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Use, web, weave and tangle, the famous tools behind Knuth's literate programming mindset.

Instead of writing code and not commenting it, you write a book on what you want your code to do, littered with examples of how it works and justifying why, and the tools somehow produces the C files and compile the library for you.

At least its something like that, the weave documentation didn't seem clear enough at the time for me to get it to do anything useful. *cough* I needed instructions not why's and because's

However it looks like folk are doing something useful with it: http://www.ox.compsoc.net/~gemini/simons/webperl/

Internet Explorer runs entirely in user mode, in the security context of the current user. The only way to get more privledges from there is to exploit a local vulnerability in the kernel or some privledged service. Any user mode program can make use of a local vuln; IE and ActiveX are not special. Many operating systems have had local vulns; Linux patched one involving mremap() not too long ago. The local vuln in the article you linked to has been fixed since NT4sp4; it isn't going to work on 2k or XP. Besides, all the problems listed either exist on UNIXes too or have been fixed for 5+ years.

I mean, who in their time at Oxford didn't load up their favourite ethernet sniffer, and take a look at the traffic flowing past (usually, the networks are made up of hubs connected to swtiches, owing to cost, so you can see traffic for 10-20 other computers). The difference with myself was I then showed this to the college IT officer, rather than the student papers, so actually got something fixed.

The big problem is lack of funds and lack of time. College IT people (the sniffing in question took place in a college, on the college network, not the main uni network) tend to have themselves and an assistant to look after a few hundred student machines, a few tens of multi user workstations, and then all the machines of the staff (50 odd, and must take priority). Oh, and they don't have enough budget. Thats why the problems remain

For anyone who knows Oxford, one of my friends wrote a very good spoof of this - http://www.ox.compsoc.net/~sheldon/oxstu.html (if you don't know Oxford, you might stuggle to get all the points...)

Everyone seems to be making a big fuss over this which isn't such a big deal. Oxford computer society's take on it was this. What they did wasn't anything fancy, it was just bummed up for the paper because exciting things don't happen in oxford very often. I've no idea why the guardian and the eeb are reporting this now, 1.5 months after the OxStu's headline, perhaps it's just a slow news day or somthing. This is all getting blown out of all proportion, at the time I thought what a big pile of bollocks and now this is just rediculous

Someone at the world-acclaimed student bogsheet the Oxford Student observed that the world was going to end because their college network isn't switched. Thankfully a far more rational person pointed out that packet switching is the least of their worries, compared with wide open pidgeon holes and dustbins. Was this weekend marking International FUD day or something?

Impossible! The Pentium 90 was released in March of 1994. See for yourself.

say what?

âoeI feel this technology looks all set to replace PCI, and we really do need some new bus technology to keep up with the bandwidth demands of today's applications. Or is this just yet another way to force us into a new upgrade cycle? When I look back at the explosion of technology within the past decade and the ever-continuing attempts to eradicate the bottlenecks that computer systems have had PCI Express is a breath of fresh air. For example lets take a look at processors; within the past ten years processor speeds have doubled every eighteen months if we go by Moores Law. Itâ(TM)s hard to believe it was a little over ten years ago that Intel released the First Pentium Chips. HDD speeds (physical read) have also increased dramatically from about 2 MB/s for a 635MB HDD to over 45 MB/s for a modern HDD. Graphics were given a face lift with the introduction of the AGP bus pushing the speeds of transfer up from PCIâ(TM)s 133 MB/s to 2.1GB/s however many systems are used for a LOT more than video rendering capabilities and are geared more towards storage markets were data access speed is of the utmost importance. 64 bit PCI gave us a boost to 266 MB/s transfer speeds to be used in conjunction with high speed U320 SCSI but even then we cannot take full advantage of the capabilities offered. PCI express opens up the horizons for computers letting us transfer substantial amounts of data in less time. This can only be a good thing. More Information * Shorter Time = Greater Efficiency Therefore I donâ(TM)t see this as another way to force us into the upgrade cycle but a good solid advancement in computers. Also, the good thing is that it is coming wither we like or not.

From a quick google search:

http://www.ox.compsoc.net/cgi-bin/safeperl/flend/a nime.pl

There was - in the early, mid eighties - a british company decided to make a computer that wasn't built 'to standards'. They went forward to sell heaps of them, and made quite a bit of money too...

The machine? The Amstrad PCW. More info here, here and off course here for some circut diagrams.

The important thing to look at is how files became the standard. It just happened that UNIX had them, IBM mainframes had them, DOS had them, and then Windows. And then Macintosh came out with them. And with the Internet, because of the UNIX heritage, we ended up thinking in terms of moving files around and file- oriented protocols like FTP. And what happened is that the file just became a universal idea, even though it didn't start out as one.

"Now that she's stepped down, maybe she's available for a Slashdot Interview?

But then again, maybe not. I can see the questions now... "

Look guys, she's not the enemy anymore. Let's pool our money together and send her a T-shirt or something to prove there's no hard feelings. She seems to like this one.

1899 "Everything that can be invented has already been invented.", Charles H. Duell, director of the U.S. Patent Office

1943 "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.", Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM.

1949 "Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.", Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science.

1957 "I have travelled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year." The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall.

1965 Moore's law published by Gordon Moore in the 35th Anniversary edition of Electronics magazine. Originally suggesting processor complexity every year the law was revised in 1975 to suggest a doubling in complexity every two years.

1968 "But what ... is it good for?" Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM commenting on the microchip.

1977 "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp..

1980 "DOS addresses only 1 Megabyte of RAM because we cannot imagine any applications needing more." Microsoft on the development of DOS.

1981 "640k ought to be enough for anybody.", Bill Gates

1992 "Windows NT addresses 2 Gigabytes of RAM which is more than any application will ever need". Microsoft on the development of Windows NT

Here's my collection of NTK Pizza Express photos including some taken last night.

You are probably looking at quite a bit later in time for the things you mention. Check out this timeline

XHTML (as opposed to IE just bailing and dumping the XML tree)

Recent versions of IE are quite happy to display XHTML 1.1. See, for example, http://compsoc.net/, which the W3C agrees is valid XHTML and, indeed, valid CSS.

There are a few nasty kludges in the CSS to work around browser bugs -- some in IE, mostly in Netscape 4.x. Compared to the latter, all versions of IE I've pointed at the page have excellent CSS support.

http://www.ox.compsoc.net/~samiri/rook/files/wareh ouse.html

Here is my favorite strip, Sabrina Online

The modern strip location;
http://sabrina-online.com/

The old strip location;
http://www.coax.net/people/erics/Sabrina.htm

And, the author's website. He is an Amiga fan and has some cool Amiga art;
http://www.compsoc.net/ericschwartz/

...an especially appropriate strip.

The whole archive is here, and the original strip here.

OG.

PS: The author is obviously an Amiga lover too :-)

...an especially appropriate strip.

The whole archive is here, and the original strip here.

OG.

PS: The author is obviously an Amiga lover too :-)

If individual authors don't release their work, that's their prerogative. But it isn't the publisher's fault.

And that doesn't just go for Wrox - O'Reilly authors are permitted to publish their work under whichever license they like. Most of them choose not to publish under open licenses because they know they will receive less royalties.
(I don't get royalties for the Perl chapter, so I can say what I like. :)
In both cases, the publishers have been committed to Open Source, and have allowed their authors the freedom to follow through their Open Source beliefs. I've done that with the Perl chapter. Look around on the web sites of the other contributors. I'm not saying you will find anything, only that you might.

But don't blame the publishers.

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS BOTH A GEEK WALK THROUGH MEMORY LANE AND ACTUAL TECH ANALYSIS. IT'S MY POST, AND I CAN WRITE WHAT I PLEASE. THANK YOU FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION. ;-)


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I'm as surprised as...well, I guess none of you have any reason to be surprised. But I've never owned an Amiga; hell, I've barely even seen one.

OK, so I grew up drooling over the concept of having a pimped out Amiga system, and can completely identify with the rabidly loyal Amiga community(I had an Apple IIgs and lived in the city Applefest used to be held in. 'Nuff said.)

And, now that I think about it, a very large proportion of the music I grew up listening to was downloaded to my IIgs via a 2400 baud modem, straight from Aminet sites. Ah, yes, the good old days of blasting data through *FSP*(does anyone else remember this beautiful little hack of a UDP protocol?) so I could get around FTP user limits...not to mention, downloading to my system that didn't even possess a hard drive! 800K floppiez, K-RAD 3133+...;-)

No, but I think the real reason I've been loving Amiga's lately is this comic strip I found off of Memepool--it's called Sabrina; the archives are here, and this is undoubtedly one of the most dementedly weird strips I've ever seen.

It's joined User Friendly and After Y2K(mmm..TTB...mmm...NTZC...) for "gotta read it" value. Imagine this strip about a bunch of Amiga-addict Anthropormophized Kitten/Skunk/Squirrels-Cum-Hot Chicks who have lives that traverse the range of Web Site Designer for Porno Director to pregnancy.

I really can't describe how strange of a geek strip this is. It's definitely geek. It's obsessively geek. In someone else's hands, it'd be Geek Sold Out. In this guy's hands...just go. Go now.
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Oh, yeah. The Amiga. The point that the Amiga was an insanely efficient OS with 512K ram should be muted by the fact that there was significant amounts of extremely useful custom hardware embedded within that system. I think one of the slowest realizations the industry is going to eventually come to grips with is that general purpose processors are really f*cking slow at many tasks, at least compared to hardwired solutions.

Just consider how many Pentium III's you'd need to match a Voodoo 3 at bilinearly filtering the texture coatings for large amounts of polygons.

One of the major things I'm looking forward to seeing out of Transmeta is the degree to which they've bridged the specialty opcode vs. general purpose architecture divide that's somewhat divided the industry over the last few years. I'm tremendously interested, for example, in if we're going to see things like Routing and Firewall Opcodes dynamically programmable into the Transmeta CPU.

If Transmeta doesn't do it, those guys with that mass FPGA programming language will. Sooner or later, we're going to have hardware morph itself into the configurations various applications and utilities require. Should be interesting to watch.

What do you guys think?

Yours Truly,

Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com

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