You have a trigger finger too, commenting over moderation some 15 minutes after the message was posted. Slashdot moderation is like definite integration of a function convergent to 0 over 0,inf), there might be crap on the beginning but it'll fix itself up in the long run and evaluate to a correct value.
I know, I'm sorry, I couldn't come up with a good car analogy.
The article duping activity would be enough to split Slashdot in two, creating a new site that could actualy cover the same events at almost the same time with little additional work, says any attentive reader.
It's going to be even more interesting than that. The area is reatively close to the shore, and the pit is actually volcanic. Guess what happens when a big mass of water spills over and enters the pit.. Well, it's a shame this is Ethiopia and not Nigeria, because if it were the latter, it would be raining scammers after the massive steam explosion that is bound to happen there...
They already have Google Moon, the rest of the solar system is just an obvious extension of the service. I'm not sure however why exactly they started with Uranus...
Take a look at Tokyo Cabinet then. Better in just about every technical aspect - it only lacks in corporate backing and marketing, probably because the author is a die-hard programmer, not very interested in those aspects of project management. Otherwise it's absolutely brilliant. Oh, and it comes with an optional, very simple and fully ACID server for network access and cuncurrency and a full-text search engine.
Either you use a serial console or buy special, expensive hardware that emulates the video card and keyboard. Well, if you're lucky, you can get some used remote administration cards relatively cheap off eBay, but they might require at least some cooperation from the mainboard, or be designed for some particular type of server hardware and might not work with what you have.
As for PCs without a serial port, you could try a USB to serial converter. I'm almost certain it won't work with the builtin kernel-level serial console mode, but should be fine with mingetty spawned from inittab (there should be a commented out example entry in your inittab, take a look), as long as the relevant kernel modules get loaded early enough - so just compile them in to be sure. When looking for the converter itself, try to get one based on an FT232 or Prolific PL2303 chip.
Oh my, another weirdo who thinks that programmers are like construction workers or the like and can be reassigned from one construction place to the other just like that.
First, there's no "they". The fact that someone is doing desktop-related work has absolutely, totally NO EFFECT on any server-related work in Linux kernel or userspace, because it's done by different people and mostly in different areas of the code (otherwise they just let you decide what code to use when configuring the kernel, like with schedulers).
Second, there's no "they", again. Different people work on different things and it'd better stay like that. Just imagine what would happen if you somehow, forcibly reassigned (an absurd idea, but let it stand for the sake of an example) the desktop programmers to write server features. Got it? I, for one, do not want a TCP/IP stack written by a guy with 15 years of graphics driver programming experience.
They do belong in user mode, but with one little catch: the user mode part must not meddle with the low-level hardware state, and that's what KMS is for. I'm not familliar with how exactly Vista and Win7 implement their video driver framework, but it seems that they do something pretty much like KMS: low-level, generic control over the graphics card (and only that) is still held by the kernel so when the high-level, user mode driver craps out, the OS can regain control of the video card and put it back in a known, stable state.
Magnatune is OK, in my opinion. First, their terms are simple and clearly stated, you know where the money goes and the artist knows that, too - that's really important. Second, as far as I know, 50% of the reatil price going directly to the artist is something unheard of in the "regular" recording industry - I did not bookmark them, but there were several quite informative Slashdot comments about this in the past, presumably written by people who know the matter first-hand, stating that the artist royalties are normally in the single-digit percentage range, due to "creative" accounting pracitcess and agreements worded strongly in favor of the labels.
Besides, it just feels nice to spend $10 and know for sure that $5 went to the artist, $5 to the guy who had this nice idea and exactly $0 to the marketoids, pointy-haired bosses and lawyers.
Nope. Jewellery is nowadays just a little part of the worldwide diamond industry, and while it often uses natural, mined diamonds (mainly because some weird people with bucketloads of cash want to be sure that the diamond they wear is natural and mined, even though it is perfectly possible to produce a diamond of equal aesthetic value in a lab), which are quite expensive, the biggest demand for diamonds is in the tools industry. Most of it goes into production of diamond-tipped cutting tools (which are actually coated in diamond powder or small diamond shards, not made of solid crystal) for the market, the rest is used to make specialized cutting and grinding elements in machines that produce solid carbide tools.
Just check eBay or your local hardware store for the prices of diamond-tipped tools - they're only about twice as expensive as high-quality HSS and often cheaper than good solid carbide cutters, because they're actually just HSS with some diamond powder coating, easy and quick to produce.
Well, "terrorism" is somewhat off, because the guy probably wasn't really aiming to cause public fear and panic (read: terror - yep, that's where the word "terrorism" comes from and everyone using it should remember that), but "attempted manslaughter" would be OK with me. Or do you consider a train crash "a prank" and tens of dead and severely injured "some trouble"? Messing with heavy, fast-moving things packed with people is quite a serious matter, even though such an idiot probably couldn't grasp it.
Yeah, that's right, because an average person has the dexterity and movement speed of an industrial assembly robot and doesn't drop anything in a lifetime. So making everyday devices that explode when dropped is all safe and good.
Well, except for the fact that people make mistakes, perform erratic, unintended moves, lose focus and, in the end, drop things as a part of their nature, so designing things that are widely available to everyone (including children) so that they can potentially explode when dropped is downright moronic and irresponsible. I'm not calling for an overprotective nanny state and I appreciate the value of darwinism and natural selection, but this has nothing to do with either of those - appliances intended for home use should be reasonably safe in all typical situations encountered in operation (dropping is one of them), and I'm pretty sure that even Albert Einstein dropped lots of things in his whole life.
With the COW-enabled b-tree storing everything including metadata and packing it in the same block as the data it describes, the atructure looks quite similar to reiserfs (v3) in terms of error tolerance and recovery. Should this get a tool like the reiserfsck --rebuild-tree, I'm switching - this single feature (well, and some quite sensible performance) is keeping reiserfs on my systems. Saved me a lot of grief several times, when an ext filesystem would be a totally lost cause (or lots of $$$ for a data recovery company), without any built-in utilities, and really no way to write them, that search the entire disk for anything that looks like filesystem metadata and try to make sense of it, even with all superblock structure completely missing and the rest spotted with garbage.
Well, a friend of mine once told me that what he likes in being his own boss is that when *he* screws up, he can tell people that *his boss* is a retarded dickhead, get away with that and actually be correct at the same time...
The clients were iMacs G3 - some argue that security by obscurity is a bad thing that should not be relied upon, but in this case, running Linux on PowerPC-based hardware with OpenFirmware puts the whole setup in the "WTF is this?" area from the perspective of a majority of the rootkit authors.
Do you always take things literally and assume that all the people are deaf, dumb, rule-following monkeys? Sure, many are, but for any sensible person documenting a program is an integral part of the process of writing it, and it certainly was allowed in the second computer room. Writing essays about the French Revolution, molecular chemistry and the culture of the Soviet Russia wasn't - see the difference?
By "homework" I meant "writing essays and/or searching for sources in the web", not writing programs - for that, a dedicated (no chatting, no social networking sites, no essay writing) computer room was available in another building, with compilers and all, managed by someone else (that is, it was actually managed, mine was "set and forget").
A few years ago, I set up a bunch of thin clients for general browsing, chatting and homework at a school dorm - they were (were, as I have no idea if they're still in use, but they were absolutely maintenance-free, so I guess they should be) running Linux, with the kernel and boot config (generated on the fly) loaded from a read-only TFTP server and / mounted from a read-only NFS share. On each boot, the init scripts would finish generating a machine-specific configuration in/etc/ and mount a few ramfses on top of some directories using unionfs to give an illusion of a read-write filesystem. Then, upon login (LDAP authentication), the user's directory would be mounted from an individual password-protected Samba share (accessible from the users' personal computers as well), with the noexec attrubite of course./tmp/ and/var/ were also noexec. Upgrades to the client system were performed at the server, by chrooting into the exported root directory.
Such a configuration is absolutely invulnerable to users, rootkits, viruses and any other riffraff known for breaking things in computers. Even in the unlikely event that someone gained root privileges on a client, they would actually gain nothing and even that nothing would vanish after a reboot.
"BSD protects the freedom of the coders, which might result in restricting the rights of the users."
Do you see the "might result" part?
Might result, as in "someone finds some BSD-licensed code, makes some changes and releases a closed-source paid version". Mind you, this scenario is not inherently a bad thing, but it fits some of the many definitions of "restricting freedom", wether the restriction is actually an issue or not - in this case, someone who ends up being a user of the released binary is deprived of the right to see the source code and modify it. More often than not, he might not give a flying rat's ass, but the restriction is still there, according to some people.
That's a rare view, I think - the majority seems to claim that GPL restricts coders by not allowing them to do whatever they want with someone else's code, and this is why I phrased it like that. Indeed, at the same time, this protects the original author.
Actually, yet another important question arises here - does "the coder" here mean "the author who released the code under GPL" or "some other programmer who found the code and wants to use it"? Do you see it now, that even your statement can be dangerously ambigius?
Don't be so quick to call nonsense, no one of us is an oracle of the absolute truth.
I guess I have some 30 seconds now before heavy airborne objects thrown by the GPL and BSD advocates bring this thread into a total mayhem, but I'll try to make an unorthodox argument there, anyway.
IMHO, both GPL-like and BSD-like licenses protect the freedom equally. The question is, whose freedom it is. Roughly speaking, GPL protects the freedoms of users by restricting the coders, while BSD protects the freedom of the coders, which might result in restricting the rights of the users. Which is more important, that's a whole new problem, but it's not about one license being "better" than the other.
Another, no less interesting way of looking at the problem is asking who do we exactly mean by the "users" of the code - the people "using" the resulting binary, or the people taking the code and "using" it to create new code? Or maybe both? This question alone puts the issue in a new light, and it's not an obvious one.
Many times I've seen people fighting over the GPL/BSD issue here and not ever once they agreed beforehand what do they mean by "users", "freedom", "better", etc. - heavy object throwing took over.
Just wait until Google starts to sell a Google Apps Appliance Box in the 2U 19" format, just like their search appliances. Actually, I'm amazed that they're not doing this now - if they added an Exchange gateway as a bonus, it would sell like fresh bread.
Slashdot Mirror
You have a trigger finger too, commenting over moderation some 15 minutes after the message was posted. Slashdot moderation is like definite integration of a function convergent to 0 over 0,inf), there might be crap on the beginning but it'll fix itself up in the long run and evaluate to a correct value.
I know, I'm sorry, I couldn't come up with a good car analogy.
Wouldn't having 18 mouse buttons all labeled "Esc" be somewhat redundant?
The article duping activity would be enough to split Slashdot in two, creating a new site that could actualy cover the same events at almost the same time with little additional work, says any attentive reader.
It's going to be even more interesting than that. The area is reatively close to the shore, and the pit is actually volcanic. Guess what happens when a big mass of water spills over and enters the pit.. Well, it's a shame this is Ethiopia and not Nigeria, because if it were the latter, it would be raining scammers after the massive steam explosion that is bound to happen there...
They already have Google Moon, the rest of the solar system is just an obvious extension of the service. I'm not sure however why exactly they started with Uranus...
Take a look at Tokyo Cabinet then. Better in just about every technical aspect - it only lacks in corporate backing and marketing, probably because the author is a die-hard programmer, not very interested in those aspects of project management. Otherwise it's absolutely brilliant. Oh, and it comes with an optional, very simple and fully ACID server for network access and cuncurrency and a full-text search engine.
Either you use a serial console or buy special, expensive hardware that emulates the video card and keyboard. Well, if you're lucky, you can get some used remote administration cards relatively cheap off eBay, but they might require at least some cooperation from the mainboard, or be designed for some particular type of server hardware and might not work with what you have.
As for PCs without a serial port, you could try a USB to serial converter. I'm almost certain it won't work with the builtin kernel-level serial console mode, but should be fine with mingetty spawned from inittab (there should be a commented out example entry in your inittab, take a look), as long as the relevant kernel modules get loaded early enough - so just compile them in to be sure. When looking for the converter itself, try to get one based on an FT232 or Prolific PL2303 chip.
Oh my, another weirdo who thinks that programmers are like construction workers or the like and can be reassigned from one construction place to the other just like that.
First, there's no "they". The fact that someone is doing desktop-related work has absolutely, totally NO EFFECT on any server-related work in Linux kernel or userspace, because it's done by different people and mostly in different areas of the code (otherwise they just let you decide what code to use when configuring the kernel, like with schedulers).
Second, there's no "they", again. Different people work on different things and it'd better stay like that. Just imagine what would happen if you somehow, forcibly reassigned (an absurd idea, but let it stand for the sake of an example) the desktop programmers to write server features. Got it? I, for one, do not want a TCP/IP stack written by a guy with 15 years of graphics driver programming experience.
They do belong in user mode, but with one little catch: the user mode part must not meddle with the low-level hardware state, and that's what KMS is for. I'm not familliar with how exactly Vista and Win7 implement their video driver framework, but it seems that they do something pretty much like KMS: low-level, generic control over the graphics card (and only that) is still held by the kernel so when the high-level, user mode driver craps out, the OS can regain control of the video card and put it back in a known, stable state.
Magnatune is OK, in my opinion. First, their terms are simple and clearly stated, you know where the money goes and the artist knows that, too - that's really important. Second, as far as I know, 50% of the reatil price going directly to the artist is something unheard of in the "regular" recording industry - I did not bookmark them, but there were several quite informative Slashdot comments about this in the past, presumably written by people who know the matter first-hand, stating that the artist royalties are normally in the single-digit percentage range, due to "creative" accounting pracitcess and agreements worded strongly in favor of the labels.
Besides, it just feels nice to spend $10 and know for sure that $5 went to the artist, $5 to the guy who had this nice idea and exactly $0 to the marketoids, pointy-haired bosses and lawyers.
Nope. Jewellery is nowadays just a little part of the worldwide diamond industry, and while it often uses natural, mined diamonds (mainly because some weird people with bucketloads of cash want to be sure that the diamond they wear is natural and mined, even though it is perfectly possible to produce a diamond of equal aesthetic value in a lab), which are quite expensive, the biggest demand for diamonds is in the tools industry. Most of it goes into production of diamond-tipped cutting tools (which are actually coated in diamond powder or small diamond shards, not made of solid crystal) for the market, the rest is used to make specialized cutting and grinding elements in machines that produce solid carbide tools.
Just check eBay or your local hardware store for the prices of diamond-tipped tools - they're only about twice as expensive as high-quality HSS and often cheaper than good solid carbide cutters, because they're actually just HSS with some diamond powder coating, easy and quick to produce.
Well, "terrorism" is somewhat off, because the guy probably wasn't really aiming to cause public fear and panic (read: terror - yep, that's where the word "terrorism" comes from and everyone using it should remember that), but "attempted manslaughter" would be OK with me. Or do you consider a train crash "a prank" and tens of dead and severely injured "some trouble"? Messing with heavy, fast-moving things packed with people is quite a serious matter, even though such an idiot probably couldn't grasp it.
Yeah, that's right, because an average person has the dexterity and movement speed of an industrial assembly robot and doesn't drop anything in a lifetime. So making everyday devices that explode when dropped is all safe and good.
Well, except for the fact that people make mistakes, perform erratic, unintended moves, lose focus and, in the end, drop things as a part of their nature, so designing things that are widely available to everyone (including children) so that they can potentially explode when dropped is downright moronic and irresponsible. I'm not calling for an overprotective nanny state and I appreciate the value of darwinism and natural selection, but this has nothing to do with either of those - appliances intended for home use should be reasonably safe in all typical situations encountered in operation (dropping is one of them), and I'm pretty sure that even Albert Einstein dropped lots of things in his whole life.
"Real men don't use backups, they post their stuff on a public ftp server and let the rest of the world make copies."
- Linus Torvalds
With the COW-enabled b-tree storing everything including metadata and packing it in the same block as the data it describes, the atructure looks quite similar to reiserfs (v3) in terms of error tolerance and recovery. Should this get a tool like the reiserfsck --rebuild-tree, I'm switching - this single feature (well, and some quite sensible performance) is keeping reiserfs on my systems. Saved me a lot of grief several times, when an ext filesystem would be a totally lost cause (or lots of $$$ for a data recovery company), without any built-in utilities, and really no way to write them, that search the entire disk for anything that looks like filesystem metadata and try to make sense of it, even with all superblock structure completely missing and the rest spotted with garbage.
Well, a friend of mine once told me that what he likes in being his own boss is that when *he* screws up, he can tell people that *his boss* is a retarded dickhead, get away with that and actually be correct at the same time...
Ah, the joys of being one's own boss!
The clients were iMacs G3 - some argue that security by obscurity is a bad thing that should not be relied upon, but in this case, running Linux on PowerPC-based hardware with OpenFirmware puts the whole setup in the "WTF is this?" area from the perspective of a majority of the rootkit authors.
Do you always take things literally and assume that all the people are deaf, dumb, rule-following monkeys? Sure, many are, but for any sensible person documenting a program is an integral part of the process of writing it, and it certainly was allowed in the second computer room. Writing essays about the French Revolution, molecular chemistry and the culture of the Soviet Russia wasn't - see the difference?
By "homework" I meant "writing essays and/or searching for sources in the web", not writing programs - for that, a dedicated (no chatting, no social networking sites, no essay writing) computer room was available in another building, with compilers and all, managed by someone else (that is, it was actually managed, mine was "set and forget").
Been there, done that, works great.
A few years ago, I set up a bunch of thin clients for general browsing, chatting and homework at a school dorm - they were (were, as I have no idea if they're still in use, but they were absolutely maintenance-free, so I guess they should be) running Linux, with the kernel and boot config (generated on the fly) loaded from a read-only TFTP server and / mounted from a read-only NFS share. On each boot, the init scripts would finish generating a machine-specific configuration in /etc/ and mount a few ramfses on top of some directories using unionfs to give an illusion of a read-write filesystem. Then, upon login (LDAP authentication), the user's directory would be mounted from an individual password-protected Samba share (accessible from the users' personal computers as well), with the noexec attrubite of course. /tmp/ and /var/ were also noexec. Upgrades to the client system were performed at the server, by chrooting into the exported root directory.
Such a configuration is absolutely invulnerable to users, rootkits, viruses and any other riffraff known for breaking things in computers. Even in the unlikely event that someone gained root privileges on a client, they would actually gain nothing and even that nothing would vanish after a reboot.
Please read carefully.
"BSD protects the freedom of the coders, which might result in restricting the rights of the users."
Do you see the "might result" part?
Might result, as in "someone finds some BSD-licensed code, makes some changes and releases a closed-source paid version". Mind you, this scenario is not inherently a bad thing, but it fits some of the many definitions of "restricting freedom", wether the restriction is actually an issue or not - in this case, someone who ends up being a user of the released binary is deprived of the right to see the source code and modify it. More often than not, he might not give a flying rat's ass, but the restriction is still there, according to some people.
That's a rare view, I think - the majority seems to claim that GPL restricts coders by not allowing them to do whatever they want with someone else's code, and this is why I phrased it like that. Indeed, at the same time, this protects the original author.
Actually, yet another important question arises here - does "the coder" here mean "the author who released the code under GPL" or "some other programmer who found the code and wants to use it"? Do you see it now, that even your statement can be dangerously ambigius?
Don't be so quick to call nonsense, no one of us is an oracle of the absolute truth.
I guess I have some 30 seconds now before heavy airborne objects thrown by the GPL and BSD advocates bring this thread into a total mayhem, but I'll try to make an unorthodox argument there, anyway.
IMHO, both GPL-like and BSD-like licenses protect the freedom equally. The question is, whose freedom it is. Roughly speaking, GPL protects the freedoms of users by restricting the coders, while BSD protects the freedom of the coders, which might result in restricting the rights of the users. Which is more important, that's a whole new problem, but it's not about one license being "better" than the other.
Another, no less interesting way of looking at the problem is asking who do we exactly mean by the "users" of the code - the people "using" the resulting binary, or the people taking the code and "using" it to create new code? Or maybe both? This question alone puts the issue in a new light, and it's not an obvious one.
Many times I've seen people fighting over the GPL/BSD issue here and not ever once they agreed beforehand what do they mean by "users", "freedom", "better", etc. - heavy object throwing took over.
Just wait until Google starts to sell a Google Apps Appliance Box in the 2U 19" format, just like their search appliances. Actually, I'm amazed that they're not doing this now - if they added an Exchange gateway as a bonus, it would sell like fresh bread.