The only attacks that these md5 collisions allow are denial-of-service/destruction-of-data attacks, they don't generally allow the compromise of protected data or access to systems or suchlike. The collision blocks that are generated are effectively random data. It has yet to be shown how to -craft- a collision block.
If we could craft a collision block that contained a specified string at a specified position, that would be another issue altogether.
The ability to find collision blocks easily does suggest that crafted collision blocks might be possible, but for now, you have as good a chance of getting a viable exploit out of/dev/random as out of a collision block.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't look to other options for the newest releases of high-security software, but it doesn't mean that the md5 algorithm should be purged from our systems altogether either. It's still extremely valuable at detecting accidental corruption, and useful-with-caveats at detecting malicious corruption (45 minutes to discover a block of data that matches the sum is not really useful in either speed or resulting data for any kind of man in the middle attack, for example, so using md5 to validate network packets is safer than using it to validate disk files).
Of course, the black hats may know more than we do about md5 weaknesses, but 'may know' is just as true of any other algorithm.
No, they are not the same thing. They are both philosophical and theological theories, and not scientific theories at all, of course, but that doesn't make them the same thing any more than it makes gravity and conservation of energy the same thing. Creationism is a fundamentalist point of view that god actively created the world (in the extreme case, literally in 7 days). Intelligent design is compatible with creationism, but it's also compatible with the Theist notion of the divine clockmaker - the notion of a God who created the universe by giving it a push at the dawn of time, and since has been hands off. (Intelligent design would hold that such a god would have had to be very selective in the direction of his push, of course.) Not that I'm endorsing these views, but, claiming that they are the same is oversimplification, and including such errors weakens your whole argument. (Not as badly as claiming ID is a scientific theory weakens your opponent's arguments, of course.)
Err, we have both. The prior poster was referring to the patriot act provisions that allow for closed hearings held in an undisclosed location with an unpublished docket. Supposedly they aren't entirely secret in that they're supposed to reveal what they've done some amount of time after the fact. Unless a motion is granted to keep the information secret for longer do to an investigation still being 'ongoing'...
Of course, that's supposed to be only in case of terrorists, ordinary criminal cases are supposed to be tried in ordinary open courts (although even there, the court can seal entire hearings so all you know is that the police made a motion before a judge at a particular time and place, not anything about the content of the motion. In wiretap warrants, for example, so as not to tip off the person to be spied on.)
If you are running a game at only 60 fps on a display of 60Hz, you might not get anywhere near that frame rate. Since the image is generally only updated during vertical retrace (the longest moment when a scanline is not actively being drawn), you effectively have a window into which you have to fit your image. If you miss that window, the same frame is going to get drawn on the display again. Of course, TV signal is different from SVGA signal, and should be a continuous stream including the big black bar where the vertical retrace is supposed to happen (but you can see it when your vsync is off). But that just pushes the timing issue back to a chip inside the playstation, it doesn't eliminate it.
So, anyway, if you're running an -average- of 60 fps but you're actually running 59 fps alternating with 61 fps at -just- the right rate, you can manage to miss the window every other frame with just a very little bit of jitter for a worst-case scenario of 30 fps viewable even though you're rendering 60 fps avg internally. (Most of the time, of course, you won't have a worst case scenario, but OTOH, if you're that close to the line you're likely to have bad synchronization scenarios causing significant frame loss from time time.) At 120 fps rendered, you'd have to have a single frame take double the average time to cause a miss, a much less likely case. In most cases, you'll have two new frames ready to go in time for your deadline.
OTOH, they -do- have effective control of every video buffer, unlike the SVGA case where the deadline lives in the monitor. So in the computer case excessive frame-rate may be the only way to get your viewed frames to match the monitor's refresh speed, but there should be a cleverer solution in the console+tv case.
Re:What's the point of these Q&A sessions?
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Sid Meier Responds
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· Score: 2, Interesting
>> For the second game developer interview in a row +5 modded questions about linux ports of the games have been posted and ignored
> The reason this question is never asked is because the answer is always the same.
No, it's not. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri from Firaxis Games was ported to Linux (and of course, just yesterday the Quake4 Linux client was released). So, even if the new Civ -isn't- going to be ported to Linux, this answer would be different from 'the usual' in that they actually have experience with having had a porting house convert one of their games. The answer might even be that they're willing to talk to LGP or someone.
Uhhm, yeah. Oddly enough, I knew all that, despite your assumptions about my ability to 'Get It (TM)'.
Let me rephrase, then.
If you have Nat + Firewall and your firewall is fucked up, nat does mean that you still are probably not exposed.
The most likely source of fucking up your firewall is doing your firewall rules wrong, so if you can write a -correct- firewall ruleset, then you don't get much security benefit from nat.
(There is the possibility, though, that your firewall has a bug in it that allows packets to be routed through it despite your rules. This is pretty damn unlikely, and in the iptables case your nat and your firewall are pretty much the same software system anyway so if one is compromised, the other probably is too. Still. Give this hypothetical bug, it means you still wouldn't be able to get through because you can't route private ip packets across the internet. It's not a likely scenario, but it is at least a slight increase in security. Very slight.)
Mostly, though, what I meant was that nat + firewall makes it harder to shoot yourself in the foot. With a default-accept firewall, it's easy to open up more than you meant to with a foolish rule (or lack of rule). With a default-reject it's a lot harder to hurt yourself, but can still be done.
NAT means that opening up some ports in your firewall doesn't actually hurt you (unless those ports are running -on- your firewall box, of course, then it does, and that's actually worse than exposing anything inside since if the firewall is compromised you're toast). But, assuming your firewall doesn't actually run any services (it shouldn't!), you'd have to manage to fuck up in a coordinated way in order to actually expose something inside the firewall. It's really hard to accidentally create a rule that forwards an external port to an internal machine that's actually running the service on that port.
If you already are or hire a competent system administrator, of course, NAT doesn't really get you anything. But I already said that, you just didn't read it the first time.
Example of shooting yourself in the foot might be, put in an accept rule for port 22 in your firewall. SSH is the preferred secure connection after all, right? Of course, network devices might have configuration over ssh... did you really want to expose your network printer? When's the last time you upgrade its firmware?
A competent sysadmin will, of course, make a rule to open up port 22 only for those hosts that actually -need- it, of course, but my -point-, if you'd bothered to listen instead of kneejerking off about who doesn't get it, was that NAT makes it harder for those who happen not to be competent professional sysadmins to shoot themselves in the foot by fucking up their firewall rules. (Like, say, home computing enthusists with a toy intranet at home to play with. Not that anyone like that would read slashdot, nosir...)
There, now I've explained myself in full detailed complexity that nobody will read anyway because the article was posted yesterday. (Why didn't I explain this before? I was trying to answer -simply- for someone who was obviously considerably clueless about how this stuff works.)
"My goal is to do all of the work it takes to be explaining to the Supreme Court in 2025 why broadcasting is unconstitutional," says Moglen, who speaks in perfect, rolling sentences. "We have a long march to do, we have a lot of education to do, society has to catch up with our vision of the future, but we are going someplace and the only question is timing and skill in driving."
Which first of all, implies he wants deregulation of broadcasting by 2025 and second of all implies that broadcasting is all he cares about, not, say, FCC regulations on interference caused by computer power supplies. Extremely hard to say with no context other than Forbes' interpretation.
There doesn't appear to be any source that puts his words in context. Other articles are appearing now on ZDnet, et al, but they only cite Forbes.
I don't think this is even remotely an accurate statement of Eben Moglen's ideas. Not to be an apologist; I think deregulation broadcasting is a stupid idea. I wouldn't mind seeing the airwaves repartioned to give more space over to public use, etc., but simple deregulation I wouldn't support. However, I strongly suspect Forbes of putting words in Moglen's mouth with its interpretation of whatever he actually said.
Wtf? '224 addresses'? A '/8' or 'class A' network is a block like 10.*.*.*, where only the first number is reserved. That's at least 16516350 and maybe 16581375 addresses (depending on whether you want to risk addresses that look like 10.2.1.0... some devices call that a broadcast to 10.2.1.*, though most call 255 broadcast.)
And you can't have trillions of ipv4 addresses because it's 4 8-bit fields separated by dots, not one 12 digit number. (0-255) . (0-255) . (0 - 255) . (0-255), just to clarify where those 32 bits live.
(And the 255 isn't really valid in an ip address, and the 0 is difficult, and 127.*.*.* is loopback and 10.*.*.* is private IP, etc.)
It's only 'sort of true'. Using private network address space and NAT means that your box is 'unreachable' from the point of view of any outside machines, even if you had no other firewall rules whatsoever. However, if you have a firewall that denies all incoming connections, you have the same protection that NAT gives you.
Also, of course, if you use a port redirect to have a server in your private ip space, you'll have a situation where you are -actually- reachable even though you -appear- unreachable, because the NAT is forwarding the packets to you. (It looks to the outside as if the NAT box is what is being reached).
So in this sense NAT gives you nothing. OTOH, when you have a tremendously complicated firewall ruleset, NAT does provide a kind of safety net, in that in many cases opening up huge holes in the firewall will not create any exposure.
So whether or not NAT is 'better' from a security point of view depends on whether or not you are (or your sysadmin is) capable of putting a correct firewall ruleset in place.
In the comments of questions-for-Sid, someone said that Sid Meier didn't actually design Alpha Centauri. Here, he says Brian Reynolds designed Alpha Centauri, so I don't know how much Sid actually had to do with the game. It does seem very civ-like though, I wouldn't be suprised if it used some of the same codebase even.
EXE files that change size sound extremely disturbing. But, of course, in the DOS days, a lot of bad habits were picked up with those damn 64k pages needing to be worked around, and other 8086 architecture nightmares, and some of that doubtless carries forward.
I've only got one of the two Programming Linux Game/s Programming books, though I can't actually recall which.
Yeah, I thought something like that might've been the case. I think the effort in porting of several of their titles were a factor in loki's downfall. Certainly LGP seems to examine the porting difficulty of any title very closely. I'll have to look ing Programming Linux Games again, I don't remember that reference.
Gotta say that Alpha Centauri is a great game though. I gave it rest for awhile, but I've been playing it again lately. It's a pretty decent multiplayer game too, though there are some interface issues with 'waiting for clearance to resolve a major action'... you get stalled if you take over a city while another player is messing with their build queues.
(Realistically, I think the answer to my question is, 'no, we don't give a damn about portability, and no, we'll -never- allow a Linux version,' but, y'know, I want to hear them actually say it, and hear whether their reasoning is more 'portability takes developer time' or more 'linux is a niche market' or more 'after Loki never again'.)
On my Linux box, I have the Firaxis game 'Alpha Centauri', ported by Loki Games. (As far as I know, Alpha Centauri is the only Firaxis game that runs on any non-Microsoft platform.) While any game could eventually be ported to any platform, choosing to use traditional sockets for networks and OpenGL for graphics and so on will make such action significantly smoother, and I believe is a strong consideration in choosing games for the Linux porting houses. Is there any thought going into portable design, any plan to release on any operating system other than Windows, and in particular, any plan - or thought of - releasing on Linux?
So -that's- what it sounds like...
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Palm's Mistakes
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· Score: 1
That horrible crunching sound you're hearing, that's the sound of a monopoly leveraging its power into a monopoly in an adjacent market.
Quoth TFA, "There is also an old-time mind-set among many IT-purchasing departments that branded items work better together," Bhavnani said. "For example, an enterprise might buy HP PCs, and also HP printers and HP iPaqs, because they all have HP on them and thus 'work better together.' The same thing is happening with Windows-based PCs and Windows-based phones."
Re:My son, 13, wants to be a game designer
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Ask Sid Meier
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· Score: 1
Whether or not Sid Meier sees your question, the truth is that game designers are a dime a dozen. -Good- game designers are rather rare, though. He'll need to learn a programming language (or several) in order to write some games, though, because the only way to prove you have any talent as a game designer is to write a game. Which you have to do yourself, because until you've proven yourself, nobody will give you any programmer-time in either the f/oss or the commercial world. It also helps, as -any- kind of software designer, to actually know how programs are written, even if you don't actually -do- much of it.
Portability
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Ask Sid Meier
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· Score: 4, Interesting
On my Linux box, I have two Sid Meier games: the original civilization, under Dosemu, and Alpha Centauri, ported by Loki Games. (As far as I know, Alpha Centauri is the only Firaxis game that runs on any non-Microsoft platform.) While any game could eventually be ported to any platform, choosing to use traditional sockets for networks and OpenGL for graphics and so on will make such action significantly smoother, and I believe is a strong consideration in choosing games for the Linux porting houses. Is there any thought going into portable design, any plan to release on any operating system other than Windows, and in particular, any plan - or thought of - releasing on Linux?
The sums are available on ftp.mozilla.org, and presumably on mirrors. If the original build was infected, the sum would match everywhere - and the infection would be everywhere. In the case as it happened, however, the clean sum from mozilla.org would not match the compromised package from mozilla.or.kr.
That said, Mozilla.org does not make it easy or obvious to check the sums. If you download through the web page you may never even know they exist.
On the high seas, it's assumed, of course, that -everyone- is hardy, else they'd have drowned already while leaning over the railing a bit too far when puking out their guts. But one greets one's fellows as 'me hearty', essentially complimenting them on their uncanny ability to remain in good spirits in the face of endless days of cold wind and salt water and fish stew yet again.
Please keep it straight, or they'll all know you for land-lubber and you'll be walking the plank in no time... if they don't keelhaul you instead.
If you can't touchtype with the number of typing tutor programs available as free or share out there, well, then I guess you've no interest in touchtyping, so -of course- a keyboard without letters is going to suck for you.
However, a keyboard without letters is going to suck even worse for games. I mean, I touch type in dvorak, so it's not like I use the letters anyway (okay, I could peek for A and M... but otherwise...)
When gaming though, I put my keyboard back in qwerty mode, because games don't use the keyboard as a -keyboard-. You can't put both hands on it and touchtype... you've got to keep a hand on the mouse or joystick. The keyboard acts as a control panel of buttons, not as a text entry device. An unlabeled keyboard for games would really and truly suck.
Well.
Unless you took advantage of this to put your own labels on the keys, maybe.
> Let's forget for a a minute that that is illegal.
That's a good plan, because it isn't. There are laws about discriminating on the basis of race, sex, and religion, and in some places, sexual preference. There are no laws about discriminating on the basis of certifications. Indeed, such a law would hardly make sense, as the certification companies want you to discriminate. Of course, they want you to discriminate -in favor- of people with certifications, nonetheless.
Moreover, 'prejudiced' isn't even the action of 'discriminate'. It's merely a statement of mindset towards someone with a particular resume. If -that- were illegal, you'd be talking thought police.
"You're not allowed to think badly of that person for that reason! 10 years, maximum security!"
*cough* Yes, you're missing something. It's been a big part of young computer geek culture to tromp all over grammar and spelling. When I was a teenager, it was writing in all lower-case (and a continuous stream of crude words intermixed). Some people were actively proud of their inability to spell - 'real hackers can't spell'. Some time after that, it was 133+ 5p34k. To-day there's a whole set of IM slang, though maybe that's a bit more mainstream than just geeks, but still, it's a similar phenomenon.
Generally, people grow out of this and start writing reasonably normally.
Parallel to this is the acronym-speak of usenet, which has carried over to some extent to the web. Generally people -don't- grow out of this, IMO, but YMMV.
Anyway, there has been a gap between those who care about correct spelling and language for its own sake (also known as liberal arts majors), and those who care about computers and networks for their own sake (also known as compsci and engineering majors).
Obviously, the increasing usability of computers and the internet is bringing people of all backgrounds together in cyberspace, but the core value of 'we're too cool for spelling' still exists. (There have also always been some people who do care about clear English language communication and computers at the same time, of course.)
(There's a whole other argument to be made about attention spans, long term memory, and the modern era, but I'm sure someone will cover that side of the story.)
It's amazing that the parent was rated funny... I know, it's slashdot, it shouldn't surprise me. I blame my inner idealist (deeply buried under my outer cynic, but he's there...)
Anyway. Yes, a false dichotomy argument is often used about television, but there's a reason for that. Television is a very habit-forming activity, as I'm sure we're all aware, and after taking time for work, sleep, personal hygiene, food, various errands and repairs... there's not a lot of hours left in an ordinary day. Pretty much, you can spend 2 hours watching TV or you can spend 2 hours doing something else. (I don't think you can read 4 novels a week if you're training for the Tour de France -and- holding down a day job, but, y'know, that's why professional athletes are professional athletes... so they can read more!;))
So, I would argue that due to its habit forming nature, TV is actually difficult to use responsibly. I still wouldn't cut broadcasts anytime soon (ie, not while there's still greater than 1% of households viewing it. Maybe 0.01% is a good threshold. 12% surely isn't), since all it will do is cause truly addicted but very poor households to spend money on a digital tuner that they can't actually afford (and cut TV off from those equally poor with a better sense of priorities, so that those who -do- use TV responsibly are effectively punished.)
Slashdot Mirror
The only attacks that these md5 collisions allow are denial-of-service/destruction-of-data attacks, they don't generally allow the compromise of protected data or access to systems or suchlike. The collision blocks that are generated are effectively random data. It has yet to be shown how to -craft- a collision block.
/dev/random as out of a collision block.
If we could craft a collision block that contained a specified string at a specified position, that would be another issue altogether.
The ability to find collision blocks easily does suggest that crafted collision blocks might be possible, but for now, you have as good a chance of getting a viable exploit out of
This doesn't mean we shouldn't look to other options for the newest releases of high-security software, but it doesn't mean that the md5 algorithm should be purged from our systems altogether either. It's still extremely valuable at detecting accidental corruption, and useful-with-caveats at detecting malicious corruption (45 minutes to discover a block of data that matches the sum is not really useful in either speed or resulting data for any kind of man in the middle attack, for example, so using md5 to validate network packets is safer than using it to validate disk files).
Of course, the black hats may know more than we do about md5 weaknesses, but 'may know' is just as true of any other algorithm.
'creationism/ID (yes, they are the same thing).'
No, they are not the same thing. They are both philosophical and theological theories, and not scientific theories at all, of course, but that doesn't make them the same thing any more than it makes gravity and conservation of energy the same thing. Creationism is a fundamentalist point of view that god actively created the world (in the extreme case, literally in 7 days). Intelligent design is compatible with creationism, but it's also compatible with the Theist notion of the divine clockmaker - the notion of a God who created the universe by giving it a push at the dawn of time, and since has been hands off. (Intelligent design would hold that such a god would have had to be very selective in the direction of his push, of course.) Not that I'm endorsing these views, but, claiming that they are the same is oversimplification, and including such errors weakens your whole argument. (Not as badly as claiming ID is a scientific theory weakens your opponent's arguments, of course.)
Err, we have both. The prior poster was referring to the patriot act provisions that allow for closed hearings held in an undisclosed location with an unpublished docket. Supposedly they aren't entirely secret in that they're supposed to reveal what they've done some amount of time after the fact. Unless a motion is granted to keep the information secret for longer do to an investigation still being 'ongoing'...
Of course, that's supposed to be only in case of terrorists, ordinary criminal cases are supposed to be tried in ordinary open courts (although even there, the court can seal entire hearings so all you know is that the police made a motion before a judge at a particular time and place, not anything about the content of the motion. In wiretap warrants, for example, so as not to tip off the person to be spied on.)
If you are running a game at only 60 fps on a display of 60Hz, you might not get anywhere near that frame rate. Since the image is generally only updated during vertical retrace (the longest moment when a scanline is not actively being drawn), you effectively have a window into which you have to fit your image. If you miss that window, the same frame is going to get drawn on the display again. Of course, TV signal is different from SVGA signal, and should be a continuous stream including the big black bar where the vertical retrace is supposed to happen (but you can see it when your vsync is off). But that just pushes the timing issue back to a chip inside the playstation, it doesn't eliminate it.
So, anyway, if you're running an -average- of 60 fps but you're actually running 59 fps alternating with 61 fps at -just- the right rate, you can manage to miss the window every other frame with just a very little bit of jitter for a worst-case scenario of 30 fps viewable even though you're rendering 60 fps avg internally. (Most of the time, of course, you won't have a worst case scenario, but OTOH, if you're that close to the line you're likely to have bad synchronization scenarios causing significant frame loss from time time.) At 120 fps rendered, you'd have to have a single frame take double the average time to cause a miss, a much less likely case. In most cases, you'll have two new frames ready to go in time for your deadline.
OTOH, they -do- have effective control of every video buffer, unlike the SVGA case where the deadline lives in the monitor. So in the computer case excessive frame-rate may be the only way to get your viewed frames to match the monitor's refresh speed, but there should be a cleverer solution in the console+tv case.
>> For the second game developer interview in a row +5 modded questions about linux ports of the games have been posted and ignored
> The reason this question is never asked is because the answer is always the same.
No, it's not. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri from Firaxis Games was ported to Linux (and of course, just yesterday the Quake4 Linux client was released). So, even if the new Civ -isn't- going to be ported to Linux, this answer would be different from 'the usual' in that they actually have experience with having had a porting house convert one of their games. The answer might even be that they're willing to talk to LGP or someone.
Uhhm, yeah. Oddly enough, I knew all that, despite your assumptions about my ability to 'Get It (TM)'.
Let me rephrase, then.
If you have Nat + Firewall and your firewall is fucked up, nat does mean that you still are probably not exposed.
The most likely source of fucking up your firewall is doing your firewall rules wrong, so if you can write a -correct- firewall ruleset, then you don't get much security benefit from nat.
(There is the possibility, though, that your firewall has a bug in it that allows packets to be routed through it despite your rules. This is pretty damn unlikely, and in the iptables case your nat and your firewall are pretty much the same software system anyway so if one is compromised, the other probably is too. Still. Give this hypothetical bug, it means you still wouldn't be able to get through because you can't route private ip packets across the internet. It's not a likely scenario, but it is at least a slight increase in security. Very slight.)
Mostly, though, what I meant was that nat + firewall makes it harder to shoot yourself in the foot. With a default-accept firewall, it's easy to open up more than you meant to with a foolish rule (or lack of rule). With a default-reject it's a lot harder to hurt yourself, but can still be done.
NAT means that opening up some ports in your firewall doesn't actually hurt you (unless those ports are running -on- your firewall box, of course, then it does, and that's actually worse than exposing anything inside since if the firewall is compromised you're toast). But, assuming your firewall doesn't actually run any services (it shouldn't!), you'd have to manage to fuck up in a coordinated way in order to actually expose something inside the firewall. It's really hard to accidentally create a rule that forwards an external port to an internal machine that's actually running the service on that port.
If you already are or hire a competent system administrator, of course, NAT doesn't really get you anything. But I already said that, you just didn't read it the first time.
Example of shooting yourself in the foot might be, put in an accept rule for port 22 in your firewall. SSH is the preferred secure connection after all, right? Of course, network devices might have configuration over ssh... did you really want to expose your network printer? When's the last time you upgrade its firmware?
A competent sysadmin will, of course, make a rule to open up port 22 only for those hosts that actually -need- it, of course, but my -point-, if you'd bothered to listen instead of kneejerking off about who doesn't get it, was that NAT makes it harder for those who happen not to be competent professional sysadmins to shoot themselves in the foot by fucking up their firewall rules. (Like, say, home computing enthusists with a toy intranet at home to play with. Not that anyone like that would read slashdot, nosir...)
There, now I've explained myself in full detailed complexity that nobody will read anyway because the article was posted yesterday. (Why didn't I explain this before? I was trying to answer -simply- for someone who was obviously considerably clueless about how this stuff works.)
The hard quote here is this:
"My goal is to do all of the work it takes to be explaining to the Supreme Court in 2025 why broadcasting is unconstitutional," says Moglen, who speaks in perfect, rolling sentences. "We have a long march to do, we have a lot of education to do, society has to catch up with our vision of the future, but we are going someplace and the only question is timing and skill in driving."
Which first of all, implies he wants deregulation of broadcasting by 2025 and second of all implies that broadcasting is all he cares about, not, say, FCC regulations on interference caused by computer power supplies. Extremely hard to say with no context other than Forbes' interpretation.
There doesn't appear to be any source that puts his words in context. Other articles are appearing now on ZDnet, et al, but they only cite Forbes.
I don't think this is even remotely an accurate statement of Eben Moglen's ideas. Not to be an apologist; I think deregulation broadcasting is a stupid idea. I wouldn't mind seeing the airwaves repartioned to give more space over to public use, etc., but simple deregulation I wouldn't support. However, I strongly suspect Forbes of putting words in Moglen's mouth with its interpretation of whatever he actually said.
That's because geeks that take videogames very seriously either,
a) Are video game designers
or
b) Never become extremely rich.
Ugh. You're right, I'm sure, but I'd not count on all devices actually complying with that behaviour correctly.
I bet you meant 2^24, didn't you? 'sup' isn't an allowed tag.
Wtf? '224 addresses'? A '/8' or 'class A' network is a block like 10.*.*.*, where only the first number is reserved. That's at least 16516350 and maybe 16581375 addresses (depending on whether you want to risk addresses that look like 10.2.1.0 ... some devices call that a broadcast to 10.2.1.*, though most call 255 broadcast.)
And you can't have trillions of ipv4 addresses because it's 4 8-bit fields separated by dots, not one 12 digit number.
(0-255) . (0-255) . (0 - 255) . (0-255), just to clarify where those 32 bits live.
(And the 255 isn't really valid in an ip address, and the 0 is difficult, and 127.*.*.* is loopback and 10.*.*.* is private IP, etc.)
It's only 'sort of true'. Using private network address space and NAT means that your box is 'unreachable' from the point of view of any outside machines, even if you had no other firewall rules whatsoever. However, if you have a firewall that denies all incoming connections, you have the same protection that NAT gives you.
Also, of course, if you use a port redirect to have a server in your private ip space, you'll have a situation where you are -actually- reachable even though you -appear- unreachable, because the NAT is forwarding the packets to you. (It looks to the outside as if the NAT box is what is being reached).
So in this sense NAT gives you nothing. OTOH, when you have a tremendously complicated firewall ruleset, NAT does provide a kind of safety net, in that in many cases opening up huge holes in the firewall will not create any exposure.
So whether or not NAT is 'better' from a security point of view depends on whether or not you are (or your sysadmin is) capable of putting a correct firewall ruleset in place.
Ahhh. That's not the book I have. That's fascinating and kinda cool in a horrible-hackery kind of way. I'll have to see about picking up that one.
In the comments of questions-for-Sid, someone said that Sid Meier didn't actually design Alpha Centauri. Here, he says
Brian Reynolds designed Alpha Centauri, so I don't know how much Sid actually had to do with the game. It does seem very civ-like though, I wouldn't be suprised if it used some of the same codebase even.
EXE files that change size sound extremely disturbing. But, of course, in the DOS days, a lot of bad habits were picked up with those damn 64k pages needing to be worked around, and other 8086 architecture nightmares, and some of that doubtless carries forward.
I've only got one of the two Programming Linux Game/s Programming books, though I can't actually recall which.
Yeah, I thought something like that might've been the case. I think the effort in porting of several of their titles were a factor in loki's downfall. Certainly LGP seems to examine the porting difficulty of any title very closely. I'll have to look ing Programming Linux Games again, I don't remember that reference.
... you get stalled if you take over a city while another player is messing with their build queues.
Gotta say that Alpha Centauri is a great game though. I gave it rest for awhile, but I've been playing it again lately. It's a pretty decent multiplayer game too, though there are some interface issues with 'waiting for clearance to resolve a major action'
(Realistically, I think the answer to my question is, 'no, we don't give a damn about portability, and no, we'll -never- allow a Linux version,' but, y'know, I want to hear them actually say it, and hear whether their reasoning is more 'portability takes developer time' or more 'linux is a niche market' or more 'after Loki never again'.)
On my Linux box, I have the Firaxis game 'Alpha Centauri', ported by Loki Games. (As far as I know, Alpha Centauri is the only Firaxis game that runs on any non-Microsoft platform.) While any game could eventually be ported to any platform, choosing to use traditional sockets for networks and OpenGL for graphics and so on will make such action significantly smoother, and I believe is a strong consideration in choosing games for the Linux porting houses. Is there any thought going into portable design, any plan to release on any operating system other than Windows, and in particular, any plan - or thought of - releasing on Linux?
That horrible crunching sound you're hearing, that's the sound of a monopoly leveraging its power into a monopoly in an adjacent market.
Quoth TFA, "There is also an old-time mind-set among many IT-purchasing departments that branded items work better together," Bhavnani said. "For example, an enterprise might buy HP PCs, and also HP printers and HP iPaqs, because they all have HP on them and thus 'work better together.' The same thing is happening with Windows-based PCs and Windows-based phones."
Whether or not Sid Meier sees your question, the truth is that game designers are a dime a dozen. -Good- game designers are rather rare, though. He'll need to learn a programming language (or several) in order to write some games, though, because the only way to prove you have any talent as a game designer is to write a game. Which you have to do yourself, because until you've proven yourself, nobody will give you any programmer-time in either the f/oss or the commercial world. It also helps, as -any- kind of software designer, to actually know how programs are written, even if you don't actually -do- much of it.
On my Linux box, I have two Sid Meier games: the original civilization, under Dosemu, and Alpha Centauri, ported by Loki Games. (As far as I know, Alpha Centauri is the only Firaxis game that runs on any non-Microsoft platform.) While any game could eventually be ported to any platform, choosing to use traditional sockets for networks and OpenGL for graphics and so on will make such action significantly smoother, and I believe is a strong consideration in choosing games for the Linux porting houses. Is there any thought going into portable design, any plan to release on any operating system other than Windows, and in particular, any plan - or thought of - releasing on Linux?
The sums are available on ftp.mozilla.org, and presumably on mirrors. If the original build was infected, the sum would match everywhere - and the infection would be everywhere. In the case as it happened, however, the clean sum from mozilla.org would not match the compromised package from mozilla.or.kr.
That said, Mozilla.org does not make it easy or obvious to check the sums. If you download through the web page you may never even know they exist.
That's 'hearty' as in 'a hearty fellow'.
On the high seas, it's assumed, of course, that -everyone- is hardy, else they'd have drowned already while leaning over the railing a bit too far when puking out their guts. But one greets one's fellows as 'me hearty', essentially complimenting them on their uncanny ability to remain in good spirits in the face of endless days of cold wind and salt water and fish stew yet again.
Please keep it straight, or they'll all know you for land-lubber and you'll be walking the plank in no time... if they don't keelhaul you instead.
If you can't touchtype with the number of typing tutor programs available as free or share out there, well, then I guess you've no interest in touchtyping, so -of course- a keyboard without letters is going to suck for you.
... but otherwise...)
However, a keyboard without letters is going to suck even worse for games. I mean, I touch type in dvorak, so it's not like I use the letters anyway (okay, I could peek for A and M
When gaming though, I put my keyboard back in qwerty mode, because games don't use the keyboard as a -keyboard-. You can't put both hands on it and touchtype... you've got to keep a hand on the mouse or joystick. The keyboard acts as a control panel of buttons, not as a text entry device. An unlabeled keyboard for games would really and truly suck.
Well.
Unless you took advantage of this to put your own labels on the keys, maybe.
> Let's forget for a a minute that that is illegal.
That's a good plan, because it isn't. There are laws about discriminating on the basis of race, sex, and religion, and in some places, sexual preference. There are no laws about discriminating on the basis of certifications. Indeed, such a law would hardly make sense, as the certification companies want you to discriminate. Of course, they want you to discriminate -in favor- of people with certifications, nonetheless.
Moreover, 'prejudiced' isn't even the action of 'discriminate'. It's merely a statement of mindset towards someone with a particular resume. If -that- were illegal, you'd be talking thought police.
"You're not allowed to think badly of that person for that reason! 10 years, maximum security!"
*cough* Yes, you're missing something. It's been a big part of young computer geek culture to tromp all over grammar and spelling. When I was a teenager, it was writing in all lower-case (and a continuous stream of crude words intermixed). Some people were actively proud of their inability to spell - 'real hackers can't spell'. Some time after that, it was 133+ 5p34k. To-day there's a whole set of IM slang, though maybe that's a bit more mainstream than just geeks, but still, it's a similar phenomenon.
Generally, people grow out of this and start writing reasonably normally.
Parallel to this is the acronym-speak of usenet, which has carried over to some extent to the web.
Generally people -don't- grow out of this, IMO, but YMMV.
Anyway, there has been a gap between those who care about correct spelling and language for its own sake (also known as liberal arts majors), and those who care about computers and networks for their own sake (also known as compsci and engineering majors).
Obviously, the increasing usability of computers and the internet is bringing people of all backgrounds together in cyberspace, but the core value of 'we're too cool for spelling' still exists. (There have also always been some people who do care about clear English language communication and computers at the same time, of course.)
(There's a whole other argument to be made about attention spans, long term memory, and the modern era, but I'm sure someone will cover that side of the story.)
It's amazing that the parent was rated funny... I know, it's slashdot, it shouldn't surprise me. I blame my inner idealist (deeply buried under my outer cynic, but he's there...)
;))
Anyway. Yes, a false dichotomy argument is often used about television, but there's a reason for that. Television is a very habit-forming activity, as I'm sure we're all aware, and after taking time for work, sleep, personal hygiene, food, various errands and repairs... there's not a lot of hours left in an ordinary day. Pretty much, you can spend 2 hours watching TV or you can spend 2 hours doing something else. (I don't think you can read 4 novels a week if you're training for the Tour de France -and- holding down a day job, but, y'know, that's why professional athletes are professional athletes... so they can read more!
So, I would argue that due to its habit forming nature, TV is actually difficult to use responsibly. I still wouldn't cut broadcasts anytime soon (ie, not while there's still greater than 1% of households viewing it. Maybe 0.01% is a good threshold. 12% surely isn't), since all it will do is cause truly addicted but very poor households to spend money on a digital tuner that they can't actually afford (and cut TV off from those equally poor with a better sense of priorities, so that those who -do- use TV responsibly are effectively punished.)