Freaky

They have no green (495-570nm) filter, just panchromatic (400-975nm), blue (400-550nm), red (540-700nm), near-IR (780-975nm) and narrow-band methane (860-910nm).

> Which is easier? Re-running make, or having to write and induce another library to read configuration files?

It's certainly easier for the programmer to just leave some of the work to the compiler, but it's at the cost of being a complete pain in the ass to packagers and users.

Do you even have to do much work yourself? .Xresources is already parsed and loaded for you by xrdb if you can't afford the cost of an extra 100 microseconds doing it yourself. Is the API to interact with that mindblowing horrid or something?

> All of this for values which change once every... how long?

When I'm configuring software to taste, several times a minute. And considering this is likely to be my first exposure to the software, it better not suck completely.

It's a funny idea of sucking less where any user configuration involves editing config.h and recompiling.

The other interpretation is that instead of reinventing the wheel purely for tar, it's all been factored out into a standardised library anything can use for generic archiving tasks.

e.g. instead of:

    440K gtar
    151K gcpio
    144K unzip

Base has:

    655K libarchive.so.6
    57K  bsdtar
    37K  bsdcpio
    20K  unzip

34K bigger, much wider format support, and directly usable by other tools like pkg and ar, as well as third party apps like tarsnap and cmake.

bsdtar's really nice. It's more a tar-flavour wrapper around libarchive, and thus has support for many formats:

Read: tar, pax, cpio, zip, xar, lha, ar, cab, mtree, rar, and ISO images.

Write: tar, pax, cpio, zip, xar, ar, ISO, mtree, and shar.

I believe it had tar compression detection significantly earlier than GNU tar too.

That's assuming every website you use with one of these passwords is secure. In practice sites get hacked, fail to enforce HTTPS, databases get leaked, etc.

Endurance is really not a concern for the vast majority of consumers. The media wearout indicator on my 19-month old cheap TLC drive has dropped 2%, and I'm a fairly heavy user.

The vast majority of SSD failures seem to be a result of firmware faults.

By default "mobile devices without USB ports" can bypass Yubikey authentication. It can be changed in the multifactor auth Yubikey settings.

PHP needs an opcache because its standard behaviour is to discard all state after each request - including all compiled bytecode - kind of emulating the CGI model.

Ruby web apps on the other hand tend to be run in a loop - the script never exits after a request, it just goes back to the top of the loop to accept the next request to serve.

e.g. https://github.com/rack/rack/blob/master/lib/rack/handler/fa...

        FCGI.each { |request|
          serve request, app
        }

It's nice because it completely decouples your app's startup time from request processing time, so you can do expensive setup stuff up-front without slowing down each request. The disadvantage to that is there's not much pressure to keep startup time low, since it's only happening once.

Anyone else remember that time Dropbox accidentally turned off authentication and you could log in as anyone?

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/06/21/dropbox-lets-any...

Yup. I was seeing occasional corruption with my SanDisk Extreme Pro's and quite happy that ZFS was able to repair the damage each time.

The problem appears to have gone away following a firmware update, touch wood.

That's certainly possible - this would get you 'a' containing an array from the first function and 'b' with the result of the last.

Can't off the top of my head recall actually seeing such a bug. I totally appreciate the desire to reduce the potential for errors from typos, but that ship has kind of already sailed with either language. I guess it just depends how far you're willing to let it go.

Yay choice. Testing will catch it anyway, right?

:/

Same in Ruby, but it doesn't need the parens to cross lines:

   root.left, root.right = invert_tree(root.right),
                           invert_tree(root.left)

Native rotating bloom filters, fantastic! Sort of thing I've had to do myself more than once - great efficient way to be able to ask "Have I seen this recently?".

Don't use this for anything important, and certainly not with a non-unique password.

Key is derived from a single SHA256 (can be brute-forced very rapidly), cyphertext isn't authenticated (can be tampered with or corrupted without anything noticing), and the padding function is broken (strips trailing NULLs, so no good for binary files).

Preferable, I'd say. The last thing you want between your OS and your disks is a buggy unknowable black box you can only talk to with some crappy binary blob management tools.

Even if it did (and it doesn't, I checked), you're probably still better off doing it explicitly since it's easier to audit, less likely to differ across implementations, and less error prone (e.g. swap the order of the comparison and you're back to plain old String#==).

For Ruby you should be using ActiveSupport::SecurityUtils.secure_compare or similar.

In theory openssl could return a String-like object with an overridden ==, but it doesn't.

ipfw's popular, well supported, and not going anywhere. It's still the default FreeBSD firewall[1], PC-BSD recently switched their default to it[2], and DragonFlyBSD recently rewrote it[3].

1: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/etc/rc.firewall?view=ma...

2: https://forums.pcbsd.org/showthread.php?tid=19683

3: http://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/ipfw2/

Do you have anything to quantify "much, much worse"? From what I've seen they're roughly as bad as each other.

USB keyboards can get around the ten key limitation by presenting themselves as multiple devices.

I get rendering problems with my font (BDF UM+ Outline), and find it has broken mouse reporting. e.g. in tmux, vertical splits aren't rendered, and clicks result in spam being written to the shell.

Also couldn't feel more clunky if it tried, impressive as its feature set is.

I got "You must restart your computer to apply these changes" in Windows 8.1 just by moving my mouse to another USB port a couple of weeks ago. I guess some other non-critical update was queued up.

This is no different from the situation in Linux, BSD etc, where executables and libraries are simply mapped into the process with mmap() - they're backed by the files and the system is free to discard those clean memory pages as it sees fit.

When you install(1) a new version of a file, the old one is deleted and the new one written in its place. The file handle in existing processes continues to point to the original, and the filesystem will wait until everything's closed it before actually discarding the file data.

> On linux, other users can see your command line (ps aux)

On FreeBSD I like doing:

/boot/loader.conf: mac_seeotheruids_load="YES"

/etc/sysctl.conf: security.mac.seeotheruids.enabled="1"

Which restricts users to seeing only their own processes. You can make exceptions for a specific group or users with the same primary group.

I still don't put anything sensitive in a command line, of course.

And how could I forget: David Langford, "BLIT"[1], and "Different Kinds of Darkness"[2].

> BLIT (which stands for Berryman Logical Image Technique) is a short science-fiction story written by author David Langford. It features a setting where highly dangerous types of images called "basilisks" have been discovered; these images contain patterns within them that exploit flaws in the structure of the human mind to produce a lethal reaction, effectively "crashing" the mind the way a computer program crashes when given data that it fails to process.

1: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm

2: http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/different-kinds-of...

I think from the BSD point of view, contributing back is seen more of a weak social obligation than a legal one. You contribute back because it's a nice thing to do for those giving you free stuff, not because of section 6 paragraph 1 of some ten page legal document.

Asking people to consider it is the right thing to do. Switching license would defeat the entire point.

Greg Egan's "Disapora"[1] (where most of us literally live in computers) and "Permutation City"[2] (living in a cellular automata).

Similar themes in Roger William's "The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect"[3] (an AI accidentally takes over the universe).

1: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/DIASPORA/DIASPORA.h...

2: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/PERMUTATION/Permuta...

3: http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/

So what's around that has a chance of replacing Wordpress? Java!

Sigh.

Doesn't look like it. They have an API you could throw encrypted blobs at with a bit of work at least.