It works with DVD player, too. Just do gdb/path/to/DVD\ Player, then break ptrace, then do a return 0 every time it hits the breakpoint. It calls ptrace about ten or fifteen times when it starts, and it gets kind of annoying, but after that it runs. I haven't actually tried playing a DVD, but the program is running in gdb and I doubt if there would be any more problems.
How are you measuring speed? FLOPS, MHz, wall clock time to run a bunch of operations on a big Photoshop document? The Alpha was seriously powerful, both in terms of clock speed and in speed per clock. I could believe that it got better than 50% speed when comparing MHz. I have a harder time believing that it got better than 50% when measuring FLOPS or wall clock time doing real-world operations.
Emulated 68k code on the PPC was only "faster than native" if you compare a fast PPC with a fastish 68k. If you magically came up with a 68k with equal performance to a PPC, it would totally smoke the PPC when running 68k code. All you have to do is look at how much faster PPCs got with new operating systems, as Apple rewrote more and more of the OS to be native PPC code. The 68k emulator was beautiful and reasonably quick, but I doubt if it was close to 50%, much less over.
Then again, emulating a register-poor architecture on a register-rich architecture is easy; emulating a register-rich architecture on a register-poor architecture quickly is very hard. PPCs have 64 general-purpose registers, and then you have the altivec registers, and Macs really rely a lot on altivec for speed. A G3 and G4 with the same clock speed, which should be pretty close for scalar performance, will not provide anywhere near the same user experience because Macs use altivec all over the place when they can.
I wish PearPC the best of luck. I don't doubt that they'll be able to produce a usable experience eventually, but I doubt that they'll ever be able to make it cheaper to buy a PC and emulate a Mac than to buy a Mac of equivalent performance to the emulation.
I think you misunderstood the emphasis of my post. I try to avoid italics, but I'll put them in:
"Macs aren't that expensive compared to PCs."
In other words, Macs are more expensive, but they aren't so much more expensive that it will be cheaper to buy a PC and emulate a Mac than it will be to simply buy a Mac.
Anyway, you say that you shouldn't judge by a top-of-the-line system, but that's what you did. $3000 gets you an unbelievably kick-ass Mac. Since Apple doesn't actually sell bottom of the barrel pieces of junk, I think it's fair to consider something like the eMac, which starts out at only $800, and it's a very nice Mac. The Mac midrange is the iMac, which starts out at $1300. I have a budget and "true technical expertise" and would happily buy either one, if not for the fact that computers that weigh over ten pounds don't agree with my lifestyle. Of course, if I could afford it, I'd get a G5, but I'd also get a better PC than your decent $800 example if I wanted a PC and had the money.
Macs don't have that third-button "scroller thingy" like on Windows, so the third button can't make it appear. But real scroll wheels work, and you can make the third button do other things (mine activates Expose so I can switch between windows in the same app).
There is no indication that EULAs (an unsigned "contract" that is dictated by only one party and can't be examined before purchase) are legally binding, and certainly breaking an EULA is no major sin. If he had a purchased copy, it's certainly not "piracy" even if it is illegal to break an EULA.
Macs aren't that expensive compared to PCs. Even a really really super-duper unbelievable emulator is going to be at least twice as slow as the host. Even the biggest Apple detractor will have to admit that you simply can't get a PC that's more than twice as fast as a top-of-the-line G5, and I bet that a PC that's twice as fast as a given Mac will cost more, no matter how cheap you build it.
Also, VMware isn't an emulator, it's a virtual machine. That's why it's so fast.
Good thing some guy named Deng tried your ideas back in the 70s. They worked out pretty well, too; things got a lot better around there after that. Of course, it's not 100% capitalist, but what is?
venusian exploration has been extremely sparse, despite how easy it is to get there compared to mars.
Say what? It's easier to send things to Mars than basically anywhere else in the solar system, including the Moon if you allow aerobraking on the receiving side of things.
American knuckleheads never let inconvenient facts like Russia currently being the only country on the planet able to regularly launch people into orbit to change their biased opinions.
I love my country, but our manned space program sucks, sucks, sucks. The US has been just as much, if not more, of a difficult ISS partner as anybody else.
Are you American, by any chance? It seems to me that I only see Americans making idiotic comments like this, and I'm always embarrassed to be one when I see something like this post. Pick up a clue next time.
First, there are shows which seem to avoid the problem. DS9, for example, was great. It started out ok, got better as it went along, and ended right. It wasn't too early, but it didn't drag on. Farscape was pretty much the same, from what I gather (I stopped watching it regularly around the end of season 2).
Second, since I stopped watching TV, I'm a much happier SF fan. Bad books and movies are much easier to ignore, and much easier to find. Good movies are hard to find, but you can substitute good books until the next Minority Report, or whatever floats your boat, comes along. Neither one has to be, for lack of a better word, subscribed to the way TV shows have to be, so it's a much better experience overall. DS9 and Farscape were good, but the pain of the medium just isn't worth the chance of finding something equally good in the future for me.
Re:Laziness
on
Hardened PHP
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· Score: 4, Insightful
This is a common theme, the "Security problems only occur because of lazy/sloppy/stupid coders, and the solution is to become better coders" theme.
The problem is that it's complete BS. Even the most wizardly coder will make mistakes. The only way to be secure is to have lots of code reviews, and then things still get through; look at holes in SSH or Apache. Tools like this certainly don't hurt, and they might just help. "Don't make mistakes" is not an option.
It's not starting a trend, just continuing it. Trailers have always reused music from other movies. Why? It's very simple. Trailers are released before the movie is finished, and way before the score for the movie has been recorded. Nobody is going to pay a ton of money to record a soundtrack for a three-minute trailer when they almost certainly won't be able to reuse the music in the movie. So they use music from other movies. With permission, of course.
I hate to be a wet blanket here, but does winning the X-Prize really get us any closer to privatization of space? The real question here is if having achieved the X-Prize, can the winning entry be modified to lead directly to LEO -- I suspect not. Most notably missing is the ability to survive the extreme thermal stress from the much higher velocities on reentry.
It doesn't matter that the current vehicles have no hope of getting to LEO. Suborbital is useful and potentially profitable by itself. Tourism is one possibility. People pay tens of thousands of dollars for an hour in a MiG-29, and you can probably find customers willing to pay a similar amount for a ride into space. Another possibility is microsatellites. Once you're in space, you can launch another rocket from your suborbital craft to put a very small (on the order of a kilogram) satellite into orbit, and there appears to be a market for this sort of thing as well if it can be done cheaply.
Scaled Composites is planning on revenue from both of these markets, from what I remember. They aren't just running a research program, they're also aiming to turn it into something that makes money. Once you have profitable, private suborbital vehicles, orbit can come in a natural, slow progression.
I've never seen a phone system where the wires were not inside the walls. And phones are always next to a wall jack, not put fifty feet away, precisely because it's a pain to make unobtrusive wires that can't get snagged by anything.
Yes, you can make RJ-45 unobtrusive, if you spend money and work hard at it. Or you can just buy a cheap wifi base station and wireless card. For some people, even with a desktop computer, the extra money is worth the convenience. If you have a portable, I can't imagine not using wifi.
Yes, wires are ugly. Despite what you may think, that is a legitimate reason to use wifi.
I have a wifi network at home, and my father does too. Neither of us have had any problems with it, ever. We both have portables, and the network reaches everywhere in the house where we would want it to go. It's very nice. If you're in the house with your portable, you have a connection, simple as that.
The right way to fix it, as I hinted at in my original post, is to make backups. This not only solves the trojan problem, but also a lot of other problems like the house-burning-down problem, the head-crash problem, and the notorious freak-meteor problem. However, it's not all that easy. I agree that laziness will eventually win out.
Actually, engine efficiencies have barely changed since the 60s. If it required hundreds of tons of rocket to get a satellite of size X into orbit then, it requires hundreds (possibly fewer hundreds, but not even one order of magnitude less) of tons of rocket to get a satellite of size X into orbit today.
Yes, but the home folder is all that matters. The way UNIX protects system files is very nice, but the reality is that for most users, the stuff in/home or/Users or/users or whatever your flavor of UNIX uses is what counts. If you trashed my entire computer but left/Users alone, I'd be annoyed and reinstall. If you trashed/Users, I'd be annoyed and restore from backup... but most people don't keep anything resembling decent backups. Especially on a Mac, where it takes twenty minutes to reinstall the OS, the difference between trashing/Users or trashing the entire system is miniscule. Of course, if it's a multi-user Mac, a trojan can only trash the current user's files.
I'm having trouble finding any sources for median income. The best I could do comes from Wikipedia's PRC entry, which says: The average annual income of a Chinese worker is $1,300. This does not seem to match well with your $300 figure. Do you have a source for it?
I don't suppose you would care to enlighten a poor ignorant soul, and explain what the difference is between per-capita GDP and median income, and also explain how the world's second-largest economy has a median income of $300 per year?
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It works with DVD player, too. Just do gdb /path/to/DVD\ Player, then break ptrace, then do a return 0 every time it hits the breakpoint. It calls ptrace about ten or fifteen times when it starts, and it gets kind of annoying, but after that it runs. I haven't actually tried playing a DVD, but the program is running in gdb and I doubt if there would be any more problems.
How are you measuring speed? FLOPS, MHz, wall clock time to run a bunch of operations on a big Photoshop document? The Alpha was seriously powerful, both in terms of clock speed and in speed per clock. I could believe that it got better than 50% speed when comparing MHz. I have a harder time believing that it got better than 50% when measuring FLOPS or wall clock time doing real-world operations.
Emulated 68k code on the PPC was only "faster than native" if you compare a fast PPC with a fastish 68k. If you magically came up with a 68k with equal performance to a PPC, it would totally smoke the PPC when running 68k code. All you have to do is look at how much faster PPCs got with new operating systems, as Apple rewrote more and more of the OS to be native PPC code. The 68k emulator was beautiful and reasonably quick, but I doubt if it was close to 50%, much less over.
Then again, emulating a register-poor architecture on a register-rich architecture is easy; emulating a register-rich architecture on a register-poor architecture quickly is very hard. PPCs have 64 general-purpose registers, and then you have the altivec registers, and Macs really rely a lot on altivec for speed. A G3 and G4 with the same clock speed, which should be pretty close for scalar performance, will not provide anywhere near the same user experience because Macs use altivec all over the place when they can.
I wish PearPC the best of luck. I don't doubt that they'll be able to produce a usable experience eventually, but I doubt that they'll ever be able to make it cheaper to buy a PC and emulate a Mac than to buy a Mac of equivalent performance to the emulation.
I think you misunderstood the emphasis of my post. I try to avoid italics, but I'll put them in:
"Macs aren't that expensive compared to PCs."
In other words, Macs are more expensive, but they aren't so much more expensive that it will be cheaper to buy a PC and emulate a Mac than it will be to simply buy a Mac.
Anyway, you say that you shouldn't judge by a top-of-the-line system, but that's what you did. $3000 gets you an unbelievably kick-ass Mac. Since Apple doesn't actually sell bottom of the barrel pieces of junk, I think it's fair to consider something like the eMac, which starts out at only $800, and it's a very nice Mac. The Mac midrange is the iMac, which starts out at $1300. I have a budget and "true technical expertise" and would happily buy either one, if not for the fact that computers that weigh over ten pounds don't agree with my lifestyle. Of course, if I could afford it, I'd get a G5, but I'd also get a better PC than your decent $800 example if I wanted a PC and had the money.
Macs don't have that third-button "scroller thingy" like on Windows, so the third button can't make it appear. But real scroll wheels work, and you can make the third button do other things (mine activates Expose so I can switch between windows in the same app).
There is no indication that EULAs (an unsigned "contract" that is dictated by only one party and can't be examined before purchase) are legally binding, and certainly breaking an EULA is no major sin. If he had a purchased copy, it's certainly not "piracy" even if it is illegal to break an EULA.
What hype? Nobody's said it's fast.
Macs aren't that expensive compared to PCs. Even a really really super-duper unbelievable emulator is going to be at least twice as slow as the host. Even the biggest Apple detractor will have to admit that you simply can't get a PC that's more than twice as fast as a top-of-the-line G5, and I bet that a PC that's twice as fast as a given Mac will cost more, no matter how cheap you build it.
Also, VMware isn't an emulator, it's a virtual machine. That's why it's so fast.
Good thing some guy named Deng tried your ideas back in the 70s. They worked out pretty well, too; things got a lot better around there after that. Of course, it's not 100% capitalist, but what is?
venusian exploration has been extremely sparse, despite how easy it is to get there compared to mars.
Say what? It's easier to send things to Mars than basically anywhere else in the solar system, including the Moon if you allow aerobraking on the receiving side of things.
American knuckleheads never let inconvenient facts like Russia currently being the only country on the planet able to regularly launch people into orbit to change their biased opinions.
I love my country, but our manned space program sucks, sucks, sucks. The US has been just as much, if not more, of a difficult ISS partner as anybody else.
Are you American, by any chance? It seems to me that I only see Americans making idiotic comments like this, and I'm always embarrassed to be one when I see something like this post. Pick up a clue next time.
I have two things to say to that one.
First, there are shows which seem to avoid the problem. DS9, for example, was great. It started out ok, got better as it went along, and ended right. It wasn't too early, but it didn't drag on. Farscape was pretty much the same, from what I gather (I stopped watching it regularly around the end of season 2).
Second, since I stopped watching TV, I'm a much happier SF fan. Bad books and movies are much easier to ignore, and much easier to find. Good movies are hard to find, but you can substitute good books until the next Minority Report, or whatever floats your boat, comes along. Neither one has to be, for lack of a better word, subscribed to the way TV shows have to be, so it's a much better experience overall. DS9 and Farscape were good, but the pain of the medium just isn't worth the chance of finding something equally good in the future for me.
This is a common theme, the "Security problems only occur because of lazy/sloppy/stupid coders, and the solution is to become better coders" theme.
The problem is that it's complete BS. Even the most wizardly coder will make mistakes. The only way to be secure is to have lots of code reviews, and then things still get through; look at holes in SSH or Apache. Tools like this certainly don't hurt, and they might just help. "Don't make mistakes" is not an option.
Don't you know that the laws do not apply to the President? Sheesh....
20 miles/gallon = 537,600 rods/hogshead
This post really makes me feel young. I'm 23, and "typewriter cleaner" sounds to me like a profession that should be on the B Ark.
Great story, though!
It's not starting a trend, just continuing it. Trailers have always reused music from other movies. Why? It's very simple. Trailers are released before the movie is finished, and way before the score for the movie has been recorded. Nobody is going to pay a ton of money to record a soundtrack for a three-minute trailer when they almost certainly won't be able to reuse the music in the movie. So they use music from other movies. With permission, of course.
"Save the children!" is the dumbest excuse for ignoring the first amendment ever.
I hate to be a wet blanket here, but does winning the X-Prize really get us any closer to privatization of space? The real question here is if having achieved the X-Prize, can the winning entry be modified to lead directly to LEO -- I suspect not. Most notably missing is the ability to survive the extreme thermal stress from the much higher velocities on reentry.
It doesn't matter that the current vehicles have no hope of getting to LEO. Suborbital is useful and potentially profitable by itself. Tourism is one possibility. People pay tens of thousands of dollars for an hour in a MiG-29, and you can probably find customers willing to pay a similar amount for a ride into space. Another possibility is microsatellites. Once you're in space, you can launch another rocket from your suborbital craft to put a very small (on the order of a kilogram) satellite into orbit, and there appears to be a market for this sort of thing as well if it can be done cheaply.
Scaled Composites is planning on revenue from both of these markets, from what I remember. They aren't just running a research program, they're also aiming to turn it into something that makes money. Once you have profitable, private suborbital vehicles, orbit can come in a natural, slow progression.
I really, really want some videos of this or any other of SS1's test flights. Does anybody know if such things are out there to be downloaded?
I've never seen a phone system where the wires were not inside the walls. And phones are always next to a wall jack, not put fifty feet away, precisely because it's a pain to make unobtrusive wires that can't get snagged by anything.
Yes, you can make RJ-45 unobtrusive, if you spend money and work hard at it. Or you can just buy a cheap wifi base station and wireless card. For some people, even with a desktop computer, the extra money is worth the convenience. If you have a portable, I can't imagine not using wifi.
Yes, wires are ugly. Despite what you may think, that is a legitimate reason to use wifi.
I have a wifi network at home, and my father does too. Neither of us have had any problems with it, ever. We both have portables, and the network reaches everywhere in the house where we would want it to go. It's very nice. If you're in the house with your portable, you have a connection, simple as that.
The right way to fix it, as I hinted at in my original post, is to make backups. This not only solves the trojan problem, but also a lot of other problems like the house-burning-down problem, the head-crash problem, and the notorious freak-meteor problem. However, it's not all that easy. I agree that laziness will eventually win out.
Actually, engine efficiencies have barely changed since the 60s. If it required hundreds of tons of rocket to get a satellite of size X into orbit then, it requires hundreds (possibly fewer hundreds, but not even one order of magnitude less) of tons of rocket to get a satellite of size X into orbit today.
Yes, but the home folder is all that matters. The way UNIX protects system files is very nice, but the reality is that for most users, the stuff in /home or /Users or /users or whatever your flavor of UNIX uses is what counts. If you trashed my entire computer but left /Users alone, I'd be annoyed and reinstall. If you trashed /Users, I'd be annoyed and restore from backup... but most people don't keep anything resembling decent backups. Especially on a Mac, where it takes twenty minutes to reinstall the OS, the difference between trashing /Users or trashing the entire system is miniscule. Of course, if it's a multi-user Mac, a trojan can only trash the current user's files.
I'm having trouble finding any sources for median income. The best I could do comes from Wikipedia's PRC entry, which says: The average annual income of a Chinese worker is $1,300. This does not seem to match well with your $300 figure. Do you have a source for it?
I don't suppose you would care to enlighten a poor ignorant soul, and explain what the difference is between per-capita GDP and median income, and also explain how the world's second-largest economy has a median income of $300 per year?