Once again Timothy couldn't let something by without stupid editorializing.
Unless something has been removed since when you posted this comment and when I read loaded the page, Timothy didn't add anything. Notice that the entire story is in italics, indicating that the comments are that of the submitter, not the editor.
Perhaps it's time for ISPs to charge per megabyte? There's no such thing as 'unlimited' or 'free'.. you end up paying in the end. So why not charge per megabyte, which will force users to consider what they're actually downloading. US$0.01 per megabyte sounds fair.
US$1 per 100 megabytes? That seems awfully steep. I sure wouldn't want to pay that for my cable modem (even though we currenly have a 1GB per day limit and have no option to pay for more). Bandwidth is a lot cheaper than that, at least in the US. The web hosting company I work for, ITmom.com, only charges US$0.50 per gigabyte for bandwidth. Obviously we are paying for some big pipes to get the cost that low, but I'd think that an ISP covering half of Austrilia would be in a similar position. I'd be willing to pay about US$1-2 max per gigabyte for home usage, and that's after hitting a limit of say 1GB per day.
It seems like the standard (BS) agreement. But I found it interesting that THIS agreement covers ALL the software that is distributed with the computer. So I wonder what would happen to Dell's EULA if they sold a system with Linux on it? Does that mean that their EULA would supercede the GPL? That doesn't sound right.
Of course not. Software EULA's prohibit you from doing things with the software that are not already covered by copyright law. You cannot distribute commercial software because of copyright, not because of the EULA. You can only distribute GPL'd software because of the GPL. Without the GPL, the software would fall under standard copyright laws. The GPL gives you more rights, it doesn't take any away.
How the hell do people cope with Daylight Savings Time? How do you indicate whether 1:30 AM is the/FIRST/ 1:30 AM, or the/SECOND/ 1:30 AM, when Daylight Savings Time hits?
You don't, plain and simple. Nasty things like time formatting and conversions should only be done when necessary, i.e. to display it to a user. No sane program (or programmer) would try to keep track of time in that format internally. The most common method of storing time is to use a UNIX timestamp, which is the number of seconds after the UNIX epoch ("1970-01-01 00:00:00 GMT"). The problem with this approach is that in 2038, a signed 32-bit number will overflow. It also means that times before 1970 and after the beginning of 2038 cannot be stored.
A better approach is to use TAI64 or TAI64NA times. TAI is much more accurate (see the page for details), and does not have the range problems of UNIX timestamps. DJB's public domain libtai library allows you to store and manipulate dates and times on the TAI64 and TAI64NA time scales.
This is very different from designing bridges or buildings, for example, where the thousands of decisions going into the design tend to reinforce the basic premise of its fundamnetal soundness. The mathematics of each calculation are usually verified by calculations done during other parts of the work. Due to this feedback, systematic failures are extremely rare, and when they do happen, often end up showcased on History Channel programs such as "Engineering Disasters".
But it is possible to write secure software through good software engineering practices. Unfortunately, not many people seem to understand them. Only a few individuals like Dan Bernstein can consistently and effectively write secure software, and will guarantee that it is secure.
If software was thoroughly designed from the start before any code was written, the same as with normal engineering projects, then perhaps more software would be secure. If you look at his guarantee for qmail, then you'll notice that he followed several principles throughout the design and implementation that allow him to guarantee that it is secure. If software engineers become liable for their work in the same way that traditional engineers are liable, then maybe software engineering will become more like traditional engineering.
1.) You can identify a search engine spider from it's logs, and set up your site to present it with different content. If you're using PHP, for example, all you have to do is create an if/then statement that basically says "if it's google, send them no data. Anything else, let them on through." It's not very hard to write this type of script in PHP. It'd take me minutes to do.
You've never heard of robots.txt? It's certainly the easiest and preferred way to keep robots from visiting your site. Now, presenting different information to search engines, that sounds familiar...
Let me just quickly say, scripts like that is the stupidest abuse of referrers I've ever come across. The referrer is a great tool for following the flow of traffic. Not to police flow of traffic.
So what about sites hotlinking to your images and literally stealing your bandwidth?
Congratulations, you just described how Zeus' configuration works. It's configuration file format is MUCH saner and nicer than Apaches, and it comes with a great web configuration GUI, that is much nicer than the one that comes with IIS. Their web GUI lets you see exactly what it will be doing to the config file.
Either way, it takes a thread or a process for each connection. Even with dynamic content, most of your content is static (i.e. images). For static content, you need a non blocking server that runs in a single process to get the best performance. And the majority of the high traffic sites on the net (adult sites) have lots of images. Thus it makes sense to have a non blocking core, and only use threads or processes for things that are more difficult to do in a single process. Better yet, leave all that stuff out of the server entirely, and use an API designed to be high performance and non blocking friendly: FastCGI. But Apache can stay a toy, and those of us that need high performance will have to continue paying for a closed source, real web server: Zeus. The Apache developers can complain all they want about how it's too hard to do and isn't necessarily the best way, while continuing to ignore the best web server available. Oh, and where's my easy to use mass virtual hosting, good config file format and web configuration tool?
And if you think this is a troll, then go play with Zeus for a day, and you'll see why Apache is nothing more than a toy.
It tracks which packages were installed `automatically' (e.g., to satisfy a dependency). If such `auto' packages later become unnecessary because nothing depends on them anymore, they will be uninstalled automatically.
Is this a feature of aptitude, or of the package database? If I install aptitude today, will it tell me which packages were automatically installed using apt-get?
A better test would be http_load, since it tests multiple connections in parallel. I don't know of a test client that does multiple connections and utilizes persistent connections, but that would be ideal for load testing. But, of course, Apache's is inherently limited to the number of connections it can handle, due to using a separate thread/process for each connection.
I'm actually not sure. My current cable company is Sunflower Broadband, and from the way it's advertised, it looks like it uses the cable. I know that Cox Communications also provides digital telephon service, and it looks like it uses cable as well. I'm sure many other cable companies offer this service.
Everything is becoming a service.. IP networking, Phone Connectivity. Video(cable tv). What does this mean? Simply you are going to see companies soon competing for the right to bring bandwith to your door. While the services you choose can be offered by anyone.
I can't believe you got modded up twice for repeating hype from five years ago.
Open your door, take a look outside. The rosy worldview you have proposed has long since failed to come about.
What do you mean it hasn't happened? It already has happened. I can get my phone service from the phone company, the cable company, or a wireless provider. I can get my internet service from the phone company, the cable company or a sattelite company. I can get my TV service from the cable company or a sattelite company. The only type of company that provides all three is the cable company, but I expect that will change in the not too distant future.
I recommend checking out Mantis if you need a good, simple, easy to use and configure bug tracker. You can have it installed and working in minutes, and only requires PHP and MySQL. The source is very clean, so it's easy to make changes to it. And the developers are very good about accepting bug reports and feature requests. For a large project like Mozilla, you might need something more large scale, but for small or medium size projects with 10-20 people, it works very well.
I run a small development firm and I wanted to use the enterprise edition. I'll pay a few thousand for something, but $30k for 30 people? I think not.
While I can't say the SourceForge is decent (imho looks like a hodgepodge of thrown together junk), $30k for 30 people is not really a lot. Say salary, benefits, overhead, etc., cost you $1k per week per employee (which is likely very modest). Is something like this going to save each developer a week of time? If there's a tool that good, then it's well worth the money. Sure, it's a big one time cost, but even over the course of a year, it really does pay for itself.
The ruling went against us - the judge decreed that anything that can be done in software can be done in hardware, therefore our software approach violated their patent.
While I don't know enough about patents or the rest of your case to have an opinion, it sounds like the judge was right on that statement. You can do anything in software that is done in hardware. Modern CPU's do in fact contain "software". Modern hardware is often designed using software resembling programming languages, such as VHDL. So where do you draw the line?
As to the taxing of software companies, I agree, they should be taxed. But taxes should be made on the final product, at the time of sale. If you buy a copy of Windows at the store, then you pay sales tax. They should likewise be taxed on software licensed through OEM agreements or other arrangements. We shouldn't be inventing new taxes, but instead fixing our current tax laws.
Actually, in order to use it, yo DO have to apply a crack to the game. You have to add entries for the bnetd servers into the gateway list. It's a fairly straightforward one, but it is a crack nonetheless. I don't believe you can get it to work without using that crack.
You don't have to crack it. You merely change the server IP's in the registry. Is Registry Editor now in violation of the DMCA?
So if you don't have access to the console, open a classical 'telnet' port for a few minutes, just during the upgrade. Once you've checked that SSH is still ok, you can remove the telnet daemon.
Since the SSH server forks after you've connected, you can safely stop the server while connected via SSH. You never need to use telnet. Just make sure that you can still connect before disconnecting from the original SSH connection.
Can you tell me another way to do this? Yes, if all his friends would get accounts on his server that would solve the problem. But, so would using hot mail. We're talking about people with existing accounts on other servers.
Give them shell accounts on the box, so that they can use either authenticated SMTP, or tunnel via SSH. Simple solution.
That will forward port 2000 on your machine to port 25 on mail.example.com, from host.example.com. It will stay in effect until you log out. If you just want to forward a port, then you can use the -f option. It still needs to execute a command, so give it something like sleep 900 (for 15 minutes). There might be a better way, but I don't know of one. Also check out stunnel. It might work with SSH.
You could forward port 25 on your local machine, but then you would need to start SSH as root (so it can bind to the low numbered port).
Then why isn't he smart enough to setup his mail server to use authentication? The web hosting company I work for (ITmom.com) allows its customers to send mail using our SMTP server, and we're not an open relay. We use POP-before-SMTP, so only IP's that have recently successfully authenticated via POP3 can send mail. There's also SMTP authentication, SSH tunneling, and probably some other available methods.
The spam problem isn't going to go away. Refusing to close relays just makes it worse.
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Once again Timothy couldn't let something by without stupid editorializing.
Unless something has been removed since when you posted this comment and when I read loaded the page, Timothy didn't add anything. Notice that the entire story is in italics, indicating that the comments are that of the submitter, not the editor.Perhaps it's time for ISPs to charge per megabyte? There's no such thing as 'unlimited' or 'free'.. you end up paying in the end. So why not charge per megabyte, which will force users to consider what they're actually downloading. US$0.01 per megabyte sounds fair.
US$1 per 100 megabytes? That seems awfully steep. I sure wouldn't want to pay that for my cable modem (even though we currenly have a 1GB per day limit and have no option to pay for more). Bandwidth is a lot cheaper than that, at least in the US. The web hosting company I work for, ITmom.com, only charges US$0.50 per gigabyte for bandwidth. Obviously we are paying for some big pipes to get the cost that low, but I'd think that an ISP covering half of Austrilia would be in a similar position. I'd be willing to pay about US$1-2 max per gigabyte for home usage, and that's after hitting a limit of say 1GB per day.It's not just a matter of making a request to Verisign. Domain registrars must pay per domain to register, transfer and renew domain names.
It seems like the standard (BS) agreement. But I found it interesting that THIS agreement covers ALL the software that is distributed with the computer. So I wonder what would happen to Dell's EULA if they sold a system with Linux on it? Does that mean that their EULA would supercede the GPL? That doesn't sound right.
Of course not. Software EULA's prohibit you from doing things with the software that are not already covered by copyright law. You cannot distribute commercial software because of copyright, not because of the EULA. You can only distribute GPL'd software because of the GPL. Without the GPL, the software would fall under standard copyright laws. The GPL gives you more rights, it doesn't take any away.How the hell do people cope with Daylight Savings Time? How do you indicate whether 1:30 AM is the /FIRST/ 1:30 AM, or the /SECOND/ 1:30 AM, when Daylight Savings Time hits?
You don't, plain and simple. Nasty things like time formatting and conversions should only be done when necessary, i.e. to display it to a user. No sane program (or programmer) would try to keep track of time in that format internally. The most common method of storing time is to use a UNIX timestamp, which is the number of seconds after the UNIX epoch ("1970-01-01 00:00:00 GMT"). The problem with this approach is that in 2038, a signed 32-bit number will overflow. It also means that times before 1970 and after the beginning of 2038 cannot be stored.
A better approach is to use TAI64 or TAI64NA times. TAI is much more accurate (see the page for details), and does not have the range problems of UNIX timestamps. DJB's public domain libtai library allows you to store and manipulate dates and times on the TAI64 and TAI64NA time scales.What's K12, and what does it stand for?
K-12, or kindergarten through twelfth grade.Very nice! The gender box isn't randomized. They're going to be getting a lot of female registrations :)
This is very different from designing bridges or buildings, for example, where the thousands of decisions going into the design tend to reinforce the basic premise of its fundamnetal soundness. The mathematics of each calculation are usually verified by calculations done during other parts of the work. Due to this feedback, systematic failures are extremely rare, and when they do happen, often end up showcased on History Channel programs such as "Engineering Disasters".
But it is possible to write secure software through good software engineering practices. Unfortunately, not many people seem to understand them. Only a few individuals like Dan Bernstein can consistently and effectively write secure software, and will guarantee that it is secure.
If software was thoroughly designed from the start before any code was written, the same as with normal engineering projects, then perhaps more software would be secure. If you look at his guarantee for qmail, then you'll notice that he followed several principles throughout the design and implementation that allow him to guarantee that it is secure. If software engineers become liable for their work in the same way that traditional engineers are liable, then maybe software engineering will become more like traditional engineering.1.) You can identify a search engine spider from it's logs, and set up your site to present it with different content. If you're using PHP, for example, all you have to do is create an if/then statement that basically says "if it's google, send them no data. Anything else, let them on through." It's not very hard to write this type of script in PHP. It'd take me minutes to do.
You've never heard of robots.txt? It's certainly the easiest and preferred way to keep robots from visiting your site. Now, presenting different information to search engines, that sounds familiar...Let me just quickly say, scripts like that is the stupidest abuse of referrers I've ever come across. The referrer is a great tool for following the flow of traffic. Not to police flow of traffic.
So what about sites hotlinking to your images and literally stealing your bandwidth?
Congratulations, you just described how Zeus' configuration works. It's configuration file format is MUCH saner and nicer than Apaches, and it comes with a great web configuration GUI, that is much nicer than the one that comes with IIS. Their web GUI lets you see exactly what it will be doing to the config file.
He's talking about building the UI, which is incredibly easy in VB, using the GUI builder. The API is easy to use with either language.
Either way, it takes a thread or a process for each connection. Even with dynamic content, most of your content is static (i.e. images). For static content, you need a non blocking server that runs in a single process to get the best performance. And the majority of the high traffic sites on the net (adult sites) have lots of images. Thus it makes sense to have a non blocking core, and only use threads or processes for things that are more difficult to do in a single process. Better yet, leave all that stuff out of the server entirely, and use an API designed to be high performance and non blocking friendly: FastCGI. But Apache can stay a toy, and those of us that need high performance will have to continue paying for a closed source, real web server: Zeus. The Apache developers can complain all they want about how it's too hard to do and isn't necessarily the best way, while continuing to ignore the best web server available. Oh, and where's my easy to use mass virtual hosting, good config file format and web configuration tool?
And if you think this is a troll, then go play with Zeus for a day, and you'll see why Apache is nothing more than a toy.
It tracks which packages were installed `automatically' (e.g., to satisfy a dependency). If such `auto' packages later become unnecessary because nothing depends on them anymore, they will be uninstalled automatically.
Is this a feature of aptitude, or of the package database? If I install aptitude today, will it tell me which packages were automatically installed using apt-get?A better test would be http_load, since it tests multiple connections in parallel. I don't know of a test client that does multiple connections and utilizes persistent connections, but that would be ideal for load testing. But, of course, Apache's is inherently limited to the number of connections it can handle, due to using a separate thread/process for each connection.
I'm actually not sure. My current cable company is Sunflower Broadband, and from the way it's advertised, it looks like it uses the cable. I know that Cox Communications also provides digital telephon service, and it looks like it uses cable as well. I'm sure many other cable companies offer this service.
Everything is becoming a service.. IP networking, Phone Connectivity. Video(cable tv). What does this mean? Simply you are going to see companies soon competing for the right to bring bandwith to your door. While the services you choose can be offered by anyone. I can't believe you got modded up twice for repeating hype from five years ago. Open your door, take a look outside. The rosy worldview you have proposed has long since failed to come about.
What do you mean it hasn't happened? It already has happened. I can get my phone service from the phone company, the cable company, or a wireless provider. I can get my internet service from the phone company, the cable company or a sattelite company. I can get my TV service from the cable company or a sattelite company. The only type of company that provides all three is the cable company, but I expect that will change in the not too distant future.I recommend checking out Mantis if you need a good, simple, easy to use and configure bug tracker. You can have it installed and working in minutes, and only requires PHP and MySQL. The source is very clean, so it's easy to make changes to it. And the developers are very good about accepting bug reports and feature requests. For a large project like Mozilla, you might need something more large scale, but for small or medium size projects with 10-20 people, it works very well.
I run a small development firm and I wanted to use the enterprise edition. I'll pay a few thousand for something, but $30k for 30 people? I think not.
While I can't say the SourceForge is decent (imho looks like a hodgepodge of thrown together junk), $30k for 30 people is not really a lot. Say salary, benefits, overhead, etc., cost you $1k per week per employee (which is likely very modest). Is something like this going to save each developer a week of time? If there's a tool that good, then it's well worth the money. Sure, it's a big one time cost, but even over the course of a year, it really does pay for itself.The ruling went against us - the judge decreed that anything that can be done in software can be done in hardware, therefore our software approach violated their patent.
While I don't know enough about patents or the rest of your case to have an opinion, it sounds like the judge was right on that statement. You can do anything in software that is done in hardware. Modern CPU's do in fact contain "software". Modern hardware is often designed using software resembling programming languages, such as VHDL. So where do you draw the line?
As to the taxing of software companies, I agree, they should be taxed. But taxes should be made on the final product, at the time of sale. If you buy a copy of Windows at the store, then you pay sales tax. They should likewise be taxed on software licensed through OEM agreements or other arrangements. We shouldn't be inventing new taxes, but instead fixing our current tax laws.Actually, in order to use it, yo DO have to apply a crack to the game. You have to add entries for the bnetd servers into the gateway list. It's a fairly straightforward one, but it is a crack nonetheless. I don't believe you can get it to work without using that crack.
You don't have to crack it. You merely change the server IP's in the registry. Is Registry Editor now in violation of the DMCA?So if you don't have access to the console, open a classical 'telnet' port for a few minutes, just during the upgrade. Once you've checked that SSH is still ok, you can remove the telnet daemon.
Since the SSH server forks after you've connected, you can safely stop the server while connected via SSH. You never need to use telnet. Just make sure that you can still connect before disconnecting from the original SSH connection.Can you tell me another way to do this? Yes, if all his friends would get accounts on his server that would solve the problem. But, so would using hot mail. We're talking about people with existing accounts on other servers.
Give them shell accounts on the box, so that they can use either authenticated SMTP, or tunnel via SSH. Simple solution.Slightly off topic, but could you (or anyone else) explain how to do this?
Well, you could start by reading the manpage :) It's actually quite simple:
$ ssh -L 2000:mail.example.com:25 user@host.example.com
That will forward port 2000 on your machine to port 25 on mail.example.com, from host.example.com. It will stay in effect until you log out. If you just want to forward a port, then you can use the -f option. It still needs to execute a command, so give it something like sleep 900 (for 15 minutes). There might be a better way, but I don't know of one. Also check out stunnel. It might work with SSH.
You could forward port 25 on your local machine, but then you would need to start SSH as root (so it can bind to the low numbered port).
Then why isn't he smart enough to setup his mail server to use authentication? The web hosting company I work for (ITmom.com) allows its customers to send mail using our SMTP server, and we're not an open relay. We use POP-before-SMTP, so only IP's that have recently successfully authenticated via POP3 can send mail. There's also SMTP authentication, SSH tunneling, and probably some other available methods.
The spam problem isn't going to go away. Refusing to close relays just makes it worse.