the sound of my point going over the heads of both respondents. I was demonstrating how it was far from "prohibitively expensive" to scan for cc#'s, and a little more reading would have also revealed that I was saying that search engines SHOULDN'T have to be burdened with this nonsense, but it sure would be useful to people specifically looking for a cc#.
And my hint had to do with the fact that even password protected pages (that are not using http auth) can often be defeated by a link that contains a password, a fact that was pointed out well earlier in the discussion. Sessions that time out aren't susceptible to that problem, even a link with all the authentication info would still be invalid by the time most search engines got around to indexing it.
I'm gonna get pissy again: doesn't anybody read anymore?
should match >99% of cc numbers. And a lot of other dross, but you can just pipe it into a mod10 checker. Search engines shouldn't have to do this -- unless they're looking for cc numbers that is. Anyone who publishes confidential data that's crawlable without any kind of password protection should be liable for damages (hint: even if you have a CGI braindead enough to allow password=foo, you can still defeat it with sessionid's that time out.... 'course if you do that, just use the sessionid as the per-request auth in the first place)
For what it's worth, I apologize for the tone. I hadn't really looked at who I was responding to. I actually respect a lot of your views, and I apologize for tarring you with the majority of the slashdoterati (which your own sig isn't kind to), at which that nasty comment was aimed.
Guess I need to remember that when I correct a misconception for the 233437324134th time, it's not the same person each time... Sorry, and peace.
KDE is findamentally different from Windows in a variety of ways - style guidelines word strongly against MDI apps, which are the standard for most Windows apps despite being confusing to end users
You just make this stuff up, don't you? In fact, the only major MDI app MS still puts out is Access. In fact, MS's own style guidelines discourage MDI. I guess the truth is inconvenient when it's Microsoft in the crosshairs.
Time most definitely does exist. The time *line* does not, that particular "arrow of time" is just entropy. Would be kind of hard for entropy to happen without time now, wouldn't it?
Whereas if the app was written in Cobol without the CLR (I'm going to assume there is some kind of COBOL.NET), you not only can't maintain the app, you can't even script the pieces with another language. Standards are good, but sometimes that standard happens to be cobol (proof that there is no god).
Imperative languages are pretty much isomorphic. Learn one that's sufficiently rich and you pretty much know 'em all.
The story gets different when you start with other paradigms. Try teaching yourself Haskell or prolog in a morning. And it's languages like that that are often a reason to pick one over the other, because the problem space demands it. I could write a web form processor with db access in any language... but trying to write a fraud detection system in C is like trying to build a house with a hammer (actually the fraud detection system I'm thinking of was written in APL... yowza)
Just those off the top of my head, I'm sure there's more.
> Anonymous structs equivalent by structure
I'm not entirely sure this is really appropriate for a strongly statically typed language. Perhaps some kind of explicit syntax to state that two interfaces are equivalent? (and while we're at it, how about anonymous interface constructor syntax that isn't so ugly)
I really hope that Microsoft tries this. I would wholeheartedly approve of the state and/or federal goverment throwing a few million dollars at developing alternate Win32 platforms.
Then by all means, go donate the money. I for one would rather see my taxes go for roads and firefighters and shelters and such, not some some damn personal geek crusade.
It's an operating system. Get some freaking perspective.
That this is repeated over and over doesn't make it any more true. MS's commandline ftp client comes from BSD. It also has BSD headers for, of all things, the BSD sockets API.
In the case of ext3, I actually agree with what is otherwise the greatest example of weasel-wording since the Evangelists excusing everything Apple does.
ext2 does not synchronously write metadata -- a power fail can hose everything. Thus I consider ext3 a bugfix on ext2, albeit a somewhat radical one. Same goes for the AA VM, a radical bugfix on a broken VM that should have been a show-stopper for 2.4 in the first place.
Otherwise, you're pretty much the kind of support Linux frankly doesn't need. Keep giving people attitude, soon enough you won't have to anymore, because they'll turn elsewhere.
(And, by the way, like Windows and Solaris, Linux is a trademark, and since we aren't talking about the kernel alone, we should probably call this operating system "GNU/Linux".)
Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds. GNU/Linux is a trademark of nobody. Despite Linus's strident claims to be disinterested, if you want to point at an official term, it's the one Linus owns.
A web browser, such as Netscape was never supposed to be a competitor with Windows
Obviously you don't remember the rhetoric streaming out of mcom.com about "rendering windows irrelevant". They were working on that desktop integration that everyone crucified microsoft for before MS had finished reading the code they had just licensed from Spyglass.
RMS believes that Free Software shouldn't promote proprietary software. That's all. He isn't saying that we should shut down www.staroffice.com, or that people who use WordPerfect should have their hands cut off
What would you say if he advocated that free software development be subsidized by compelling manufacturers and purchasers under the force of law to fund its development? All right here in black and white. I have no problem with Free Software, I just have a problem with him speaking for my views.
and most important of all, the browser windows are displayed as children within the same MDI-app. I currently have 10 browser children open, just because it is so convenient. In spite of my Opera zeal, it would seem that Konqueror would be comparable if only it had the MDI-feature. How come no Open Source team takes that path?
Possibly because it's only a niche market who considers that hideous interface a feature. Even Microsoft hates it. If Opera disabled this "feature", I might consider using it, but probably wouldn't anyway, as it really doesn't offer me much of anything IE with the appropriate extensions does not (though I could do with GetRight fixing some of their annoying bugs)
If I'd known you programmed in MOO, I'd have asked: what's your character name on LambdaMOO?
Anyway, implementing tail calling in MOO isn't as bad as it sounds, and for a trivial case of it, I implemented it. You do lose most of callers(), and thus have less meaningful tracebacks, but I just keep the last frame for caller and caller_perms(). The only thing that permanently breaks is callers() based security like @gag and @refuse, but I implemented a "taint" mechanism (in-db, could easily have been done in-server) that just held the set of perms used. gag_p was then a simple matter of $set_utils:intersection(this.gaglist, permset)
Sometimes wish I still had my old MOO code, but I gave up on MOO long ago after seeing that it just wasn't going to get anywhere. Shame I don't see any real languages anymore with integrated security like MOO had.
I rather like the slashdot look -- except for those awful "themed" color selections. Apache stories are the worst, it's like bisque and mauve. I hate to say it, but "skins" (oh dear god, just strike me dead) are really the answer here... Slash obviously has some support for them, c.f. slashdot lite. I personally think skinning is the most useless interface boondoggle that actually detracts from real interface usability (distracts anyway), but it would seem to be a necessary feature point for a good blog.
Or do like half-empty does. Only allow appending, which is clearly marked, not outright editing, and the ability to do so times out once the post is a few hours old.
I post at +2, and occasionally use the "No Score +1 Bonus" checkbox. I dont see the point of making it a default, but I do see its use, as I do occasionally post cute or snide little one liners that really don't belong at the +2 threshold that many (including myself) read slashdot at. I should probably use it more often, actually...
ObWish: Javascriptify slash for browsers that are capable. Background moderation submits like half-empty. Disable the submit button until the timeouts pass. Or just make the submission textarea a little bit bigger (there's a preference item for ya). I'd hack on it myself, but last I looked at Slash.pm I was just too horrified for words.
I believe that filenames can even include/. Shells might not like it, but Unix filesystems don't care
Shells don't care about/, the filesystem most certainly does. Path parsing is not done by the shell, it's done by the filesystem. creat() and open() and company will all fail if you try to have a file with a slash in it. Try it with a C program sometime.
Are there any examples of (possibly failed) systems that are more powerful than UNIX?
Well the obvious question to your question is "for what?". Mainframes have been doing something like vmware for ages, had hugely advanced (and yes, crufty) networking protocols, record-oriented files, and I/O so well tuned it would make a strong webmaster cry. About the same time Unix was announced to the world, another OS built on capabilities security came out, but languished. VMS is built around async I/O from the ground up. NT inherits that I/O from VMS, and just about every kernel object can be inspected and given ACL's.
Mainframes also had a huge cost and came with the IBM monkey on your back, VMS only ran on DEC boxen, NT got features slapped on it that degraded its stability, and Unix was nearly free to start (AT&T was under a consent decree and basically couldn't be in the software business), completely free soon after, and portable to the campus toaster ovens. Unix had an evolutionary advantage similar to the ones humans enjoy: it could live anywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
zzzzzzzzZZZZZZZOOOOOOMMMMM
the sound of my point going over the heads of both respondents. I was demonstrating how it was far from "prohibitively expensive" to scan for cc#'s, and a little more reading would have also revealed that I was saying that search engines SHOULDN'T have to be burdened with this nonsense, but it sure would be useful to people specifically looking for a cc#.
And my hint had to do with the fact that even password protected pages (that are not using http auth) can often be defeated by a link that contains a password, a fact that was pointed out well earlier in the discussion. Sessions that time out aren't susceptible to that problem, even a link with all the authentication info would still be invalid by the time most search engines got around to indexing it.
I'm gonna get pissy again: doesn't anybody read anymore?
but with all the different formatting done on CC numbers (XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX, XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX, etc) the algorithm could get ugly to maintain.
? \d .?\d.?\d.?\d
\d.?\d.?\d.?\d.?\d.?\d.?\d.?\d.?\d.?\d.?\d.?\d.
should match >99% of cc numbers. And a lot of other dross, but you can just pipe it into a mod10 checker. Search engines shouldn't have to do this -- unless they're looking for cc numbers that is. Anyone who publishes confidential data that's crawlable without any kind of password protection should be liable for damages (hint: even if you have a CGI braindead enough to allow password=foo, you can still defeat it with sessionid's that time out.... 'course if you do that, just use the sessionid as the per-request auth in the first place)
For what it's worth, I apologize for the tone. I hadn't really looked at who I was responding to. I actually respect a lot of your views, and I apologize for tarring you with the majority of the slashdoterati (which your own sig isn't kind to), at which that nasty comment was aimed.
Guess I need to remember that when I correct a misconception for the 233437324134th time, it's not the same person each time... Sorry, and peace.
KDE is findamentally different from Windows in a variety of ways - style guidelines word strongly against MDI apps, which are the standard for most Windows apps despite being confusing to end users
You just make this stuff up, don't you? In fact, the only major MDI app MS still puts out is Access. In fact, MS's own style guidelines discourage MDI. I guess the truth is inconvenient when it's Microsoft in the crosshairs.
Time most definitely does exist. The time *line* does not, that particular "arrow of time" is just entropy. Would be kind of hard for entropy to happen without time now, wouldn't it?
Whereas if the app was written in Cobol without the CLR (I'm going to assume there is some kind of COBOL.NET), you not only can't maintain the app, you can't even script the pieces with another language. Standards are good, but sometimes that standard happens to be cobol (proof that there is no god).
Imperative languages are pretty much isomorphic. Learn one that's sufficiently rich and you pretty much know 'em all.
... but trying to write a fraud detection system in C is like trying to build a house with a hammer (actually the fraud detection system I'm thinking of was written in APL ... yowza)
The story gets different when you start with other paradigms. Try teaching yourself Haskell or prolog in a morning. And it's languages like that that are often a reason to pick one over the other, because the problem space demands it. I could write a web form processor with db access in any language
Well heck, the Vatican is probably one of the most wired states in the world -- they have a website.
There's the problem with percentages...
Works just dandy with bash on my box. Cygwin bash at that.
Just those off the top of my head, I'm sure there's more.
> Anonymous structs equivalent by structure
I'm not entirely sure this is really appropriate for a strongly statically typed language. Perhaps some kind of explicit syntax to state that two interfaces are equivalent? (and while we're at it, how about anonymous interface constructor syntax that isn't so ugly)
I really hope that Microsoft tries this. I would wholeheartedly approve of the state and/or federal goverment throwing a few million dollars at developing alternate Win32 platforms.
Then by all means, go donate the money. I for one would rather see my taxes go for roads and firefighters and shelters and such, not some some damn personal geek crusade.
It's an operating system. Get some freaking perspective.
I'm pleased as punch that slashdot has its very own kooks, like this guy, but why the hell was this modded up?
> MS uses the BSD TCP/IP stack IIRC
That this is repeated over and over doesn't make it any more true. MS's commandline ftp client comes from BSD. It also has BSD headers for, of all things, the BSD sockets API.
In the case of ext3, I actually agree with what is otherwise the greatest example of weasel-wording since the Evangelists excusing everything Apple does.
ext2 does not synchronously write metadata -- a power fail can hose everything. Thus I consider ext3 a bugfix on ext2, albeit a somewhat radical one. Same goes for the AA VM, a radical bugfix on a broken VM that should have been a show-stopper for 2.4 in the first place.
Otherwise, you're pretty much the kind of support Linux frankly doesn't need. Keep giving people attitude, soon enough you won't have to anymore, because they'll turn elsewhere.
(And, by the way, like Windows and Solaris, Linux is a trademark, and since we aren't talking about the kernel alone, we should probably call this operating system "GNU/Linux".)
Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds. GNU/Linux is a trademark of nobody. Despite Linus's strident claims to be disinterested, if you want to point at an official term, it's the one Linus owns.
I run cygwin. Does that make it GNU/Windows?
A web browser, such as Netscape was never supposed to be a competitor with Windows
Obviously you don't remember the rhetoric streaming out of mcom.com about "rendering windows irrelevant". They were working on that desktop integration that everyone crucified microsoft for before MS had finished reading the code they had just licensed from Spyglass.
RMS believes that Free Software shouldn't promote proprietary software. That's all. He isn't saying that we should shut down www.staroffice.com, or that people who use WordPerfect should have their hands cut off
What would you say if he advocated that free software development be subsidized by compelling manufacturers and purchasers under the force of law to fund its development? All right here in black and white. I have no problem with Free Software, I just have a problem with him speaking for my views.
and most important of all, the browser windows are displayed as children within the same MDI-app. I currently have 10 browser children open, just because it is so convenient. In spite of my Opera zeal, it would seem that Konqueror would be comparable if only it had the MDI-feature. How come no Open Source team takes that path?
Possibly because it's only a niche market who considers that hideous interface a feature. Even Microsoft hates it. If Opera disabled this "feature", I might consider using it, but probably wouldn't anyway, as it really doesn't offer me much of anything IE with the appropriate extensions does not (though I could do with GetRight fixing some of their annoying bugs)
If I'd known you programmed in MOO, I'd have asked: what's your character name on LambdaMOO?
Anyway, implementing tail calling in MOO isn't as bad as it sounds, and for a trivial case of it, I implemented it. You do lose most of callers(), and thus have less meaningful tracebacks, but I just keep the last frame for caller and caller_perms(). The only thing that permanently breaks is callers() based security like @gag and @refuse, but I implemented a "taint" mechanism (in-db, could easily have been done in-server) that just held the set of perms used. gag_p was then a simple matter of $set_utils:intersection(this.gaglist, permset)
Sometimes wish I still had my old MOO code, but I gave up on MOO long ago after seeing that it just wasn't going to get anywhere. Shame I don't see any real languages anymore with integrated security like MOO had.
I rather like the slashdot look -- except for those awful "themed" color selections. Apache stories are the worst, it's like bisque and mauve. I hate to say it, but "skins" (oh dear god, just strike me dead) are really the answer here... Slash obviously has some support for them, c.f. slashdot lite. I personally think skinning is the most useless interface boondoggle that actually detracts from real interface usability (distracts anyway), but it would seem to be a necessary feature point for a good blog.
Or do like half-empty does. Only allow appending, which is clearly marked, not outright editing, and the ability to do so times out once the post is a few hours old.
I post at +2, and occasionally use the "No Score +1 Bonus" checkbox. I dont see the point of making it a default, but I do see its use, as I do occasionally post cute or snide little one liners that really don't belong at the +2 threshold that many (including myself) read slashdot at. I should probably use it more often, actually...
ObWish: Javascriptify slash for browsers that are capable. Background moderation submits like half-empty. Disable the submit button until the timeouts pass. Or just make the submission textarea a little bit bigger (there's a preference item for ya). I'd hack on it myself, but last I looked at Slash.pm I was just too horrified for words.
two extra keystrokes would have spared us all this nitpicking. one just needed to spell out the word "third". *sigh*
I believe that filenames can even include /. Shells might not like it, but Unix filesystems don't care
/, the filesystem most certainly does. Path parsing is not done by the shell, it's done by the filesystem. creat() and open() and company will all fail if you try to have a file with a slash in it. Try it with a C program sometime.
Shells don't care about
Are there any examples of (possibly failed) systems that are more powerful than UNIX?
Well the obvious question to your question is "for what?". Mainframes have been doing something like vmware for ages, had hugely advanced (and yes, crufty) networking protocols, record-oriented files, and I/O so well tuned it would make a strong webmaster cry. About the same time Unix was announced to the world, another OS built on capabilities security came out, but languished. VMS is built around async I/O from the ground up. NT inherits that I/O from VMS, and just about every kernel object can be inspected and given ACL's.
Mainframes also had a huge cost and came with the IBM monkey on your back, VMS only ran on DEC boxen, NT got features slapped on it that degraded its stability, and Unix was nearly free to start (AT&T was under a consent decree and basically couldn't be in the software business), completely free soon after, and portable to the campus toaster ovens. Unix had an evolutionary advantage similar to the ones humans enjoy: it could live anywhere.