The day after this article was first posted, I'm surprised to see how many people were griping about it not having Ethernet or running some OS other than Linux... when it clearly states on the web page that it both has Ethernet and runs Linux?
Folks, this looks like what I've been wanting to see for a while now. These are the specs of the "C64 of the 90's" I've been wondering when someone will make, only it's a couple of years late.:-)
Now, the specs you have to go a little deeper to read say "The NIC includes a 56K soft modem (PCTEL) onboard.". So basically it's a WinModem. Or rather, a LinModem. But the GPL virus means that they almost certainly have to release the source code to the driver along with the rest of the base operating system and utilities. They don't have to release the source to any custom applications they might have, but there don't seem to be any mentioned, just publically available software like Linux and Netscape.
But the important thing is that it has a USB port. You can add a real modem, and you can (probably) add a USB hard drive although the speed won't exactly rock. And it should work with any old cheap VGA monitor you can find at a swap meet, since it supports up to 1024x768x millions VESA modes with XFree 3.6.
For the home user who has never used a computer before, this can be a cheap way to get on the internet, do e-mail, and browse the web.
And for the power user, it does have 10/100 Ethernet, so this would make a nice home workstation so you could read Slashdot on the crapper with the addition of an LCD screen. I already have Ethernet wire strung through most of the house by running a 10B2 coax backbone on the floor around the outer walls, taping it down where there is no carpet, so I can just have it boot from one of my servers.
One more thing... this past weekend I figured out how to set up PPP dial-ins on my server (with TWO modem lines!), although the IP addresses are are on the wrong side of IP masquerading (because my fixed IP block comes in in bridged mode). But since most of the services that average users will use work fine behind IPMasq, they can leech off my DSL line in "mini-ISP" mode! Open source hot grits! Of course I have an understanding ISP (who has an "any server you want" policy), and will pre-educate the few friends I give passwords to to NOT spam anyone, because it's MY ass on the line if they do.
All Laserwriter II models use the same engine. The engine is the problem. It was not designed to have a power saving mode. OTOH, Apple has made at least one model of printer (the Personal LW 600, I think -- whatever it is, it's a QuickDraw printer) that doesn't even have a power switch!
And yes, I do have a IIg board now. That's why I said it was a IIntx back then. In fact, I now have two spare IInt printers and passed up another because they are so old they show up cheap (like $15-20!) at thrift stores these days.
One interesting quote: "It was just a hobby," he said. "I didn't expect it to turn into a business."
I had a moderately successful shareware program myself during the '80s, and it sure didn't help my life much. Fortunately I have no interest in booze or drugs -- they just get in the way of hacking. And also fortunately, I let it go when it wasn't successful any more. Maybe a little later than I should have, but I did move on.
Later model Apple Laserwriters do have an Ethernet port, but no TCP/IP stack that I am aware of. Would it be cheating to set up a protocol proxy to translate TCP/IP into PAP (Printer Access Protocol)? Would it be cheating to also translate the request into a Postscript command?
But the real problem with running it on a real printer is that older (pre-EnergyStar) laser printers suck electricity like crazy. Once I decided to leave my Laserwriter (a IIntx at the time) on continously for a whole month. At the time I lived in a small apartment, with a $35/mo average electric bill, and leaving the printer on caused it to jump by about $20!
They might not be able to talk with an old 212 modem, but they are modems. They just happen to operate in a higher frequency band than POTS modems. The higher the base frequency, the more bandwidth available per octave of frequency.
In fact, even ISDN has to do analog modulation. It just uses a much simpler form of modulation which can easily be run through repeaters for longer distances from the CO. ISDL is DSL protocols over ISDN modulation, and using ATM instead of the PSTN to get out of the CO.
In a Scientific American article on the DE a few years ago, it was noted that one cog template in particular had bits that stuck out in the wrong direction, and only by trying to build the machine could you notice that it was wrong.
DotTV has agreed to pay Tuvalu $50 million in royalties over the next decade for use of the country code. The Internet start-up intends to sell the rights to Web addresses ending in ".tv," such as www.abc.tv or www.law&order.tv.
So is this "next decade" just the time period in which they will pay the $50M for rights in perpetuity, or were the Tuvaluans smart enough to make this a ten-year contract that they could re-negotiate in 2010? And that is $50M US, right? Since it was mentioned that Tuvalu's official currency is the Australian dollar, this is an important point.
And if zd.tv really is going for $10K/yr, I think that's not too bad of a deal for ZDTV.
As for the trademark problem, all they have to do is NOT sell trademark names to those who don't own the trademarks in their own country. In other words, "abc.tv" could only be sold to a few specific television networks, such as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and "pepsi.tv" could not be sold to the Coca Cola company.
Of course this is run by the same people who run etoys.com, so you can imagine all the fun they will have when they get to decide what you can and can't have, and for how much. And no worries that someone already got there first!
(theme song) "We all live... in a Microsoft world..."
Cut to Team Rocket members Billy and Kid Ballmer...
"Looks like Microsoft is blasting off again!"
Personally, I think Microsoft will end up just like the Baby Bells. Break it up and it the pieces will just grow into monsters of their own. Bill Gates has already seen this coming, and that's why he resigned the top spot... he knew it was a game of musical chairs, and he picked his chair before the music stopped.
Yesterday's stock price drop just means a bargain for long-term investors. A divided Microsoft is a Microsoft worth more than it was ever worth before!
Yes, that's what I also noticed. There are long delays before DNS servers will update their entries. This scheme works fine on a small site where there aren't thousands of copies of DNS entries cached on major ISPs around the world. It fails for any large site where the ISPs will continue to provide DNS entries which use the old IP addresses...for hours or days.
That's why the proposal specifies the Time To Live value for the DNS entry as zero. This means that EVERY request for the domain name will cause the authoritative DNS server to be hit. That sounds a bit silly to me. If implemented as suggested, the DNS servers would fall down instead.
In this plan the TTL is the limiting factor for switching over the server address. If it were more than about five minutes, you'd just end up DoS-ing yourself. One or two minutes would be better in terms of latency, but since people often take more than a couple of minutes to actually read a web page before going on to the next one, there would still be a lot of load on the DNS servers.
As long as most of the "eyeballs" are querying their ISP's domain name servers, a TTL of a minute or two will reduce the DNS load... assuming the web page is really popular, like Yahoo or Ebay, or the ISP has a lot of subscribers, like AOL.
But really, as long as too many border routers allow packets with forged source addresses to get out, this will continue to be a problem. Not that even that would stop DoS attacks entirely, because one could always forge a valid "inside" address, or one could just run an automated DDoS with unforged packets that look like normal web traffic.
The routing between my DSL modem and my ISP's gateway went down an hour ago, and the SWB guys say it's not just me... I guess they decided to get their part of the spring cleaning started early! 6:30PM on a Friday, too. Go figure. (They don't care, they don't have to, they're the Phone Company!)
Took me half an hour to hook a modem back up and work out the routing changes to use PPP again. Sigh. At least I hadn't cancelled my old dial-up account.
It was an example of the hardware's ability to quickly and easily (ie, low CPU usage) move a big bunch of bits hither and tither.
Actually, it was an example of the hardware's ability to quickly and easily fool you into thinking it was moving a big bunch of bits "hither and tither".
In reality, all it was doing was messing with registers. The red and white ball was composed of a lot of colors (probably a 16 color mode), which were rotated between red and white. And the ball was in its own bit plane, while the program was changing the location of the bit plane. The graphics hardware was putting it on the display at the appropriate place based on where the bit plane was supposed to be. The blitter chip wasn't being used at all.
No bits were being moved. They stayed right there. They were just displayed at different offsets from the vertical and horizontal sync. That's it. But it looked impressive, and that's why the bouncing ball demo is so famous.
The problem is, multi-layer and sprite graphics hardware like that is rather non-portable. It's awful hard to write cross-platform code that makes good use of such graphics chip tricks, when there is only one hardware platform which can do those tricks. And if a graphics library (X?) isn't designed with them in mind, it's almost impossible to support them portably. The world has gone with flat bitmaps and blitters because they're portable.
Then there are usually limitations with such hardware. They may only handle a maximum number of bit planes and a maximum number of sprites per horizontal line. It's rather technical, but back in the days of single-megahertz CPUs, there were only so many memory accesses you could do per scan line, to fetch the sprite data for the next scan line. If you ran out of bus cycles to the video RAM, tough luck. That's why in Gauntlet (and the Sega Genesis version of it as well!), a screen full of ghosts has sprites missing scanlines on the right edge of the screen.
In my opinion, there's not much that you would get out of someone manufacturing "Amiga" computers these days, except maybe having a major manufacturer other than Apple (and IBM's higher-end stuff) to making PowerPC machines that can run Linux.
1. usable floppy install 2. lean, non-obfuscatory, packaging system
I can install a slackware system in well under half an hour in which I can have reasonable confidence that source tarballs from anywhere on the net will compile under it. With DeadRat, I end up pulling my hair out just trying to figure out which RPM contains the library I need, then installing the RPMs that it depends on in the right order.
Slackware is well named. It really does have more slack. I can feel it oozing slack every time I install it.
Let me start by asking: why haven't there been many Macintosh viruses? Sure, it's not that popular a platform to begin with, but it had its share of viruses at first.
Then something happened. The first "stealth" virus, the WDEF virus, came out. Instead of using the OS calls like a good little virus, it tried to bypass them and jump right into the ROM, to avoid detection. This was about the time the Mac IIci came out, with a completely recompiled ROM. Instead of spreading, it crashed the machine. There have been a few recompiled ROM versions since then, but then Apple switched over to the PowerPC, increasing the diversity level. If a virus is incompatible with a good number of its target machines, it doesn't spread well. It's much harder to write a virus for a diverse platform.
And have you noticed how all the virus threats lately have been involving e-mail viruses and worms? This is because MicroSloth came up with a pitifully easy virus transmission method, by allowing live code in what was formerly only data. Worms and viruses spread best when they have a convienent way to propagate.
And how many Windows NT viruses are out there anyhow? I'm not talking about macro viruses here, I'm talking about real native code viruses infecting NT. Not too many of those, huh? Because, like Linux, there are more internal barriers for a virus to overcome. Plus, some of the macro viruses don't work under NT, even when the user logs in as Administrator all the time, because NT stores some of its files in different places than 95/98.
Now back to Linux. The creators of various distributions are having a hard enough time agreeing where to put various kinds of files, that a virus can't depend on their location. Diversity again.
About the only thing that is consistent is services on various ports, but you can't even rely on a consistent set of vulnerabilities, because the more clued admins will be able to upgrade from a source tarball.
In what form does Linux lack diversity? First of all, in a common binary format. This means that a virus can know where to patch, and a worm will run on many machines. There can be some problems in library availability, but a worm could just statically link itself. It could also spread by source code, but it can't rely on a given Linux box having a C compiler (or Perl interpreter for Perl worms!) installed.
And diversity is reduced by popular distributions like Red Hat and Mandrake which tend to be preferred by the "naive" (in a Unix admin context) users. I recently got DSL, and at least one port probe I received came from a system on a cable modem running (surprise!) Red Hat 5.2. And finger said nobody was logged in. I am quite sure the port scan was NOT initiated by the owner of the machine.
Now a big question: why a virus over other forms of attack? Personally, I think a "worm" (a program which spreads intact copies of itself, rather than inserting itself in other executables) is better suited to the Unix and Internet environment. All it has to do is carry around enough "skr1pt k1dd33" code and it can spread through less-protected systems.
However, as awareness over stack overflow bugs increases and other vulnerabilities, such holes will decrease over time. The slow animals in the herd (Red Hat 5.2 "default" installs) will be more easily taken down than others.
Are we likely to see another "RTM worm" incident in the next year or two? Probably. Now that broadband 7/24 connections are on the rise due to DSL and cable modems, the percentage of unsecured hosts will rise. And with the increase in opportunity will come an increase in exploits. However, as the RTM worm incident showed, writing a good, well-behaved worm isn't as easy as it sounds.
As to viruses in source tarballs, those are rather unlikely. Certainly it is difficult to generically add virus code to source code, but many source releases include some sort of validity check like an MD5 signature. And these days, the source is usually taken from THE official archive.
In summary, I think Linux is diverse enough that viruses will be too much effort to write. Worms are much more likely to become a problem in the near future.
I think the coolest "interesting" way to deliver network services that I've heard of was this: at one time New Zealand's link to Usenet was a regular cargo plane which would fly reel-to-reel magtapes of newsgroup posts in from Australia.
Anyhow, if you don't mind coming up with your own protocol, and high lag is a way of life (like a Mars-Earth IP link), just transmit everything redundantly over a UDP like protocol with extra redundancy! Then keep everything on file for retransmission if packets still get lost.
Video gaming blisters predate Nintendo by many years. Yep, you young whippersnappers, there were video games before Nintendo! Y'all ever heard of Atari??? In fact, one Atari 2600 game manufacturer, Imagic, had a "Numb Thumb Club"! We had numb thumbs and we were proud of it! Carpal tunnel syndrome? Wussies!
Yep, back in the old days we didn't have rapid fire, and we had to learn how to press that button really fast! And we didn't have these wussy "party" games where you could sit back in your comfy couch holding your controller, we had games like Track and Field where you had to stand up and slap your hands back and forth as fast as you could! In fact, some of the kids figured out they could hold a pencil in just the right way where they could slap those buttons really fast, so those evil arcade people, they put bumps around the buttons where you couldn't do that any more!
Okay, guys, I'll just have to try Slackware when I'm mucking around with setting up a desktop Linux box again.
I do have a confession to make, though. The biggest reason I haven't switched over to Linux as a desktop operating system is because... I use MacOS! Yep, a Slackware box and NiftyTelnet (and the latest netatalk+asun afpd) was the best upgrade I ever got for my PowerMac. When I find an X newsreader that is as convienent to use and stable as NewsWatcher, and proper Japanese language support, then I'll switch.
Dude, there's something called m4. That's the modern, enlightened way of configuring sendmail. If you're mucking around with.cf files, then you get what you deserve...
Now that you mention this, have you seen ever how linuxconf sets up sendmail.cf? It has a whole bunch of chopped-up pieces of m4-generated (!) sendmail.cf files, and sticks them together like a first grader with a bottle of paste sticks construction paper together. Of course, all the tags at the top from the original chopped up sendmail.cf which are generated by the m4 macros to document what was used to build the sendmail.cf file are left in, making them less than useless. Furrfu!
I'd rather watch something calm and wholesome like an unrated horror slasher flick or a video of surgial procedures on cable TV than have to ever look at a linuxconf generated sendmail.cf file again. (shudder)
This is great news for me, because I was just thinking the other day about those new cheap (but supposedly good) $25 Linksys 10/100 cards which require the latest (Tulip?) driver from 2.2.14! Now I can get one! And I've been upgrading for DSL, so I don't even have an uptime to lose!
While I don't think I'd ever consider using Slackware as a "desktop" OS, it's a great distro for command-line hacks like me who would rather stick the box in a corner and telnet in.
But the main thing that keeps me coming back to Slackware is that I can be sure the source tarballs I download will fscking compile. I've always had a bad time trying to compile source under less-than-full installs of RedHat (ever since the time I bought a release version of 5.2 and the kernel wouldn't recompile), then I go to Slackware and things compile with no problem. I'm sorry, but I don't want to bloat my hard drive with a full install of RedHat just to be sure I can compile something without being in RPM hell trying to find the right libraries!
As far as I'm concerned, Slackware is much easier for me to install, because there are fewer packages to keep track of, which means less chance of missing a "regular" library during install. But I think the "flat" nature of the Slackware install, compared with RPM's extensive hierarchial dependencies, is the real reason I find Slackware so much easier to install.
And as a bonus, it's a floppy-friendly install, too! When I first installed it, I didn't have a CD-ROM on an Intel box, and was downloading Slackware tarball disks and installing them from a directory on the hard drive (because I was getting too many disk errors from those el cheapo HD floppies I had lying around). The install disks make a good root-boot, too. The first time I tried Red Hat, I tried downloading just the 50 or so RPMs I tought I needed to a hard drive, and it bitched about every single RPM I didn't download being missing, whether I was installing it or not. Since Red Hat uses hundreds of RPMs, I had to press the enter key a lot.
Although sometimes I wish it used SysV init, I'm not installing many services, and I can do well enough just editing rc.local. SysV init just seems to be an excuse for distros like Red Hat to start up every service they can think of. And IMHO, most people DON'T need fscking sendmail running!
The thing that annoys me most about Slackware, though, is that it doesn't put the kernel into/boot like all the other modern distros. IMHO,/boot is the only way to go when you have an enormous hard drive. So I have to move the kernel and edit lilo.conf and go back into setup and "recycle" lilo to get my machine bootable.
California is full of migrating Okies again, only this time the Okies have laptops, Web pages, and cell phones. It's basically a Grapes of Wrath thing, only they're logging frequent-flier miles.
And reading his writing is a much richer multi-media experience if you've heard him giving readings enough to know his voice, with that California valley accent, so out of place in Texas, fondling every word like stream water rolling over pebbles. Oooooh...
This makes one big whopper of an assumption: that the web page has moved and still exists somewhere. Well, the major cause of 404s that I know of is web sites simply going away.
So you get a 404 and you want to use a search site to find where it went? That's fine if it's been long enough since the move to give the web crawlers time to find it... there's a lot of web space out there to search!
But here's the good one: what if someone decides to hijack your web site by simple keyword spamming? All they have to do is set up their own page with the right keywords, get it indexed, and anyone who uses an "old" link will get redirected to them instead! And if web pages can be defaced, they can be removed, too, thus forcing the 404 and the search!
Better yet, use wholesale keyword spamming to get all those "dead" web pages pointing to your e-commerce site!
Slashdot Mirror
The day after this article was first posted, I'm surprised to see how many people were griping about it not having Ethernet or running some OS other than Linux... when it clearly states on the web page that it both has Ethernet and runs Linux?
:-)
Folks, this looks like what I've been wanting to see for a while now. These are the specs of the "C64 of the 90's" I've been wondering when someone will make, only it's a couple of years late.
Now, the specs you have to go a little deeper to read say "The NIC includes a 56K soft modem (PCTEL) onboard.". So basically it's a WinModem. Or rather, a LinModem. But the GPL virus means that they almost certainly have to release the source code to the driver along with the rest of the base operating system and utilities. They don't have to release the source to any custom applications they might have, but there don't seem to be any mentioned, just publically available software like Linux and Netscape.
But the important thing is that it has a USB port. You can add a real modem, and you can (probably) add a USB hard drive although the speed won't exactly rock. And it should work with any old cheap VGA monitor you can find at a swap meet, since it supports up to 1024x768x millions VESA modes with XFree 3.6.
For the home user who has never used a computer before, this can be a cheap way to get on the internet, do e-mail, and browse the web.
And for the power user, it does have 10/100 Ethernet, so this would make a nice home workstation so you could read Slashdot on the crapper with the addition of an LCD screen. I already have Ethernet wire strung through most of the house by running a 10B2 coax backbone on the floor around the outer walls, taping it down where there is no carpet, so I can just have it boot from one of my servers.
One more thing... this past weekend I figured out how to set up PPP dial-ins on my server (with TWO modem lines!), although the IP addresses are are on the wrong side of IP masquerading (because my fixed IP block comes in in bridged mode). But since most of the services that average users will use work fine behind IPMasq, they can leech off my DSL line in "mini-ISP" mode! Open source hot grits! Of course I have an understanding ISP (who has an "any server you want" policy), and will pre-educate the few friends I give passwords to to NOT spam anyone, because it's MY ass on the line if they do.
I guess it was just my bad timing. It's up again.
Right now www.i-opener-linux.net is responding to pings, but the web server isn't responding.
Does anybody know what's up? I finally got a thin enough hard drive for my i-o this weekend and now I need one of those special cables.
All Laserwriter II models use the same engine. The engine is the problem. It was not designed to have a power saving mode. OTOH, Apple has made at least one model of printer (the Personal LW 600, I think -- whatever it is, it's a QuickDraw printer) that doesn't even have a power switch!
And yes, I do have a IIg board now. That's why I said it was a IIntx back then. In fact, I now have two spare IInt printers and passed up another because they are so old they show up cheap (like $15-20!) at thrift stores these days.
From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
The original obituary notice
A more complete article
One interesting quote:
"It was just a hobby," he said. "I didn't expect it to turn into a business."
I had a moderately successful shareware program myself during the '80s, and it sure didn't help my life much. Fortunately I have no interest in booze or drugs -- they just get in the way of hacking. And also fortunately, I let it go when it wasn't successful any more. Maybe a little later than I should have, but I did move on.
Later model Apple Laserwriters do have an Ethernet port, but no TCP/IP stack that I am aware of. Would it be cheating to set up a protocol proxy to translate TCP/IP into PAP (Printer Access Protocol)? Would it be cheating to also translate the request into a Postscript command?
But the real problem with running it on a real printer is that older (pre-EnergyStar) laser printers suck electricity like crazy. Once I decided to leave my Laserwriter (a IIntx at the time) on continously for a whole month. At the time I lived in a small apartment, with a $35/mo average electric bill, and leaving the printer on caused it to jump by about $20!
So what happens when Windoze blue-screens?
Will they have to scrape your brains off the wall?
They might not be able to talk with an old 212 modem, but they are modems. They just happen to operate in a higher frequency band than POTS modems. The higher the base frequency, the more bandwidth available per octave of frequency.
In fact, even ISDN has to do analog modulation. It just uses a much simpler form of modulation which can easily be run through repeaters for longer distances from the CO. ISDL is DSL protocols over ISDN modulation, and using ATM instead of the PSTN to get out of the CO.
In a Scientific American article on the DE a few years ago, it was noted that one cog template in particular had bits that stuck out in the wrong direction, and only by trying to build the machine could you notice that it was wrong.
DotTV has agreed to pay Tuvalu $50 million in royalties over the next decade for use of the country code. The Internet start-up intends to sell the rights to Web addresses ending in ".tv," such as www.abc.tv or www.law&order.tv.
So is this "next decade" just the time period in which they will pay the $50M for rights in perpetuity, or were the Tuvaluans smart enough to make this a ten-year contract that they could re-negotiate in 2010? And that is $50M US, right? Since it was mentioned that Tuvalu's official currency is the Australian dollar, this is an important point.
And if zd.tv really is going for $10K/yr, I think that's not too bad of a deal for ZDTV.
As for the trademark problem, all they have to do is NOT sell trademark names to those who don't own the trademarks in their own country. In other words, "abc.tv" could only be sold to a few specific television networks, such as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and "pepsi.tv" could not be sold to the Coca Cola company.
Of course this is run by the same people who run etoys.com, so you can imagine all the fun they will have when they get to decide what you can and can't have, and for how much. And no worries that someone already got there first!
(theme song) "We all live... in a Microsoft world..."
Cut to Team Rocket members Billy and Kid Ballmer...
"Looks like Microsoft is blasting off again!"
Personally, I think Microsoft will end up just like the Baby Bells. Break it up and it the pieces will just grow into monsters of their own. Bill Gates has already seen this coming, and that's why he resigned the top spot... he knew it was a game of musical chairs, and he picked his chair before the music stopped.
Yesterday's stock price drop just means a bargain for long-term investors. A divided Microsoft is a Microsoft worth more than it was ever worth before!
Yes, that's what I also noticed. There are long delays before DNS servers will update their entries. This scheme works fine on a small site where there aren't thousands of copies of DNS entries cached on major ISPs around the world. It fails for any large site where the ISPs will continue to provide DNS entries which use the old IP addresses...for hours or days.
That's why the proposal specifies the Time To Live value for the DNS entry as zero. This means that EVERY request for the domain name will cause the authoritative DNS server to be hit. That sounds a bit silly to me. If implemented as suggested, the DNS servers would fall down instead.
In this plan the TTL is the limiting factor for switching over the server address. If it were more than about five minutes, you'd just end up DoS-ing yourself. One or two minutes would be better in terms of latency, but since people often take more than a couple of minutes to actually read a web page before going on to the next one, there would still be a lot of load on the DNS servers.
As long as most of the "eyeballs" are querying their ISP's domain name servers, a TTL of a minute or two will reduce the DNS load... assuming the web page is really popular, like Yahoo or Ebay, or the ISP has a lot of subscribers, like AOL.
But really, as long as too many border routers allow packets with forged source addresses to get out, this will continue to be a problem. Not that even that would stop DoS attacks entirely, because one could always forge a valid "inside" address, or one could just run an automated DDoS with unforged packets that look like normal web traffic.
The routing between my DSL modem and my ISP's gateway went down an hour ago, and the SWB guys say it's not just me... I guess they decided to get their part of the spring cleaning started early! 6:30PM on a Friday, too. Go figure. (They don't care, they don't have to, they're the Phone Company!)
Took me half an hour to hook a modem back up and work out the routing changes to use PPP again. Sigh. At least I hadn't cancelled my old dial-up account.
It was an example of the hardware's ability to quickly and easily (ie, low CPU usage) move a big bunch of bits hither and tither.
Actually, it was an example of the hardware's ability to quickly and easily fool you into thinking it was moving a big bunch of bits "hither and tither".
In reality, all it was doing was messing with registers. The red and white ball was composed of a lot of colors (probably a 16 color mode), which were rotated between red and white. And the ball was in its own bit plane, while the program was changing the location of the bit plane. The graphics hardware was putting it on the display at the appropriate place based on where the bit plane was supposed to be. The blitter chip wasn't being used at all.
No bits were being moved. They stayed right there. They were just displayed at different offsets from the vertical and horizontal sync. That's it. But it looked impressive, and that's why the bouncing ball demo is so famous.
The problem is, multi-layer and sprite graphics hardware like that is rather non-portable. It's awful hard to write cross-platform code that makes good use of such graphics chip tricks, when there is only one hardware platform which can do those tricks. And if a graphics library (X?) isn't designed with them in mind, it's almost impossible to support them portably. The world has gone with flat bitmaps and blitters because they're portable.
Then there are usually limitations with such hardware. They may only handle a maximum number of bit planes and a maximum number of sprites per horizontal line. It's rather technical, but back in the days of single-megahertz CPUs, there were only so many memory accesses you could do per scan line, to fetch the sprite data for the next scan line. If you ran out of bus cycles to the video RAM, tough luck. That's why in Gauntlet (and the Sega Genesis version of it as well!), a screen full of ghosts has sprites missing scanlines on the right edge of the screen.
In my opinion, there's not much that you would get out of someone manufacturing "Amiga" computers these days, except maybe having a major manufacturer other than Apple (and IBM's higher-end stuff) to making PowerPC machines that can run Linux.
1. no ftp install
2. packaging system inferior
So don't use it. For me, it was:
1. usable floppy install
2. lean, non-obfuscatory, packaging system
I can install a slackware system in well under half an hour in which I can have reasonable confidence that source tarballs from anywhere on the net will compile under it. With DeadRat, I end up pulling my hair out just trying to figure out which RPM contains the library I need, then installing the RPMs that it depends on in the right order.
Slackware is well named. It really does have more slack. I can feel it oozing slack every time I install it.
Let me start by asking: why haven't there been many Macintosh viruses? Sure, it's not that popular a platform to begin with, but it had its share of viruses at first.
Then something happened. The first "stealth" virus, the WDEF virus, came out. Instead of using the OS calls like a good little virus, it tried to bypass them and jump right into the ROM, to avoid detection. This was about the time the Mac IIci came out, with a completely recompiled ROM. Instead of spreading, it crashed the machine. There have been a few recompiled ROM versions since then, but then Apple switched over to the PowerPC, increasing the diversity level. If a virus is incompatible with a good number of its target machines, it doesn't spread well. It's much harder to write a virus for a diverse platform.
And have you noticed how all the virus threats lately have been involving e-mail viruses and worms? This is because MicroSloth came up with a pitifully easy virus transmission method, by allowing live code in what was formerly only data. Worms and viruses spread best when they have a convienent way to propagate.
And how many Windows NT viruses are out there anyhow? I'm not talking about macro viruses here, I'm talking about real native code viruses infecting NT. Not too many of those, huh? Because, like Linux, there are more internal barriers for a virus to overcome. Plus, some of the macro viruses don't work under NT, even when the user logs in as Administrator all the time, because NT stores some of its files in different places than 95/98.
Now back to Linux. The creators of various distributions are having a hard enough time agreeing where to put various kinds of files, that a virus can't depend on their location. Diversity again.
About the only thing that is consistent is services on various ports, but you can't even rely on a consistent set of vulnerabilities, because the more clued admins will be able to upgrade from a source tarball.
In what form does Linux lack diversity? First of all, in a common binary format. This means that a virus can know where to patch, and a worm will run on many machines. There can be some problems in library availability, but a worm could just statically link itself. It could also spread by source code, but it can't rely on a given Linux box having a C compiler (or Perl interpreter for Perl worms!) installed.
And diversity is reduced by popular distributions like Red Hat and Mandrake which tend to be preferred by the "naive" (in a Unix admin context) users. I recently got DSL, and at least one port probe I received came from a system on a cable modem running (surprise!) Red Hat 5.2. And finger said nobody was logged in. I am quite sure the port scan was NOT initiated by the owner of the machine.
Now a big question: why a virus over other forms of attack? Personally, I think a "worm" (a program which spreads intact copies of itself, rather than inserting itself in other executables) is better suited to the Unix and Internet environment. All it has to do is carry around enough "skr1pt k1dd33" code and it can spread through less-protected systems.
However, as awareness over stack overflow bugs increases and other vulnerabilities, such holes will decrease over time. The slow animals in the herd (Red Hat 5.2 "default" installs) will be more easily taken down than others.
Are we likely to see another "RTM worm" incident in the next year or two? Probably. Now that broadband 7/24 connections are on the rise due to DSL and cable modems, the percentage of unsecured hosts will rise. And with the increase in opportunity will come an increase in exploits. However, as the RTM worm incident showed, writing a good, well-behaved worm isn't as easy as it sounds.
As to viruses in source tarballs, those are rather unlikely. Certainly it is difficult to generically add virus code to source code, but many source releases include some sort of validity check like an MD5 signature. And these days, the source is usually taken from THE official archive.
In summary, I think Linux is diverse enough that viruses will be too much effort to write. Worms are much more likely to become a problem in the near future.
I think the coolest "interesting" way to deliver network services that I've heard of was this: at one time New Zealand's link to Usenet was a regular cargo plane which would fly reel-to-reel magtapes of newsgroup posts in from Australia.
Anyhow, if you don't mind coming up with your own protocol, and high lag is a way of life (like a Mars-Earth IP link), just transmit everything redundantly over a UDP like protocol with extra redundancy! Then keep everything on file for retransmission if packets still get lost.
Video gaming blisters predate Nintendo by many years. Yep, you young whippersnappers, there were video games before Nintendo! Y'all ever heard of Atari??? In fact, one Atari 2600 game manufacturer, Imagic, had a "Numb Thumb Club"! We had numb thumbs and we were proud of it! Carpal tunnel syndrome? Wussies!
Yep, back in the old days we didn't have rapid fire, and we had to learn how to press that button really fast! And we didn't have these wussy "party" games where you could sit back in your comfy couch holding your controller, we had games like Track and Field where you had to stand up and slap your hands back and forth as fast as you could! In fact, some of the kids figured out they could hold a pencil in just the right way where they could slap those buttons really fast, so those evil arcade people, they put bumps around the buttons where you couldn't do that any more!
...37734 5P33|!!! So all we need is to get a skr1pt k1dd33 to decode it for us!
Okay, guys, I'll just have to try Slackware when I'm mucking around with setting up a desktop Linux box again.
I do have a confession to make, though. The biggest reason I haven't switched over to Linux as a desktop operating system is because... I use MacOS! Yep, a Slackware box and NiftyTelnet (and the latest netatalk+asun afpd) was the best upgrade I ever got for my PowerMac. When I find an X newsreader that is as convienent to use and stable as NewsWatcher, and proper Japanese language support, then I'll switch.
Dude, there's something called m4. That's the modern, enlightened way of configuring sendmail. If you're mucking around with .cf files, then you get what you deserve...
Now that you mention this, have you seen ever how linuxconf sets up sendmail.cf? It has a whole bunch of chopped-up pieces of m4-generated (!) sendmail.cf files, and sticks them together like a first grader with a bottle of paste sticks construction paper together. Of course, all the tags at the top from the original chopped up sendmail.cf which are generated by the m4 macros to document what was used to build the sendmail.cf file are left in, making them less than useless. Furrfu!
I'd rather watch something calm and wholesome like an unrated horror slasher flick or a video of surgial procedures on cable TV than have to ever look at a linuxconf generated sendmail.cf file again. (shudder)
This is great news for me, because I was just thinking the other day about those new cheap (but supposedly good) $25 Linksys 10/100 cards which require the latest (Tulip?) driver from 2.2.14! Now I can get one! And I've been upgrading for DSL, so I don't even have an uptime to lose!
/boot like all the other modern distros. IMHO, /boot is the only way to go when you have an enormous hard drive. So I have to move the kernel and edit lilo.conf and go back into setup and "recycle" lilo to get my machine bootable.
While I don't think I'd ever consider using Slackware as a "desktop" OS, it's a great distro for command-line hacks like me who would rather stick the box in a corner and telnet in.
But the main thing that keeps me coming back to Slackware is that I can be sure the source tarballs I download will fscking compile. I've always had a bad time trying to compile source under less-than-full installs of RedHat (ever since the time I bought a release version of 5.2 and the kernel wouldn't recompile), then I go to Slackware and things compile with no problem. I'm sorry, but I don't want to bloat my hard drive with a full install of RedHat just to be sure I can compile something without being in RPM hell trying to find the right libraries!
As far as I'm concerned, Slackware is much easier for me to install, because there are fewer packages to keep track of, which means less chance of missing a "regular" library during install. But I think the "flat" nature of the Slackware install, compared with RPM's extensive hierarchial dependencies, is the real reason I find Slackware so much easier to install.
And as a bonus, it's a floppy-friendly install, too! When I first installed it, I didn't have a CD-ROM on an Intel box, and was downloading Slackware tarball disks and installing them from a directory on the hard drive (because I was getting too many disk errors from those el cheapo HD floppies I had lying around). The install disks make a good root-boot, too. The first time I tried Red Hat, I tried downloading just the 50 or so RPMs I tought I needed to a hard drive, and it bitched about every single RPM I didn't download being missing, whether I was installing it or not. Since Red Hat uses hundreds of RPMs, I had to press the enter key a lot.
Although sometimes I wish it used SysV init, I'm not installing many services, and I can do well enough just editing rc.local. SysV init just seems to be an excuse for distros like Red Hat to start up every service they can think of. And IMHO, most people DON'T need fscking sendmail running!
The thing that annoys me most about Slackware, though, is that it doesn't put the kernel into
California is full of migrating Okies again, only this time the Okies have laptops, Web pages, and cell phones. It's basically a Grapes of Wrath thing, only they're logging frequent-flier miles.
And reading his writing is a much richer multi-media experience if you've heard him giving readings enough to know his voice, with that California valley accent, so out of place in Texas, fondling every word like stream water rolling over pebbles. Oooooh...
So how do you say "first post" in Spanish
:)
There don't seem to be any first-posting assholes on that site...
This makes one big whopper of an assumption: that the web page has moved and still exists somewhere. Well, the major cause of 404s that I know of is web sites simply going away.
So you get a 404 and you want to use a search site to find where it went? That's fine if it's been long enough since the move to give the web crawlers time to find it... there's a lot of web space out there to search!
But here's the good one: what if someone decides to hijack your web site by simple keyword spamming? All they have to do is set up their own page with the right keywords, get it indexed, and anyone who uses an "old" link will get redirected to them instead! And if web pages can be defaced, they can be removed, too, thus forcing the 404 and the search!
Better yet, use wholesale keyword spamming to get all those "dead" web pages pointing to your e-commerce site!