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Comment Re:You don't need cryptocurrency (Score 1) 271

Nonsense. They're just ahead of the curve, the same way the porn industry is always ahead of the curve in video technology. (Multiple camera angle DVDs? Yeah, first used in porno...)

it will all become mainstream down the road. You may think it's only of interest to an undesirable fringe of society, but reality is they're the early adopters because they are social pioneers.

Comment Re:Bitcoin, Ethereum or Monero (Score 1) 271

You're talking about two very different things. The old Monero (pre-0.9) kept the entire blockchain in RAM and so required huge amounts of RAM to be installed in the machine. The current version uses LMDB which is a memory-mapped database. The mmap may use a huge chunk of *virtual address space* but it never uses more than the currently available amount of RAM.

It is vastly more efficient than the old code. It also vastly more efficient and more reliable than LevelDB, which is used in Bitcoin.

Comment Re:Would it hurt ... (Score 1) 98

MongoDB uses mmap but the similarity ends there. It uses a journal, not COW. It suffers from a number of durability and consistency vulnerabilities. LMDB has no such weaknesses.

http://www.slideshare.net/mong...

This research group at University of Wisconsin cites 1 vulnerability for LMDB, but they were mistaken:

https://www.usenix.org/confere...

http://www.openldap.org/lists/...

Comment Re:Would it hurt ... (Score 1) 98

CouchDB is a pure append-only design which means that within a few dozen write operations, 90+% of its space is filled with out-of-date records. It requires frequent periodic compaction phases, and each compaction phase has a significant negative impact on latency and throughput. LMDB requires no compaction, and provides consistent latency and throughput at all times.

They are similar in that both use COW, but the similarity ends there.

Comment Did that 23 years ago (Score 2) 57

with my Atari ST. It was trivial then since the same chip controlled both the keyboard and MIDI ports, just redirect one of the intercept vectors to catch the incoming MIDI packets and feed the notes to the keyboard buffer.

It's more fun to do this with a Zeta MIDI violin. I programmed it to move the mouse pointer on glissandos too, could do pretty much anything without touching keyboard or mouse.

Comment Re:Can't say I disagree. (Score 1) 1098

As a related example, I was recently (last summer) confronted by a patchset from [a prominent network router manufacturer] for OpenLDAP, which they wanted to contribute back to the Project. Upon reviewing the patchset, I found they were using an OpenLDAP release from 2001, and this is the code they've been embedding in the firmware of many of their router products from then till now. Many of the patches they sent me were in fact patches I had written for the Project, which they had backported somewhere in the mists of time.

So, thanks to OpenLDAP's permissive license, there's a lot of network hardware out there running ancient, patchwork code that's massively obsolete, along with a crazyquilt of patches of widely varying quality. None of the users of this hardware have any idea of what's inside there, no one can say what security vulnerabilities may or may not exist in any particular model # or serial #, because the code itself is just a frankenstein jumble.

Personally I would have preferred the GPL, because it would have prevented this sort of situation, but it would be quite difficult for the OpenLDAP Foundation to contact all of the copyright holders and ask them to approve a license change, and I suspect a number of them would refuse to change.

Just keep in mind - the freedom that permissive licenses grants to proprietary software companies almost always works to the customers' disadvantage. They will allow their code bases to diverge, they will allow bitrot to set in, they will allow CVEs to go unaddressed, and no one outside will know exactly how bad things are. Until perhaps 10-15 years later, if someone inside the company wakes up and realizes how untenable their situation really is. But the problem is these companies always jump down this path at first; they haven't looked far enough down it to see where it goes.

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