How about, make the ROM binaries freely distributable, but not resellable or modifyable.
Putting them under GPL requires a lot of work, as then you'd need to release the source code as well, and keep source servers around, and deal with hoards of linux nuts asking for more source, and why isn't X under the GPL when Y is, and why isn't all new games under the GPL, blah blah blah.
Also, it isn't Sega's decision that all Sega games are free. Sure, they can make freely distributable ROMs of Sonic (made by Sega), but not of Contra (made by Konami).
Furthermore, if Sega wanted to implement a system of redistribution, they would want to control that as well with licensing agreements, which means the rom sites would be shut down anyways.
It can also work against you as well. Some of the better programmers out there may look at it and say....okay this sucks. Screw it, I hear sendmail needs some work.
I occasionally get soft/trialware that makes me say funk dat, I'm not using this, and then it gets blown away from my realm forever.
Your source code having a bad reputation is not a good way to generate interest. Maybe, combine your idea AugstWest and my reservations. Selective early release, where only some people see the code and help, and then general release after it's matured a bit.
The format is irrelevant. If mp3 was illegal, just use mp2 (almost the same anyways).
This is an issue about copyright and piracy. If I scan every page of a book and post it on the web as jpeg images, it's not the fault of the JPEG people.
The RIAA want to set some legal precidents over (re)distribution. Format doesn't matter, those change all the time. The mp3 format is useful in certain situations, and if you have enough processing power, can make a nice format to store video game sound files in. A ruling in this case would work across most formats of audio data.
In large programs, you will not find every bug and security hole. Don't try, it won't happen. You could spend decades and trillions of dollars trying, and may get almost everything, but you won't get all of them.
It takes time to develop a fix. You need to a) Determine how (what) is wrong. b) Fix it. c) Make sure the fix didn't break anything. d) Make sure the fix didn't open more holes.
That will take time. Testing is a key part. Windows runs on a lot of different environments, the patch has to be checked. Installers need to be made, documentation written, and so on. This takes time. This is why vendors should be notified first. Otherwise everyone has access to an exploit and nothing can be done until the now-scrambled vendor developer team releases a fix, and all the developers may be on a team building retreat that week.
Not notifying the vendors does not improve security. Security is about managing risk. You want to improve software, show the risk levels of using it as opposed to a different vendor.
While reading over the set of comments displayed as of this writing (9 so far), none are legitimate.
Could this be the faith of slashdot too? I propose slashdot having 'troll/asses moderators'. Their job is to take spam, and mod it to -1. This does not mean if something appears to maybe be valid for it to be modded into oblivian (there's a lot of false troll calling), but instead take the goatsex, hot grits, that jerk with the whole page of line returns, the credit card offer, and get rid of them. I hate wasting my meger 5 mod points to blow off the exponentially growing trolls and asses who disrupt the conversations.
So now Metrowerks needs two products to work with only two distributions of Linux.
There is nothing wrong with Linux standards. Standards are good, it makes things easier. Nothing like trying to edit text files in 400 different formats and use 200 different graphical interfaces. Can you imagine the Internet without standards in how TCP/IP works?
There are some advantages of T1's over cable. Cable modems offer no assurance of bandwidth (shared medium, so if your buddy next door downloads a big file, it'll affect your bandwidth).
Second, upload speeds on a cable modem really sucks. 17K/s isn't fun.
Lastly, if you can figure out how to do it of course, if the T1 is an ISDN connection (which I think it is), then you have the abilitity to set up channels and dedicate bandwidth to different functions.
Personally, I'd rather have a direct T1 then cable line. My cable line seems to max around 4mbps, but upload speed is very slow.
I've seen SCSI cables that extend rather far. I think I've seen at least a 50 foot cable (cost like $400 for the cable) a few years back. It was the kind that would be used on a DigiSphere (I can't remember the manufacturer anymore). It is indeed feasable to put the drives in a different room. You will probably want to check to make sure the SCSI card and computer supports booting off external SCSI disks. That was you can rip out all drives from the case, and boot from the other room.:)
If that idea fails, you can also try giving it lots of RAM, maybe putting stuff on a RAM disk, and using a networked file server. Either another windows/unix box, or a Snap drive or somesuch should work. Check the bandwidth first though. Running at 10Mbps, that gives you a theoretical max of 1.25MBps. That may not be enough for what you're doing, as that's only an ideal maximum. A 100 network should be able to handle it just fine.
You can also buy a solid state drive (Quantum makes one I think), which would be rather silent. However, I don't know about heat on that, and they may cost a bunch.
Don't forget that the CD drive also causes a bunch of sound too. There's probably no hope in finding a totally silent one of those, unless it's running at 1x or 2x in which it'd be quite quiet. If your reading audio CDs in realtime, you'd only need a 1x anyways.
"If you received an offensive message that appears to be from "Nick" or from info@mail-abuse.org, it was a forged attempt to sully the good name of MAPS and its employees. We are investigating the incident; if you wish to provide further evidence or have any questions, please contact abuse@mail-abuse.org. Thank you for your understanding and patience."
I'm saying Slashdot is not a media source. I'm not necessarily saying it 'sucks'.
I view slashdot as a giant funky message board. I don't think I'm alone in the applicational flaws associated with moderation (Katz mentions moderating in the article).
Slashdot is an interesting place to find opinions and ideas on news stories. I use it to keep tabs on what the next generation of techies, the people who will be directly after me and I may be managing, are thinking and how their thought patterns work. It's also a nice place to bounce ideas around and see how much praise or flames an idea can attract. But to call it a media source is to give too much credit.
Yeah, nothing I like more than to get my news from places with 1) No journalistic styling. 2) Even more bias reporting than normal media. 3) No integrity. 4) Scounging around multiple places to find stuff.
And added onto that, a discussion forum with lots of people who don't understand the concepts but instead just want to spout out stuff, and it doesn't matter if they know what is being talked about.
This is what slashdot basically is. Slashdot is NOT a news or media site. It's a glorified message board. Slashdot produces no news articles, everything is grabbed from other places - with lots from 'old' media places like nbc or cnn. Each article has little editorials attached to them, which usually dictates the angle of the discussion forum. Look at any YRO article, there's almost always an editorial in there. And then the discussion area is usually one sided.
Moderators go against their own opinions. People with different opinions are repressed on slashdot. If I post a pro NT comment in a linux article, it'll be modded down, called FUD, or flamed.
The main point, slashdot is not a media source. It's an office water cooler.
It depends on what you're doing of course, but Java can be fast enough.
Sometimes it's not speed, but ease. It's relatively easy to send data back and forth under Java to clients from a central server. Three of my friends did a distributed fractal images program (it did more than that, but it was neat).
You can have the one java code work under all the different platforms you're using, which could make the creation of new clients easier to deal with (this is not always true, Java is more crossplatform than many languages out there, but it's not perfect).
Java is fast enough. Granted, it'd be much faster with c/c++, but doing networking for multiple platforms under that can be a bit more difficult and time consuming. ymmv.
Wasn't something like this said a few years ago? Back before the Rebirth of The Jobs? When Apple was rumored to be merging with every company out there? I remember David Pogue speculating that Apple could merge with Toys R Us. Maybe Gil is back.:)
""Both companies would be divisions of DISNEY, with Steve being president of both, as well as chairman of WALT DISNEY Co."
Oh come on now. Now that's just ridiculous. Jobs chairman of Disney?
On the plus side, Mickey would come in 5 different colors.
At the networking magazine I work for, we have a 4-6 week leadtime. For large scale reviews, I need about two or three weeks to do the tests. And waiting for vendors to send their software sucks, especially when it's past the "send it now or you're out" dates.
CodeWarrior is available on Linux (they support RedHat and SuSE). I've used CW on the Mac, and rather like it. But anyways, the program is available on Mac, Win, Linux, and Solaris. Now, when I got mine it said the project could be shared across different platforms. This may make it easier to do cross development.
So if you like CW under Windows, you could use it under Linux (hopefully they kept the user interface the same under linux, and that would make transitioning easier).
While I'm knowledgable of some aspects of magazine creation, I do not know much about the actual printing process (I just write, not print.:)
However, I was thinking more along the lines of an ad designer, making an ad for a magazine to print. Or somesuch. I guess the point is mostly the matching from screen -> printer -> published work
Although, I would guess that even big magazine places would use Photoshop or Illustrator or probably both often. If I get the chance, I may one day ask the cover designers what they use (although they work in an office 250 miles away).
"So with Adobe running out of steam for interesting ideas... When will GIMP catch up? Can Gimp catch up?"
Color matching.
Important thing in the graphics community. Getting the thing on the screen to look like what's on the proof pages and get that to look like the magazine prints. This requires a great deal of effort to get right. This may (it'd be a good thing at least) require OS support. MacOS has color matching support in the OS and Adobe, which is part of why it's really popular with graphics work (other advantages of MacOS and other platforms aside, it's just an example). So good color matching support would be a nice thing to work on.
Trojans are among the hardest things for a firewall to defend against. Is it a trojan, or just a normal Internet application?
Even personal firewalls that do intrusion detection has problems with trojan programs. Plus, you're at the mercy at the frequency of signature updates. Or run BO on port 5000, that throws some policy files off.
I saw a neat firewall made by ZoneLabs that does application control (pops up a dialog when a program attempts to connect to the Internet), but that is much more user intrusive.
Blocking all outgoing ports is an interesting idea but still problematic. A fun test I do on firewalls I test is playing with UDP port 53 (thats DNS). You can also send a DOS attack over port TCP 80, and even use valid http syntax too. The only other choice is bandwidth controlling, but even that won't help tremendously in a DDOS attack.
Anyone have any good ideas of how to defend against DOS and trojans, incoming and outgoing? The current firewall model is flawed with it's implementation. However, I can't think of any solutions, if there even is one.
"I reserve the right, however, to claim that linux will patch something and put it out for download within a DAY of the exploit being made public."
Yes, and with no beta testing, thus making the patch essentially unusable on production systems for some time, and during that time, everyone will know about the exploit.
In general, Linux is bad with TCP/IP traffic. This includes, as you could guess, firewall and routing. This is also why Linux doesn't completely overshine NT in those web server tests.
Of course, if you are on a cable modem or other mid-bandwidth, then it should definitely be fast enough. I'm guess slashdot has a tremendous amount of traffic to deal with, and probably has a big pipe.
The BSD's are generally looked at as more secure and better performing firewalls.
Personally, I don't like the linux ipchains. The policy file (text editing) is not friendly when you have a complex set of rules, multiple hosts with different rule sets. And the reporting is bad. Catting a logfile is not how I want to look for attacks. A GUI can be better than the command line, if the GUI is done right (key point: done right). Creating the policy file and reporting is a major factor with every firewall vendor out there.
If I was going to use a free (cost) software firewall, I'd go with an OpenBSD box myself.
Crusoe is also slower. Everything is based on tradeoffs. What do you want? Slow and long, fast but shorter.
Business laptops today need high performance power to do presentations through a video projector. These will probably be plugged into a wall jack, so battery life won't be as big a factor in that.
Hmm. Over 200 new features. Oh boy. I wonder if they improved stability on the UltraSPARC (kinda ironic on that one. Like QuickTime being more stable on Windows). StarOffice is (was?) horrible on sparc. A peon user, from a remote X session, was able to consistantly crash the OS to the point of where you couldn't ping it and had to power cycle. That was fun when someone was giving a presentation. I dislike the interface of star office. Copying microsoft, fine, okay, if you really want to, but they take it to the extreme. Why do I need url's to my files? Silly file-viewer-is-a-web-browser-like-MS. -- Mike DeMaria
Slashdot Mirror
Why must everything be under the GPL?
How about, make the ROM binaries freely distributable, but not resellable or modifyable.
Putting them under GPL requires a lot of work, as then you'd need to release the source code as well, and keep source servers around, and deal with hoards of linux nuts asking for more source, and why isn't X under the GPL when Y is, and why isn't all new games under the GPL, blah blah blah.
Also, it isn't Sega's decision that all Sega games are free. Sure, they can make freely distributable ROMs of Sonic (made by Sega), but not of Contra (made by Konami).
Furthermore, if Sega wanted to implement a system of redistribution, they would want to control that as well with licensing agreements, which means the rom sites would be shut down anyways.
It can also work against you as well. Some of the better programmers out there may look at it and say....okay this sucks. Screw it, I hear sendmail needs some work.
I occasionally get soft/trialware that makes me say funk dat, I'm not using this, and then it gets blown away from my realm forever.
Your source code having a bad reputation is not a good way to generate interest. Maybe, combine your idea AugstWest and my reservations. Selective early release, where only some people see the code and help, and then general release after it's matured a bit.
The format is irrelevant. If mp3 was illegal, just use mp2 (almost the same anyways).
This is an issue about copyright and piracy. If I scan every page of a book and post it on the web as jpeg images, it's not the fault of the JPEG people.
The RIAA want to set some legal precidents over (re)distribution. Format doesn't matter, those change all the time. The mp3 format is useful in certain situations, and if you have enough processing power, can make a nice format to store video game sound files in. A ruling in this case would work across most formats of audio data.
In large programs, you will not find every bug and security hole. Don't try, it won't happen. You could spend decades and trillions of dollars trying, and may get almost everything, but you won't get all of them.
It takes time to develop a fix. You need to
a) Determine how (what) is wrong.
b) Fix it.
c) Make sure the fix didn't break anything.
d) Make sure the fix didn't open more holes.
That will take time. Testing is a key part. Windows runs on a lot of different environments, the patch has to be checked. Installers need to be made, documentation written, and so on. This takes time. This is why vendors should be notified first. Otherwise everyone has access to an exploit and nothing can be done until the now-scrambled vendor developer team releases a fix, and all the developers may be on a team building retreat that week.
Not notifying the vendors does not improve security. Security is about managing risk. You want to improve software, show the risk levels of using it as opposed to a different vendor.
While reading over the set of comments displayed as of this writing (9 so far), none are legitimate.
Could this be the faith of slashdot too? I propose slashdot having 'troll/asses moderators'. Their job is to take spam, and mod it to -1. This does not mean if something appears to maybe be valid for it to be modded into oblivian (there's a lot of false troll calling), but instead take the goatsex, hot grits, that jerk with the whole page of line returns, the credit card offer, and get rid of them. I hate wasting my meger 5 mod points to blow off the exponentially growing trolls and asses who disrupt the conversations.
from the codewarrior system requirements:
"RedHat Linux 5.2 later"
They also make a different one for SuSE.
So now Metrowerks needs two products to work with only two distributions of Linux.
There is nothing wrong with Linux standards. Standards are good, it makes things easier. Nothing like trying to edit text files in 400 different formats and use 200 different graphical interfaces. Can you imagine the Internet without standards in how TCP/IP works?
There are some advantages of T1's over cable. Cable modems offer no assurance of bandwidth (shared medium, so if your buddy next door downloads a big file, it'll affect your bandwidth).
Second, upload speeds on a cable modem really sucks. 17K/s isn't fun.
Lastly, if you can figure out how to do it of course, if the T1 is an ISDN connection (which I think it is), then you have the abilitity to set up channels and dedicate bandwidth to different functions.
Personally, I'd rather have a direct T1 then cable line. My cable line seems to max around 4mbps, but upload speed is very slow.
I've seen SCSI cables that extend rather far. I think I've seen at least a 50 foot cable (cost like $400 for the cable) a few years back. It was the kind that would be used on a DigiSphere (I can't remember the manufacturer anymore). It is indeed feasable to put the drives in a different room. You will probably want to check to make sure the SCSI card and computer supports booting off external SCSI disks. That was you can rip out all drives from the case, and boot from the other room. :)
;-)
If that idea fails, you can also try giving it lots of RAM, maybe putting stuff on a RAM disk, and using a networked file server. Either another windows/unix box, or a Snap drive or somesuch should work. Check the bandwidth first though. Running at 10Mbps, that gives you a theoretical max of 1.25MBps. That may not be enough for what you're doing, as that's only an ideal maximum. A 100 network should be able to handle it just fine.
You can also buy a solid state drive (Quantum makes one I think), which would be rather silent. However, I don't know about heat on that, and they may cost a bunch.
Don't forget that the CD drive also causes a bunch of sound too. There's probably no hope in finding a totally silent one of those, unless it's running at 1x or 2x in which it'd be quite quiet. If your reading audio CDs in realtime, you'd only need a 1x anyways.
Of course, there's always that new Mac Cube...
This seems a bit ironic.
"If you received an offensive message that appears to be from "Nick" or from info@mail-abuse.org, it was a forged attempt to sully the good name of MAPS and its employees. We are investigating the incident; if you wish to provide further evidence or have any questions, please contact abuse@mail-abuse.org.
Thank you for your understanding and patience."
I'm saying Slashdot is not a media source. I'm not necessarily saying it 'sucks'.
I view slashdot as a giant funky message board. I don't think I'm alone in the applicational flaws associated with moderation (Katz mentions moderating in the article).
Slashdot is an interesting place to find opinions and ideas on news stories. I use it to keep tabs on what the next generation of techies, the people who will be directly after me and I may be managing, are thinking and how their thought patterns work. It's also a nice place to bounce ideas around and see how much praise or flames an idea can attract. But to call it a media source is to give too much credit.
Yeah, nothing I like more than to get my news from places with
1) No journalistic styling.
2) Even more bias reporting than normal media.
3) No integrity.
4) Scounging around multiple places to find stuff.
And added onto that, a discussion forum with lots of people who don't understand the concepts but instead just want to spout out stuff, and it doesn't matter if they know what is being talked about.
This is what slashdot basically is. Slashdot is NOT a news or media site. It's a glorified message board. Slashdot produces no news articles, everything is grabbed from other places - with lots from 'old' media places like nbc or cnn. Each article has little editorials attached to them, which usually dictates the angle of the discussion forum. Look at any YRO article, there's almost always an editorial in there. And then the discussion area is usually one sided.
Moderators go against their own opinions. People with different opinions are repressed on slashdot. If I post a pro NT comment in a linux article, it'll be modded down, called FUD, or flamed.
The main point, slashdot is not a media source. It's an office water cooler.
It depends on what you're doing of course, but Java can be fast enough.
Sometimes it's not speed, but ease. It's relatively easy to send data back and forth under Java to clients from a central server. Three of my friends did a distributed fractal images program (it did more than that, but it was neat).
You can have the one java code work under all the different platforms you're using, which could make the creation of new clients easier to deal with (this is not always true, Java is more crossplatform than many languages out there, but it's not perfect).
Java is fast enough. Granted, it'd be much faster with c/c++, but doing networking for multiple platforms under that can be a bit more difficult and time consuming. ymmv.
Wasn't something like this said a few years ago? Back before the Rebirth of The Jobs? When Apple was rumored to be merging with every company out there? I remember David Pogue speculating that Apple could merge with Toys R Us. Maybe Gil is back. :)
""Both companies would be divisions of DISNEY, with Steve being president of both, as well as chairman of WALT DISNEY Co."
Oh come on now. Now that's just ridiculous. Jobs chairman of Disney?
On the plus side, Mickey would come in 5 different colors.
>Think: magazine lead-time.
At the networking magazine I work for, we have a 4-6 week leadtime. For large scale reviews, I need about two or three weeks to do the tests. And waiting for vendors to send their software sucks, especially when it's past the "send it now or you're out" dates.
I've heard Linus claim that before. Either
:-)
:)
1) He's overconfident.
2) He's arrogant.
3) He's being funny.
I'd wager all three of them.
And 1.1.81 is officially BugFree(tm), so if you receive any bug-reports on it, you know they are just evil lies.
-- Linus Torvalds
I kinda like that quote.
This post is neutral.
CodeWarrior is available on Linux (they support RedHat and SuSE). I've used CW on the Mac, and rather like it. But anyways, the program is available on Mac, Win, Linux, and Solaris. Now, when I got mine it said the project could be shared across different platforms. This may make it easier to do cross development.
So if you like CW under Windows, you could use it under Linux (hopefully they kept the user interface the same under linux, and that would make transitioning easier).
-- Mike DeMaria
While I'm knowledgable of some aspects of magazine creation, I do not know much about the actual printing process (I just write, not print. :)
However, I was thinking more along the lines of an ad designer, making an ad for a magazine to print. Or somesuch. I guess the point is mostly the matching from screen -> printer -> published work
Although, I would guess that even big magazine places would use Photoshop or Illustrator or probably both often. If I get the chance, I may one day ask the cover designers what they use (although they work in an office 250 miles away).
-- Mike DeMaria
"So with Adobe running out of steam for interesting ideas... When will GIMP catch up? Can Gimp catch up?"
Color matching.
Important thing in the graphics community. Getting the thing on the screen to look like what's on the proof pages and get that to look like the magazine prints. This requires a great deal of effort to get right. This may (it'd be a good thing at least) require OS support. MacOS has color matching support in the OS and Adobe, which is part of why it's really popular with graphics work (other advantages of MacOS and other platforms aside, it's just an example). So good color matching support would be a nice thing to work on.
-- Mike DeMaria
Trojans are among the hardest things for a firewall to defend against. Is it a trojan, or just a normal Internet application?
Even personal firewalls that do intrusion detection has problems with trojan programs. Plus, you're at the mercy at the frequency of signature updates. Or run BO on port 5000, that throws some policy files off.
I saw a neat firewall made by ZoneLabs that does application control (pops up a dialog when a program attempts to connect to the Internet), but that is much more user intrusive.
Blocking all outgoing ports is an interesting idea but still problematic. A fun test I do on firewalls I test is playing with UDP port 53 (thats DNS). You can also send a DOS attack over port TCP 80, and even use valid http syntax too. The only other choice is bandwidth controlling, but even that won't help tremendously in a DDOS attack.
Anyone have any good ideas of how to defend against DOS and trojans, incoming and outgoing? The current firewall model is flawed with it's implementation. However, I can't think of any solutions, if there even is one.
"I reserve the right, however, to claim that linux will patch something and put it out for download within a DAY of the exploit being made public."
Yes, and with no beta testing, thus making the patch essentially unusable on production systems for some time, and during that time, everyone will know about the exploit.
Yeah, I have OpenBSD sitting on one of my personal machines, and I rather enjoy it. And mucking with the kiddies is fun too.
:)
Like responding back with an ACK for random ports at random times. That'll confuse em. Heehee.
Do you have trouble getting X clients to go in and out of the firewall?
Mike
In general, Linux is bad with TCP/IP traffic. This includes, as you could guess, firewall and routing. This is also why Linux doesn't completely overshine NT in those web server tests.
Of course, if you are on a cable modem or other mid-bandwidth, then it should definitely be fast enough. I'm guess slashdot has a tremendous amount of traffic to deal with, and probably has a big pipe.
The BSD's are generally looked at as more secure and better performing firewalls.
Personally, I don't like the linux ipchains. The policy file (text editing) is not friendly when you have a complex set of rules, multiple hosts with different rule sets. And the reporting is bad. Catting a logfile is not how I want to look for attacks. A GUI can be better than the command line, if the GUI is done right (key point: done right). Creating the policy file and reporting is a major factor with every firewall vendor out there.
If I was going to use a free (cost) software firewall, I'd go with an OpenBSD box myself.
Mike
Hi dummy to you buddy.
:)
There's more to presentations than just click click click presentations.
Play a movie of the next commercial. Show off your new product. Get smooth transitions while loading big slides. Show the program compiling.
Mike DeMaria
Crusoe is also slower. Everything is based on tradeoffs. What do you want? Slow and long, fast but shorter.
Business laptops today need high performance power to do presentations through a video projector. These will probably be plugged into a wall jack, so battery life won't be as big a factor in that.
The solution is not to use slower technology.
Mike DeMaria
Hmm. Over 200 new features. Oh boy. I wonder if they improved stability on the UltraSPARC (kinda ironic on that one. Like QuickTime being more stable on Windows). StarOffice is (was?) horrible on sparc. A peon user, from a remote X session, was able to consistantly crash the OS to the point of where you couldn't ping it and had to power cycle. That was fun when someone was giving a presentation. I dislike the interface of star office. Copying microsoft, fine, okay, if you really want to, but they take it to the extreme. Why do I need url's to my files? Silly file-viewer-is-a-web-browser-like-MS. -- Mike DeMaria