KeithW - Slashdot User

Submission + - New "mosh" modernizes SSH with IP roaming, instant local echo (mit.edu)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 09, 2012 @10:08PM

An anonymous reader writes: Launched in 1995, SSH quickly became the king of network login tools, supplanting the old insecure mainstays TELNET and RLOGIN. But 17 years later, a group of MIT hackers have come out with "mosh", which claims to modernize the most annoying parts of SSH. Mosh keeps its connection alive when clients roam among WiFi networks or switch to 3G, and gives instant feedback on typing (and deleting). No more annoying network lag on typing, the MIT boffins say, citing Bufferbloat, which has been increasing latencies. Not sure if the SSH folks will have some tricks up their sleeves though. It's not clear if mosh's security has been vetted yet either.

Submission + - The many faces of 3G (ksplice.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 20, 2010 @01:14PM

An anonymous reader writes: Did you ever notice how each new generation of cell-phone tech gets branded "3G", and the previous thing is retroactively downgraded to some lesser number of G's? An MIT engineer explains why in this brilliant essay about "3G" in the last 10 years, showing how the cell carriers have kept offering it and swiping it away to sell more stuff. He cites numerous Cingular/AT&T and Sprint press releases showing how the companies have made "3G" into a brand name ideally suited for amnesiac consumers. Meanwhile, no cell carrier is foolish enough to sell you bottom-line throughput like an ISP in 1996 — you could actually hold them to that.

Submission + - Writing filesystems now as easy as Web apps (reddit.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 08, 2010 @02:45PM

An anonymous reader writes: Remember the old days of writing Web apps, when you had to parse the CGI arguments separately, do all the safety checks yourself and implement everything manually? Neither do I, but it looks like all the cool stuff from Web apps is making its way to writing filesystems. This guy shows how to writing an entire Linux filesystem in 50 lines of Python using "dispatch" techniques totally stolen from Ruby on Rails. Are we ready to give up the Web and go back to just using the filesystem for everything, the way Unix intended?

Submission + - Query Planners and Baseball (ksplice.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 10, 2010 @03:05PM

An anonymous reader writes: A baseball-noob computer nerd discovers baseball1.com and uses the data to illustrate the decisions a database's query planner makes. Finally, someone explains to me what the hell a bitmap heap scan is.

Submission + - Getting bitten by constant factors in MySQL (ksplice.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 13, 2010 @06:20PM

An anonymous reader writes: Think you're pretty good around a database? I thought I knew plenty about indices and the sweet performance of binary search, but it turns out that when it comes to MySQL, things aren't quite as simple as that! No matter how many fancy indices you have, if you load your data into MySQL in the wrong order (at least if you're using InnoDB), constant factors will totally bite you — as I unfortunately learned this week.

Submission + - Kernel prog shows how to exploit NULL pointers (ksplice.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 13, 2010 @02:10PM

An anonymous reader writes: Ever wondered what was so bad about NULL pointer exceptions? An MIT Linux kernel programmer explains how to turn any NULL pointer into a root exploit on Linux. (There was also a previous installment about virtual memory and how to make NULL pointers benign.)

Submission + - International Longest Tweet Contest seeks entries (ksplice.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 25, 2010 @02:25PM

An anonymous reader writes: The 1st International Longest Tweet Contest is open for submissions until April 12. It looks to be a take-off of the famous Obfuscated C Contest. So far the record is 4.2 kilobits encoded per tweet, based on exploiting the fact that Twitter actually passes the full 31 bits of ISO 10646 (the international standard that Unicode is based on), not the roughly 20.08 bits/character of Unicode itself.

Simpler "Hello World" Demonstrated In C 582

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday March 16, 2010 @10:03PM from the non-obfuscated dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Wondering where all that bloat comes from, causing even the classic 'Hello world' to weigh in at 11 KB? An MIT programmer decided to make a Linux C program so simple, she could explain every byte of the assembly. She found that gcc was including libc even when you don't ask for it. The blog shows how to compile a much simpler 'Hello world,' using no libraries at all. This takes me back to the days of programming bare-metal on DOS!"

Submission + - Simpler "Hello World" demonstrated in C (ksplice.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 16, 2010 @03:12PM

An anonymous reader writes: Wondering where all that bloat comes from so even the classic "Hello world" now takes 11k? An MIT programmer decided to make a Linux C program so simple, she could explain every byte of the assembly. She found gcc was including libc even when you don't ask for it, and shows how to compile a much simpler "Hello world" — using no libraries at all. This takes me back to the days of programming bare-metal on DOS!

Submission + - "Mythical Man-Month" supposedly busted by MIT firm (ksplice.com) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 10, 2010 @03:08PM

An anonymous reader writes: We all know about the Mythical Man-Month, the argument that adding more programmers to a software project just makes it later and later. A Linux startup out of MIT claims to have busted the myth of the myth, using an MIT holiday month to hire 20 college student interns to get all their work done in a month and quadrupling its productivity. This picture shows the interns jammed in like sardines to a tiny room. We've written about them previously, but is this really who you want working on your kernel?

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