That's taking GPL to the point of anal retention, No binary drivers but money making (corrupt evil) companies can use Linux?
The GPL says you can play with the software as long as you're willing to give back your changes in the same terms. Binary drivers don't want to play by those rules so they have to cope with the rules Linus set for them. As for money making companies using Linux, well, they're playing by the same rules and providing the code back. The binary driver companies (money making companies as well) are not doing that. They get no sympathy from me, especially the ones (NVidia) that won't provide programming information for the hardware they sell us. The Linux companies, on the other hand, are usually willing to give everyone, under the GPL, the new software they write themselves, making it available to everyone, even competing companies. This makes them alot more noble in my eyes than those whose business is hardware but are so stuck in the Microsoft mentality they wont release the code to make their hardware work.
I won't buy hardware that doesn't have opensource drivers if I can't help it, more for pragmatic than ideological reasons. In two years when the hardware I bought isn't the latest or when the company that built it goes under I can still have driver support for newer versions of the OS. My tv card was built by a company that went out of business. It doesn't have drivers for the latest revisions of Windows (the only OS for which the manufacturer provided drivers) but it works great on Linux since the driver's source is available and can be ported to newer versions of the kernel.
Based on my experiences so far, I can say without reservation that the current versions of Outlook Express, Internet Explorer, Word and Excel are still far superior to their open source/free software counterparts for most practical purposes
Word and Excel I won't debate, Internet Explorer I'll put down to rendering IE specific pages, but Outlook Express? Most Linux mail clients are better than that. You lost all credibility there.
but I think that makeing them ALL GP (even the older ones) would be good, and maybe bring up the number of registers to a good round 32 or something. Am I missing something glaring wrong?
Well, the only reason why the other registers aren't GP on x86 is that there are instructions that use them implicitly. If you don't care about these instructions you can use them as regular registers.
As an example the EDI register is used by the SCAS* instructions as a pointer to memory. If you don't care about the instructions that use this register like that you're free to do regular operations on the EDI register, it has no limitations on what you can do with it.
You're right to say that there are few registers though. Before I learned x86 I learned MIPS and there you got all the glory of 28+ GP registers.
In the simple examples we did I never needed to push and pop from the stack.
one is introducing an inferior GUI layer on top of a state-of-the-art one in order to run legacy applications
X11 is not a GUI, it's a device-independent, network-transparent way to draw stuff on screens.
One of the reasons Quartz was designed around display postscript was to enable possible "remote desktop" type applications for Mac; otherwise, they would have just stuck to the usual bitmap based methods.
One common misconception about X11 is that it's tied to the rendering model. It's not. The designers of X11 knew that the wire protocol could survive time, but that the rendering method couldn't. They designed the protocol acordingly. It so happens that the original rendering method was good enough for a long time. Nowadays it's getting outdated, but there are efforts to create new ones. See Keith Packard's work.
Also, have you ever even LOOKED into the X11 source? Some real shitty stuff, man.
There's no such thing as the X11 source. X11 is a protocol, like HTTP or FTP. Xfree86 (which I assume you meant) is one of it's implementations, but not the only one. I haven't looked at the code for Xfree86 yet but it used to suck a hole lot more in the 3.x days.
To wrap this up and to awnser all your inflated comments on how MacOSX stuff is so much better and X11 a pile of crap, I'd like to say that X11 has survived the test of time, Quartz hasn't. Considering that Next's similar technology didn't take over X11 I'd say X11 is here to stay.
There's something here you didn't consider. Apple will give back the KHTML changes because the KHTML license says it has to, not out of the kindness of their hearts. As for BSD, Apple is free to take the code and run. Considering that it's been a long time since MacOSX's release, it's pretty safe to assume that's what is happening.
Of course this is perfectly fine since the people that write FreeBSD code chose that license expecting this.
They're trying to kill P2P because it's cutting in on their sales. Or so they say, since they're raising prices and focusing on the 3 bands that sell the million albums instead of having a bit of variety.
I would buy alot more CDs and DVDs if they were marked at half or a quarter of the price. Meaning that I would spend more money if they were cheaper. But with all this nonsense about this being all about protecting the artists, the big labels are just bringing in the money.
What's the result then? I'm now much more inclined to go to a P2P system (I don't but I might start doing it) and downloading the music I want. I pay for concerts, and I know that money goes to the artists. When I buy a CD I'm thinking that this overpriced little round thingie that costs 17 cents to make is going to fund the record labels' lousy service to music and not the artists.
To top all this, I get kicked in the back with crippled CDs that try to prevent me from turning my music into MP3's that I can put in a playlist in my computer. And then they ask why I'm not buying so many CDs? Whatever...
The problem with micropayments is more of a technical problem than anything else. You need to have trusted parties to verify the number of pages you've viewed (or the amount of bandwidth you consumed in your scheme) and you need a way to pay these very small amounts. Bank transfers are too expensive (per-transaction) to acomplish this.
So that this actually works we need a new bank-like network of entities that will all be able to transfer money from the user to the website. The micropayment itself is just a small counter. Websites don't receive a payment for each webpage but instead receive an aggregate transfer every day (for example). This can't all be done by one entity (Paypal and Passport come to mind) because you don't want the mechanism to transfer money on the internet to be a monopoly. The ideal setup would probably be some major traditional banks stepping up and providind this service.
I'm just saying that the commoditisation of the hardware market will make things harder for users who really do need pro quality equipment.
I don't think this is true. this "commoditisation of the hardware market" will only make the percentage of pro-quality equipment drop but the raw number will probably increase. Think about it. More people using low-end hardware means more people wanting better stuff.
As for your SCSI disk example, just think how much you'd have to pay for a 0,5 GB slow and unreliable disk a few years ago. Alot more than you do now.
The increase in the price of pro-equipment is only hapenning because you're changing that definition to mean server-class stuff, since that's becoming afordable today. Hence, prices are actually *droping* because of the massification of computer hardware. There's no indication that that won't continue.
It was fun:) I had to go and restart the darned thing every time the administrator rebooted, though (the administrator was not particularly UNIX smart
If you had to restart the webserver manually on every reboot you're not very UNIX smart either. A cron job running every 5 minutes to see if the server is still up would have taken care of it.
The 2% elite geeks never even call unless *we* have something wrong, so they're a breeze too (and have managed to evolve in a hostile world and are pretty savvy at handling their service provider).
I guess your isp works alot better than mine then. I had a latency problem in my connection a few days ago where the jump from one router to the next would cost ~200ms at peek hours, but the transfer rate would be great anyway. I tried to get this solved for a week but the "helldesk" people wouldn't let me through to a real tech. Even though I pinpointed the problem, giving them the IP's to the relevant routers.
After a while they fixed it (a ten minute telnet to the relevant router I'd guess) and not even once awnsered the e-mails the people at the helpdesk told me to write. All this while being very friendly to talk to.
Good digital cameras don't fake shutter click shounds. They actually do the same a film camera would do and only expose the CCD/CMOS sensor for the length of the exposure time. The ones that show you what they're seeing in the screen are always exposing, but I haven't seen one of these fake shutter sounds.
Well, since the person in question is only trying guest logins and not doing any kind of dictionary password guessing that's not really a problem is it?
Crusoe isn't a RISC processor like you claim. It's a VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) processor. Diferent things here. That's where it get's it's simplicity from, by doing most of what the hardware usually does in software.
As for RISC vs. CISC... Intel hasn't designed a CISC chip in years! Today's x86 chips (Intel or AMD) are much more RISC chips than they are CISC. They run a small instruction set and then a small piece of software (the microcode) that does the translation of the x86 instructions to the basic hardware-level instructions.
This is how they're able to produce these stellar clock rates. Very small instructions (hence the RISC) that are composed to form the x86 ISA in all it's glory.
A good decision would probably be scraping the backwards compatibility cruft from x86 and moving on to a cleaner x86 based ISA. As far as I know the x86-64 from AMD still supports code for the 8086 and that is just crazy.
Your error message suggests you might be getting some extra cruft as part of the rsh output. That usually means a wordy.profile (or similar) file; hack it until it's silent (e.g., until the env command above only shows environment variable settings and nothing else).
Login scripts should only output stuff to the terminal if running in an interactive shell otherwise they'll break "scp" and aparently ssh CVS login as well.
So the screen printing parts should be enclosed in something like this:
This just emphasizes how hard Open Source companies like Linux and RealMedia are going to have to work to overcome the scourge that is Micro$oft.
Since when is Real Media an open source company? Real is a proprietary technology (and a pretty crappy one too) and Real Media is just another proprietary software maker. They're not any better than Microsoft.
It's a stretch but it's possible. The plane will fall slower than 007 since it's wings will give it some suport and because it drags around alot more air than 007. If that's enough, and if there's any cliff in the world big enough for the whole scene to be possible is a whole diferent story.
In case the archive becomes slashdotted here's the announcement:
Last year the Honeynet Project sponsored the Forensic Challenge, a competition amongst the security community to study, analyze, and report on a computer hacked in the wild. The result was a complete forensic analysis of the hacked system. Both the analysis from different individuals and the the images of the hacked computer are shared and used to this day.
This year we are continuing that tradition and are announcing the Reverse Challenge. The goal of this challenge is to develop reverse engineering skills amongst the security community. Your mission, if you should choose to accept, is to analyze and report on a binary captured in the wild. Your analysis will then be judged by a panel of experts, rated, and shared with the security community.
This year we actually have prizes. Top prizes include licensed copies of IDA Pro, $200 Amazon gift certificate from DataRescue, and free pass to the Black Hat Briefings. As if that was not enough, the top 20 entries get a signed copy of the Honeynet book, Know Your Enemy (you know, the book the guy down the hall is using as a door stopper:). Judges include:
- David Dittrich
- K2
- Halvar
- Job de Haas
- Niels Provos
- Gera
The challenge officially begins Monday, 06 May when we release the binary. You have between now and the 6th to get your tools ready, form teams if you wish, and stock up on the caffeinated beverage of choice. You will then have four weeks to complete your analysis and submit your report no later the 24:00 GMT, Friday, 31 May. Submissions will be judged and then released 01 July. You can learn more about the challenge now, and download the binary on 06 May, at
I think we're just stuck with jpeg and gif for about the next 5-10 years, until browsers in general get reinvented.
How much reinventing is required to support a new image format? If it's open and well documented konqueror/mozilla could have support for it in a release version within a month or two. And if IE supports it soon, we might start seeing websites actually using it often.
But this is really not a Web-only thing. This is a jpeg replacement that can be used wherever jpeg is used now.
Thankfully, I was able to get Debian installed. Now only if I could figure out how to boot it properly from OpenFirmware. The steps in the recent O'reilly article didn't work for me.
Slashdot Mirror
I won't buy hardware that doesn't have opensource drivers if I can't help it, more for pragmatic than ideological reasons. In two years when the hardware I bought isn't the latest or when the company that built it goes under I can still have driver support for newer versions of the OS. My tv card was built by a company that went out of business. It doesn't have drivers for the latest revisions of Windows (the only OS for which the manufacturer provided drivers) but it works great on Linux since the driver's source is available and can be ported to newer versions of the kernel.
Word and Excel I won't debate, Internet Explorer I'll put down to rendering IE specific pages, but Outlook Express? Most Linux mail clients are better than that. You lost all credibility there.
Well, the only reason why the other registers aren't GP on x86 is that there are instructions that use them implicitly. If you don't care about these instructions you can use them as regular registers.
As an example the EDI register is used by the SCAS* instructions as a pointer to memory. If you don't care about the instructions that use this register like that you're free to do regular operations on the EDI register, it has no limitations on what you can do with it.
You're right to say that there are few registers though. Before I learned x86 I learned MIPS and there you got all the glory of 28+ GP registers. In the simple examples we did I never needed to push and pop from the stack.
Common misconception. sqrt(x^2) = abs(x).
Meaning that Women are actually the absolute value of Evil. :)
What's with the AMD logo. Did they get an Athlon in one of these things?
Let me break down your arguments.
one is introducing an inferior GUI layer on top of a state-of-the-art one in order to run legacy applications
X11 is not a GUI, it's a device-independent, network-transparent way to draw stuff on screens.
One of the reasons Quartz was designed around display postscript was to enable possible "remote desktop" type applications for Mac; otherwise, they would have just stuck to the usual bitmap based methods.
One common misconception about X11 is that it's tied to the rendering model. It's not. The designers of X11 knew that the wire protocol could survive time, but that the rendering method couldn't. They designed the protocol acordingly. It so happens that the original rendering method was good enough for a long time. Nowadays it's getting outdated, but there are efforts to create new ones. See Keith Packard's work.
Also, have you ever even LOOKED into the X11 source? Some real shitty stuff, man.
There's no such thing as the X11 source. X11 is a protocol, like HTTP or FTP. Xfree86 (which I assume you meant) is one of it's implementations, but not the only one. I haven't looked at the code for Xfree86 yet but it used to suck a hole lot more in the 3.x days.
To wrap this up and to awnser all your inflated comments on how MacOSX stuff is so much better and X11 a pile of crap, I'd like to say that X11 has survived the test of time, Quartz hasn't. Considering that Next's similar technology didn't take over X11 I'd say X11 is here to stay.
There's something here you didn't consider. Apple will give back the KHTML changes because the KHTML license says it has to, not out of the kindness of their hearts. As for BSD, Apple is free to take the code and run. Considering that it's been a long time since MacOSX's release, it's pretty safe to assume that's what is happening.
Of course this is perfectly fine since the people that write FreeBSD code chose that license expecting this.
I would buy alot more CDs and DVDs if they were marked at half or a quarter of the price. Meaning that I would spend more money if they were cheaper. But with all this nonsense about this being all about protecting the artists, the big labels are just bringing in the money.
What's the result then? I'm now much more inclined to go to a P2P system (I don't but I might start doing it) and downloading the music I want. I pay for concerts, and I know that money goes to the artists. When I buy a CD I'm thinking that this overpriced little round thingie that costs 17 cents to make is going to fund the record labels' lousy service to music and not the artists.
To top all this, I get kicked in the back with crippled CDs that try to prevent me from turning my music into MP3's that I can put in a playlist in my computer. And then they ask why I'm not buying so many CDs? Whatever...
Wi-Fi is the Never Ending Buzzword (tm)!
So that this actually works we need a new bank-like network of entities that will all be able to transfer money from the user to the website. The micropayment itself is just a small counter. Websites don't receive a payment for each webpage but instead receive an aggregate transfer every day (for example). This can't all be done by one entity (Paypal and Passport come to mind) because you don't want the mechanism to transfer money on the internet to be a monopoly. The ideal setup would probably be some major traditional banks stepping up and providind this service.
I don't think this is true. this "commoditisation of the hardware market" will only make the percentage of pro-quality equipment drop but the raw number will probably increase. Think about it. More people using low-end hardware means more people wanting better stuff.
As for your SCSI disk example, just think how much you'd have to pay for a 0,5 GB slow and unreliable disk a few years ago. Alot more than you do now.
The increase in the price of pro-equipment is only hapenning because you're changing that definition to mean server-class stuff, since that's becoming afordable today. Hence, prices are actually *droping* because of the massification of computer hardware. There's no indication that that won't continue.
If you had to restart the webserver manually on every reboot you're not very UNIX smart either. A cron job running every 5 minutes to see if the server is still up would have taken care of it.
I guess your isp works alot better than mine then. I had a latency problem in my connection a few days ago where the jump from one router to the next would cost ~200ms at peek hours, but the transfer rate would be great anyway. I tried to get this solved for a week but the "helldesk" people wouldn't let me through to a real tech. Even though I pinpointed the problem, giving them the IP's to the relevant routers.
After a while they fixed it (a ten minute telnet to the relevant router I'd guess) and not even once awnsered the e-mails the people at the helpdesk told me to write. All this while being very friendly to talk to.
Good digital cameras don't fake shutter click shounds. They actually do the same a film camera would do and only expose the CCD/CMOS sensor for the length of the exposure time. The ones that show you what they're seeing in the screen are always exposing, but I haven't seen one of these fake shutter sounds.
Well, since the person in question is only trying guest logins and not doing any kind of dictionary password guessing that's not really a problem is it?
Crusoe isn't a RISC processor like you claim. It's a VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) processor. Diferent things here. That's where it get's it's simplicity from, by doing most of what the hardware usually does in software.
As for RISC vs. CISC... Intel hasn't designed a CISC chip in years! Today's x86 chips (Intel or AMD) are much more RISC chips than they are CISC. They run a small instruction set and then a small piece of software (the microcode) that does the translation of the x86 instructions to the basic hardware-level instructions.
This is how they're able to produce these stellar clock rates. Very small instructions (hence the RISC) that are composed to form the x86 ISA in all it's glory.
A good decision would probably be scraping the backwards compatibility cruft from x86 and moving on to a cleaner x86 based ISA. As far as I know the x86-64 from AMD still supports code for the 8086 and that is just crazy.
Slow day, huh?
Login scripts should only output stuff to the terminal if running in an interactive shell otherwise they'll break "scp" and aparently ssh CVS login as well.
So the screen printing parts should be enclosed in something like this:
case "$-" in
*i*)
(...)
esac
A diamond isn't a molecule. It's a tighly packed structure of molecules with very strong connections between them, but not a single molecule.
A person freefalling can maneuver. Sky-divers do this. Bond could too.
Cliff height does seem to be the more significant problem
Yep, with enough height all this would be possible.
I agree, but the whole scene was pretty dodgy :-)
Yes it was.
Since when is Real Media an open source company? Real is a proprietary technology (and a pretty crappy one too) and Real Media is just another proprietary software maker. They're not any better than Microsoft.
It's a stretch but it's possible. The plane will fall slower than 007 since it's wings will give it some suport and because it drags around alot more air than 007. If that's enough, and if there's any cliff in the world big enough for the whole scene to be possible is a whole diferent story.
Last year the Honeynet Project sponsored the Forensic Challenge,
a competition amongst the security community to study, analyze,
and report on a computer hacked in the wild. The result was a
complete forensic analysis of the hacked system. Both the analysis
from different individuals and the the images of the hacked
computer are shared and used to this day.
This year we are continuing that tradition and are announcing the
Reverse Challenge. The goal of this challenge is to develop reverse
engineering skills amongst the security community. Your mission, if
you should choose to accept, is to analyze and report on a binary
captured in the wild. Your analysis will then be judged by a panel
of experts, rated, and shared with the security community.
This year we actually have prizes. Top prizes include licensed
copies of IDA Pro, $200 Amazon gift certificate from DataRescue, and
free pass to the Black Hat Briefings. As if that was not enough, the
top 20 entries get a signed copy of the Honeynet book, Know Your Enemy
(you know, the book the guy down the hall is using as a door stopper
Judges include:
- David Dittrich
- K2
- Halvar
- Job de Haas
- Niels Provos
- Gera
The challenge officially begins Monday, 06 May when we release the
binary. You have between now and the 6th to get your tools ready,
form teams if you wish, and stock up on the caffeinated beverage of
choice. You will then have four weeks to complete your analysis and
submit your report no later the 24:00 GMT, Friday, 31 May. Submissions
will be judged and then released 01 July. You can learn more about the
challenge now, and download the binary on 06 May, at
http://project.honeynet.org/reverse/
All question, concerns, and submissions should be sent to
We hope that the community has fun with this, with the ultimate goal
of learning and sharing. Let the games begin!
--- The Honeynet Project
PS, the person who hacked our Honeynet is not eligible to submit an entry,
you know who you are. The question is, do we?
How much reinventing is required to support a new image format? If it's open and well documented konqueror/mozilla could have support for it in a release version within a month or two. And if IE supports it soon, we might start seeing websites actually using it often.
But this is really not a Web-only thing. This is a jpeg replacement that can be used wherever jpeg is used now.
Branden Robinson (the debian XFree maintainer) has a page about that kind of stuff.