Slashdot Mirror

All of my servers are crammed into a small corner of a small room. I do my best to keep it need and tidy, but I have to hook up a 15 inch monitor to a KVM switch. Even with the best cable managment system, it is a nightmare of KVM cables. If I could have these screens in the servers, then I could eliminate the cables, KVM switch, and monitor

Doh, if the smart displays had VNC support, they could be pretty cool tools. Cross-platform, with unices - non-blocking for the desktops, a neat thing to have in a company plus if the prices were lower - Welcome back old times of one big server plus multiple terminals :) A good way to miniaturise your box is to put everything you don't need to carry around on some shelf and connect the rest wirelessly :)

1. C++ is clearly off topic.

2. This is a hoax. Worse, this is any old hoax. Someone has just filed off the original dates provided and changed them to 2003. The first mention I can find is this 1998 post which might represent the original version.

3. By failing to link to any original source or otherwise provide attribution (other than the incorrect claim that it's a from an interview with IEEE's Computer), you are at best infringing on someone else's copyright, or at worst misrepresenting the work as your own.

Three strikes, you're out.

The article does humorously point out some of C++'s shortcomings, but to just repost it here now is wrong.

It's now official. C++ creator admits it was all a hoax!

Well actually you can make SQL queries to XML with the W3C drafted XQuery language, or if you want to use an older method, then try XQL, or XML-QL.
As for the flat text file, no you cant SQL query those, perhaps reading up on regex could help you get data out of those pesky text files.

Here's interactive demo

That text-to-speech thing is nothing compared to this.

...wouldn't using VNC be cheaper and easier?

This was used in Mission to Mars for the spaceship's voice. The director was looking to do some sound FX to create one from a human voice, then found AT&T's product which was a perfect fit.

I wanted the same voice for my computer-controlled house, and tracked down where they got it. Now my handheld says, "Warning. Power failure immenent." when it's batter is about to die.

Used to? Still does! It's called "AT&T Natural Voices," and there's an online demo.

"Aargh! I've been slashdotted!"

This one is much better at saying "slashdotted". Neither of them do the "Aargh!" very well. Especially the IBM one ought to be convincing, given current circumstances ;-)

Generate more samples for yourself at http://www.naturalvoices.att.com/demos/

• dyphone-based synthesis where the database contains one dyphone (end of first sound + start of next sound) for each psossible sound combination. This approach is used in Festival. Dyphone-based synthesis will hardly sound better that in Festival because dyphones have to be modified artificially to fit every variation of pitch, duration and any other parameter that is needed to produce a given phrase.
• corpus-based synthesis takes a different approach where a large database of several hours of speech is recorded and manually labelled to mark the start and end of each sound. Such a database is used to extract the best and the longest sequence of dyphones during the production. This approach gives naturally sounding results for short sentences where intonation is not so important Given that the cost of developing a database for corpus synthesis may be orders of magnitude higher than for dyphone synthesis, there are very few companies that make them. Two companies offer a demo on the internet: ATT and Scansoft (former L&H) and

Some of the voices sound okay I guess. Better than Stephen Hawking anyway.

...a new administration tool called "Desktop sharing" that allows remote control of other desktops

Yeah, the rest of the world has that already. It's called VNC.

Apart from everyone complaining and joking about the strength of the average user's password i read nothing about the actual worm this is about.

The worm comes in using port 445 (this is the samba over TCP port) and tries some simple passwords (the most effective being the empty password). After the infection the worm drops the file dvldr32.exe in the startupfolder so that next time the machine is restarted the worm/virus will be installed onto the machine.

What the worm does is:
- Start scanning and infecting other random ips, it does this on a very high speed (i.e. 100's of ips per minute)
- Installs WinVNC (a vnc server for windows) that allows remote control, see the vnc webpage.
- Connects to some private IRC servers and joins a channel with some high ascii chars in the name (chinese?) and a password. The IRC server is modified so that it does not give back any information to the client, but anyone on IRC can request the ips of all the infected machines. When i tested this there were about 8000 infected machines on IRC (8000 was the IRC client limit so there are probably alot more infected machines out there).

Note that this is quite a big threat as even passive attackers can get ips of infected machines by watching their logs for connections to port 445. Most of the machines making such connections to you are either machines in your local network or infected machines (unless you do alot of samba over tcp/ip over the internet).

One can easily access the harddisks of these machines using the Admin$ share (which you know has no or only a simple password) either to get files from the users or computer or get a copy of the worm itself (it's located in \winnt\system32 folder and named dvldr32.exe). Once you have a copy of the worm you can obtain the vnc password using some good old reverse engineering tricks (which i will not give out here because that would help out scriptkiddies just a little bit too much). I tried out the password i obtained using this analysis on one of the hosts that scanned me and guess what the guy was doing on his pc, yep he was downloading porn using KaZAA.

From the looks of it this worm has already infected alot of machines. I get about one connection attempt to port 445 every 2 hours.

For some more info about the worm checkout the antiy website

Let's see how long it takes before all ISPs block their vnc (5900) and their microsoft-ds (445) ports to stop the worm or microsoft issues a security update that forces strong passwords upon users or asks for permission everytime something new is put into the startup folder.

There are always ways to get around these problems. You can try to use libraries like GMP with C/C++ where you can store data in rational numbers instead of floats. And then you do the convertions at the very end. However, if your calculation starts out in numeric (i.e. calculating regression) instead of symbolic (i.e. polynomials or linear algebras), you cannot use this trick. Library like GMP do the job really well if you want to get around floating point errors with your regular C code. There are other tricks which I don't remember right now. Try the C Primer, or Stroustrup

actually you have already started playing with/sconsidering something that might be of use. I use textaloud mp3 as a front end for the att natural voices engine (with which I am MOST impressed) to actually read project gutenberg e-texts to mp3. I then burn 4 or 5 books to cd and listen to them on my commute. There is a server component of this that can be hooked into. They actually do something similar to this one the ATT natural voices web site you should be able to use wget your favorite means to get a page interactively, scrape the contents (a few perl Regex's perhaps) and then pipe it through the server component ont he fly to spit out wav or mp3 files. This would allow you to have any given page read out loud in real time.

1991 - AT&T and NCR signed a definitive merger agreement in May, and the merger was completed on September 19. Product introductions included: the NCR 3600, the most powerful general-purpose computer on the market; NCR Document Management System, a general-purpose imaging system based on microprocessor technology and open, scalable systems; the NCR 3120, a notebook computer designed for mobile professionals who want feature-rich computing both in and outside the office; the NCR 3125, an advanced pen-based notepad that is the first mobile automation tool with true handwriting-recognition capabilities; and NCR Fourth Generation Self-Service Systems, which offer retail banks an unprecedented availability level of up to 99.9 percent. Charles E. Exley retired and Gilbert P. Williamson assumed the position of chairman and chief executive officer. R. Elton White was named president.

1992 - Teradata merged with AT&T on February 28 and was functionally integrated into NCR. Groundbreaking on a new development facility for massively parallel computing takes place in San Diego. NCR and AT&T recognize one-year anniversary of successful high-tech merger. 1992 Democratic National Convention delegates vote using NCR 7054 Integrated Touch Screen Systems. Product introductions included: the NCR 3170, successor to the Safari notebook computer; the 3130 NotePad computer; the System 7000 family of MIPS RISC-based symmetric multiprocessing systems running UNIX System V 4.0; the 5688 drive-up ATM; and new ATMs capable of reading AT&T smart cards.

From this page, you can call up the inventer with technical questions:

Saul Backal - Meganet Corp.
818-757-3890
matrix@meganet.com

Reporters can call these people. Hey, if their professional email ends in "juno.com", they must be legit!

Kenny Spitler or Bernie Kiesel - Absolute Results Inc.
615/843-8710
Absoluteresults@juno.com

Check out this press release... he claims to have given the algorithm to Bill Gates, AT&T, HP, Intel, and DELL for cracking. I guess if the crypto community shuns him, then he should take it somewhere else.

I love how he subtly calls these people his peers (as if!), but even more masterful, the press release is on the AT&T website, so it looks like it has a bit of an endorsement. Of course, I think Bill Gates is the world's greatest cryptographer and Microsoft has by far the most secure products. (I'd bet microsoft has some very good cryptographers, but that's not the problem; they just have holes in their software).

According to their FAQ, AT&T lets you connect "four additional computers" to your cable modem.

I'm thinking that even for Slashdot readers, five computers in the house with broadband internet will be sufficient.

Read it here:
Connect Multiple Computers to the AT&T Broadband Internet Service

There is currently a system available to anonymize web transactions . The legal implications of this are worth considering, with the current spat of court cases holding service providers responsible for the actions of their users.

Of course, for those that are advertising tomorrow and put up the website on the ad, it can be a very heavy day. I used to administer AT&T's website and each SuperBowl Sunday came in as the heaviest day of the year for us due to the number of ads that AT&T ran.

You wouldn't think that there would be that many people distracted enough to check out the website, but that is exactly what happened, to the tune of 3-4x the average daily traffic.

As pointed out in David Deutsche's The Fabric of Reality , no encryption based on large primes is ever indefinitely secure.

While the factorization of large prime numbers is currently an intractable task, quantum computing is very likely to make it as tractable as multiplication.

For instance, Shor's Algorithm, first discovered in 1994, has already been implemented to factor the number 15 -- to 3 and 5 with 80% accuracy. (If anyone knows what it got the other 20% of the time, I'm interested!)

Now certainly 15 isn't comparable to a 1024-bit RSA key, but it's only a start for quantum computers. Using entanglement and interference, one can have very large primes factored in a matter of minutes! All we have left to do is actually build a device that does it ... and currently decoherence is the largest obstacle to overcome.

So, if you really want information to be secure, and remain secure indefinitely, a better method of encryption which does not rely on the factorization of large primes needs to be implemented.

Peter Shor even wrote a poem about it. =P

-------
If you don't take responsibility
for what goes into your mind ...
Someone Else Will!

As pointed out in David Deutsche's The Fabric of Reality , no encryption based on large primes is ever indefinitely secure.

While the factorization of large prime numbers is currently an intractable task, quantum computing is very likely to make it as tractable as multiplication.

For instance, Shor's Algorithm, first discovered in 1994, has already been implemented to factor the number 15 -- to 3 and 5 with 80% accuracy. (If anyone knows what it got the other 20% of the time, I'm interested!)

Now certainly 15 isn't comparable to a 1024-bit RSA key, but it's only a start for quantum computers. Using entanglement and interference, one can have very large primes factored in a matter of minutes! All we have left to do is actually build a device that does it ... and currently decoherence is the largest obstacle to overcome.

So, if you really want information to be secure, and remain secure indefinitely, a better method of encryption which does not rely on the factorization of large primes needs to be implemented.

Peter Shor even wrote a poem about it. =P

-------
If you don't take responsibility
for what goes into your mind ...
Someone Else Will!

What's happended to Bell Labs?

It got broken into a number of pieces, just as AT&T split up.

(is it somewhere in Lucent?)

The piece called Bell Labs did.

How about HP?

HP Labs still exists; whether they're doing less, or just doing stuff other than the commodity stuff HP's using more of, is another matter.

But, as has been noted, there are some research departments in big companies that are doing interesting stuff, such as IBM and even a favorite whipping boy on Slashdot. How pure the research of any given company is might be a different matter.

Not so, my friend! They had one that went:

"Ever send a fax from the beach? You will..."

The product that the person in the commercial was using is the AT&T EO. My friend had one... it was a funky notebook page sized PDA that had a real OS, a windowing system and everything. I even hacked on it on a road trip once so we could use it as a serial terminal to get to the Linux box we had booted in the car to listen to MP3s (Yes, that's ultimately geeky, but it was cool! :)

Cyclone is an existing safe dialect of C.

I've used VNC server/client combinations to update and check on remote *nix systems for a little while now. Copies for many different operating systems, including Windows 98, can be checked here. It's simple, but it gets the job done. I like it because I can administer from wherever I need to.

Timbuktu has similar features, but its Windows compatibility is less extensive and its not free (in either way). It does have a more extensive feature set though, so I reccommend at least giving it a look if you look at VNC.

The main issue I've found with these is their use of bandwidth. Even then, quality can be reduced and compression can be increased for responsiveness. Good luck.

Not to mention the TV stations all being administered by a sinister few....

Helloooo! A simple Slashdot opinion post is clearly not even intended to be on the same level as arguments with a bigger scope of time. You might also want to try being explicit about why C or Java is better than C++.

I wasn't trying to say why C or Java is better than C++. I don't stoop to such vacant navel contemplation. I was making a statement of my own personal preference and giving a couple of general and personal reasons why.

Stroustrup actually has a faq on his home page which refutes most of the common criticisms applied to C++. You should be able to find this via google.

It would seem that Stroustrup's FAQ doesn't really refute many criticsms at all.

The relevant works are listed in the C++ faq lite.

Yep. For a fee.

Which means you really have to send it to a lawyer if you really want to be sure. Who will gladly charge you $500/hour to look at it, and then weeks later say: "No, you can't use it. Gimme $10,000."

At that point, you just say "screw it" and write it yourself. The result? Who loses? The apolitical Linux users who just need the goddammned app and are willing to pay for it. Then they have to wait a few years while wheels are reimplemented. That time spent reimplementing it translates to a higher cost to users, and longer time getting the stuff they want. And this is why I'll never see potentionally useful stuff like Quicken or Finale for Linux. Sigh...

Personally, I think the LGPL is the right thing to do if you want to write any library code, or otherwise intend your app to be a building block for other apps.

(Disclaimer: I write proprietary software to put food on the table, and free software for fun.)

AT&T has an engine here, but I'm sure you can't afford it. They do, however, have a desktop client edition that runs under linux, according to this fact sheet.

The latest Discover magazine reports that this was used for the voice of the ship in the movie "Red Planet".

Then again, I was more interested in looking at Carrie Anne Moss...

AT&T has an engine here, but I'm sure you can't afford it. They do, however, have a desktop client edition that runs under linux, according to this fact sheet.

The latest Discover magazine reports that this was used for the voice of the ship in the movie "Red Planet".

Then again, I was more interested in looking at Carrie Anne Moss...

• Net Traffic Doubling every 6 months -- Note, original report from Caspian seems to be removed
  

• Internet traffic growth: A gale or a hurricane?
  
• Comments on the Larry Roberts and Caspian Networks study of Internet traffic growth
  
• Internet growth: Is there a Moore's Law?
  
  

Very little in Java is new to a student of programming languages, so there has been little effect on the C++ definition. In that area, Java is still playing catch-up (for example, I think it is just a matter of time before Sun will add a template-like mechanism to Java).

Links man, come on! This is Slashdot, you can't just make wild assertions without backing them up with facts.

You're new around here, aren't you?

Since you asked, though, the first thing to realise that you may well have written a program in a high-level language which can way outperform the naive C equivalent yourself. Ever used yacc (or bison)? It's a high-level language compiled to C, after all. I defy you to write a naive (the "naive" part is important) LALR(1) parser in C yourself which outperforms those generated by yacc and related tools.

Slightly less facetious examples:

• C++ beats C
• The functional language Sisal beats High Performance Fortran on numerical simulations. (Note: This is an older paper; Sisal has changed a bit since then.)

Still, this is not the real benefit of high-level languages. The point is that in many situations, you gain a lot without paying too much. There's always C and assembly language below a high-level language if you find you really need it. If you don't, or for those part of an application where you don't, you get rapid development, higher robustness and better maintainability, and that's where you win.

Of course Bjarne Stroustrup would say this, but he has some nice examples backing his statements up, too. See his FAQ and his paper on "Learning Standard c++ as a New Language".

Stroustrup explains some nice details on especially this issue of memory constructs. He makes a convincing argument for why C++ is easier for C-style programming... Especially for those of you (One I saw below) who "Don't want to get into c++", realize that you can edge into it pretty easily, and accomplish your tasks more easily and quickly -- give it a try!

Of course Bjarne Stroustrup would say this, but he has some nice examples backing his statements up, too. See his FAQ and his paper on "Learning Standard c++ as a New Language".

Stroustrup explains some nice details on especially this issue of memory constructs. He makes a convincing argument for why C++ is easier for C-style programming... Especially for those of you (One I saw below) who "Don't want to get into c++", realize that you can edge into it pretty easily, and accomplish your tasks more easily and quickly -- give it a try!

Of course Bjarne Stroustrup would say this, but he has some nice examples backing his statements up, too. See his FAQ and his paper on "Learning Standard c++ as a New Language".

Stroustrup explains some nice details on especially this issue of memory constructs. He makes a convincing argument for why C++ is easier for C-style programming... Especially for those of you (One I saw below) who "Don't want to get into c++", realize that you can edge into it pretty easily, and accomplish your tasks more easily and quickly -- give it a try!

I've seen an especially nice version of these dynamic stack frames in Cyclone. For those of you who don't know it, Cyclone is kind of a type-safe, pointer-safe version of C, mixed with some good features found in languages like ML. It takes only simple transformations to compile C code as Cyclone (mostly having to do with minor pointer syntax differences).

Cyclone has region-based memory protection, which means that you can't do stuff like return pointers to local variables etc. because it statically checks the pointer lifetime using region tags that are part of the pointer type. Example: you can have a pointer-to-memory-belonging-to-region-foo, where foo is a function or some other static scope, (written sometype * `foo, although the default region tag is usually correct, then it's just sometype *) which can point to heap memory because that's garbage-collected and guaranteed to live at least as long as function foo's memory, but you can't have a pointer-to-memory-belonging-to-region-Heap pointing to a variable on the local stack: if you have a local variable x and take the address, the type of that is pointer-to-memory-in-region-foo, and that type is not allowed to be cast to pointer-to-memory-in-region-Heap because foo's memory doesn't necessarily live as long as Heap does.

They combined this region-based mechanism with dynamic "stack frames": You can open a dynamic region to open up a new "stack frame" or separate heap of memory bound to a scope in the program, so when an exception is thrown or when you exit the scope the memory is automatically deallocated. The good thing is, you can't go wrong, because the region-based pointer lifetime checking will prohibit you from casting a pointer into that specific region to a pointer into a region with a longer lifetime, so you will never have dangling pointers into such a dynamic region: you will get a compile-time error when you attempt to do this.

It seems like you could pretty easily ditch the laptop and set up a mini-ITX motherboard (like the VIA Epia) and an 802.11 card or USB adapter. Then you could run VNC on your desktop to see what the camera sees and to set up the software.

One of the biggest problems in the backbone is that attempting to support arbitrary routing policies driven by a myriad of different customers overconstrains the problem of global internet routing. This leads to configurations in which either many solutions exist or no solutions exist to the routing problem and causes routing instability. Couple this with the fact that router configuration is a black art that is extremely error-prone and you get WorldCom-like outages. Such problems will actually IMPROVE with more consolidation. If you're interested, check this paper out.

I keep a bunch of "classic" bookmarks around. Some are undisputed gems, others are, well, to my taste. Bytes being cheap here's a batch.

• Ars Technica: The PC enthusiast's resource
• AmbySoft Inc. White Papers: Scott Ambler's Online Writings
• windows.oreilly.com -- Deep Inside C#: An Interview with Microsoft Chief Architect Anders Hejlsberg
• TQ
• The Rise of ``Worse is Better''
  
• A Whirlwind Tutorial on Creating Really Teensy ELF Executables for Linux
  
• Theist Hall of Shame
• Internetworking Technology Overview
  
• Software Technology Review
  Eric Weisstein's World of Mathematics
• P.S.: More Than Just Words
• Welcome to the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences
• John McCarthy
  
• Slashdot | Net Translations of Dead-Tree IT Classics
  
• advICE
  
• 0xdeadbeef archives
  

Check out AT&T's TTS demo. It sounds REALLY good.

Yeah. This is not unlike the idea I had about a year ago...admittedly it's not that unique.

Y'see, VNC runs on PalmOS. So you run a VNC Server on your *nix or Windows box, and then remotely control it via VNC client on the Palm OS. With a *nix such as Linux or FreeBSD, you can simultaneously connect many of these devices.

The only problem is that the screen on a PalmOS device is typically very small. So you develop a PalmOS device with a larger screen.

My guess is that Mira isn't much different from this setup, just using proprietary Microsoft technology rather than the Open Source VNC protocol.

It's 2002, and Microsoft has re-invented VNC. Not bad: this time it took them less than a decade to copy someone else's idea; usually, it takes them several decades.

If you dont need the speed, and/or value security more, any language which relies as heavily on pointer arithmetic as C/C++ should be out of the question. If you must use a C type dialect you could consider something like Cyclone C

. The crux of his arguement depends on the absence of pointers, if you cannot see why that is good for security then you are naive.

If you program in C or assembly you might know what the hardware is doing, but as soon as you leave pointers and the low level attacks they make possible behind that stops being an issue anyway ... the exploits depend on simple bugs and on your algorithms, with C/assembly you will simply have more code so more bugs and you will be farther removed from the high level workings of the program. A loose loose situation.

I'll let Bjarne Stroustrup (creator of C++) answer.

If you're going to complain about casting int to char * without warning, as you do in the second example, you should also complain about converting void * to char * without warning..

I'll let Steve Summit (author of the comp.lang.c FAQ) answer.

Healthy skepticism is a good trait on Slashdot, but it's best to stay polite ("rubbish") unless you know what you're talking about.

• dyphone-based synthesis where the database contains one dyphone (end of first sound + start of next sound) for each psossible sound combination. This approach is used in Festival. Dyphone-based synthesis will hardly sound better that in Festival because dyphones have to be modified artificially to fit every variation of pitch, duration and any other parameter that is needed to produce a given phrase.
• corpus-based synthesis takes a different approach where a large database of several hours of speech is recorded and manually labelled to mark the start and end of each sound. Such a database is used to extract the best and the longest sequence of dyphones during the production. This approach gives naturally sounding results for short sentences where intonation is not so important