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Comment Re:I don't get it (Score 1) 270

No, but Adobe is. They have a long history of doing stupid things, then waiting until the actual consumer release to "discover" that their product has a problem and not fixing it until the next major release thereby preventing their users from upgrading OS.

In this case CS3 may actually work, they just aren't going to promise it so people will pay to upgrade and Adobe doesn't have to do any support on CS3.

Comment Workaround is disaster for laptops (Score 5, Insightful) 421

The workaround (flushing everything to disk before the rename) is a disaster for laptops or anything else which might wish to spin down a disk drive.

The write-replace idiom is used when a program is updating a file and can tolerate the update being lost in a crash, but wants either the old or the new to be intact and uncorrupted. The proposed sync solution accomplishes this, but at the cost of spinning up the drive and writing the blocks at each write-replace. How often does your browser update a file while you surf? Every cache entry? Every history entry? What about your music player? Desktop manager? All of these will be spin up your disk drive.

Hiding behind POSIX is not the solution. There needs to be a solution that supports write-replace without spinning up the disk drive.

The ext4 people have kindly illuminated the problem. Now it is time to define a solution. Maybe it will be some sort of barrier logic, maybe a new kind of sync syscall. But it needs to be done.

Communications

IPv4 Address Use In 2008 258

An anonymous reader writes "The world used 197 million new IPv4 addresses in 2008, leaving 926 million addresses still available. The US remains the biggest user of new addresses, but China is catching up quickly. Quoting Ars Technica: 'A possible explanation could be that the big player(s) in some countries are executing a "run on the bank" and trying to get IPv4 addresses while the getting is good, while those in other countries are working on more NAT (Network Address Translation) and other address conservation techniques in anticipation of the depletion of the IPv4 address reserves a few years from now. In both cases, adding some IPv6 to the mix would be helpful. Even though last year the number of IPv6 addresses given out increased by almost a factor eight over 2007, the total amount of IPv6 address space in use is just 0.027 percent.'"

Comment Re:Who do you trust with a death ray? (Score 1) 275

Your numbers are likely off by several orders of magnitude. 100W/m2 is 1/10th the energy density of direct sunlight. i.e. you can do ten times better than that with a flat mirror, no concentration.

Who says it has to a be a centimeter wavelength? How about the 95GHz pain beam? (I haven't checked to see what the atmosphere does at that wavelength, I would suspect clouds block it at the very least, but given that light is shorter wavelength and it penetrates well, I'm fairly certain there will be something between cm and nm that also works well.)

Of course in normal operation your 1000 units would beam to 1000 different reception sites at a safe level, it is only when you want to destroy someone that you divert them all to your enemy.

Comment I don't think this applies to real HTTP passwords. (Score 0) 218

Reading the article, this doesn't seem to be about real HTTP authentication passwords, but rather about the interaction of form autofilling and fields that an application might consider to be a password. (Like slashdot uses.)

Granted, somewhere the HTTP standards committee failed the community making ad hoc form based passwords more common than real authentication. I suspect the lack of a "logout" concept has a lot to do with that, though designers' desire to spread their "look and feel" over all elements also contributes.

If you use HTTP authentication this does not apply. If you use <input type=password ...> then, yeah, autofillers may autofill.

Comment Go install fail2ban (Score 2, Informative) 167

fail2ban will watch your log files and when it sees probing will firewall ban the offender. It has virtually eliminated probing attacks on my networks of machines. Sure, a distributed botnet can still probe you, but I haven't seen that happening.

Do be careful though...

  • Have two different IPs you can come from. You will eventually ban yourself by being stupid. It took me a year, but I finally banned myself while working on some backup scripts.
  • It is written in python and uses 3M of RAM plus maybe 20M more virtual memory. Sure, you high end gamers have 100 times that in your video card alone, but if you are running on a 64M VPS or a 32M router it is something to think about.
  • You can have it watch much more than ssh if you wish.
  • If you forward the syslogs of all your machines to your firewall and run fail2ban out there you can protect all of your machines at the first transgression and only have to manage one copy of fail2ban.
  • If you are running virtual servers, consider running their syslogs out to the host box and running fail2ban there. Works well.
  • There should be a memory efficient alternative, maybe I'll have to write that.

Comment Just Hype (Score 4, Insightful) 133

Cyber Monday is just marketing hype. The peak shopping days come later. The goal is to have a recognizable name that people will google up and read their customers' ads. I suppose they owe a big thank you to Soulskill for getting their message out.

Maybe we can have a slashdot article for Sears' next "White Sale".

Comment I wonder if it is personal? (Score 4, Interesting) 205

The DoD takes everything personally, and for good reason, but I have a steady stream of chinese hackers attempting to break into the router in my tool shed that reports battery voltage and temperature at a cabin that is inaccessible for 6 months of the year.

I really should put a webcam in there so they can see what they have achieved if they ever do manage to get in.

(22.1F, batteries 25.3V, 600 watt hours of energy stored today.)

Comment I'm unsure if RMS is truly free. (Score 5, Funny) 905

I have no personal evidence that he is currently free, thus he falls into the same category for me as Firefox does for him.

More disturbing (from TFA)...

I received an EeePC as a gift, but I could not run it because my conscience will not let me agree to the EULA. Finally, I asked someone to install a free GNU/Linux distro so the machine could be used.

I wonder which of these is true:

  • It's ok to get some other sap to commit unconscionable behavior on your behalf?
  • He is not able to install Linux? (Possibly because he keeps looking in the library under 'G'.)
  • Installing Linux is not worth his time, but he has a sap with less worthy time to do these things?

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