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relax, i was just foolin'

there's a system like this for gsm phones called International Mobile Equipment Identity

And using a document framework called OpenDoc.

Another great concept buried by Microsoft.

I'd never buy a wooden computer.

I'd never even accept one if it was given to me.

Reminds me too much of Greeks Bearing Gifts.

(clue for the philestines: I think we have enough trouble with TROJANS already)

This article somewhat erroneously compares the speed of "DSL" vs the speed of "BIC-TCP". DSL is a link-layer protocol. BIC-TCP is an network layer protocol. These are different things. See http://www.webopedia.com/quick_ref/OSI_Layers.asp for details.

The question I'd love to ask the authors would be "so, what happens when I run BIC-TCP over a DSL modem? Does it suddenly become 6000 times faster?" I don't think so.
Connections are still going to be constrained by the underlying link speed, and the internet will not become thousands of times faster overnight because of this.

Sure, BIC-TCP looks like it's more efficient than TCP and that's a good thing, but the gains this protocol provides over TCP are in scalability when using suitably big links.

Bullshit. The owner of any particular work can put whatever restrictions they with on it's use.

No, they can't.

What if I'm controlling my media access?

I'm Rick James, Bitch

Likewise, is DDR a former communist country, a type of SDRAM, or a rhythm video game?

And I thought "CRM" was Christopher R. Milne, son of late children's book author A. A. Milne.

Grandparent does have a solid point though. The obvious intent of the 386 Protected Mode Specification (or any DPMI Spec for that matter that covers the behavior of segment descriptors) outlines the spirit of this concept he/she mentioned.

See DPMI Specification, here and here.

For the uninitiated, the CPU watches the kinds of activites performed on different types of segments and coughs up an interrupt if the program breaks the rules. This is the source of the infamous "Illegal Operation" errors you get in Windows 3.11, among other things. The second you try to execute data, or write to code without going through specific channels, things grind to an immediate halt. You can use pointer arithmetic to talk to other chunks of memory outside the allocation range of the segment, but the location of other code segments is also specified to be somewhat unpredictable, due to page caching (Unless those pages are locked).

So the sprit of processor-based protection did exist 14+years ago. That's somewhat besides the fact since the exploit mentioned in this article, has much more to do with working within stack, not data segments.

As long as you don't overflow the stack, you can still overrun a stack-allocated buffer and muck with the return address as well as older stack frames (remember, the stack winds down, not up, into memory). Adding additional, executable code to this 'payload' is really just an added bonus.

If I had to guess, I'd say that AMD is going to track if CS:IP is aimed at any allocated region assigned to a data or stack style descriptor and fire and interrupt. The same may go for any combination of ES, DS, GS or SS based pointer set to any code segment.

IMO, It makes sense that a processor manufacturer is stepping up to solve this problem since such protection would have to be a processor behavior in order to be secure. However, I wonder about the implications this will have on operating-system software since *something* will have to handle the destruction of compromised threads/processes.

If you RTFA you will realize that I'm not lying in the least when I say that, effectively, they ran out of flash-based "disk" space!

To me, if this were a Unix-like system, it sounds like they ran out of inodes. Running out of inodes is very different than running out of disk space.

If you think runing out of disk space can be hard to trouble shoot, try running out of inodes.

Why would Maxtor's drive testing tool disable auto sector relocation? The test is to ensure that the drive is useable, not to ensure that there are no bad sectors on the underlying media. In fact, the underlying media usually has bad sectors from the factory.

The original poster says that the Maxtor tester disables the feature when testing. It's possible that he's right, but it isn't the norm. More than once, I've had a drive with bad sectors that was miraculously "cured" by zeroing it out (dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda), to the satisfaction of the manufacturer's diagnostic test. (To my chagrin, on the one drive, the bad sectors came back with reinforcements months later. I guess there's only so many spare sectors to map.)

I'll agree that Steve Gibson is a nut. SpinRite has some good ideas in it, though, but it hasn't been updated in years and is more useful for older drives. It was a good piece of software in its time, and it's probably the reason that he gets as much attention as he does today.

It's hard to believe there is 'heavy' use of IPv6 when the dedicated IPv6 exchange in the UK peaks at 4Mbit/s of traffic and the LINX exchange in London has >30Gbit/s of IPv4 traffic

https://lg.ipv6.btexact.com/lgmrtg/hopper-day.html

http://www.linx.net/tools/stats/index.thtml

Sorry, but not true. Both Verdan and Tahoma are sans serif fonts, whereas Times New Roman is a serif font. A very common guideline for readability is that body text should use a serif font; sans serif fonts are better for titles.

Sorry, but not true. Both Verdan and Tahoma are sans serif fonts, whereas Times New Roman is a serif font. A very common guideline for readability is that body text should use a serif font; sans serif fonts are better for titles.

Hey, 128k (actually 144k with DSL or ISDN) IDSL isn't big-bad broadband. But is is a hellavalot faster than 53.3k.

Thanks for providing a link to The Supreme Court. Now I can visit its site to find out what it is. Good thing posters on on Slashdot privide hyperlinks to every page on the World Wide Web that they reference. Otherwise we'd all be confused idiots.

Well, there it is - my first rudely sarcastic post.

Some day, firms will indeed stop maintaining huge, complex and expensive computer systems that often sit idle and cannot communicate with the computers of suppliers and customers. Instead, they will outsource their computing to specialists (IBM, HP, etc) and pay for it as they use it, just as they now pay for their electricity, gas and water. As with such traditional utilities, the complexity of the supply-systems will be entirely hidden from users.

Here is the term most of these replies are probably looking for... JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks).

Actually, Network Attached Storage to be precise.

Real Men use uuencode/uudecode.

That's not Polymorphism, it's plain old static typing.

It is highly related to polymorphism. Was my original criticism entirely lost on you? I said dynamic typed languages do not support "true" polymorphism, because - as you mentioned - any class can be valid with any expression provided it contains the requisite method! For instance, classes "ShapeA" and "ShapeB" could both contain the method area(), allowing for the seemingly proper execution of code, while failing to extend the anticipated "BaseShape".

They don't complicate debugging at all - you see the traceback on exception, and notice what line of code calls a method that doesn't exist. Such errors are trivial to correct, and are not really all that common either (usually typos)

In most cases I would agree with you, but only if you assume the developer writing code using the function:
1. Has perfect documentation, and never forgets to implement a rarely used, but critical method; or
2. Has the source code so the he can see how the function works so that he can make sure he hasn't forgotten to implement a method that is only called in certain circumstances; or
3. Tests all possible input

That's because usually these checks are not made at all in dynamically typed languages. They are simply not needed.

Actually, in many cases these checks need to be made, especially within the scope of framework or toolkit development (of which I do a considerable amount).

It's a tradeoff, really. Dynamically typed languages lose some, and win a lot.

The gains decrease exponentially with the size, and complexity of the project.

Believe me, I used to think the way you do now before discovering Python.

Well I'll certainly give it a try. Please understand that I really have no prejudice when it comes to languages; they all have advantages, and disadvantages. What I'm attempting to do is make observations based around issues that dynamically typed languages have in common.

He forgot the EX at the end - as in Exabyte

"Bubble memory is here and ... in use today... [in] Specalist machines. I suggest you do research."

Beg pardon for not taking several hours off to do research before posting :-) Actually, if you hit Webopedia http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/b/bubble_memory.html , you will see "It was once widely believed that bubble memory would become one of the leading memory technologies, but these promises have not been fulfilled."

Seriously, I hope it's fairly clear from the context that vaporware refers to stuff that never fulfilled its glowing promise; not necessarily stuff that never sold even a few units.

but no full-screen maximize mode on any convenient keypress if the feature is even there.

Others already pointed out before me that full-screen is available only with QT Pro (~30$). On the Mac there are free add-ons to play full-screen, like this one. Dunno if that exists for Windows.

Anyway, Quicktime don't let you do any of this stuff. Who is it for? Who uses it, other than mac loons without viable alternatives?

You shouldn't forget that you're not talking about QuickTime, which is a technology integrated to the system on Mac OS X. You're bitching about the QuickTime Player, which is essentially a crippled frontend to the technology, no worse than WMP or Real Player. See this for an overview. And by the way, don't worry for Mac loons, I don't think they lack choice.

the quicktime versions always tend to be itty bitty 320x240 things with scratchy lo-fi sound

I don't see how you can blame QuickTime or Apple for that. If you want some quality content encapsulated in .mov wrapper, just go here for a starter. In fact, if QT was so irrelevant, I don't see why the format has been taken as the basis for the MPEG-4 standard by the ISO.

No, seriously? Windows GUIs suck... compared to what?

Compared to X? The same X where every single programmer just _has_ to use a different layout, different shortcuts, different menu structure, and for bonus points his own widgets?

Not to make you sound like a newbie in the world of computing, but what you are railing against isn't the 'ease of use' of UNIX/GNU/Linux GUIs.

Many, many people fall into this trap. What you are proposing is the adoption of something both unessecary (and in many cases) Evil, Bad and Wrong. This thing is called an SAA CUA. They were practically invented by IBM in the 50s and 60s. These ideas are simple: do something one way and only one way.

From the user's perspective, this is okay. I only have to learn quaduple-double-bucky-shift-Q to print once.

From the UI designer's point of view this is crap. Look at video games. Many custom, learn once and use once indterfaces. Games deal with this by being on the cutting edge of computer-assisted education. They have dollars and reputations staked in 'playability' and 'ease of use' so they do the Right Thing.

Wrong Thing: pick standard, crappy global contants, enforce those on everyone. Aribitrary user interfaces are just as bad as random interfaces.

Right Thing: common core behavior in frameworks that act AS EXPECTED, customized application interfaces to the TASK that the application SOLVES or DOES. Show and Walk users through the non-standard parts with HOW-TOs, demos and trainers.

The Right Way is more work for the lazy, boring person who wouldn't write documentation anyway. The Wrong Way means that you probably will guess correctly on the first try, but the application programmer still didn't do his job.

This is a very important sticking point with the Aunt Mable newbie computer user argument as well. If good ol' Auntie has never used a computer, learning a KDE (GNOME) desktop or the UNIX command line will be as EQUALLY challenging as learning a WIMP like Windows. MACs were/are easily learned because of some UI choices that favor new users without bothering experienced users (of those UI's).

Finally, like in the world of video games, with the diversity of UIs in Linux/GNU/Unix I can select those features/interfaces that work best and use them. With a system like Windows, some people won't buy/sell your software unless is meets the criteria in the SAA CUA.

I appologise for the grammar. I need more sleep and less Trolls.

Steganography has been around since the days of the ancient geeks, er greeks. :)

http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/S/steganography.html

"Steganography (literally meaning covered writing) dates back to ancient Greece, where common practices consisted of etching messages in wooden tablets and covering them with wax, and tattooing a shaved messenger's head, letting his hair grow back, then shaving it again when he arrived at his contact point."

I feel sorry for the messenger who's tattoo ended in "Destroy this message after receiving." We can't have male pattern baldness exposing classified information!

"With the help of the new LZW time compression algorithm. Why else do you think companies outsource to Bangalore?"

Because they don't hate Unisys there yet? Or is it because they call 26 year old things new?

I have some new farting technology for sale, too. It stinks better than the farts you know, and it's patent pending!

The first employs the "Berkeley Packet Filter" (BPF) firewall but SCO ever held an ownership interest in the original BPF implementation

Moglen said a pattern matching search shows SCO what it thought was an example of copying

but the "C code" shown in the slides was first incorporated in Unix Version 3

SCO used pattern matching to associate code as its own

It has therefore published its supposed trade secrets and copy-righted material

distribute under GPL (define)

He also sees merit in IBM's counterclaim against SCO raises with respect to IBM's contributions to the Linux kernel.

anyone who violates GPL automatically loses

Etc., etc. Wasn't Slashdot's point to link original sources so as to spare us such tripe? Editors: edit!

Close, but not quite. The apple II didn't use VRAM; it used standard DRAM as part of the memory map (at either 0x400-7FF default, or 0x800-0xBFF page two).

This was part of the beauty of woz's design ... processor and video accesses were interleaved at a 1:1 ratio, so when the video system scanned through memory to draw to the screen, it also refreshed the dram. (You didn't need to access all the memory to refresh it, just through a certain number of low-order bits). The IBM PC required a timer and a dma controller to handle its refreshes, adding extra hardware.

And, to continue the grumpy old man tradition... my PC-4 had 544 bytes standard, and I bought the 1K expansion module. It had a display on the screen that showed the number of bytes remaining.

how does the fact that the router uses a packet shaper require the end user to have AV software?

No, I'm not talking about his dick, you perv! I'm talking about the DMCA, President Clinton's personal gift to the IT world.

Seriously, I have a problem here. My job is to make customers' IT systems work with my employer's product. It involves testing software and fixing bugs. It means poking into third-party products and trying to find potentially damaging flaws.

If this becomes a crime, we IT grunts better find a way out. Preferably before we're sent to jail for finding a flaw in a piece of software junk released by a company that spends more in lawyer fees than in R&D.

--SysKoll

# from file: Big Mac rant.txt
I have found that you have capitalized all the letters in the word Mac. However, Mac is short for Macintosh, a model series of computers and operating systems designed by the Apple Computer, Inc. of Cupertino California. e.g. iMac, Power Mac and Mac OS X: http://www.apple.com/

It is a common misconception that MAC is an acronym that stands for something such as DOS (Disk Operating System) and ACL (Anterior Cruciate Ligament) those examples being an Acronym (see: http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=Acronym ) and an Initialism (see: http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=Initialism ) respectively.

However Mac is an abbreviation (see: http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=abbreviation ) of the full word Macintosh. If it is written as all capitals, MAC, is an acronym for the computer technology Media Access Control: http://webopedia.com/TERM/M/MAC.html which is a technology and standard used in the hardware devices used to connect to the internet or network computers together (modems, network interface cards, routers, switches and hubs.)

I hope that I have not offended or overwhelmed you. It was simply my intention to inform you as to the proper capitalization of the abbreviation for Macintosh.
#EOF

Well, XML was really mostly a buzzword that PHB's and marketing types threw around a couple years ago. Remember how XML was going to allow business to automatically place orders, any device to get any piece of information, your toaster to talk to your fridge, etc.? Well, I guess what they failed to mention was that it had to actually be implemented in everything.

XML is a nice format, for some things: it's human readable, it's extensable, it's based in plaintext, so easy to compress/transmit/whatever, and it's a good way of representing objects in lists or a hierarchy (or both). To make it actually do anything though, you have to specify a format. For two business to talk to each other, they have to use the same formats, and provide the interfaces.

Now we are talking about XAML. Is this just a name for one of those proprietary schema in XML, or is it a new proprientary markup type trying to score off XML's name, or...?

I've actually never heard of XAML before, but according to Webopedia, it sounds like the same old crap, once again. :)

Likely scoring off XML's name isn't too far off, either. PHB's eat this stuff up.

I guess you never heard about pseudocode then. Because that's what the original poster wrote.

I thought that the parent was referring to FPGAs or Field Programmable Gate Arrays

These devices are chips that can be programmed to perform a certain function. They used to mainly be used for prototyping, but recently are being used for all kinds of things (even processors) because they allow you to produce small numbers (even just 1) of a chip cheaply and quickly, without having th rely on the economies of scale that you get with the hardwired chips.

The specific application the grand-parent was probably referring to was Digital Signal Processing (DSP). This is a common application for FPGAs (don't ask me why....IANA-EE (yet)). DSPs are used to (suprise) process signals digitally. This could include (de)compression, (un)encrypting, filtering, and/or frequency modulation in hardware.

I haven't had my DSP classes yet, so I may be a little off, but that's the general gist of it...

A large percentage of new mobile phones from the major manufacturers are all equipped with Bluetooth, and combined with GPRS, it's an ideal way to connect your laptop to the internet when you're on the move.

It allows my calendar on my Mac to synchronise with the calendar on my organiser, it lets me send files to and from my office PC without the need for a network, and it's even used for wireless keyboards, mice, and audio headsets.

It's the wireless equivalent of USB, and it works just fine thank you.

This is the last bit of the old home network that used to connect my SE/30 to a Deskwriter and my mother's Macintosh classic. Ah, the time when you could do your own network cabling with telephone wires, simple soldering and small resistors.

This is really an amazing thread, because half of the posts seem to be really strident calls for use of this "kibibyte" terminology that I've never heard of before.

I teach CS in a community college and I've got a whole bookshelf here of CS books and not one of them has any reference to this "kibi" notation. My Webster's New World Dictionary (c) 1988 defines "kilobyte n. 1. a unit of capacity, equal to 1,024 (2^10) bytes 2. loosely, one thousand bytes". Webopedia lists kilobyte as meaning 2^10, and has no entry for "kibibyte". Link.

This "kibibyte" notation is really very nonstandard and it's astonishing to see people incensed over the decades-old practice of "kilobyte = 1024 bytes".

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't a plugin essentially the same thing as OLE, which has been around since before Windows 3.1? I mean, OLE does stand for Object Linking and Embedding and it was developed by our friends at Microsoft.

MRAM @ whatis.techtarget.com
MRAM @ Webopedia
MRAM @ German Wikipedia

Win32s gave the ability to run some Win32 programs on Win 3.11.

Webopedia TCP/IP Entry
Sangoma's TCP/IP Routing Tutorial

In a nutshell, the IP address space was designed so that information about routing was built in to the addresses themselves by dividing it into two parts: a network (n) part and a host (h) part. Since they wanted as much flexibility as possible to assign big networks and little networks with just enough hosts, they broke the address space into classes A,B,C, etc. that could be determined by inspection of value of the first octet.

To deterimine the class of the address, you first you have to write out the first octet of the address in binary.

If the first octet starts with 0 binary (meaning the first octet itself is between 0 and 127 decimal), then it is a CLASS A address. The first octet is the network address and the last three octets are taken together to be the host address (n.h.h.h). This means it has a netmask of /8 or 255.0.0.0 and there are 2^24 individual hosts available for addressing and/or subnetting. Note that the loopback 127.0.0.1 and the 10.0.0.0 nets are both class A.

If the first octet starts with 10 binary (meaning the first octet is between 128 and 191), it's a CLASS B with two octets for the net address and two for the host (n.n.h.h). It has a netmask of /16 or 255.255.0.0 with 2^16 hosts to address or subnet.

If the first octet starts with 110 binary (meaning it's between 192 and 223 decimal), it's a CLASS C with three octets to specify the network and one for the host (n.n.n.h). These have netmask /24 or 255.255.255.0 with 2^8=256 host addresses.

Of course, this is all goes out the window with CIDR. High-speed dedicated routers brought the realization that the class-ful blocks we unnecessary and you could just use the subnet mask itself to determine routing. This allowed them to use more flexible rules to arbitrarily divide the address blocks into smaller chunks like /2, /3, /15. etc.

1) Are there any?
No idea, a check around the net may come up with something. However they are specific to the board you are using...

2) How much bios code is reusable between completely different motherboards?
This again depends, on similar hardware, memory controllers, etc...

3) Will we always need a bios?
Well the other option is a ROM monitor or ipl (Initial program loader), those need to be written for the board you have, which is not trivial, esp without the hardware manual (specs, etc.)

Your suspicion is right - usually the components are as follows:

DHTML = (XHTML || HTML) + (DOM || JS) + CSS

Then the newb goes out looking for a DHTML language reference but guess what: The language doesn't exist.

An excellent point, which shows the problem in not only trying to learn 'DHTML', but dismissing learning other basic concepts (such as DOM) thinking it's something other than DHTML.

Judging by the very general definition at Webopedia, for one to say "I'm learning DHTML" doesn't mean very much..

"Don't most people just flip on the TV (or 'telly' in the UK I guess) when they are seeking "rich multimedia content" that neither broadband nor a newspaper can deliver?"

Wasn't Intercast and TeleText suppose to be the "rich multimedia content"?

Right story, wrong consortium product. VESA is not a bus, it's a standard for a Super VGA BIOS. The EISA bus was defined by IBM's rivals.

Somehow I think slashdot readers are smart enough to find Sony, Philips, Matsushita, Panasonic, Hitachi, Sharp, Samsung, NEC, IBM, LG, Thomson, RCA, or Toshiba websites without the useless plethora of links.

If I See Another Hyperlink I Might Explode

Sorry, but "...nothing but the main CPU..." means you only got the processor. I think you meant that you only got the console, or the system unit.

A CPU (reasonable definition) in a desktop computer would be the Pentium/SPARC/PowerPC etc. -- CPU does not refer to the whole system box (which along with the CPU usualy has a HD, CD/DVD, power supply, motherboard, memory etc.). Similarly with consoles: the CPU is the processor and the console usually also houses a power supply, memory, I/O circuitry, graphics processor(s) etc.

Sorry for the pedantry, but I expect a little more from the /. crowd.

In any case, brighter or underlined text onscreen is a far cry from WYSIWYG.

From here:

Note that the WYSIWYGness of an application is relative. Originally, WYSIWYG referred to any word processor that could accurately show line breaks on the display screen. Later WYSIWYGs had to be able to show different font sizes, even if the screen display was limited to one typeface. Now, a word processor must be able to display graphics and many different typefaces to be considered WYSIWYG.

Well I don't remember "being able to accurately display linebreaks" as WYSIWYG, but then even my old WordStar 3 (I think) defaulted to showing control codes only, and I don't think you could get it to do otherwise.

01010011-01101100
01100001-01110011
01101000-011 00100
01101111-01110100
00101110-01001111
01010 010-01000111
If you can read this, you belong here.

Very funny. Does .ORG really have to be capitalized? It's like yelling. :) And does this mean that Slashdor favors a particular endian?