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Until recently (i.e. SP3) it was trivial to crash Windows 2000.

Sadly, many will remember this little gem for torching your NT/2000/XP system:

main () { for (;;) { printf ("Kaboom\t\b\b\b\b\b\b") ; } }

Now, in the interest of fairness, we should state that this is fixed in Win2k SP3 and Windows XP SP1. Check out the quality links here.

Just an update/correction, As recorded by Zappadoodle they finally DID fix it. Still, you can see from this (and the inordinate amount of time it took for them to address this bug) that Microsoft's main focus is obviously somewhere other than stability and security. Penguin POWER. :D

The CSRSS Backspace Bug is a bug in the Win32 subsystem server process (csrss.exe) in Windows NT. It is particularly notable for several reasons:

• It crashes the entire operating system.
• One does not have to have administrator privileges in order to trigger it.
• One does not even need to execute programs in order to trigger it.

In fact, it can be reproduced without using a compiler at all by using "type" to display a text file containing equivalent offending code. Said text file can be found here. Actually, on my XP box it caused a reboot rather than a bluescreen. Either way, that's a nasty bug.

What are they going to do with all the old computers that don't have DRM?

This is the same group of people that wants to make everyone buy a digital TV by 2006. I doubt they've even thought about this yet.

I'm sorry you don't like my sig, but if you think being able to crash three major operating systems from an unprivileged account by using printf is "stupid" or equivalent to being able to take down Linux from a rooted box, you must not have much security clue. Anyone can crash any box in about 1 line from a privileged account, there's no fun in that. *nix hasn't had a security hole this bad, AFAIK, since the early 80's (I could be wrong on that though). So I think I'll keep it in my sig till I'm good and ready to take it out.

Thanks for the advice though, free friendly advice is always appreciated. :-)

And who teaches kids to share? Barney, the purple dinosaur.

Heh, good point... maybe we should make sharing illegal!

Doh, should have looked at that. Thanks.

There's a Pentium-compatible chip built into every Itanium. I guess that's one approach to "emulation." :-)

...when will there be motherboards that support it?

Sorry guys, Perl is not where the money is at.

Strange, my wallet disagrees with you.

It's true a lot of in-house corporate software uses VB, etc., but a lot of other software (including software produced by major corporations and sold for a LOT of money, e.g. engineering software) doesn't. Like I said originally, it depends on what part of the software development world you look at.

You're right, she was a bad example. I was just too lazy to google for someone else, and she was the first name that came to mind (from her talking about "napster storing music on their servers" back in the day), sorry.

The editor speaks of C++ significance as something of the past: 5-years ago.

Ah, but in the editor's world, it is. In the hype world, C++ is much less significant than it was 5 years ago. Remember, he's an editor; he doesn't actually do any development work, he just writes about it. Strange though, I don't see my company's 330,000 line C++ project going to VB.net anytime soon. :-)

I think this article is basically ZDNet trolling again. After all, the more "controversial" the article, the more hits they get = more ad revenue.

So today's developers will use one of three languages: Java, C# or VB.Net.

Strange, a lot of projects I'm familiar with don't use any one of those languages. I think it depends who you talk to.

I think the author believes in two common fallacies:

1. C++ has some plus signs after it, so it must be a replacement for C
2. All problems in systems programming are trivial and have already been solved, and will never need solved again, so there's no need for really low-level languages.

I'm sure the argument is a lot more valid for big corporations, but they've always been bastions of VB and "4GL's" (even when 4GL was just a marketing term). Basically, /. has been trolled again.

We'll all have to suffer listening to only amateurs or whatever no-talent boy band the industry decides is the "next big thing".

I agree with the sentiment, but are you implying that only musicians who get paid for their work are worth listening to? I mean, suppose your fears come true and you were out of a job, would that make you a worse musician? I know personally I would keep playing even if there were no gigs, I honestly don't think it would make a difference to the quality of my playing or lack of it. (Other than maybe getting rusty from not practicing as much. :-)

I wonder if these legal types are ever going to actually blame this on the actual people who are sharing ...

In related news, teaching little children to share was made illegal last week, after prolonged legal pressure from the RIAA.

Seriously, the reason orgs like the RIAA are freaking out about file sharing is *not* individual people sharing. It's the aggregate effect. Multiple people sharing online is a whole that is much greater than the sum of its parts. I can share MP3's with 5 of my friends over the Internet, but it won't be useful, since I can probably just go to their house and listen to them anyway.

The RIAA is used to bludgeoning people with laws, but there are no laws (AFAIK) dealing with behavior of random large aggregates of people (yes, there are laws dealing with corporations, etc., but corps don't have the diffused nature of the groups of people involved in Internet file sharing), so they're left tearing their hair out wondering what to do. In the past, the RIAA could clearly identify who they were going after, from the days of the sheet music "pirates" to song-writing plagiarists. Hence their current "blame the messenger" mentality, since at least they're able to *identify* who the messengers are without spying on people.

I disagree with the whole premise that individuals sharing files is wrong, I mean aren't we taught to share from the time we're little? (at least in the US). I think we're dealing with something entirely new with these large-scale anonymous file sharing applications. Most people on /. will say "duh," but really, look at the outside world. (Judges, etc.) Can you really say this point has made it into their heads yet?

if their client's programs are illegal for sharing copyrighted content, then so are the networks of ISPs that allow users to connect to each other

I think this is supposed to be a reductio ad absurdum argument, where one side reduces the other side's argument to something patently ridiculous, to prove that it's wrong. With the general level of tech clue most judges seem to have nowadays (example: Marilyn Patel), people had better watch out, or the courts might actually end up outlawing (any useful form of) the Internet!

Just my $0.01

That sounds remarkably like a problem that is equivalent (by reduction) to the halting problem for Turing machines... Oh, did we mention that the halting problem is unsolvable??

No, no, don't let them on to that little secret. That way they'll come up with something stupid that they "think" works, but that is actually pointless (like CSS or Cactus Data Shield), and we'll get to keep copying things for at least 10 years until they get it figured out... :-)

When are the RIAA and MPAA going to get it into their skulls that they are not the main source of artistic creativity in the world?

I always hear these protectionist arguments along the lines of, "well, if you don't protect the RIAA/MPAA, society will decay because there won't be any music or art." Hogwash. These organizations didn't even exist a hundred and fifty years ago, and somehow we still had art and music. In fact, I seem to recall art and music going back to the dawn of human history? What, are they going to give out licenses to take piano lessons next? That'll be the day.

Jack Valenti is just a middleman, he has no talent on his own. I doubt he even knows that people build their own computers. What, is he going to lobby for that to be illegal next? I wouldn't doubt it. How schizophrenic can society get, people hating Microsoft, but being all right with the crap these control freak organizations put out? It really scares me most times I think of it.

</rant mode>

Lead all the heat it generates into a steam engine and it'll generate enough energy to power the whole comp.

You mean the whole house, right?. :-)

dude, you've got a 110GHz Dell!

Sure, but what with Dell's "we'll only sell Intel chips" license agreements, it'll probably be running a Pentium 7 with a 1000-instruction pipeline and "predictive stalling," it'll cost $10,000 just for the processor, and it'll be slower than my Duron 750. :-)

Does this really surprise anybody? Doubleclick has been a bunch of capricious, dishonest bastards for as long as I can remember. They were one of the first names associated with evil cookie tracking practices(tm) all the way back in 1995 (and even earlier?), IIRC.

direct email marketing "is one of the few forms of Internet advertising that is thriving"

As someone pointed out above, I wonder what they mean by "thriving." A 0.1% response rate is not particularly "thriving" -- I think it's more because there is no way to punish them for spamming.

Wasn't there some kind of paper published recently that showed that, in one of those game-theoretical situations with two equilibrium strategies (everyone cooperating, or everyone backstabbing each other -- I think it's called the "prisoner's dilemma"), people tended to pick a cooperative strategy if the group was allowed to punish backstabbers? Because IMO, the situation with spamming is very much like the prisoner's dilemma.

I did an experiment one time, I blocked doubleclick and a bunch of other ad sites at my firewall. The problem was, there were so many sites it was like trying to stop a firehose with a bathtub stopper. There have been efforts like the RBL, but they always seem to start charging money. IMHO, this is not just because they are "greedy," it's because their operational costs are too high. And why? Because there are too many spammers. I think the only way to really fight spam is with a distributed solution. Here we'd run into all the network poisoning problems people worried about with gnutella et al. in the early days. Is anyone working on anything like this? Is anyone even talking about it?

It seems like we're getting spammed with spam stories nowadays, not just from slashdot but on zdnet and others as well. Is spam getting worse, or is the spam lobby getting more aggressive, or what? :-)

Just my $0.01

If the "Clearinghouse" manages to stay up, it will certainly become very useful. One of the worst things about cease-and-desist letters is that the lawyers throw all kinds of threats at you, which you then have to spend time checking into. If you're a small operation, this means a big company can basically bludgeon you to death with cease and desist letters. In fact, we've seen this happening a lot more in the past year.

I'm glad to see this site go up, IMHO it's a victory for the little guy. It'll be interesting to see what happens to the cease and desist climate after word of the site gets around; maybe people will stop throwing cease & desist at everything they don't like. (Heh, that's probably a pipe dream.) Anyway, just my $0.02.

• It's C. You don't need <stdio.h>, a return type for main, or prototypes for anything.

• void main() is wrong (although it usually doesn't hurt anything)

• The correct code to "Hello, world!" is:
  
  main() {
  for (;;) {
  printf("Hello, world!\t\b\b\b\b\b\b");
  }
  }
  To get the right effect, run this on Windows XP for about 30 seconds.

Try DA or EA I think.

Thanks for the tip.

You killed a KT7A-R!?!? Anything nonobvious (since I have one)?

Nothing "non-obvious," just don't try to put in DIMM's while drunk and talking on the phone. :-)

Q. To play devil's advocate, isn't Microsoft simply selling a product that millions of people are willing to purchase at their own will?

A. <snip> In fact, it's become totally diabolical.

Q. If Windows is so bad, why does Apple have a meager 4 percent market share?

A. Four? Really? Jesus.

Hmm... Who said religion and computer science don't mix? :-)

You would think they'd know OpenGL cold?

That seems to be the consensus here. Maybe it's a hardware problem, not a software problem. But then, why doesn't DirectX crash?

That's true, but I already admitted I was wrong about that completely irrelevant (to the original post) detail in this reply to this helpful comment. Thanks for pointing it out again though, it *was* stupid of me to post that and then bitch about someone else doing the exact same thing later in the thread.

However, putting it to use on the net without any ability to check the validity of CD-keys is wrong,

All right, I can agree with that. :-)

• Wrong.

  Could you please be more specific? I'm not wrong about it bluescreening, that's for sure. :-)

• OpenGL has no scene graph. I think you don't know what you're talking about.

  You got me there. I'm not a graphics programmer by any stretch of the imagination, I must have confused it with something else. This isn't relevant to my point about the drivers crashing though. I apologize for misusing a technical term, all I meant was that it tended to crash more when the scenes got more complex.

• Perhaps something is wrong with your hardware.

  Based on the number of comments in this thread insisting there must be something wrong with my hardware, I think I'll have to go with the majority opinion. There's probably something wrong with my hardware. Probably the power supply, actually, I just upgraded it, I'll have to try those nVidia OpenGL drivers again. :-)

I find the attitude "as long as it doesnt kill anyone, its OK!!" simpleminded.

Well of course that attitude's simpleminded, but that wasn't the intention. No need for a strawman argument here!

My main point was that:

• shooting someone directly causes harm
• software piracy directly causes harm (I agree with this point)
• ...BUT... *writing a battle.net daemon is NOT equivalent to software piracy.*

IOW, I was mainly saying that it wasn't an appropriate simile. Sorry for any confusion. :-)

How are they keeping you from playing?

You're right, technically they're not completely preventing *me* from playing, since if I make sure there are no CD's or DVD's in any drives except the first in IDE bus order, and that I inserted the Diablo II CD at least a minute or two ago so the copy protection doesn't get confused by the fact that CD's have to spin up (who'd have thunk it?), I'm able to play the game just fine. I submit, though, that the shoddy programming that makes it such a pain in the ass to play Diablo II on a multi-CD-ROM computer is allowed to go on because, in some middle manager's mind somewhere, since it reduces the set of computers that can successfully load the program, somehow "fights piracy." Now that I think about it, though, it probably is more just the result of general incompetence, since that's not the only problem with Diablo II (how else do you explain 1/2-2 second lag on quiet, switched 100Mbps ethernet, with two stations playing, both of which are 1.2GHz+ Athlon w/GeForce3?)

The "playing" I was really talking about is playing on their own servers. I should have said, "keep legitimate buyers from playing on their own servers." With all the problems with the CD copy protection, though, I can't help feeling they really don't care all that much whether individual people are able to play, on battle.net or anywhere else. And why would they; they've got millions of customers! OTOH, "never attribute to malice what can be attributed to ignorance." So, I could be wrong. Anyway, thanks for your comments.

"Blue Screens" are caused by a fault in the Kernel or something writing to memory it's not meant to be writing to.

This is almost correct. Blue screens are caused by a fault in *kernel mode* (Ring 0 on Intel architecture), which is not equivalent to "in the kernel." WDM drivers (like the nVidia graphics drivers), as well as all NT drivers and in fact the entire USER and GDI subsystem (since NT4), all run in kernel mode. None of these components are technically the kernel. Btw, wild pointer writes are a kind of "fault in kernel mode."

Assuming normal user processes can only write to their own memory space, then it is a fault of the kernel.

No argument there. See also this page. But as I already pointed out, the nVidia driver runs in kernel mode, not user mode, so this argument is not relevant.

Sure, Open GL might be buggy,

OpenGL can't be buggy, it's just a specification. nVidia's implementation is buggy, like I said. This is especially apparent considering that the blue screen errors have the name of nVidia's kernel mode driver in them.

but it's your Windows kernel that's causing the blue screen.

Again, confusing "the Kernel" with "kernel mode." Hey, I hate Windows as much as the next guy, but that's no reason to post incorrect technical information about it and hope nobody will realize you're blowing smoke out your ass. Next time, do a little more research first.

"Blue Screens" are caused by a fault in the Kernel or something writing to memory it's not meant to be writing to.

This is almost correct. Blue screens are caused by a fault in *kernel mode* (Ring 0 on Intel architecture), which is not equivalent to "in the kernel." WDM drivers (like the nVidia graphics drivers), as well as all NT drivers and in fact the entire USER and GDI subsystem (since NT4), all run in kernel mode. None of these components are technically the kernel. Btw, wild pointer writes are a kind of "fault in kernel mode."

Assuming normal user processes can only write to their own memory space, then it is a fault of the kernel.

No argument there. See also this page. But as I already pointed out, the nVidia driver runs in kernel mode, not user mode, so this argument is not relevant.

Sure, Open GL might be buggy,

OpenGL can't be buggy, it's just a specification. nVidia's implementation is buggy, like I said. This is especially apparent considering that the blue screen errors have the name of nVidia's kernel mode driver in them.

but it's your Windows kernel that's causing the blue screen.

Again, confusing "the Kernel" with "kernel mode." Hey, I hate Windows as much as the next guy, but that's no reason to post incorrect technical information about it and hope nobody will realize you're blowing smoke out your ass. Next time, do a little more research first.

I'm sure Blizzard would gladly let *one* software pirate slip through the cracks if they could eliminate the annoyances to honest users.

OK, for the exact number *one*, I admit they would probably let it slip. :-)

Also, what exactly gives you the right to endanger Blizzards revenues just because you are a hobbyist?

Why do I have to have some special "right" to work on a hobby? Blizzard didn't give me my intelligence or my programming skills; they're not representative of society as a whole; what special claim do they have on me? I don't owe them anything (I already paid them for all the Blizzard games I have). It was through the actions of many "hobbyists," along with some people who believed they were fighting to save X (where X is the reason they thought they were in WWII), that this whole thing we call "the computing world" came about. Not through the actions of a bunch of lawyers trying to *limit* what people can do. If you limit what people can do without giving them other possibilities for creative outlet, you are IMHO diminishing the potential of society as a whole.

IOW, I'm not a big fan of the whole "individuals are intrinsically powerless and start off with squat, and then *society* grants them all their rights." I have feet, does society have to come to me when I'm a baby and say, "OK little child, now you may walk?!" Sure society can take this away from me, but society didn't have to explicitly give permission for me to do it in the first place, it just had to not interfere with what I naturally did anyway.

how about *shooting* someone because you are a hobbyist?

Shooting someone kills them (if you are a good shot). Working on battle.net-compatible server software (a) doesn't threaten anyone's life (surely you're not going to tell me $25 for Diablo II is worth equivalent to someone's life!), (b) *doesn't actually even cause software piracy.* It just means "maybe" it could happen. In speech (a lot of people at /., including me, think code is speech), this is called a "prior restraint" when it's done by a government. It may or may not be legal, but it's scary that people think there's "nothing wrong with it."

• what's the deal with that little daughter-card looking thing where the power comes in?

  I haven't seen the one on the A7M266-D, but I remember some older ASUS boards did this as well. In that case, it was some kind of power filter; it was on a daughtercard to keep the motherboard from heating up too much. :-)

• I'm assuming the two 64-bit PCI slots are on a separate bus from the 32-bit slots... would this mean less IRQ conflicts?

  Unfortunately, it depends on the design of the board, but I doubt you'll run into IRQ conflicts on a modern SMP board. All the PCI interrupts end up on PCI INTA-INTD lines, which on SMP boards are routed to the APIC. PCI interrupts are level-triggered (i.e. intrinsically shareable) so most IRQ conflicts are caused by devices on the ISA bus, e.g. parallel ports, serial ports, floppy disk, many sound cards, ISA modems, etc., *except* in cases where the BIOS insists on allocating a separate interrupt for each device. Anyway, I've heard that some OS's show APIC interrupts as INT1-INT24 (so you obviously couldn't possibly have an interrupt conflict), and I know my SMP board hasn't had any interrupt conflict-type problems, so I doubt you'll have any problems, but YMMV.

• Oh, and did you use Athlon MP's or did you cheat and use the XP's?

  I used the MP's, only because I wanted to make sure if something went wrong with the system it *wasn't* going to be the processors. A lot of people use the XP's instead, they seem to work well. I heard a rumor that AMD is going to lock out SMP capabilities on the XP's. I also heard that they're releasing Duron MP's. Isn't the rumor mill fun? :-)

...has always been that driver support is buggy. nVidia is notoriously bad at this; their DirectX drivers are quite stable, but OpenGL blue screens left and right (especially with a lot of detail in the scene graph). I always wondered why they even bothered to include OpenGL support in their drivers, although I suppose with such a major standard they have pretty much no choice.

Now, with OpenGL 2.0, if they have to support three different API's, isn't driver quality going to suffer even more? Oh well, ATI has been getting a lot better recently, I guess we can always switch to them. :-)

Blizzard just needs to release a legitimate version of the B.Net server

This is a great idea. A couple problems though:

1. The current battle.net server is an in-house application, which means (since they probably didn't develop it with a public release in mind), it's probably (a) really warty (not that this would matter to the average buyer) and (b) probably horribly coupled to all kinds of internal proprietary servers. I mean, look at Bugzilla; it's successfully used by a lot of projects, but it started as an in-house bug tracking system and *it still really shows.* Just try to set it up sometime!

2. The server would probably only run on Windows, since that seems to be the main audience Blizzard develops for. Or, alternately, if it runs on *nix, their marketing types would probably say, "well, our customers aren't running *nix, so there's no point selling it." Catch-22 here.

   Also, with LAN parties combined with Microsoft's infamous "no more than 10 people may connect to a Win2K Pro machine over TCP/IP" (yieh! you're just a *consumer*, a *nobody*, so sit down biotch!), Blizzard's lawyers might warn them about people violating Microsoft's EULA. And heavens, that might be worse than Software Piracy!

3. With the server released, that would be more code crackers could look at to try to reverse-engineer the CD key algorithm. True, this can be done with the game too, but maybe the authentication is written in perl or some other text based language that would be trivial to reverse engineer.

4. Blizzard/*Vivendi*. How likely is Vivendi to do anything that even resembles giving customers freedom? They're all about control of "consumers," nowadays.

5. Blizzard tech support, like any large tech support organization, is already overworked from idiots emailing them about trivial problems. At least they probably have a good procedure in place for dealing with this though. Server software is a completely different ballgame, and they'd probably have to hire new staff just to deal with it. To their minds, this could be just more money down the tube.

So basically I agree with you, but with the analysis for blizzard = spending more $$ on development + spending more $$ on tech support + fear of "software pirates" + general belligerence, I doubt it will ever happen. Oh well, we can always hope, right? :-)

From the FAQ:

Q. What about the hobbyists who are not pirating your software but just want to use these servers as an alternative to Battle.net? A. Unfortunately, software pirates have spoiled this situation for hobbyists.

"Software Pirates" didn't spoil this for hobbyists. *Blizzard* spoiled it for hobbyists. In the style typical of any arrogant corporation, they don't care what their customers want; they just want to control every aspect of everyone's interaction with them. (IMO, this is typified by the horribly buggy CD copy protection on Diablo II -- ever try to play it with more than one CD-ROM drive, or the CD not in the first drive? Feh. They'd rather keep legitimate buyers from playing (hell, they already have our money) than risk letting even *one* "software pirate" slip through the cracks!)

Don't let Blizzard fool you. *They* are the ones who are causing problems here, not bnetd. What ever happened to "innocent until proven guilty?" (Yes, I know it's a legal principle, but it used to be widely practiced even by ordinary people... until the lawyers found they could make more money by pre-shafting people, so to speak.) Anyway, just my $0.02.

Sure, I tried pretty much every value from 0xB0 to 0xFF in steps of four over a period of about two weeks. I could never figure out what *exactly* the AGP driving value meant, though (need to bust out the reference books), so maybe the right answer was somewhere outside that range. It's a moot issue at this point though, since that motherboard (KT7A-RAID) is dead (oops).

I always wonder if it was some kind of Freudian slip when I killed that motherboard. :-)

As far as I know the Duron itself will not permit being run with anything other than a 100 mhz bus,

That's true. However, this particular board is an ABIT KT7A, which has an option to run the RAM bus at host clock + PCI clock, = 133 MHz. It works fine with a single 128MB PC133 DIMM (NEC, not sure of CAS rating, it's "virtual channel memory" -- anyone else remember virtual channel memory? :-), also with dual 256MB PC133 DIMM's (CAS 2, Crucial), but with a 512MB CAS3 DIMM (also Crucial), it won't post with 133MHz RAM clock. With 100 MHz RAM clock, it works just fine (of course). Oh well, that's my worst system anyway, so who cares. Thanks for your comments though.

You're right, it *does* have the AMD northbridge. My bad. I just remembered that it was the only system I built with VIA components in it which actually worked. :-)

Why can't someone produce motherboards wherein components other than the CPU are quickly upgradeable?

Wow, that's a good idea. I wonder how the cost of manufacturing for, e.g. a ZIF socket + chip compares to just surface-mounting or whatever the motherboard makers do now. (Although, actually I think at least one of my current motherboards has the southbridge in a socket).

I see two problems though:

1. How big of a target market would there be, initially? I mean, sure probably 50% of the people on /. would be in the market, but what about the big OEM's? I don't see "consumers" going to the local CompUSA to upgrade their northbridge, I mean hell, (a) most people don't even know what a "northbridge" is, (b) the CompUSA folks would be more likely to tell them they just needed a new motherboard or new computer. "Oh yeah, your power switch is broken, better upgrade your case, motherboard, and processor while you're at it." :-)
2. The programming interface to each chipset is proprietary. Ever try to get information about the registers on a VIA chipset? They want you to sign a giant NDA just to look at the specs PDF, for crying out loud! (Although last time I looked, some people had slipped up and posted NDA'd VIA specsheets where google could find it. Shh, don't tell anyone. :-) And since it's proprietary, that means the developers are used to being able to change it whenever they want. IOW, there's no engineering pressure to make things backward-compatible, because the only software that is affected is the BIOS. So, you could say, just distribute BIOS images with the new chipsets. But how many tech support calls do you think they're going to get when people accidentally plug in the new chipset with ACPI power off registers are in the same place the DRAM timing registers used to be? (so the board won't power on anymore).

So in other words, I think it's a great idea, but there's no way the chipset companies are going to have it while they're still acting like it's the 1950's and every single chipset is (a) proprietary, (b) guarded like it's the secret to eternal life or something. Oh well, we can always dream. :-)

The Tyan Tiger MP kicks ass, IMHO. (AMD 760MP chipset). I've been running it since December, never crashed (from hardware, anyway. :-) One note with this board, be sure to get a *heavy-duty* power supply. My SMP box has an Enermax EG651P-VE-something or other (550W), which works *very* well (but is kind of expensive).

Be sure to stay away from the AMD 760MPX chipset (note the X) until early March, because on the current revision, *USB doesn't work at all on the Southbridge* (although I've heard vendors are shipping USB 2.0 cards to get around this problem, but do you really want to lose a PCI slot?)

Come to think of it, I recall reading that by adding more north bridges from the 760MP chipset, you could have more than 2 Athlons on a board.

Could you post a link to this?

I agree completely about VIA's stability problems. Out of all the computers I've had based on VIA chipsets (about 4 or so), the only one with a decent amount of stability was the ASUS A7M266. Except for that one oddball stable board, it's been a horror story of:

• random lockups with the GeForce2 (no, it *isn't* that the power supplies are too small when they're all in the 450-550W range! :-)
• data corruption problems with the infamous 686B southbridge
• not being able to run CAS3 memory at 133MHz (on a Duron) (note, maybe I am just stupid, but shouldn't a 512MB CAS3 DIMM behave the same as a 128MB with respect to this?)
• conflicts with the Creative Labs SoundBlaster PCI 512, Live!, *and* Audigy, and finally
• the notorious Windows Driver Upgrade Treadmill (well, at least VIA actually *does something* about their bugs :-)

Personally, I'm terrified of VIA chipsets at this point. I like the AMD 760MP much better. :-)

According to the article, it's only "a couple thousand atoms" so you probably wouldn't even notice if it hit you. Ordinary objects (e.g. pretzel, human being) contain at least 10 orders of magnitude more atoms. Personally, I'd be more worried about the containment apparatus blowing up.

before we collapse the fabric of the universe or something like that

Antimatter behaves just like ordinary matter, except (a) opposite electric charge, (b) opposite parity (left-right orientation, e.g. of spin), (c) opposite direction in time (whatever that means). I wouldn't worry. Besides, how would we stop these people anyway? :-)

Last time I heard about any "really new" developments in antimatter, they were just figuring out how to contain 10-100 protons (circa 1992) (I know, I'm dating myself, whatever. :-) This is really cool news.

Still, even a million atoms is really physically small. I wonder

• how much it weighs?
• whether it's visible to the naked eye? (well, duh, I guess being hydrogen gas it wouldn't be, or does it have interesting optical properties?
• how much energy it would give off if you mixed it with hydrogen?
• how long it will be till someone makes a weapon out of it. Would it even work?

Anyway, just my $0.01. :-)

You're right, that code (even before Slashcode killed it for you) won't work. The standard C++ library eats the backspaces, and they're the key to making it crash. Someone (usually a library) has to be calling (eventually) WriteConsole with tabs and backspaces in a loop. Apparently, the C++ standard library isn't doing that, so chalk one up to C++, but only because it's not outputting what you told it to. Now, is that a feature or a bug? :-)