any headaches for you.
And generally, any outage will be blamed on you, not the worms.
Too bad, in reality, trying to block a customer or even educate him will make you lose a client. People will argue that they run anti-virus software and are clean; no amount of evidence is going to persuade them. Thus, you have the choice of either pampering them or letting them go.
I do some consulting for a couple of local ISPs -ie, I'm the guy who tells people who run them how to set up traffic shaping, firewall rules, etc. And generally, whenever the network gets stuffed with worms, we just block the relevant traffic and suck it up.
Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday November 07, @08:23AM from the weighty-breakthroughs dept. Technology Science Seumas Hyslop writes [...] Basically, a laser beam is split into two branches that are sent down two identical 2000 feet long tubes and back again via mirrors. TFA: In the corner of a giant field of beet on an unremarkable patch of wasteland, two 2,000ft-long corrugated steel pipes emerge at right angles from a grey cabin.
I do believe you, but then both the article and the blurb are wrong.
They probably did not know, because they did not want to know.
They certainly knew that, it's a part of their core business after all.
And even if they somehow didn't indent to run malwarevertising, they certainly watch closely where their money go. You don't pay a subsidiary for something you don't even know what it is. A friend of mine, someone who got suckered into HerbaLife (a nasty Amway-like scheme), used to hire students to give people leaflets. And of course, if he didn't supervise them, all leaflets tended to be dumped into a trash can. Sure, you can only do limited supervision, but no one is stupid enough to pay for advertising and not check how (and if!) it is done.
One of the consequences is, people will tend to format their partitions using JFS instead of XFS...
Re:Indexing or Caching?
on
Reining in Google
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Let's think carefully about the 'Google cache' thing though - that's dubious because it allows people access to content without going through the content provider's access mechanisms. For things the "content providers" already made publicly available, for crying out loud. What you want to do, is applying extra restrictions management over what was emitted to the public. If you want that "content" to be private, you know how to restrict it in the first place, Google will obey your request.
And for books, Google Print scans books for which the copyright has already expired. Promoting them is a huge boon to the society, to everyone except for publishers who want revenues from books that are supposed to be available to the public.
The only validity to your claim is that mysql might be a better choice if you're running 1995-era hardware, or are buying new hardware but want less than 128 mbytes of memory (for some unfathomable reason). In this case, ya, mysql can run on a lower memory footprint than oracle. [...] ok, now, how about a real-world situation. Try this: Try this: host 100 clients on a single server (+backups). 100*128MB vs 100*10MB... *bzzzt* Your solution simply doesn't scale.
Try this:
- assuming that your company firewall is getting 5,000,000 rows/day
- query: "is the current accept & deny traffic for any given protocol and port 5-minute interval more than 3 standard deviations from the mean for its time of day and day of week over last 90 days?" Ugh, and you really do that in SQL? You're using an abysmal tool for this job. By using the right data structure, you can answer these queries in real time on any hardware, with a minimal memory footprint and O(1) access time. And while you can say that you have a modern server doing this task, your solution doesn't scale, while mine does.
I guess my main point was (to put it into your analogy) if you're not an F1 driver, don't bitch because you don't have the skills to drive an F1 car.
It's not a matter of skills -- it's a matter of not needing a costly, gas-guzzling car when you have better alternatives. Skills are something you can get quite easily; while it takes years to be a top-notch DBA, an intelligent person with experience in related fields (programming, sysadminning, etc) can learn the basics in a week. The thing is, if you take the F1 for a test drive, and it takes X gallons of gas, you can say "if I train driving it, I can need only X/4 that much fuel, but that is still 10 times as much as a normal car takes", you will learn that the other choice is a lot better unless you specifically need a car that fast. I did evaluate Oracle, and learned that even if you divide its requirements by 4, MySQL can still run circles around it within the needs the company or any of our customers have for a database.
Even if you are a master at using rocket launchers, you still can't conceal one in your pocket.
I routinely run MULTIPLE instances of Oracle on my 2GB laptop, each instance taking up less than 120MB of memory. If you know more about Oracle than me, sure, you are able to tune it down. To 120 freaking megabytes. This means, a program that uses an Oracle database will waste 120MB of memory just to have its data accessible in SQL form. If you run several different things which require a database, this adds up to something completely unacceptable for a shared server.
What most people need, is a SQL database as a tool, not as the main component. The database is supposed to store data in an efficient form and provide you with an ability to quickly query the data, nothing more.
If you're expecting to be able to "understand" Oracle and get it installed and running and build something on it in a few hours, then you're looking at the wrong database. If anything, it might be said that Oracle gives the developer/dba TOO much control, and therefore makes it easier for the end-user to royally fsck things up. Good point. I learned SQL (Oracle!) in an university course, then never touched databases in any form for several years. When I finally felt the need, I could learn MySQL and get the job done in a jiffy -- on the other hand, setting up an efficient Oracle server does indeed require a skilled DBA. It's like requiring an engineer to drive a car -- if you want to be able to get from point A to point B frequently, you use a tool that doesn't force you to devote all your efforts into driving itself. On the other hand, if you are a Formula 1 driver, you need a lot of skill. As an another example, a rocket launcher is more powerful than a handgun, but the latter is what most people use, a handgun is a lot cheaper, less bulky and can be easily carried around.
If you want to build your hobby-ish "web site stats" db, then you're probably better off using sqlServer or something more simple. Or, a system that holds personnel training and machine maintenance data for a mid-sized company. Or, a webapp for an user car dealer. Or, players data for a game with >20k users. Or, billing data for a city-wide ISP. In other words, for tasks where you don't need a full-time DBA just to hold the data.
You will be shocked, but one of the biggest car manufacturers use.dbf files (in dBase3+ format, not dBase4 or never) to hold their data. Not even a relative database, just plain, aeons-old database engine; it does its job perfectly and doesn't require all of the software to be ported. A database is supposed to do its job while keeping its total cost (license+DBA labor+hardware) minimal.
You say that Oracle takes up a whopping 17MB of disk space for your data. Is it 1994? Why is this even an issue? Honestly, I am suprised that it takes so little, considering you had to set up temp tablespaces, logs files, etc. When I was DBA'ing I think each of my log files was 50MB.
Eh? I meant 17MB of _data_, not 17MB of disk space taken. The server which handles the database is (IIRC) a P4 with a RAID1 160GB disk; just a random ok machine at the time. It serves around ~15 clients for two applications.
My point was, it's a typical company and it doesn't produce excessive amount of data. With 200 employees, several records per employee who worked in production on a given day and a couple of years, the whole database doesn't require a grid.
Also, I am sure you can tune an Oracle server down. My whole experiences with Oracle are a semester at university several years ago and setting up an installation for evaluation purposes once. I'm not an Oracle DBA, I just notice that it's too elephantine for your everyday website. If I were setting up an ATM processing datawarehouse, I would know to look elsewhere than MySQL.
The problem with Oracle is, it doesn't scale at all. It is meant to do grid computing, but can't really do anything smaller.
How often do you need to use a cluster for your data? If you are a major organization, then you will, but the majority of installations are pretty small. Firewall/website logs. Customer data. And so on.
I have once developed a workshift-tracking application for a company with around 200 employees. A couple of years later, the total data takes 17MB. Why would you use Oracle if MySQL works faster and takes 1% of the resources? A minimal installation of Oracle 10g takes ~800MB of memory, and will take over ten hours to install on a machine with 512MB ram, on the other hand, on my firewall (486, 32MB ram) MySQL can handle Apache logs (only about 200k hits, though) taking a split second for any reasonable query.
Oracle works better for clusters. MySQL works better for a single machine.
MySQL is a lot faster. Oracle takes distributed processing a lot better. But uhm, where does a crippled version fit in the picture?
Wrong. The MS Word document format has not changed since Word 97 for the express purpose of ensuring that 90% of common formatting attributes were preserved between Word 97 through 2003
No. I am a lucky fellow who was forced to have anything to do with.doc files only several times in the past few years, but still, I don't recall a single case where at least the formatting wasn't completely screwed up.
A recent (~2 weeks old) example: my boss received a ~4MB file containing ~40 pages, each with a screenshot and some text below. But, if you tried to even save the same file without making any modifications whatsoever, the resulting file got a random size anywhere between 2MB and 218MB -and- all the images were resized to a tiny size. I couldn't tell what could influence the file size, but the size the images were resized to depended on which printer was set as the default. When I tried to import the doc on my box, both OO and AbiWord were able to read it just fine -- but, as you can expect, saving it and reading back in Word didn't help the tiniest bit.
Being a C programmer/sysadmin, I don't produce any formatted documents, but if I was forced to do anything beyond HTML, something tells me it would be a good idea to refresh my memory of TeX.
OpenOffice has support for Word documents so it comes as no suprise that MS would do the same. Wrong. MS Office doesn't support Word documents in general, but just those produced with the same version of Word, and -perhaps- with the previous one. In some rare cases, you may succeed with importing simple documents from even earlier versions -- but you will need to spend a long time reformatting everything.
MS Office is compatible only with the same version, and even only if both computers have the same default printer installed.
I wonder how they count it when you have different names for a single site:
<VirtualHost *>
ServerName urukpr0n.angband.pl
ServerAlias urukporn.angband.pl urukp0rn.angband.pl urukpron.angband.pl [...] (No, this site isn't what you think.)
This is especially important if you count the fact that in a lot of cases www.$SITE is a CNAME for $SITE.
Ancient and medieval ships had the hull and rigging covered with a significant amount of tar, to make gaps in the wood water-proof. Tar is easily flammable compared to wood.
No, dissipation of light in air is negligible on such distances, so the power itself is roughly constant. The effect of distance is all in targetting inaccuracies -- having a number of soldiers pinpoint a distant object exactly is not really feasible.
Slashdot Mirror
Somehow, all lawsuits were dropped when Microsoft robbed the name "Windows Vista" from a couple of window washing liquids manufacturers, a window making company, and the name "Vista" from a slew of other businesses.
The US law system is basically "who has the money, has everything" (for comparison, in Poland it's "who has ties to the judge, has everything" -- the ties are everywhere but its relatively hard to buy them for money). This means, your trademark doesn't matter if you can't afford the litigation.
Especially, this means you are allowed to edit away the part that displays the EULA. Copyright can't affect use, just copying (as its name says), so you don't have to agree to have your rights restricted if you haven't agreed to it before (written contract, etc). That's good, as click-wrap EULAs have always been dubious.
Driver certification means just that Microsoft received the driver, and agreed to confirm that the driver comes from one of its business partners, and not from a suspicious open-source hacker. You don't even have a guarantee that the driver is free from rootkits.
The company isn't really interested in fixing any issues with the drivers -- if you have problems with a bug, you have already paid them all the money they are going to get for that particular piece of hardware.
An example: the !@#$%^&* nVidia proprietary X driver. On some older cards, it will cause kernel oopses, within my usage patterns around once per several hours. Is there anything we can do to fix the problem? I'm not a master kernel hacker, but I do have some rudimentary skills there -- I would have at least some chances to make a fix myself; if I wouldn't succeed, reporting a data-loss bug would make us have it fixed by someone with more knowledge in no time.
On my current desktop, switching to text mode the first time X is run after a boot puts the console into 80x25 mode without even doing a TIOCSWINSZ. Somehow, if I kill the X server, reset the video mode then start X again, everything is fine, until the next boot/resume. What can I do to fix this annoyance? Begging to nVidia does nyet work.
Any ISP with a clue will notice that a packet with source address outside of their network simply couldn't originate there. Allowing any spoofed traffic to leave into the world is nothing but incompetence on their part.
All it can do is disconnect it, and that just leads to support calsl and whining from the (l)user. ... and to lusers leaving you like a leaky ship. They just _hate_ being educated.
In many cases, you can block the relevant ports. 135, 137-139, 445, 5000 are among those that can be shut without any users even noticing. Blocking 25 would help, but you can't do that unless you're a monopoly. But, there is a trick out here -- count outgoing mails (-p tcp --dport 25 --tcp-flags SYN,ACK,FIN,RST SYN) and enact a block once they reach a certain threshold. At that point, if the user complain, you'll tell the user it's a virus what's breaking their e-mail.
This won't be as nice on the rest of the network as we would wish (as 100 first pieces of spam will get out), but it will provide the user with an incentive to clean up their box. And, if the user uses webmail, they will sleep with their worm silently, without any headaches for you.
And generally, any outage will be blamed on you, not the worms.
Too bad, in reality, trying to block a customer or even educate him will make you lose a client. People will argue that they run anti-virus software and are clean; no amount of evidence is going to persuade them. Thus, you have the choice of either pampering them or letting them go.
I do some consulting for a couple of local ISPs -ie, I'm the guy who tells people who run them how to set up traffic shaping, firewall rules, etc. And generally, whenever the network gets stuffed with worms, we just block the relevant traffic and suck it up.
Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday November 07, @08:23AM
from the weighty-breakthroughs dept.
Technology Science
Seumas Hyslop writes [...]
Basically, a laser beam is split into two branches that are sent down two identical 2000 feet long tubes and back again via mirrors.
TFA:
In the corner of a giant field of beet on an unremarkable patch of wasteland, two 2,000ft-long corrugated steel pipes emerge at right angles from a grey cabin.
I do believe you, but then both the article and the blurb are wrong.
the interferometer is 2e3 meters long
Feet. I'll better not let you anywhere near an orbiter spacecraft...
They probably did not know, because they did not want to know.
They certainly knew that, it's a part of their core business after all.
And even if they somehow didn't indent to run malwarevertising, they certainly watch closely where their money go. You don't pay a subsidiary for something you don't even know what it is.
A friend of mine, someone who got suckered into HerbaLife (a nasty Amway-like scheme), used to hire students to give people leaflets. And of course, if he didn't supervise them, all leaflets tended to be dumped into a trash can. Sure, you can only do limited supervision, but no one is stupid enough to pay for advertising and not check how (and if!) it is done.
One of the consequences is, people will tend to format their partitions using JFS instead of XFS...
Let's think carefully about the 'Google cache' thing though - that's dubious because it allows people access to content without going through the content provider's access mechanisms.
For things the "content providers" already made publicly available, for crying out loud. What you want to do, is applying extra restrictions management over what was emitted to the public. If you want that "content" to be private, you know how to restrict it in the first place, Google will obey your request.
And for books, Google Print scans books for which the copyright has already expired. Promoting them is a huge boon to the society, to everyone except for publishers who want revenues from books that are supposed to be available to the public.
Mandatory Wikipedia link.
Open? Free? No way.
Hell, even their developer portal requires login to even look at. Doesn't smell like something open to the public to me...
The only validity to your claim is that mysql might be a better choice if you're running 1995-era hardware, or are buying new hardware but want less than 128 mbytes of memory (for some unfathomable reason). In this case, ya, mysql can run on a lower memory footprint than oracle.
[...]
ok, now, how about a real-world situation. Try this:
Try this: host 100 clients on a single server (+backups). 100*128MB vs 100*10MB... *bzzzt* Your solution simply doesn't scale.
Try this:
- assuming that your company firewall is getting 5,000,000 rows/day
- query: "is the current accept & deny traffic for any given protocol and port 5-minute interval more than 3 standard deviations from the mean for its time of day and day of week over last 90 days?"
Ugh, and you really do that in SQL? You're using an abysmal tool for this job. By using the right data structure, you can answer these queries in real time on any hardware, with a minimal memory footprint and O(1) access time. And while you can say that you have a modern server doing this task, your solution doesn't scale, while mine does.
I guess my main point was (to put it into your analogy) if you're not an F1 driver, don't bitch because you don't have the skills to drive an F1 car.
It's not a matter of skills -- it's a matter of not needing a costly, gas-guzzling car when you have better alternatives. Skills are something you can get quite easily; while it takes years to be a top-notch DBA, an intelligent person with experience in related fields (programming, sysadminning, etc) can learn the basics in a week. The thing is, if you take the F1 for a test drive, and it takes X gallons of gas, you can say "if I train driving it, I can need only X/4 that much fuel, but that is still 10 times as much as a normal car takes", you will learn that the other choice is a lot better unless you specifically need a car that fast. I did evaluate Oracle, and learned that even if you divide its requirements by 4, MySQL can still run circles around it within the needs the company or any of our customers have for a database.
Even if you are a master at using rocket launchers, you still can't conceal one in your pocket.
I routinely run MULTIPLE instances of Oracle on my 2GB laptop, each instance taking up less than 120MB of memory.
.dbf files (in dBase3+ format, not dBase4 or never) to hold their data. Not even a relative database, just plain, aeons-old database engine; it does its job perfectly and doesn't require all of the software to be ported. A database is supposed to do its job while keeping its total cost (license+DBA labor+hardware) minimal.
If you know more about Oracle than me, sure, you are able to tune it down. To 120 freaking megabytes. This means, a program that uses an Oracle database will waste 120MB of memory just to have its data accessible in SQL form. If you run several different things which require a database, this adds up to something completely unacceptable for a shared server.
What most people need, is a SQL database as a tool, not as the main component. The database is supposed to store data in an efficient form and provide you with an ability to quickly query the data, nothing more.
If you're expecting to be able to "understand" Oracle and get it installed and running and build something on it in a few hours, then you're looking at the wrong database. If anything, it might be said that Oracle gives the developer/dba TOO much control, and therefore makes it easier for the end-user to royally fsck things up.
Good point. I learned SQL (Oracle!) in an university course, then never touched databases in any form for several years. When I finally felt the need, I could learn MySQL and get the job done in a jiffy -- on the other hand, setting up an efficient Oracle server does indeed require a skilled DBA. It's like requiring an engineer to drive a car -- if you want to be able to get from point A to point B frequently, you use a tool that doesn't force you to devote all your efforts into driving itself. On the other hand, if you are a Formula 1 driver, you need a lot of skill. As an another example, a rocket launcher is more powerful than a handgun, but the latter is what most people use, a handgun is a lot cheaper, less bulky and can be easily carried around.
If you want to build your hobby-ish "web site stats" db, then you're probably better off using sqlServer or something more simple.
Or, a system that holds personnel training and machine maintenance data for a mid-sized company. Or, a webapp for an user car dealer. Or, players data for a game with >20k users. Or, billing data for a city-wide ISP. In other words, for tasks where you don't need a full-time DBA just to hold the data.
You will be shocked, but one of the biggest car manufacturers use
You say that Oracle takes up a whopping 17MB of disk space for your data. Is it 1994? Why is this even an issue? Honestly, I am suprised that it takes so little, considering you had to set up temp tablespaces, logs files, etc. When I was DBA'ing I think each of my log files was 50MB.
Eh? I meant 17MB of _data_, not 17MB of disk space taken. The server which handles the database is (IIRC) a P4 with a RAID1 160GB disk; just a random ok machine at the time. It serves around ~15 clients for two applications.
My point was, it's a typical company and it doesn't produce excessive amount of data. With 200 employees, several records per employee who worked in production on a given day and a couple of years, the whole database doesn't require a grid.
Also, I am sure you can tune an Oracle server down. My whole experiences with Oracle are a semester at university several years ago and setting up an installation for evaluation purposes once. I'm not an Oracle DBA, I just notice that it's too elephantine for your everyday website. If I were setting up an ATM processing datawarehouse, I would know to look elsewhere than MySQL.
The problem with Oracle is, it doesn't scale at all. It is meant to do grid computing, but can't really do anything smaller.
How often do you need to use a cluster for your data? If you are a major organization, then you will, but the majority of installations are pretty small. Firewall/website logs. Customer data. And so on.
I have once developed a workshift-tracking application for a company with around 200 employees. A couple of years later, the total data takes 17MB. Why would you use Oracle if MySQL works faster and takes 1% of the resources? A minimal installation of Oracle 10g takes ~800MB of memory, and will take over ten hours to install on a machine with 512MB ram, on the other hand, on my firewall (486, 32MB ram) MySQL can handle Apache logs (only about 200k hits, though) taking a split second for any reasonable query.
Oracle works better for clusters.
MySQL works better for a single machine.
MySQL is a lot faster. Oracle takes distributed processing a lot better.
But uhm, where does a crippled version fit in the picture?
Wrong. The MS Word document format has not changed since Word 97 for the express purpose of ensuring that 90% of common formatting attributes were preserved between Word 97 through 2003
.doc files only several times in the past few years, but still, I don't recall a single case where at least the formatting wasn't completely screwed up.
No. I am a lucky fellow who was forced to have anything to do with
A recent (~2 weeks old) example:
my boss received a ~4MB file containing ~40 pages, each with a screenshot and some text below. But, if you tried to even save the same file without making any modifications whatsoever, the resulting file got a random size anywhere between 2MB and 218MB -and- all the images were resized to a tiny size. I couldn't tell what could influence the file size, but the size the images were resized to depended on which printer was set as the default.
When I tried to import the doc on my box, both OO and AbiWord were able to read it just fine -- but, as you can expect, saving it and reading back in Word didn't help the tiniest bit.
Being a C programmer/sysadmin, I don't produce any formatted documents, but if I was forced to do anything beyond HTML, something tells me it would be a good idea to refresh my memory of TeX.
OpenOffice has support for Word documents so it comes as no suprise that MS would do the same.
Wrong. MS Office doesn't support Word documents in general, but just those produced with the same version of Word, and -perhaps- with the previous one. In some rare cases, you may succeed with importing simple documents from even earlier versions -- but you will need to spend a long time reformatting everything.
MS Office is compatible only with the same version, and even only if both computers have the same default printer installed.
I wonder how they count it when you have different names for a single site:
<VirtualHost *>
ServerName urukpr0n.angband.pl
ServerAlias urukporn.angband.pl urukp0rn.angband.pl urukpron.angband.pl
[...]
(No, this site isn't what you think.)
This is especially important if you count the fact that in a lot of cases www.$SITE is a CNAME for $SITE.
Yeah, but Internet Explorer still tries to pretend it's Mozilla...
Before you sign (click) the EULA, you are allowed to modify your copy of the software, just like you are allowed to mod your car.
Ancient and medieval ships had the hull and rigging covered with a significant amount of tar, to make gaps in the wood water-proof. Tar is easily flammable compared to wood.
Now we know that SQ of distance effects the power
No, dissipation of light in air is negligible on such distances, so the power itself is roughly constant. The effect of distance is all in targetting inaccuracies -- having a number of soldiers pinpoint a distant object exactly is not really feasible.