Alex is one fuckin' awesome web designer, but I know at least one of his tricks: How to get those awesome flaming gifs. Check it out at http://www.flamingtext.com/!
From their legal page, it seems that their encoding software apparently uses LAME. Isn't that kind of sad? A nice free piece of software used for such evil?
Well, first of all, buffer overflows are far far more serious than denial-of-service attacks, since buffer overflows can lead to a compromise of your system, and DOS attacks do not. Typically, the attacker needs to continually expend resources in order to carry out a DOS attack, as well.
Second, being free from buffer overflows (and other perils of C programming like manual memory management and core dumps) gives you more time to spend looking over your program for other kinds of security problems. This is good, of course.
Java is not the greatest language, for sure, but safe high-level languages ARE the future, whatever they are named.
The short version is that any modern high level language (one that is safe) would be good enough regardless of performance (let's say, natively compiled Java) since the network will be the bottleneck for almost all users anyway. But I prefer SML or O'Caml for their superior efficiency on top of their many other nice language features.
If performance and C idioms are really critical, there is also Cyclone, which is essentially C with some extensions and (most importantly) with safety.
> Buffer overflow bugs can be prevented by a
> middle-school hacker. This is elementary stuff.
> Doesn't anybody believe in putting limits on
> characters? This is simple to prevent.
This is pure bullshit. Are the programmers of
Apache, IIS, Half-Life, Quake 3 Arena, Perl, SSHD, glibc, wu_ftpd, or BIND at the middle school level? Windows NT? How about the linux kernel? All have had buffer overflows, and I'll bet that many of them still do.
Unfortunately it is not always as simple as "putting limits on characters". The simple fact is that the C language is practically designed to make buffer overflow bugs easy to write and easy to exploit.
I agree with you that buffer overflows are serious, though. That's why I think it is ridiculous that we still write security-critical network software in C. Sometimes it is hard to get around, like in the linux kernel when you need to do hardware access (a microkernel architecture might make it easier to write certain parts in higher-level languages). You might argue that performance would be impacted (I don't think this is true, especially with network software where the network is the real bottleneck), but even this argument falls through for 99% of users, since most users are far from full utilization of their processor. However, almost all users *are* affected by security holes.
I believe it refers to both directions, so that 180 degrees would be the whole area you'd ever expect to be visible. I think this one is advertised for 170 degrees vertically and horizontally.
I am not sure I can get that much accuracy.;) My point is that I can look at it from just about any angle; there's no color distortion, even though I obviously can't read the text when I am nearly perpendicular to the screen! MVA screens really do have good viewing angles.
My ViewSonic VG191 is pretty good for Q3, though the pixel response (25ms) is not really as good as a CRT. Image quality is loads better, though you'll need a nice graphics card to run it at 1280x1024!
FPS gaming is really LCD's weakest point, in my opinion. Everything else about LCD is superior to CRTs.
I have animosity towards legal solutions because they violate the spirit of the internet. Wasn't it just a few days ago that we were discussing on slashdot the imposition of one country's (often stupid) laws on another via the internet?
It would seem to me that a technical solution would be more effective, and also would retain the most freedoms.
LCDs typically have crisper pixels, use far less power, have no headache-inducing flicker, allow better desktop usage (I gained about a foot when I replaced my 19" CRT with a 19" LCD!), often support pivoting, and are more likely to get you laid.
Though this used to be the case, perhaps, now everyone uses DVI and everything is compatible and great.
(The really-high end LCDs usually need special cards to support their crazy resolutions, and some pivoting LCDs might not work with video cards that don't support strange resolutions like 1024x1280.)
I would have liked to have bought an OLED monitor, but the technology is not available or cheap yet.
I can't say much about price (OLED is likely to have the same problem as LED does) or weight (my LCD weighs only 20 lbs, and I never move it anyway?) or durability (??), but basically, it seems like you haven't used a LCD in many years. This year we are standardized on DVI (I certainly would not want to use an analog connector for a digital device, anyway), the monitors are viewable from almost any angle (my VG191 actually is viewable from any angle I've tried) and the picture quality is totally awesome. My monitor, which has close to 4 million pixels (counting separately the Red, Green, and Blue components) has exactly 2 flaws, both in the same (logical) pixel.
I'm not sure if you have an ulterior motive or what, but this post is seriously misinformed. It will probably be the case that OLED is a superior solution in several years, once it has matured, but LCD is already quite mature and there are many reasons to use it.
I just got a new LCD myself! ViewSonic just released last year their VG191, which is a 19" TFT. It's MVA, 1280x1024, 500:1, 250 nits, and it pivots. I love it very dearly.
http://www.viewsonic.com/products/lcd_vg191.cfm
I got mine for $860, though prices seem to have gone up a little since last week (?). I think this makes it a great alternative to those ridiculously expensive ones like Apple's Cinema display. (Especially since I could not find a GeForce 3 with DVI-out at higher res than 1280x1024).
Anyway, the real point of my post is this: If you go for a high-end LCD, do yourself a favor and get one that *pivots* or at least a VESA wall adaptor. I thought this would just be a kind of fun gimmick, but there really is nothing like reading a webpage in portrait mode. I leave my monitor like that almost all the time, in fact (I like to have a widescreen movie playing across the bottom of the screen and emacs up at the top.;))
> And even if you did run it, how would it spread. It
> might try and email itself to everyone in your
> address book, but Linux doesn't have a default
> address book, nor is it likely to ever have one.
This is your weakest argument here. First, it would be pretty easy to just search the whole hard drive for email addresses:
strings `find/` | grep "^.*@.*$"
.. this would find stored in plain text form (almost certainly any app would store them this way) in any kind of file. You might need to use xargs or whatever since the list of files will be too long for strings, but, you get the idea.
Sircam on win32 used your web cache directory to find email addresses, for instance. Man, I got gillions of those things.
Second, until linux does have wide-spread, standardized address book access APIs (and things like that), it will not be as attractive and coherent a desktop to users as Windows is.
Basically, I am excited that Microsoft is moving their API to the CLR, because the Win32 C API is extremely annoying. What I really want is to be able to write portable GUI apps with my favorite language, SML, and.NET is (probably) going to make this possible, yay!
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poo poo hello
Alex is one fuckin' awesome web designer, but I know at least one of his tricks: How to get those awesome flaming gifs. Check it out at http://www.flamingtext.com/ !
From their legal page, it seems that their encoding software apparently uses LAME. Isn't that kind of sad? A nice free piece of software used for such evil?
The real problem with the biodome projects is that they let guys like Pauly Shore in. That guy was no scientist!
Well, first of all, buffer overflows are far far more serious than denial-of-service attacks, since buffer overflows can lead to a compromise of your system, and DOS attacks do not. Typically, the attacker needs to continually expend resources in order to carry out a DOS attack, as well.
Second, being free from buffer overflows (and other perils of C programming like manual memory management and core dumps) gives you more time to spend looking over your program for other kinds of security problems. This is good, of course.
Java is not the greatest language, for sure, but safe high-level languages ARE the future, whatever they are named.
I answered this question here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=25781&threshol d=1&commentsort=3&mode=thread&cid=2804384. There's a lot of info/evangelizing there!
The short version is that any modern high level language (one that is safe) would be good enough regardless of performance (let's say, natively compiled Java) since the network will be the bottleneck for almost all users anyway. But I prefer SML or O'Caml for their superior efficiency on top of their many other nice language features.
If performance and C idioms are really critical, there is also Cyclone, which is essentially C with some extensions and (most importantly) with safety.
> Buffer overflow bugs can be prevented by a
> middle-school hacker. This is elementary stuff.
> Doesn't anybody believe in putting limits on
> characters? This is simple to prevent.
This is pure bullshit. Are the programmers of
Apache, IIS, Half-Life, Quake 3 Arena, Perl, SSHD, glibc, wu_ftpd, or BIND at the middle school level? Windows NT? How about the linux kernel? All have had buffer overflows, and I'll bet that many of them still do.
Unfortunately it is not always as simple as "putting limits on characters". The simple fact is that the C language is practically designed to make buffer overflow bugs easy to write and easy to exploit.
I agree with you that buffer overflows are serious, though. That's why I think it is ridiculous that we still write security-critical network software in C. Sometimes it is hard to get around, like in the linux kernel when you need to do hardware access (a microkernel architecture might make it easier to write certain parts in higher-level languages). You might argue that performance would be impacted (I don't think this is true, especially with network software where the network is the real bottleneck), but even this argument falls through for 99% of users, since most users are far from full utilization of their processor. However, almost all users *are* affected by security holes.
Fuck that! I'm the real Tom Murphy!
I dunno, PNY has been making memory for a long time. This is the first video card I've seen from them.
The card works great for me; no hassles. I'm using the NVIDIA reference drivers, which is nice because those are always released first. =)
The PNY Verto. (Geforce 3 Ti 200)
I think all of the Geforce 3 cards with DVI are essentially the same, though...
I believe it refers to both directions, so that 180 degrees would be the whole area you'd ever expect to be visible. I think this one is advertised for 170 degrees vertically and horizontally.
I am not sure I can get that much accuracy. ;) My point is that I can look at it from just about any angle; there's no color distortion, even though I obviously can't read the text when I am nearly perpendicular to the screen! MVA screens really do have good viewing angles.
My ViewSonic VG191 is pretty good for Q3, though the pixel response (25ms) is not really as good as a CRT. Image quality is loads better, though you'll need a nice graphics card to run it at 1280x1024!
FPS gaming is really LCD's weakest point, in my opinion. Everything else about LCD is superior to CRTs.
I have animosity towards legal solutions because they violate the spirit of the internet. Wasn't it just a few days ago that we were discussing on slashdot the imposition of one country's (often stupid) laws on another via the internet?
It would seem to me that a technical solution would be more effective, and also would retain the most freedoms.
.... faraday cages.
LCDs typically have crisper pixels, use far less power, have no headache-inducing flicker, allow better desktop usage (I gained about a foot when I replaced my 19" CRT with a 19" LCD!), often support pivoting, and are more likely to get you laid.
Though this used to be the case, perhaps, now everyone uses DVI and everything is compatible and great.
(The really-high end LCDs usually need special cards to support their crazy resolutions, and some pivoting LCDs might not work with video cards that don't support strange resolutions like 1024x1280.)
I would have liked to have bought an OLED monitor, but the technology is not available or cheap yet.
I can't say much about price (OLED is likely to have the same problem as LED does) or weight (my LCD weighs only 20 lbs, and I never move it anyway?) or durability (??), but basically, it seems like you haven't used a LCD in many years. This year we are standardized on DVI (I certainly would not want to use an analog connector for a digital device, anyway), the monitors are viewable from almost any angle (my VG191 actually is viewable from any angle I've tried) and the picture quality is totally awesome. My monitor, which has close to 4 million pixels (counting separately the Red, Green, and Blue components) has exactly 2 flaws, both in the same (logical) pixel.
I'm not sure if you have an ulterior motive or what, but this post is seriously misinformed. It will probably be the case that OLED is a superior solution in several years, once it has matured, but LCD is already quite mature and there are many reasons to use it.
I just got a new LCD myself! ViewSonic just released last year their VG191, which is a 19" TFT. It's MVA, 1280x1024, 500:1, 250 nits, and it pivots. I love it very dearly.
http://www.viewsonic.com/products/lcd_vg191.cfm
I got mine for $860, though prices seem to have gone up a little since last week (?). I think this makes it a great alternative to those ridiculously expensive ones like Apple's Cinema display. (Especially since I could not find a GeForce 3 with DVI-out at higher res than 1280x1024).
Anyway, the real point of my post is this: If you go for a high-end LCD, do yourself a favor and get one that *pivots* or at least a VESA wall adaptor. I thought this would just be a kind of fun gimmick, but there really is nothing like reading a webpage in portrait mode. I leave my monitor like that almost all the time, in fact (I like to have a widescreen movie playing across the bottom of the screen and emacs up at the top.
I agree that low refresh rates on a CRT give headaches, but LCD backlights don't flicker, so it is not really comparable in terms of refresh rates.
Personally, I just switched from a Trinitron CRT to a new LCD and I love the LCD.
Instead of encouraging litigation, why don't we develop (easy) and attempt to gain acceptance (harder) of an authenticated e-mail format?
I would much rather see technical (or social) solutions to the spam problem... laws have a funny way of not going in our favor, don't they?
How about paying for 1 copy (or, say, 10) and copying it to all the machines that need it?
The excess money can go to pay for a real service, like to employ free software programmers.
> And even if you did run it, how would it spread. It
> might try and email itself to everyone in your
> address book, but Linux doesn't have a default
> address book, nor is it likely to ever have one.
This is your weakest argument here. First, it would be pretty easy to just search the whole hard drive for email addresses:
strings `find
.. this would find stored in plain text form (almost certainly any app would store them this way) in any kind of file. You might need to use xargs or whatever since the list of files will be too long for strings, but, you get the idea.
Sircam on win32 used your web cache directory to find email addresses, for instance. Man, I got gillions of those things.
Second, until linux does have wide-spread, standardized address book access APIs (and things like that), it will not be as attractive and coherent a desktop to users as Windows is.
Forgive my ignorance, but what's wrong with ps2pdf? Is it only the lack of TOC, x-refs, URLs? (I hate that stuff anyway...)
Yeah, Java is ok with me too. =)
.NET is (probably) going to make this possible, yay!
Basically, I am excited that Microsoft is moving their API to the CLR, because the Win32 C API is extremely annoying. What I really want is to be able to write portable GUI apps with my favorite language, SML, and