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"UNIX was designed to run on mainframes and serve dozens, hundreds or even thousands of users."

Actually, UNIX was designed to run as a game platform on a PDP-7 minicomputer. :)

From Origins and History of Unix
"Unix began its life on a scavenged PDP-7 minicomputer[14] like the one shown in Figure 2.1, as a platform for the Space Travel game and a testbed for Thompson's ideas about operating system design."

Nothing to see here folks, this whole thread is over. A Nazi comparison on the second post to a /. discussion... I think this might just be a record breaking Godwin's Law post. Come to think of it, I doubt it.

This is one of the best collections of graphics algorithms on the net I'm aware of:

comp.graphics.algorithms FAQ

Another favorite of mine is Ray Tracing News, but there haven't been any new issues in a few years.

What other people's favorite collections of algorithms?

-jim

I'm depressed to see that gmail appears to use top-posting aka "jeopardy quoting" for replies.

Maybe there is a setting, but if this is the default, then the option to change it is pointless- no one will.

I hate getting top-posted emails. I hate trying to wade backwards in time to find out what the hell the cryptic first line refers to. Thank you Outlook for bringing this "feature" to the masses and lazy users who can't be bothered to edit quotes meaningfully for wasting bandwidth and my time. And, now, thank you gmail, for perpetuating it.

I feel like Don Quixote.

-h3

Why?

Zawinski's Law

I also heard that the version of TCP/IP in SP2 is compatible with RFC 3514

Theats sure to get them some credibility in the slashdot world :)

This will do in the meantime.

... TMTOWTDI

I did read the article and what's your point? It's still bulk transfer of data and you can still do a lot with it. I would imagine that the people offering the service send all the web pages as self contained html mail and translate the urls so when someone clicks on a link, it creates the necessary email to get a new page the next time the e-mailman makes a loop through town.

I understand how to confuse the computer -- give it a sufficiently large "number of entries" such that (n+2)*16 is larger than (2^m-1).

But how does overwriting the rest of memory allow you to gain control? Surely the "execution" pointer -- where the computer is looking next for an instruction -- is in some unpredictable place relative to the code you've written in to the heap? Is this just a way to crash the machine as I do if I accidentally reference a memory position I haven't allocated?

Do you just wait and hope that the pointer ends up in your patch of overwritten memory, and write your malicious code so that you can make sure it never leaves your space? Or is there some way to trick the machine into sending the execution pointer directly to your chunk of code?

From How to post about Nazis and get away with it:

Godwin's Law is a natural law of Usenet named after Mike Godwin (godwin@E F F [edited].org) concerning Usenet "discussions". It reads, according to the Jargon File:

As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

It's a real thing.

Give an infinite amount of monkeys an inifinte amount of typewriters...

Of course, who is going to implement the IMPS system?

Maybe someone is actually using Evolutionary Programming (not)?

Well, I won't comment on WordPerfect for Linux not supporting dictionary definitions... okay, I guess I did. That stinks. But the Windows version, which supports dictionary definitions, requires you to pay for a complete dictionary.. it's the Oxford "concise" dictionary. If I'm paying for a dictionary service, I'd at least want the unabridged definitions, with an option to only see concise definitions. Also, it'd be nice if they offer a free alternative, allowing the user to specify a dictionary server and interfacing it using the DICT protocol. See RFC 2229 and dict.org for an example at what's available for free.

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1925.html

-ft

This is what an obscured email address in your signature is for. See RFC 1855 section 3.1.1.

The parent is 100% right. At this point, it's nuts not to use a restricted email address for mailing lists since so many are archived in various places, and it's well known that spammers crawl these archives for addresses. Some mailing lists are archived on hundreds or even thousands of web sites.

Another option is time-expiring addresses. I do this for usenet since there are no subscription issues. I change addresses every month, and they last for 2, giving a reasonable working time. Again - obscured real address in the sig.

These schemes obviously work best when you control your own domain as you can have custom bounce messages and such. I actually use several domains for different things (and host accounts for family and friends...)

I supported Wine development in a small way early on when I was director of the Syntropy Institute. I think one of the most important things we've learned from Wine Development is that catching up with a complex closed source project is _hard_. My guess is that Xen will be the first Open Source product to really allow Windows and Linux to coexist well. IMHO it is worthwhile for Wine to be fully developed-but in the meantime, Xen provides a solution that is applicable for folks that already have a Windows license. Xen appears to have Microsoft's blessing. The release of Xen will mean there is no reason not to have Linux on any Windows machine-you'll be able to give Windows badly needed adult supervision with no more ill effects other than use of a bit of disk space and cpu cycles.

Everyone who wants to communicate about their computer should name the thing, if only for the sake of the tech support people they call to help them out when it's busted. But most people choose horrible names like "david's computer", or "my new computer", or worse, they name it after their spouse or something.

The Naming of Hosts is a difficult matter,
It isn't just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a host must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.

Since 1990 IMAP had a "search unseen" feature (See http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1176.html which enabled clients to easily broaden and narrow searches easily (see Pine for a good implementation).

I currently have about 1GB across a few IMAP folders at my ISP; and can search the hole think quickly and efficiently using '90's technology.

I don't see the big deal.

Sounds like progressive JPEG to me, in which case the patent would apply to browsers.

Perhaps. Though progressive, as I understand it, isn't really a diff of images. It's one image where, at each stage of refinement, more data is displayed. Ie, it's simply a way of displaying a subset of the pixel information on-the-fly. See What is progressive JPEG?

Why the tab in column 1? Yacc was new, Lex was brand new. I hadn't tried either, so I figured this would be a good excuse to learn. After getting myself snarled up with my first stab at Lex, I just did something simple with the pattern newline-tab. It worked, it stayed. And then a few weeks later I had a user population of about a dozen, most of them friends, and I didn't want to screw up my embedded base. The rest, sadly, is history.

There is only one protocol for this: RFC 3251 -- Electricity over IP.

(In fact, as far as I know, the MD5 option was added to TCP specifically to get round this vulnerability in BGP!)

Patrick

Just block the packets that will have the evil bit set. After all, it was for cases like this it was introduced. Doh!

I can't believe where we're heading today, when so many developers sloppily seem to think "bah, just another useless standard we can ignore" when the standard in question is a very important one to follow!

For more information about what TCP resets are and why they can be harmful, see RFC3360.

Why in the world in 2004 are we still using username/passwords as the primary means of authentication and authorization?

Usernames and passwords do nothing to authenticate someone. All they mean is that someone knows a username and password. Besides being a lowsy way to authenticate somebody, passwords are a pain in the ass. Everybody has different rules for having a "good password" , they expire at different times, and it seems as though every website now requres a username and password to buy something, or read extra content, or whatever. Its gotten so out of hand that I make up 99% of my username and passwords and redoit every time I go to the site.

Compare this to going to a physical place like a store or resteraunt. When you go to a bar or nightclub, does the doorman say, "Hey man, come into this room here, and fill out some forms. You must then think of a unique name thats not your real name, and please make a list of some random characters that should be different from every other nightclub that you go to, and remember both of these every time you come back here. Oh yeah, I need to see an ID too, because its the law that you have to be 21 to drink."?

If someone asked me to do this, I'd tell them to go to hell.

But this is OK to do this with computers? Why?

PKI is out there, been around for quite some time. There can be X.509 certs that have things like your age, address, etc, that has been issued by somebody with some form of verification process, and signed by that issuer. These certs can be used over and over again, and the information in them can be given to whomever asks. Wanna look at some free porn? Well, give me your cert field that says your over 18 please. No username, no password, and very little chance that little Johnny will have access to such a cert. Oh, and this cert can be stored on a credit card sized piece of plastic called a smartcard. I have probably close to 10 credit card sized cards in my wallet, I bet you have a few as well.

Sometimes it amazes me how much different situations can be when a computer is involved. For example, how many other times in your life have you used a password besides on a computer? I can hear the tin foil heads saying that "Using an ID with a computer will violate my privacy!" Yet its completely volunary for you to give up the information either via filling out a form, or by showing an ID physically or electronically. Is anyones privacy any better with the current system?

I wonder how much longer its going to take before we get out of the username/password insanity.

Wow, and I thought RFC 3251 was just a joke!

"Openness means dirty laundry IS aired in public." This is strictly a bad thing. We don't need to have CIOs potentially exposed to Richard M. Stallman and his self-aggrandizement. We don't want to have our critical customers exposed to the egos that rewrite dictionaries and spam mailing lists with idiotic rants about "anti-idiotarianism."

Frankly, I think the Open Source movement's greatest enemy is its own membership. When a professional software developer lets his ego get the best of him, he gets fired. When an open source developer starts ranting, he starts public embarrassing flame wars that only undermine investors' confidence in the viability of Linux tools.

Sincerely,
Seth Finklestein
Flaming For Peace

I guess I should have said that it is pretty easy, given a few things.

• You are running a 2.6 kernel (I am)
• You are running Debian (I am), Debian unstable has an Xserver reaady for multiple X-heads, and no special issues

My setup:

1. Geforce4MX/USB Keyboard/USB Mouse
2. Matrox G200-TV/PS2 keyboard/serial Wacom tablet

• If you want multiple consoles with seperate keyboards/mice, then you are looking for The Linux Console Project, I've never played with this
• If you just want multiple X-Sessions running with sperate keyboards/mice, then you should just need to seperate all your keyboard, mice, and screens into sperate ServerLayout sections of your XF86Config-4 file. check here for documentation, This isn't actually all that hard.

Wonder no more ...

RFC 3607 - Chinese Lottery Cryptanalysis Revisited: The Internet as a Codebreaking Tool

Agreed. And I know a ton of people who are boycotting the music industry because of this. I knew maybe one or two people boycotting them before this PPP crackdown, DRM, and suing of 12yo's shit went down, but now I know several dozen, myself included. Also, their high album prices drive away a lot of customers.

On the murder comparison, I dont think thats stealing a life either. Its destroying one. If i were to do that to some music then by analogy nobody would have a copy of it any more including the copyright holders.

Just the fact that the grandparent poster invoked the murder comparision in what should be a civil matter makes his/her argument weak. Not too far from mentioning...something that would be sure to end this thread of discussion.

Fraud is as ridiculous a comparision as stealing, IMO, if not more so. Even if you can stretch the law to call it that, unless you're selling it, I don't imagine it holding up in court.

ObQuirk: I call Quirk Objection, five times over.

Then again, they all sound like fun. Except for the unwarranted slur against Oedipal fellatio fetishists who happen to be descended from medically-challenged ladies of the evening. I expect you'll be getting your cease-and-desist notice from the MCSOAFWAnti-Defamation League shortly.

I didn't post above, but I currently use both XP and 2000 daily. Make your own decisions but I also use OS X daily and it's far and away the most pleasant working environment I've encountered to date. That doesn't mean it's perfect, by any stretch of the imagination, but that's not the point now, is it.

As for "OS 9," um, who's talking about OS 9?

If you want Unix, install Linux... FreeBSD... SuSE... Debian... Lycoris... Lindows... There are choices in the Windows world.

Well, by the time I've finished clicking through the (Continue) buttons in an OS X install I've managed to install both the entire GUI environment and the entire Unix OS. I can also install other Unix systems on Mac hardware, but frankly I've got everything I need right here.

I don't need to install anything else except Logic Pro 6, Ableton Live, MetaSynth, ArtMatic Pro, MetaTrack, Voyager, VTrack, Absynth, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, OmniDiskSweeper, Studiometry, FileMakerPro, Adobe Creative Suite, LaunchBar, MySQL, Perl 5.8.3, Fink, Plone, Keynote, BBEdit, FastTrack Schedule Pro, Sonasphere, Toast 6, ZBrush, and a few more but I'll get to those tomorrow.

I run all these (plus my email, internet, contacts management, calendaring, etc) in the same operating environment; not an emulation shell, not after dual-booting, but in the very same operating system and simultaneously.

To top it all off OS X comes with a full set of developer tools, documentation and optimization utilities, plus Cocoa+Obj-C is a match made in heaven.

There's no need to pay Apple for a decent Unix experience.

Well, I believe there is. I enjoy the ability to support quality whether it's a film, a restaurant, a music venue, a book, clothing, my neighborhood, an artist, etc. every single day.

The hardware is just a hunk of material until you've discovered/designed an interface with which to use it. Solely on a base consumer level, I'm very happy to pay Apple for what is, in daily practice, a superior computer operating system. From the level of both a technology consultant and a media creator, the solution is very simple.

OS X is a very impressive "Holy Grail" for all my current activities. Strap me in because I'm ready to get to work.

I think this is the one that ended up being the most help (I had problems getting the steps in the general printing howto to payoff for me)...

debian windows shared printing

Make sure to force the CUPS sharing into RAW mode...

I certainly haven't trained for a marathon or even a 10K, but there's no reason not to scale up within reason depending on your training.

Couldn't we use the security flag from RFC 3514 for that? It would make as much sense as the broadcast flag, but would be more general. Why new flag?

The content of a NWG note may be any thought, suggestion, etc. related to the HOST software or other aspect of the network. Notes are encouraged to be timely rather than polished. Philosophical positions without examples or other specifics, specific suggestions or implementation techniques without introductory or background explication, and explicit questions without any attempted answers are all acceptable. The minimum length for a NWG note is one sentence.

These standards (or lack of them) are stated explicitly for two reasons. First, there is a tendency to view a written statement as ipso facto authoritative, and we hope to promote the exchange and discussion of considerably less than authoritative ideas. Second, there is a natural hesitancy to publish something unpolished, and we hope to ease this inhibition.

An important one.

IMHO, probably one of the most important and most well-known is RFC 822.

Even though HTTP is used even more than SMTP these days it wasn't always so. I kept hearing no end of RFC 822, the Dcc field, etc. in the old days.

From a history of the Internet perspective I have to wonder when it was that port 80 traffic overtook port 25.

This may be odd, but a quick jaunt through the archive shows that RFC4 seems to predate it by a few days: it was born on March 24th vs. RFC1's April 7th...

-Jack Ash

Read RFC1543

:-)

RFC 4 has a date of 24 March 1969. Granted, it probably wasn't considered an RFC until a couple of weeks later, but...

Usually we get a new RFC on april fools day, they are slipping this year so I will repost an oldie but goodie. RFC 3514, the security flag. (A.K.A. "evil" bit)

Did it occur to you that today is April Fool's Day?

In previous years other spoof RFCs have come out, such as RFC 1149, A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers.

They compare it to the implementation of RFC1149 in Bergen by BLUG,however this is clearly a breach of 1149.

From RFC1149:

[snip]
Frame Format

The IP datagram is printed, on a small scroll of paper, in hexadecimal, with each octet separated by whitestuff and blackstuff. The scroll of paper is wrapped around one leg of the avian carrier. A band of duct tape is used to secure the datagram's edges. The bandwidth is limited to the leg length.
[/snip]
See. One IP datagram, one scroll of paper. The community demands interoperability tests if CPIP is ever to become a standard


*sigh*

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1149.html

A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers

Status of this Memo

This memo describes an experimental method for the encapsulation of IP datagrams in avian carriers. This specification is primarily useful in Metropolitan Area Networks. This is an experimental, not recommended standard. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

Overview and Rational

Avian carriers can provide high delay, low throughput, and low altitude service. The connection topology is limited to a single point-to-point path for each carrier, used with standard carriers, but many carriers can be used without significant interference with each other, outside of early spring. This is because of the 3D ether space available to the carriers, in contrast to the 1D ether used by IEEE802.3. The carriers have an intrinsic collision avoidance system, which increases availability. Unlike some network technologies, such as packet radio, communication is not limited to line-of-sight distance. Connection oriented service is available in some cities, usually based upon a central hub topology.

Frame Format

The IP datagram is printed, on a small scroll of paper, in hexadecimal, with each octet separated by whitestuff and blackstuff. The scroll of paper is wrapped around one leg of the avian carrier. A band of duct tape is used to secure the datagram's edges. The bandwidth is limited to the leg length. The MTU is variable, and paradoxically, generally increases with increased carrier age. A typical MTU is 256 milligrams. Some datagram padding may be needed.

Upon receipt, the duct tape is removed and the paper copy of the datagram is optically scanned into a electronically transmittable form.

Discussion

Multiple types of service can be provided with a prioritized pecking order. An additional property is built-in worm detection and eradication. Because IP only guarantees best effort delivery, loss of a carrier can be tolerated. With time, the carriers are self-regenerating. While broadcasting is not specified, storms can cause data loss. There is persistent delivery retry, until the carrier drops. Audit trails are automatically generated, and can often be found on logs and cable trays.

Security Considerations

Security is not generally a problem in normal operation, but special measures must be taken (such as data encryption) when avian carriers are used in a tactical environment.

Is this the list of things you can do via email you were looking for?

Can you find prior art? A published description of using a single DNS wildcard for user's subdomains prior to 8/99?

So the technology was patented or just the method? The technology is described here: RFC1034 or RFC1035

So then we need an implementation that can take advantage of multiple subdomains using a wildcard, prior to 1999. This will show it's possible to do what the patent describes without inventing new technololgy /writing new software:

Apache mod_rewrite
So in 1997 it was definitely possible.

So we need someone actually doing it, so the method wasn't invented by them either (I've only done a quick search on google here)
These two links: Google Group, and http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/417/1998/2/50 /2275350/. So there you go, prior art, or at least close enough to prior art. The can't patent this technology or idea. The best they could do would be to perhaps claim copyright on a particular implementation, but I doubt that would hold up either.