True. They couldn't afford the license fees for the James Bond theme, so they went with the Peter Gunn theme, and it really worked out.
The Spy Hunter console game has several really cool musical themes, sort of based on the Peter Gunn theme, plus a grunge version played by a band called Saliva. I actually like the grunge version; Peter Gunn played slowly in a minor key with lots of guitar. As a bonus, there is a "music player" mode where you can play all the tunes without any explosions or other sound effects, to just enjoy the music.
The Spy Hunter console video game has a movie-like plot.
There is a multinational company that is actually run by a secret society. The company is named NOSTRA, from Nostradamus, and these guys take his prophecies way too seriously. There is this one prophecy about the Four Horsemen riding and a king rising to rule what's left of the Earth; they have a plan to launch four satellites into orbit and use EMP weapons to smash all the computers and such, hopefully plunging the world into a new Dark Ages, and they figure they will end up ruling the world.
Of course they have offices and labs and things all over the world, so you travel all over on your missions to figure out what they are up to. Your car can shoot radio trackers onto trucks or ships, your car has a scanner that can find trucks carrying evil payloads, and you have to not only blow up enemies but do things like find bombs and disable them (luckily you have a magic "EMP gun" that disables bombs). In one level the bad guys have stolen a car from the good guys; the car is just like the one you are driving, and while you are chasing it, it hits you with oil slicks and such. In the final level you need to drive inside their ridiculous lair and prevent the four missiles from launching.
The car, of course, is the real star here. It drops oil slicks, fires missiles, and if you go into water, it morphs to a boat. If you take a lot of damage, most of the car explodes and falls away, and you are left driving an armored motorcycle. If you take the motorcycle into the water, it morphs into an armored jet ski!
With a decent script, a decent director, decent music and a decent actor in the lead role, this could add up to an enjoyable action movie.
I believe only one was pulled, and that was The Follow. They must have worked out the issues, because that movie is back on the site; you can just download it along with the others.
The "dumb" part is that such an obvious algorithm with prior art was granted a patent.
Palm copied PARC's Graffiti alphabet because the algorithm was so elegant.
Er, no.
Graffiti was invented by Palm. Xerox was developing Unistrokes around the same time, and giving lectures about it, and generally not keeping it a secret.
The patent is not specifically about Graffiti. Xerox basically patented the whole idea of a handwriting recognition alphabet where each letter is a single stroke. And that idea is obvious.
How can I claim it's obvious? Well, think about it. What's the #1 problem in character recognition on a PDA? Figuring out which stroke is part of which letter. Did the user want to write a 't', or did he want to write an 'i' followed by a '-'? Gee, life is so much simpler with the letters like 'c', 'z', 'o', etc., where there is just one stroke. Hang on... what if all letters were just one stroke? Then we don't need to figure out which stroke is part of which letter!
Entirely because of the Xerox lawsuit, Palm rolled out Graffiti 2. It's major difference from Graffiti is... not every letter is one stroke. Some are two strokes. It's dumb that they had to do that; there is zero benefit to the consumer here.
According to the PalmOne press release, the appeals judge ruled that a) this idea is obvious, b) there was prior art, so therefore c) the patent is not valid and PalmOne doesn't have to pay Xerox.
I never pictured the driver of the Spy Hunter car as a big, hulking guy with muscles. Why not somebody like Clive Owen? (Did BMW build the G-6155 Interceptor?)
Yeah, I know, because The Rock helps sell tickets when he is in an action movie. With The Rock on board the project, you don't need to worry about making an actual movie; you can string together a bunch of explosions and add The Rock and it will sell.
I love the Spy Hunter video game but I don't know if the movie will be any good. Odds are against it, alas.
Basically, the reason why Hollywood is looking at a Spy Hunter movie is because the 3D, modern Spy Hunter game is so much fun.
The original Spy Hunter was a favorite of mine, but would hardly inspire a movie. It was a top-down (third-person perspective) sprite-based scrolling shooter game, designed to be hard enough that it would pull in a respectable amount of coins in an arcade.
The 3D Spy Hunter game, available for the major game console systems, plays differently and I think it is huge fun. It's a "second-person" shooter: like a first-person game, but you can see yourself (i.e., the car) to make it easier to figure out if you are clearing obstacles. Once you learn the game, you usually don't die; you are racing the clock and trying to find secrets in the various levels more than trying to survive. You have lots of weapons, an unrealistic amount of them, and it's surprising how I never seem to get tired of locking missiles onto bad guys and lighting them up. The music is also excellent in this game, enough so that I want to get Ogg Vorbis files of the music so I can listen to it when I'm not playing the game.
The most recent Spy Hunter game, Spy Hunter 2, is different again. Your car is much more fragile now, and survival is a major problem. Your turbo boost doesn't recharge, you have to find and collect powerups to recharge it. And "boss" enemies are now a major part of the game. While I found the first one to be addictively playable, the second one frustrates me, and frustration isn't fun. Oh, and just in case you are a 12-year-old boy, there is now a female character with lots of polygons on her chest, moving in stiff, unrealistic ways as she walks and talks. Woo hoo! Who needs game play! And the music isn't nearly as interesting as in the first one.
If you haven't tried the Spy Hunter console game, I recommend you do so. It's a fun hybrid of a first-person shooter and a car racing game, retaining the best elements of each.
I'd be extremely happy if they ever release a "Spy Hunter 1.5" with the original game engine, just with new levels to play.
Are we talking about the same Enterprise? I'm talking about the one from the original series, the NCC-1701.
The one in TNG, the NCC-1701D, not only could detach and reattach, but there was a "battle bridge" to be used when commanding the engineering hull/warp engines piece without the saucer attached. As seen in the very first episode "Encounter at Farpoint".
Now as any Trek fan knows, the impulse engines are on the saucer, and the warp engines are in the twin nacelles on stalks, attached to the engineering hull.
I read somewhere -- I think it was The Making of Star Trek -- that they always figured the saucer was held on to the engineering hull with explosive bolts, and in a dire enough emergency they could blow the bolts, fly on impulse, and even land the saucer (but probably not ever be able to take off again).
They never had occasion to use this, though.
I read somewhere else that the original ending of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (i.e., the Star Trek I movie) would have had lots of expensive special effects. The idea was that VGER, just before fading out, would re-create all the ships it had eaten and leave them behind. The problem was that it was leaving them near Earth, and it had shut down all Earth's defenses and forgot to turn them on again, and if you will recall it had eaten a few Klingon cruisers at the start of the movie. The Klingons look at a defenseless Earth and say "Whoa! Time to shoot some fish in a barrel!" and the Enterprise has to fight. Outnumbered and alone, Enterprise just barely wins... but they have to eject in the saucer.
If I could travel to parallel universes, I'd seek out one where that was actually made.
If the judge had given SCO, say, one week to provide the evidence, and then thrown the case out -- SCO would appeal. And the appeals court would give SCO a new hearing.
The judge has given SCO multiple, generous chances to cough up some evidence. Now that it has been a year, the judge can entertain a motion to toss out the parts of the case for which no evidence has been offered.
SCO will appeal if this happens. However, if IBM and the judge have crossed all their t's and dotted all their i's, the appeals court will refuse SCO's appeal.
Only once the appeal has been made and rejected is it truly over!
The wheels of law grind slowly, but they do get the grinding done eventually.
Yes: the first plant will make 500 barrels per day.
Future plants will be bigger, and make more.
And this is totally worth doing. They are taking stuff that is currently garbage, that somebody must pay to dispose of, and they are turning it into oil. And the process will rip apart any bacteria (and even prions) in the input.
If I understand it correctly, they could actually process sewage into oil! You could actually dig up garbage dumps, process them, and get oil and minerals back.
This is totally great, and I wish them all success.
This is Slashdot. All sorts of somewhat-related topics get posts, and often get moderated up. For example, on a discussion of privacy issues in the wilderness, a side thread about joining a search & rescue team wasn't exactly on-topic, but was moderated up rather than down.
As another example, your comment isn't about NX either, but you felt free to make it. And I doubt a moderator would be sufficiently offended by it to moderate it off-topic, even if any moderators were paying attention to this topic anymore.
If Slashdot was intended to be narrowly moderated, there would be more topics, and there probably wouldn't be a "funny" moderation (because jokes are really pretty off-topic most of the time).
I wouldn't have been surprised much to be moderated down, but I was surprised to be moderated all the way down to -1. And I guess I failed, but I was trying to be funny in a sort of sarcastic way. (Tip for any moderators reading this: if you want to go back and mod down my attempt at humor, I sugget you use "overrated" since there isn't a "not funny".)
I think the NX is a good idea, and I'd like it on all my computers. But the specific reason I want Efficeon chips is so they can run with just a heatsink, for the quietness.
Load in a gigabyte of RAM, and set up a network boot from one of my VIA C3 servers. No hard drive. It would work just fine for email and web browsing, and playing tunes and DVDs.
But that's not what the OP said. He said that stack smashing attacks write past the stack, back into code space, so an NX protected stack won't save you. I said I've never heard of that.
In my original comment, I said:
If the buffer overrun cannot put in a code stub, then the best it can hope to do is to overwrite the stack data to send execution somewhere else. If you can do that right, you might have a local root exploit: you might be able to get the code to run a root shell for you or something.
Did you see the part where I said I wanted it to be silent? As in, passive heatsink only? Athlon64 need not apply.
That said, my next desktop computer will be an Athlon64, because I can make it pretty quiet and it will run Doom III pretty well. I'd just like to have another computer that's silent, and use that for email and such. Then I can power down the Athlon64 when I'm in the mood for total silence (and not playing Doom III).
By the way, you say "VIA's crap" but I really love my tiny, quiet little Mini-ITX servers with VIA C3 chips. Great for email servers, file servers, etc.
A buffer overrun is a way of putting data PAST the end of your variable (which would be marked NX in your hypothetical scenario) into an about-to-be-executed chunk memory.
That could be true, if the buffer were placed right before an executable chunk. But it never is. Variables are allocated on the stack, not in code space. Heap memory is often allocated near the stack, but again not in code space.
When a program calls a function, it stashes a return address on the stack. This address specifies where execution should resume after the function returns. If an exploit can overrun the stack, the exploit overruns this return address! So an exploit will fill a buffer, run off the end of the buffer, put an address on the stack right where it overwrites the return address of the current function, and possibly then overrun some more. If there is a function embedded in the overrun (either on top of the buffer, or after the return address) the address of that function is used to overwrite the return address. So when the function returns, that function runs. A small amount of code can act as a bootstrap loader that loads the rest of the exploit.
Here's a primer on how to write a basic stack smashing local root attack. I just found this with Google.
Here's the text of a comment from the sample code:
filling up the end of the buffer with our shellcode which will be executed on the stack after the bof
Emphasis added by me. "executed on the stack"... in other words, this exploit would not work if the stack were marked NX, like I said.
Can you find me an article about how to execute a stack-smashing attack, where the exploit actually blows past the end of the stack or the heap and somehow winds up in normal code space? I have never heard of any such. Can you find even one example of the technique as you describe it?
I'd really like to build a computer with one of these new chips. I hope someone will release a motherboard.
Ideally we could choose from MicroATX or mini-ITX, but if I had to pick one I think I'd pick MicroATX.
I'd like to make a computer that is totally silent when it is idle, but has enough power to play DVDs (with some resolution upsampling for a large monitor). I'd like it to have some expansion capability, too.
And I'd totally love to see a new mini-rackmount form factor, based on mini-ITX, but that's probably such a tiny geekish market segment that no one will try to sell into it.
And as long as I'm dreaming, I'd love a 2-way or 4-way Efficeon SMP motherboard. It would always be snappy and responsive, would have plenty of power for my day-to-day tasks, and could still be really quiet or (I hope) totally silent. With the 90 nanometer cores, I'll bet you could put passive heatsinks on a pair of Efficeons without having problems with overheating.
Basically, it's an unreliable but better-than-nothing safety backstop behind unchecked buffers. If somebody manages to exploit a buffer overflow, there's a semi-random chance that the virus code might just crash into being allocated into another area marked NX, and when the execution point gets there the underlying application starts to crash.
Oh, it's a bit better than that. I believe most buffer overrun exploits put code into the buffer overrun. If the buffer is allocated on the stack, and the buffer and the whole stack are non-execute, then the exploit code can't run.
If the buffer overrun cannot put in a code stub, then the best it can hope to do is to overwrite the stack data to send execution somewhere else. If you can do that right, you might have a local root exploit: you might be able to get the code to run a root shell for you or something.
But as far as I know, setting NX on all your variables and stack space would stop all the buffer overrun remote root attacks.
The fact is there is one. It's pointed out here all the time, that Moller skycar.
I would love for that thing to be real. I fear it isn't. They never actually fly it. I think they said that they can't fly it for insurance reasons, but if it actually worked I'd expect to see them at least do a hover demo.
Slashdot Mirror
True. They couldn't afford the license fees for the James Bond theme, so they went with the Peter Gunn theme, and it really worked out.
The Spy Hunter console game has several really cool musical themes, sort of based on the Peter Gunn theme, plus a grunge version played by a band called Saliva. I actually like the grunge version; Peter Gunn played slowly in a minor key with lots of guitar. As a bonus, there is a "music player" mode where you can play all the tunes without any explosions or other sound effects, to just enjoy the music.
steveha
The Spy Hunter console video game has a movie-like plot.
There is a multinational company that is actually run by a secret society. The company is named NOSTRA, from Nostradamus, and these guys take his prophecies way too seriously. There is this one prophecy about the Four Horsemen riding and a king rising to rule what's left of the Earth; they have a plan to launch four satellites into orbit and use EMP weapons to smash all the computers and such, hopefully plunging the world into a new Dark Ages, and they figure they will end up ruling the world.
Of course they have offices and labs and things all over the world, so you travel all over on your missions to figure out what they are up to. Your car can shoot radio trackers onto trucks or ships, your car has a scanner that can find trucks carrying evil payloads, and you have to not only blow up enemies but do things like find bombs and disable them (luckily you have a magic "EMP gun" that disables bombs). In one level the bad guys have stolen a car from the good guys; the car is just like the one you are driving, and while you are chasing it, it hits you with oil slicks and such. In the final level you need to drive inside their ridiculous lair and prevent the four missiles from launching.
The car, of course, is the real star here. It drops oil slicks, fires missiles, and if you go into water, it morphs to a boat. If you take a lot of damage, most of the car explodes and falls away, and you are left driving an armored motorcycle. If you take the motorcycle into the water, it morphs into an armored jet ski!
With a decent script, a decent director, decent music and a decent actor in the lead role, this could add up to an enjoyable action movie.
steveha
Thank you! That's perfect. I'll use that term from now on.
steveha
I believe only one was pulled, and that was The Follow. They must have worked out the issues, because that movie is back on the site; you can just download it along with the others.
steveha
That actually makes sense. Hmmm. Is there some other term that means "first person except that you can see yourself from behind"?
steveha
This algorithm is neither dumb nor obvious.
The "dumb" part is that such an obvious algorithm with prior art was granted a patent.
Palm copied PARC's Graffiti alphabet because the algorithm was so elegant.
Er, no.
Graffiti was invented by Palm. Xerox was developing Unistrokes around the same time, and giving lectures about it, and generally not keeping it a secret.
The patent is not specifically about Graffiti. Xerox basically patented the whole idea of a handwriting recognition alphabet where each letter is a single stroke. And that idea is obvious.
How can I claim it's obvious? Well, think about it. What's the #1 problem in character recognition on a PDA? Figuring out which stroke is part of which letter. Did the user want to write a 't', or did he want to write an 'i' followed by a '-'? Gee, life is so much simpler with the letters like 'c', 'z', 'o', etc., where there is just one stroke. Hang on... what if all letters were just one stroke? Then we don't need to figure out which stroke is part of which letter!
Entirely because of the Xerox lawsuit, Palm rolled out Graffiti 2. It's major difference from Graffiti is... not every letter is one stroke. Some are two strokes. It's dumb that they had to do that; there is zero benefit to the consumer here.
According to the PalmOne press release, the appeals judge ruled that a) this idea is obvious, b) there was prior art, so therefore c) the patent is not valid and PalmOne doesn't have to pay Xerox.
steveha
I never pictured the driver of the Spy Hunter car as a big, hulking guy with muscles. Why not somebody like Clive Owen? (Did BMW build the G-6155 Interceptor?)
Yeah, I know, because The Rock helps sell tickets when he is in an action movie. With The Rock on board the project, you don't need to worry about making an actual movie; you can string together a bunch of explosions and add The Rock and it will sell.
I love the Spy Hunter video game but I don't know if the movie will be any good. Odds are against it, alas.
steveha
Basically, the reason why Hollywood is looking at a Spy Hunter movie is because the 3D, modern Spy Hunter game is so much fun.
a sh/spyhunter/
The original Spy Hunter was a favorite of mine, but would hardly inspire a movie. It was a top-down (third-person perspective) sprite-based scrolling shooter game, designed to be hard enough that it would pull in a respectable amount of coins in an arcade.
The 3D Spy Hunter game, available for the major game console systems, plays differently and I think it is huge fun. It's a "second-person" shooter: like a first-person game, but you can see yourself (i.e., the car) to make it easier to figure out if you are clearing obstacles. Once you learn the game, you usually don't die; you are racing the clock and trying to find secrets in the various levels more than trying to survive. You have lots of weapons, an unrealistic amount of them, and it's surprising how I never seem to get tired of locking missiles onto bad guys and lighting them up. The music is also excellent in this game, enough so that I want to get Ogg Vorbis files of the music so I can listen to it when I'm not playing the game.
The most recent Spy Hunter game, Spy Hunter 2, is different again. Your car is much more fragile now, and survival is a major problem. Your turbo boost doesn't recharge, you have to find and collect powerups to recharge it. And "boss" enemies are now a major part of the game. While I found the first one to be addictively playable, the second one frustrates me, and frustration isn't fun. Oh, and just in case you are a 12-year-old boy, there is now a female character with lots of polygons on her chest, moving in stiff, unrealistic ways as she walks and talks. Woo hoo! Who needs game play! And the music isn't nearly as interesting as in the first one.
If you haven't tried the Spy Hunter console game, I recommend you do so. It's a fun hybrid of a first-person shooter and a car racing game, retaining the best elements of each.
I'd be extremely happy if they ever release a "Spy Hunter 1.5" with the original game engine, just with new levels to play.
http://www.spyhunter.midway.com/futuretense_cs/fl
steveha
Are we talking about the same Enterprise? I'm talking about the one from the original series, the NCC-1701.
The one in TNG, the NCC-1701D, not only could detach and reattach, but there was a "battle bridge" to be used when commanding the engineering hull/warp engines piece without the saucer attached. As seen in the very first episode "Encounter at Farpoint".
steveha
Now as any Trek fan knows, the impulse engines are on the saucer, and the warp engines are in the twin nacelles on stalks, attached to the engineering hull.
I read somewhere -- I think it was The Making of Star Trek -- that they always figured the saucer was held on to the engineering hull with explosive bolts, and in a dire enough emergency they could blow the bolts, fly on impulse, and even land the saucer (but probably not ever be able to take off again).
They never had occasion to use this, though.
I read somewhere else that the original ending of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (i.e., the Star Trek I movie) would have had lots of expensive special effects. The idea was that VGER, just before fading out, would re-create all the ships it had eaten and leave them behind. The problem was that it was leaving them near Earth, and it had shut down all Earth's defenses and forgot to turn them on again, and if you will recall it had eaten a few Klingon cruisers at the start of the movie. The Klingons look at a defenseless Earth and say "Whoa! Time to shoot some fish in a barrel!" and the Enterprise has to fight. Outnumbered and alone, Enterprise just barely wins... but they have to eject in the saucer.
If I could travel to parallel universes, I'd seek out one where that was actually made.
Geekily yours,
steveha
If the judge had given SCO, say, one week to provide the evidence, and then thrown the case out -- SCO would appeal. And the appeals court would give SCO a new hearing.
The judge has given SCO multiple, generous chances to cough up some evidence. Now that it has been a year, the judge can entertain a motion to toss out the parts of the case for which no evidence has been offered.
SCO will appeal if this happens. However, if IBM and the judge have crossed all their t's and dotted all their i's, the appeals court will refuse SCO's appeal.
Only once the appeal has been made and rejected is it truly over!
The wheels of law grind slowly, but they do get the grinding done eventually.
steveha
-1, Overrated.
Wikipedia has a great article about this:
t ion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymeriza
steveha
Yes: the first plant will make 500 barrels per day.
Future plants will be bigger, and make more.
And this is totally worth doing. They are taking stuff that is currently garbage, that somebody must pay to dispose of, and they are turning it into oil. And the process will rip apart any bacteria (and even prions) in the input.
If I understand it correctly, they could actually process sewage into oil! You could actually dig up garbage dumps, process them, and get oil and minerals back.
This is totally great, and I wish them all success.
steveha
This is Slashdot. All sorts of somewhat-related topics get posts, and often get moderated up. For example, on a discussion of privacy issues in the wilderness, a side thread about joining a search & rescue team wasn't exactly on-topic, but was moderated up rather than down.
As another example, your comment isn't about NX either, but you felt free to make it. And I doubt a moderator would be sufficiently offended by it to moderate it off-topic, even if any moderators were paying attention to this topic anymore.
If Slashdot was intended to be narrowly moderated, there would be more topics, and there probably wouldn't be a "funny" moderation (because jokes are really pretty off-topic most of the time).
I wouldn't have been surprised much to be moderated down, but I was surprised to be moderated all the way down to -1. And I guess I failed, but I was trying to be funny in a sort of sarcastic way. (Tip for any moderators reading this: if you want to go back and mod down my attempt at humor, I sugget you use "overrated" since there isn't a "not funny".)
steveha
I think the NX is a good idea, and I'd like it on all my computers. But the specific reason I want Efficeon chips is so they can run with just a heatsink, for the quietness.
steveha
Load in a gigabyte of RAM, and set up a network boot from one of my VIA C3 servers. No hard drive. It would work just fine for email and web browsing, and playing tunes and DVDs.
steveha
Wow -- that was my first post ever to be modded down to -1. And I wasn't even trying!
That will sure teach me to talk about Efficeon motherboards when the topic is Efficeon chips. I have learned my lesson. I am a changed man.
steveha
Here's an even better tutorial on how to do buffer overrun attacks:
t orial.txt
http://community.core-sdi.com/~juliano/exploit_tu
steveha
In my original comment, I said:
Your "direct shell" attack is an example of this.
steveha
Duh, build an Althon64 system.
Did you see the part where I said I wanted it to be silent? As in, passive heatsink only? Athlon64 need not apply.
That said, my next desktop computer will be an Athlon64, because I can make it pretty quiet and it will run Doom III pretty well. I'd just like to have another computer that's silent, and use that for email and such. Then I can power down the Athlon64 when I'm in the mood for total silence (and not playing Doom III).
By the way, you say "VIA's crap" but I really love my tiny, quiet little Mini-ITX servers with VIA C3 chips. Great for email servers, file servers, etc.
Not every computer needs to run Doom III.
steveha
That could be true, if the buffer were placed right before an executable chunk. But it never is. Variables are allocated on the stack, not in code space. Heap memory is often allocated near the stack, but again not in code space.
When a program calls a function, it stashes a return address on the stack. This address specifies where execution should resume after the function returns. If an exploit can overrun the stack, the exploit overruns this return address! So an exploit will fill a buffer, run off the end of the buffer, put an address on the stack right where it overwrites the return address of the current function, and possibly then overrun some more. If there is a function embedded in the overrun (either on top of the buffer, or after the return address) the address of that function is used to overwrite the return address. So when the function returns, that function runs. A small amount of code can act as a bootstrap loader that loads the rest of the exploit.
Here's a primer on how to write a basic stack smashing local root attack. I just found this with Google.
http://community.core-sdi.com/~juliano/htce.txt
Here's the text of a comment from the sample code:
Emphasis added by me. "executed on the stack"... in other words, this exploit would not work if the stack were marked NX, like I said.
Can you find me an article about how to execute a stack-smashing attack, where the exploit actually blows past the end of the stack or the heap and somehow winds up in normal code space? I have never heard of any such. Can you find even one example of the technique as you describe it?
steveha
I'd really like to build a computer with one of these new chips. I hope someone will release a motherboard.
Ideally we could choose from MicroATX or mini-ITX, but if I had to pick one I think I'd pick MicroATX.
I'd like to make a computer that is totally silent when it is idle, but has enough power to play DVDs (with some resolution upsampling for a large monitor). I'd like it to have some expansion capability, too.
And I'd totally love to see a new mini-rackmount form factor, based on mini-ITX, but that's probably such a tiny geekish market segment that no one will try to sell into it.
And as long as I'm dreaming, I'd love a 2-way or 4-way Efficeon SMP motherboard. It would always be snappy and responsive, would have plenty of power for my day-to-day tasks, and could still be really quiet or (I hope) totally silent. With the 90 nanometer cores, I'll bet you could put passive heatsinks on a pair of Efficeons without having problems with overheating.
steveha
Basically, it's an unreliable but better-than-nothing safety backstop behind unchecked buffers. If somebody manages to exploit a buffer overflow, there's a semi-random chance that the virus code might just crash into being allocated into another area marked NX, and when the execution point gets there the underlying application starts to crash.
Oh, it's a bit better than that. I believe most buffer overrun exploits put code into the buffer overrun. If the buffer is allocated on the stack, and the buffer and the whole stack are non-execute, then the exploit code can't run.
If the buffer overrun cannot put in a code stub, then the best it can hope to do is to overwrite the stack data to send execution somewhere else. If you can do that right, you might have a local root exploit: you might be able to get the code to run a root shell for you or something.
But as far as I know, setting NX on all your variables and stack space would stop all the buffer overrun remote root attacks.
steveha
The fact is there is one. It's pointed out here all the time, that Moller skycar.
I would love for that thing to be real. I fear it isn't. They never actually fly it. I think they said that they can't fly it for insurance reasons, but if it actually worked I'd expect to see them at least do a hover demo.
steveha