There's an old bug in Win2K which allows a buffer overflow in the kernel via a suitable.BMP file.
There's a lossless compressed form of.BMP files called RLE, for run length encoding. For some stupid reason, there's a decompressor for these things inside the Win2K kernel. Malformed.BMP files can cause a buffer overflow and system crash. This could probably be exploited into an attack.
Speaking as the author of a physics engine for animation, "Physics for Game Developers" is a bit too light for an engine developer.
The easy stuff (i.e. what you'd get in a college-level dynamics course) is covered, along with collision detection. But beyond that, the book does not take you.
Basic problem with building a game physics engine: if you do all the obvious stuff, it sort of works.
If you're competent, you should be to that point in a few months. Getting from "sort of works" to "works" is about 5x to 10x as hard as the first step.
There are really only a few game physics engines out there that really work.
You'll find out more about stiff systems of nonlinear differential equations than you ever wanted to know, if you don't give up first.
It's interesting that the book talks about the problems that occur when you take into account the propagation delay of gravity. Game physics engines, having rather large time steps, have some similar problems. I'll have to read this and see if I get any new insights applicable to game engines.
There's a related book, an ACM prizewinner, on the N-body problem. There's a clever numerical solution to the N-body problem that works for large N (millions), so you can simulate galaxies forming and such. The basic idea is that you can treat a group of bodies as a single body if they're near to each other and far away from the body being affected. This can be quantified and safe limits computed for grouping.
It's thus a numerical solution with a proveable upper bound on the error, which bound can be made arbitrarily small at the cost of more computation. This is effectively as good as a closed-form solution, although some older mathematicians deride it as inelegant.
Unless it works well on a general purpose computer but won't go fast enough, there's no reason for custom silicon.
Besides, making a workable technology cheaper is a job for the private sector. Nokia, etc. should be funding this. If it was likely to work, they would be.
For a good time, visit this spammer bulletin board. "Make Big Money with Spam". There's enough criminal activity described there to put some people in Club Fed for many years. This is a window into organized crime. Some excerpts:
07-07-2004, 05:25 PM
Nugster is Offline:
Junior Member
Join Date: Jul 2004
Reliable Proxie service hourly updated
Hello,
I am providing a very good proxie service with hourly updates.
each members list contains 1,000-2,000 working proxies at all times.
all you do is load the list into your mailer llike DM mailer uses links to get proxies set it to hourly updates and wala hands free mailing.
we offer the service for a weekly price of $600 with discount for montly memberships which monthly is $2,200 a $200 savings.
...
We are here to stay & aim to please.
Our service is staffed by a full time crew of 10 people who are constantly maintaing our lists by hand 24/7 to ensure working proxies, unlike others who have there lists checked by computers only not acutally checking for smtp enable....
Need money laundering services?
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processing
Quote:
Originally Posted by excelbru
Can someone advise me a reliable bulk proof credit card processor not shutting me down after the first complaints? ...
We can do such processing for you. Take a look at our site www.oxbill.com
And much, much more.
If you deal with spam, it's worth some time spent visiting that site. There's a whole criminal infrastructure to support spamming. You'll find "bullet proof web hosting", domain laundering,
credit card laundering, virus/worm distributors selling access to zombie machines, mortgage lead buyers, and "pharmacy" operators.
Yes, it's been reported to CERT/Homeland Security and NANAE.
PlanetLab is another "mobile code" scheme for running your stuff on other people's machines.
As an operational model, this fails. Either the system gets take over by hostile code, or there's some central adminstration that controls who runs what. (This last is the 3G cell phone services model. It's not working.)
This is one of those ideas, like "push technology" and "micropayments", which fail because the people who benefit are separate from those who absorb the costs. Only in a monopoly situation can that work.
Re:another senseless Slashdot story title
on
P2P Web searches
·
· Score: 1
Right.
It's important to get the scaling right.
Many of the P2P networks out there have algorithms that scale very badly. There's way too much unnecessary P2P traffic. The earliest P2P algorithms were horribly inefficient. There's been some progress, but not enough.
Kids should be able to find the latest pirated Britney Spears video in about 2 hops, without blithering all over the planet looking for it.
There's probably a copy on the local cable LAN segment, after all, and that's where it should come from.
As I point out occasionally, if the content were legal, netnews (which is a decades-old peer to peer network) would be a more efficient method of delivering it than the mess we have now.
There is a central organization that makes the decisions about which colors are In and which colors are Out. It's the Color Association of the United States. Their primary focus is clothing and textiles. But there's also an "automotive/technology/health" trend package, available to members of the Color Association.
"Leading professionals in the
design community serve to select the colors that will be popular 20 months ahead." This provides the needed lead time for manufacturers. The dye plants start to make the dyes that the textile plants will use to dye the yarn that will be woven into the fabrics that will go into the clothing that will be worn in the next selling season.
(Once, due to a somewhat strange chain of events, I had to learn more about the rag trade than I ever wanted to know. But that was back when the US had an apparel industry.)
By volume, most of what you find in the "SF" section today is either sword-and-sorcery fantasy or space opera. Neither is really about "the future".
Most of the classic SF themes, like alien first contact, have been done so many times that it's hard to come up with a new approach. (But see First Contract.)
Another problem is that space travel didn't work. There's no place in the Solar System worth going.
Mars is almost airless, Venus is superheated steam, and everything else is worse. We can't even get stuff into orbit cheaply after forty years of trying, and we're not getting any better at it.
Computers, as a subject, have been done to death.
Nanotechnology looks too much like magic. Telepathy, ESP, etc. have been overdone. (There's a classic short story that more or less ended the Campbell era of ESP enthusiasm. All the ESP adepts get together and build a spaceship powered by mental levitation. Years of mental training are required. They all get splitting headaches whenever they run the thing. "Give me an old-fashioned machine where I can push buttons", one says. Once it gets out that the adepts are doing this, other people figure out how to do it with hardware, antigravity goes commercial, and the adepts are left out of the ensuing boom.)
Seagate is backlogged a bit, but they're increasing capacity and these drives should be available shortly. "We're a bit oversubscribed. We're looking at ways of increasing capacity." -- Rob Pait, Seagate's director of global consumer electronics marketing. Pulling these things from consumer products will be unnecessary very shortly. After all, the version they put in the Rio Carbon was packaged for retail sale. A USB-keychain format is coming. There's also an ATA version for OEMs.
The drive was designed in Singapore and manufactured in China. Seagate, once a California company, is now so multinational they barely have US operations.
They've closed plants in Ireland, Mexico, Mayalasia, and Singapore because those places weren't low-cost enough.
Here's the
ST1 drive manual.
Expect a glut of these things in January, once the holiday season business has been fulfilled and the production lines are running at full speed.
The rule is now well established. A contractual provision fixing damages in the event of breach will be sustained if the amount liquidated bears a reasonable proportion to the probable loss and the amount of actual loss is incapable or difficult of precise estimation. If, however, the amount fixed is plainly or grossly disproportionate to the probable loss, the provision calls for a penalty and will not be enforced. In interpreting a provision fixing damages, it is not material whether the parties themselves have chosen to call the provision one for "liquidated damages", as in this case, or have styled it as a penalty. (citations omitted.) Such an approach would put too much faith in form and too little in substance. Similarly, the agreement should be interpreted as of the date of its making and not as of the date of its breach.
(Truck Rent-A-Center, Inc. v Puritan Farms 2nd, Inc., 41 NY2d 420, 425 [1977]; see Fingerlakes Chiropractic, P.C. v Maggio, 269 AD2d 790 [4th Dept. 2000]; Benderson v. Poss, 142 AD2d 937 [4th Dept. 1988]; Pyramid Centres & Co. v Kinney Shoe Corp., 244 AD2d 625 [3d Dept. 1997].)
It's up to a court to decide whether $500 is proportional to the actual loss incurred by PayPal. You usually don't get to count administrative time as costs in contract disputes; it has to be an outside expense.
OK, here we have two competing firms agreeing to do something disadvantageous to their customers.
Let's go to the US Code.
15 USC 1:
Section 1. Trusts, etc., in restraint of trade illegal; penalty
Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or
conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several
States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal. Every
person who shall make any contract or engage in any combination or
conspiracy hereby declared to be illegal shall be deemed guilty of
a felony, and, on conviction thereof, shall be punished by fine not
exceeding $10,000,000 if a corporation, or, if any other person,
$350,000, or by imprisonment not exceeding three years, or by both
said punishments, in the discretion of the court.
What part of "restraint of trade" didn't they understand?
There's such a thing as engineered recipes, but these aren't it. Engineered recipes are for volume production in food plants.
Serious recipes have tolerances. What temperatures are needed, and how tightly do times and temperature have to be controlled? What's the effect of ambient humidity? Here's a oven for a commercial bakery.. 6 heat zones, digital temperature control, and a conveyor belt. The bakery with a unit like that has recipes that tell how to set it up for each product they make.
There's no market for a few thousand slightly burnt rolls. Some jobs need a fancy oven like that. Others are less critical. Some jobs (especially pastries) need even finer control.
This was supposed to ship last June. Originally, Conran was trying to do the whole job with his own people in Canoga Park.
The project was in deep trouble by last winter, and they were frantically outsourcing work to the usual effects houses (ILM, Pixel Liberation Front (hi!), Ring of Fire, etc.)
ILM makes about half of their money bailing out productions in trouble.
(Incidentally, this is why working with Hollywood is such a pain. Either you're in development hell, and there's no money, or you're in production, and and there's no time.)
"Sky Captain" does look a bit too much like Crimson Skies.
Microsoft has a line of Crimson Skies pulp fiction novels. that seem designed to be movies. Dreamworks optioned movie rights for Crimson Skies back in 2001, but didn't use the option.
There are worse things than the command line. There are programs with many hotkeys, and hotkeys that do different things in different states. With some of those programs, it's not obvious what state you're in. Some of the state switching hotkeys may be toggles, for extra confusion. Many of the hotkey functions have no corresponding menu entry. And they may not have a good "undo" capability.
Now that's fear. One wrong move and you're dead.
See Blender, the open source animation system. In the manual, the "Hotkeys Reference" extends from page 480 to page 505. There are so many hotkeys that they use combinations like SHIFT-PAGEDOWN and ALT-CTRL-T.
Now we'll hear complaints from Blender fans. OK, Blender fans, you're in mesh edit mode. What does ALT-CTL-RIGHTMOUSEBUTTON do? No looking at the manual. Only if you can answer that do you get to comment.
and nothing, not anything, can ever be made hacker-proof.
It's quite possible to build very high security systems. With enough effort, you can take proof of correctness all the way down to the hardware level.
Nobody does this any more, because 1) the costs are very high, 2) you have to make the designs so brutally simple that you lose performance, and 3) everything becomes totally incompatible with Microsoft. . But go look at the list of systems approved under the old NSA Red Book criteria at the higher levels.
There are many house brands of common over-the-counter drugs that are packaged somewhat similarly and bear text like "compare to the ingredients of (brand name product)". That's just fine.
Of course, the question is why anyone would want a pay service that uses the playlists of mainstream stations.
I made the comment a few years back that broadcast radio is an enormous waste of bandwidth, because the content is so repetitive. It's far more efficient to download the content once and cache it locally. Then all the station has to broadcast is a playlist, using tiny bandwidth.
At the time, that was a joke. Now it's a viable business model.
Agreed. It's getting silly to stay with interlace. Today, both the camera imager and the flat-screen display are non-interlaced devices.
We certainly don't need interlace in the middle.
The frame rate needs to go up, too. 24FPS is way too slow. The classic choice between strobing and blur on every pan needs to go away. Digital cinema should be 72FPS.
Some video games now have sharper images than Hollywood. This is embarassing.
Actually, HP was the first vendor to ship machines with 3.5" diskettes. The HP 150, a DOS machine introduced in 1983, had only 3.5" diskettes. That was a good, reliable little DOS machine. It had a touchscreen, which made it useful for retail applications. It also had an optional hard drive.
The earlier HP-120, which ran CP/M, on a Z-80, also had 3.5" diskettes. But as one of the last CP/M machines, it was a dead end.
Apple didn't ship the original Macintosh with 3.5" drives until 1984. The Lisa had 5.25" drives (made by Apple, and crappy), and a hard drive (made by Apple, and crappy). Apple never made disk drives again after the Lisa.
The original Mac had no hard drive and only one floppy, remember. Everybody else was shipping machines with two floppies and a hard drive by 1984. Not until the Mac got a hard drive was it useful, or did it make money for Apple.
Slashdot Mirror
Any questions?
There's an old bug in Win2K which allows a buffer overflow in the kernel via a suitable .BMP file.
There's a lossless compressed form of .BMP files called RLE, for run length encoding. For some stupid reason, there's a decompressor for these things inside the Win2K kernel. Malformed .BMP files can cause a buffer overflow and system crash. This could probably be exploited into an attack.
Basic problem with building a game physics engine: if you do all the obvious stuff, it sort of works. If you're competent, you should be to that point in a few months. Getting from "sort of works" to "works" is about 5x to 10x as hard as the first step. There are really only a few game physics engines out there that really work.
You'll find out more about stiff systems of nonlinear differential equations than you ever wanted to know, if you don't give up first.
It's interesting that the book talks about the problems that occur when you take into account the propagation delay of gravity. Game physics engines, having rather large time steps, have some similar problems. I'll have to read this and see if I get any new insights applicable to game engines.
There's a related book, an ACM prizewinner, on the N-body problem. There's a clever numerical solution to the N-body problem that works for large N (millions), so you can simulate galaxies forming and such. The basic idea is that you can treat a group of bodies as a single body if they're near to each other and far away from the body being affected. This can be quantified and safe limits computed for grouping. It's thus a numerical solution with a proveable upper bound on the error, which bound can be made arbitrarily small at the cost of more computation. This is effectively as good as a closed-form solution, although some older mathematicians deride it as inelegant.
Besides, making a workable technology cheaper is a job for the private sector. Nokia, etc. should be funding this. If it was likely to work, they would be.
Nugster is Offline:
Junior Member
Join Date: Jul 2004
Reliable Proxie service hourly updated
Hello, I am providing a very good proxie service with hourly updates.
each members list contains 1,000-2,000 working proxies at all times.
all you do is load the list into your mailer llike DM mailer uses links to get proxies set it to hourly updates and wala hands free mailing.
we offer the service for a weekly price of $600 with discount for montly memberships which monthly is $2,200 a $200 savings.
We are here to stay & aim to please. Our service is staffed by a full time crew of 10 people who are constantly maintaing our lists by hand 24/7 to ensure working proxies, unlike others who have there lists checked by computers only not acutally checking for smtp enable. ...
Need money laundering services?
Junior Member
Join Date: Apr 2004
Posts: 11
processing Quote: Originally Posted by excelbru
Can someone advise me a reliable bulk proof credit card processor not shutting me down after the first complaints?
...
We can do such processing for you. Take a look at our site www.oxbill.com
And much, much more.
If you deal with spam, it's worth some time spent visiting that site. There's a whole criminal infrastructure to support spamming. You'll find "bullet proof web hosting", domain laundering, credit card laundering, virus/worm distributors selling access to zombie machines, mortgage lead buyers, and "pharmacy" operators.
Yes, it's been reported to CERT/Homeland Security and NANAE.
As an operational model, this fails. Either the system gets take over by hostile code, or there's some central adminstration that controls who runs what. (This last is the 3G cell phone services model. It's not working.)
This is one of those ideas, like "push technology" and "micropayments", which fail because the people who benefit are separate from those who absorb the costs. Only in a monopoly situation can that work.
It's important to get the scaling right. Many of the P2P networks out there have algorithms that scale very badly. There's way too much unnecessary P2P traffic. The earliest P2P algorithms were horribly inefficient. There's been some progress, but not enough. Kids should be able to find the latest pirated Britney Spears video in about 2 hops, without blithering all over the planet looking for it. There's probably a copy on the local cable LAN segment, after all, and that's where it should come from.
As I point out occasionally, if the content were legal, netnews (which is a decades-old peer to peer network) would be a more efficient method of delivering it than the mess we have now.
"Leading professionals in the design community serve to select the colors that will be popular 20 months ahead." This provides the needed lead time for manufacturers. The dye plants start to make the dyes that the textile plants will use to dye the yarn that will be woven into the fabrics that will go into the clothing that will be worn in the next selling season.
(Once, due to a somewhat strange chain of events, I had to learn more about the rag trade than I ever wanted to know. But that was back when the US had an apparel industry.)
Yeah, the industry switched from silver to black around 1990, and from black to silver around 2000.
Most of the classic SF themes, like alien first contact, have been done so many times that it's hard to come up with a new approach. (But see First Contract.)
Another problem is that space travel didn't work. There's no place in the Solar System worth going. Mars is almost airless, Venus is superheated steam, and everything else is worse. We can't even get stuff into orbit cheaply after forty years of trying, and we're not getting any better at it.
Computers, as a subject, have been done to death. Nanotechnology looks too much like magic. Telepathy, ESP, etc. have been overdone. (There's a classic short story that more or less ended the Campbell era of ESP enthusiasm. All the ESP adepts get together and build a spaceship powered by mental levitation. Years of mental training are required. They all get splitting headaches whenever they run the thing. "Give me an old-fashioned machine where I can push buttons", one says. Once it gets out that the adepts are doing this, other people figure out how to do it with hardware, antigravity goes commercial, and the adepts are left out of the ensuing boom.)
This kind of limits what you can write about.
The drive was designed in Singapore and manufactured in China. Seagate, once a California company, is now so multinational they barely have US operations. They've closed plants in Ireland, Mexico, Mayalasia, and Singapore because those places weren't low-cost enough.
Here's the ST1 drive manual. Expect a glut of these things in January, once the holiday season business has been fulfilled and the production lines are running at full speed.
(Truck Rent-A-Center, Inc. v Puritan Farms 2nd, Inc., 41 NY2d 420, 425 [1977]; see Fingerlakes Chiropractic, P.C. v Maggio, 269 AD2d 790 [4th Dept. 2000]; Benderson v. Poss, 142 AD2d 937 [4th Dept. 1988]; Pyramid Centres & Co. v Kinney Shoe Corp., 244 AD2d 625 [3d Dept. 1997].)
It's up to a court to decide whether $500 is proportional to the actual loss incurred by PayPal. You usually don't get to count administrative time as costs in contract disputes; it has to be an outside expense.
Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal. Every person who shall make any contract or engage in any combination or conspiracy hereby declared to be illegal shall be deemed guilty of a felony, and, on conviction thereof, shall be punished by fine not exceeding $10,000,000 if a corporation, or, if any other person, $350,000, or by imprisonment not exceeding three years, or by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court.
What part of "restraint of trade" didn't they understand?
Take a look at the FTC Guidelines on horizontal agreements among competitors. There's a good chance that the FTC could challenge this. Even under the Bush Administration, the FTC regularly takes antitrust enforcement actions.
Serious recipes have tolerances. What temperatures are needed, and how tightly do times and temperature have to be controlled? What's the effect of ambient humidity? Here's a oven for a commercial bakery.. 6 heat zones, digital temperature control, and a conveyor belt. The bakery with a unit like that has recipes that tell how to set it up for each product they make. There's no market for a few thousand slightly burnt rolls. Some jobs need a fancy oven like that. Others are less critical. Some jobs (especially pastries) need even finer control.
There are safety issues. See this microorganism lethality calculator. That's a key part of an industrial recipe.
Here are some engineered home recipes. These are intended for use in a programmable home bread-making machine. Note the comments:
- Measure all ingredients exactly -- close is not "good enough".
- Water temperature must be between 70 and 80 degrees Farenheit.
- Use flour specifically designed for bread machines; it rises better than all-purpose flour.
- Load ingredients in the pan in the order listed.
- Keep yeast away from liquids.
Now that's what real engineered recipes look like, tolerances, computer control, and all.(Incidentally, this is why working with Hollywood is such a pain. Either you're in development hell, and there's no money, or you're in production, and and there's no time.)
"Sky Captain" does look a bit too much like Crimson Skies. Microsoft has a line of Crimson Skies pulp fiction novels. that seem designed to be movies. Dreamworks optioned movie rights for Crimson Skies back in 2001, but didn't use the option.
For classical piano works, MIDI is almost tolerable.
Now that's fear. One wrong move and you're dead.
See Blender, the open source animation system. In the manual, the "Hotkeys Reference" extends from page 480 to page 505. There are so many hotkeys that they use combinations like SHIFT-PAGEDOWN and ALT-CTRL-T.
Now we'll hear complaints from Blender fans. OK, Blender fans, you're in mesh edit mode. What does ALT-CTL-RIGHTMOUSEBUTTON do? No looking at the manual. Only if you can answer that do you get to comment.
It's quite possible to build very high security systems. With enough effort, you can take proof of correctness all the way down to the hardware level.
Nobody does this any more, because 1) the costs are very high, 2) you have to make the designs so brutally simple that you lose performance, and 3) everything becomes totally incompatible with Microsoft. . But go look at the list of systems approved under the old NSA Red Book criteria at the higher levels.
It's interesting that articles like this don't blame Microsoft. One wonders how Microsoft arranges that.
This guy is a lawyer? With all those misspellings? And a credit card problem he can't solve with a gym?
This only happened after Savvis was told that their entire network was about to be e-mail blocked.
(No, not Battlestar Galactica).
Of course, the question is why anyone would want a pay service that uses the playlists of mainstream stations.
I made the comment a few years back that broadcast radio is an enormous waste of bandwidth, because the content is so repetitive. It's far more efficient to download the content once and cache it locally. Then all the station has to broadcast is a playlist, using tiny bandwidth.
At the time, that was a joke. Now it's a viable business model.
The frame rate needs to go up, too. 24FPS is way too slow. The classic choice between strobing and blur on every pan needs to go away. Digital cinema should be 72FPS.
Some video games now have sharper images than Hollywood. This is embarassing.
The earlier HP-120, which ran CP/M, on a Z-80, also had 3.5" diskettes. But as one of the last CP/M machines, it was a dead end.
Apple didn't ship the original Macintosh with 3.5" drives until 1984. The Lisa had 5.25" drives (made by Apple, and crappy), and a hard drive (made by Apple, and crappy). Apple never made disk drives again after the Lisa.
The original Mac had no hard drive and only one floppy, remember. Everybody else was shipping machines with two floppies and a hard drive by 1984. Not until the Mac got a hard drive was it useful, or did it make money for Apple.