User: (1 -sqrt(5))*(2**-1)

Re:A Trilogy, why not?

On: Hitchhikers Guide Movie Might Become a Trilogy

You're looking for the word pentateuch.

Pentalogy is the more general of the two, referring to a set of five generic works; from the OED:

pentalogy [cf. TRILOGY], a combination of five mutually connected parts; a pentad.

Pentateuch refers specifically to a set of five books, the books ascribed to Moses in particular.

Quel Élan!

On: Deep Impact Catches First Glimpse of Target Comet

Impact scheduled for July 4, no less; who says American science cum colonialism is dead?

Re:I want animated program icons

On: Longhorn Preview

Well, WinXP still has Progman.exe [...].

Back before I switched to Linux, my startup ritual consisted of killing explorer.exe and starting Program Manager; it was a throwback to 3.1, without the need to roll your own sockets.

Re:General questions

On: Fedora Core 4 Test 2 Released

Also, what's the advantages of GCC 4.0?

I can attest to a palpable optimization; on the other hand, the following refused to compile therewith out of the box:

• Firefox
• Lilypond
• MPlayer

On that account, mainly, I've fallen back on GCC 3.

Re:MOD PARENT DOWN

On: Caltech Pranks MIT's Prefrosh Weekend

This guy's just been copy/pasting stuff to get his FREE CRAP links up.

Speaking of which, I wonder if it's high time Slashcode implemented NOFOLLOW.

Re:Wrong attitude.

On: Some Linux Distros Found Vulnerable By Default

Your sensible defaults (which you're still loathe to define) haven't help[ed] our server admin.

Just to get some numbers on the table, here are bash's default ulimits in FC3:

$ ulimit -a
core file size (blocks, -c) 0
data seg size (kbytes, -d) unlimited
file size (blocks, -f) unlimited
pending signals (-i) 1024
max locked memory (kbytes, -l) 32
max memory size (kbytes, -m) unlimited
open files (-n) 1024
pipe size (512 bytes, -p) 8
POSIX message queues (bytes, -q) 819200
stack size (kbytes, -s) 10240
cpu time (seconds, -t) unlimited
max user processes (-u) 8185
virtual memory (kbytes, -v) unlimited
file locks (-x) unlimited

I've only had to tweak them in specialized circumstances: like running Apache-spawned processes, for instance; they weren't enough, on the other hand, to protect me against the fork bomb posted above.

Re:Already ditched

On: Will Sun's Java Go Open Source?

Sure[,] scripting languages may do some things in less lines of code[;] but that[']s hardly a valid way of measuring a language.

Whose time is dearer: the agent's or the machine's? If the former, then oeconomy of script is a sound argument.

Re:Not surprised

On: Google and Their Server Farm

Maybe [Google cache]'ll go on like that forever. Maybe it won't.

Google's NOARCHIVE opt-out seems to work well enough for jealous parties; there have been claims, though, of an adherent rank-drop.