In thinking about the whole subject of how languages deal with types recently , it struck me that calling something anuntyped language is usually somewhat of a misnomer.

Most things that get called untyped languages, such as assembly code,actually have types; it's just that they are attached to operationsinstead of to values (and variables, and storage locations). Arguablyassembly language has stronger typing for arithmetic operations thanmost high level languages, since there isn't any silent conversionbetween different types of numbers.

Thinking

Due to recent events I have become interested inthis issue, so I have been poking around and doing some experiments.Unfortunately, while Linux has a bewildering variety of memory relatedper-process resource limits that you can set, most of them don't work ordon't do you any good.

What you have, in theory and practice:

• ulimit -m , the maximum RSS, doesn't do anything; the kernelmaintains the number but never seems to use it for anything.

• ulimit -d

For our backwards compatibility sins, we have plain POP3 exposed tothe general Internet. This morning, we discovered that our POP3 serverhad more or less locked up around 6:30 am, apparently because someonedecided to open up hundreds of connections to it and perform a bruteforce mass account/password attempt.

(In fact it took down our IMAP server too, because we're runningDovecot. This is one of the annoying limitations of Dovecot; there is acentral server process that has a

Courtesy of a nice little thunderstorm, I lost power for a bit, whichreminded me of why ATX power supplies are not my favorite thing. Theproblem is that they are too smart yet not smart enough.

In the old days of simple power supplies, when you turned a machine offit would stay off and if you turned a machine on it stayed on, and powerfailures didn't change this; after the power came back, the off machinestayed off and the on machine powered back up. In