Don't confuse "specification" with "implementation." Nowhere in the article is Mono mentioned, as it is a non-Microsoft application of the CLI specification. I was specifically referring to Microsoft-published software, and as mentioned above in a separate thread, I was correct in referring to the bytecode (CIL) with respect to how it can be interpreted by a Microsoft VM on either architecture. Obvious by my confusion with the command-line, I wasn't even aware there was an approved specification for.NET's VM (or any Microsoft product, for that matter). But regardless of whether it's standardized for all to use or not, the article focuses on Microsoft. Even if it were not standardized they could continue to publish VMs on their own platform as far as I'm aware.
Nowhere in the article did I say that CIL executes anything. Every instance of CIL was meant to refer to the intermediate bytecode itself, which can be JIT compiled by a virtual machine (the CLR everyone here who clearly did not comprehend the article thinks I'm confusing it for). Re-read the article carefully, keeping this in mind, and I might not appear as stupid as everyone here believes me to be regarding a subject that they themselves must not completely understand.
This guy is a complete moron. First, it's called the CLI, not the CIL. Second, it's called the Windows Runtime or WinRT and it runs.NET apps and HTML5/js apps. This is all quite plain to anyone that has even a tiny understanding of the system. This architecture diagram has been posted for quite some time, and clearly shows C# and VB as well as C/C++ apps running under WinRT/Metro.
Hi, I'm the "complete moron" who wrote the article. I most definitely meant CIL and not CLI, as I was referring to the Common Intermediate Language, and not the Command Line Interface. One is used to interact with an operating system through mostly text (curses and cursor-based terminal graphics being a stark exception), and the other allows multiple human-written programming languages to be compiled to a common bytecode form for interpretation by a.NET virtual machine runtime, and the basis of this article was that the same VM can be ported to Windows 8 on ARM in place of Metro apps. And your diagram does not clearly note anywhere that it is valid for Windows 8 on ARM as it is for x86/x86-64. Next time, don't be so quick to jump to conclusions and throw the words "moron" and "idiot" around. Thank you in advance.
Did you even read the Secunia links you posted? Both unpatched vulnerabilities require usage of Apache's mod_ftp module, which I've honestly never even seen used as most hosts and general servers use external (and hardened) FTP software like ProFTPd:
Successful exploitation requires that a threaded Multi-Processing Module is used and that the mod_proxy_ftp module is enabled. (...) An error in the included APR-util library can be exploited to trigger hangs in the prefork and event MPMs on Solaris.
And the second (first in order on the site) unpatched vulnerability deals strictly with a mod_ftp input validation issue. Again, I rarely even see mod_ftp even used as opposed to an entirely seperate FTP server daemon but disabling the faulty module is simple enough in environments requiring absolute security.
And input validation issues are usually patched fairly quickly anyways, I mean come on, this is 2009 and there are too many developers for the project that wouldn't let this sort of thing continue for this amount of time. Not to mention the fact that these unpatched vulnerabilities are nothing compared to the olde IIS Webdav exploit of a few years ago - too bad there wasn't a community aware of it sooner other than the underground black hats already using it to their advantage by the time it was brought to the attention of MS.
Users don't read dialog boxes. It could've had red flashing lights around it, and it wouldn't have mattered.
Yeah I get those at the bottom of websites all the time, usually because I'm the Xth visitor etc. For some reason, the prize is always a bunch of forms to fill out promising more prizes. (this is a joke, by the way)
Pictures and the Mother's day rush killed our 2Mbps cable bandwidth; here's a "mirror":
Netbooks are making huge waves within the hardware and software industries today, but not many would believe that the whole Netbook craze actually started back around 1996 with the Toshiba Libretto 70CT. Termed technically as a subnotebook because of its small dimensions (given below), the computer is the first that fits all of the qualifications of being what we would call a Netbook today, due in part to its built-in Infrared and PCMCIA hardware, and itâ(TM)s (albeit early) web browsing software.
The First Netbook Computer
The First Netbook Computer
The hardware includes the two (potentially) wireless PCMCIA and Infrared network connections, Windows 95 OSR 2 with Internet Explorer 2.0, a whole 16MB of RAM and a 120Mhz Intel Pentium processor (weâ(TM)re flying now!).
A further look at the hardware reveals even more Netbook-ish hardware/software trends (and pictures below), given todayâ(TM)s standards for Netbook qualifications.
The Libretto (70CT) was certainly not the first small (8â) form factor laptop produced in the early 90â(TM)s, but it was the first to be considered a Netbook given todayâ(TM)s standards because of itâ(TM)s PCMCIA and Infrared connections, used for wireless network connectivity and possibly even via a phone card. The inclusion of Internet Explorer 2.0 within the software also contributes to its ability to be officially termed a âoeNetbookâ (more on this below).
The hardware includes an 8â wide, 5â deep and almost 1.5â form factor containing a whopping 16MB of RAM, a 120Mhz Intel Pentium processor (with added MMX technology!) and a whole 30-45 minutes of battery life.
The software running on the âoeNetbookâ is Windows 95 OSR2, with Included Internet Explorer 2.0 and the Windows 95 Plus! pack of software. The mouse is the nub/nipple/clit mouse, given the lack of trackpad hardware and the only alternative being the bulky ball-based mice of the time, and the actual mouse buttons are mounted on the back.
I donâ(TM)t consider Internet Explorer 2.0 being the most supported browser for web-based applications (hell, I donâ(TM)t even support 6 or 7), and 16MB doesnâ(TM)t sound like a whole lot of RAM for storing a large web page and JavaScript into memory along with the operating system, but around the year 1996 this laptop/subnotebook/netbook would meet all the requirements given its environment to be called a Netbook as we would today.
Other hardware besides what was listed above includes a (HiFi?) 1/4â sound port on the back, a mono speaker on the front above the mouse, and a proprietary docking port on the bottom.
The Pentium MMX and bulky battery connector doesnâ(TM)t exactly make this ACPI-lacking portable the most environmentally-friendly book of all time, but it is certain that it must have gotten the job done in its time.
The screen was a very low-resolution (640Ã--480) 5â LCD screen, leaving enough room on the front for the mouse, speaker, power button, and all-too-important logos of Intel and Toshiba.
While I write this largely with humorous intent, it is worth noting the satire I intend to make of the industryâ(TM)s buzzwords for modern products that sometimes have been out for quite a while, e.g. cloud computing versus clustering/distributed applications and âoehigh-speed Internetâ versus what a T1/ATM connection was over decade ago.
Also, something patent trolls working for Toshiba might wish to investigate are the 22 patents listed on the bottom of the Libretto model (pictured below). What these patents cover and how many modern netbooks/subnotebooks violate these are unknown to me, although Iâ(TM)m sure you could find a few with the right research as these patents were approved less than 25 years ago.
Picture Gallery
These (possibly slow-loading) pictures display several features of the computer, displaying as many of its features as possible (and probably killing our bandwidth): (and indeed they did)
Never was a nail except for the Ruby community that was in denial.
The same thing I said about six months ago - look at the comments on the article. Ruby/Rails never reached the support it needed to be widely deployed, and it's less likely for an ISP/host to deploy a framework than a well-established language. Case in point: more Perl deployments by hosts than Ruby or rails, not to mention PHP/ASP.NET.
For those of you whom read the parent after slashdot fixed the problem, this is the original, unmodified summary:
"A European Union directive, which Britain was instrumental in devising, comes into force which will require all internet service providers to retain a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/technologynews/5105
buying Sun out and firing all OOo devs would *seriously* hurt it as a project
In that case, since Sun is taking the role of old yeller, we should start learning more about the source code so as to keep the project alive after Sun.
I have not laughed that hard in a long time. It reminds me of The Onion video on the subject, and it's even sadder because I know somebody who even dropped out of college to wait on tables just to have more time to play WoW. It's really sad, actually, but you made me laugh at it.
There is a hidden cavern down there that looks like it was going to be something that wasn't included in the game
Too bad the mods won't scroll this far, but there's a whole story behind that little cavern - it was rumored to be some kind of fountain, don't quote me on this but I believe a "unicorn fountain" (no BS) that was scrapped in the end. There were found to be little traces of graphics from this fountain buried here and there within the game cartridge, but no playable version of the fountain was uncovered.
This secret, alongside the Banjo-Kazooie Stop n' Swop conspiracies, are amongst the Nintendo 64's greatest mysteries. I haven't seen the cavern myself personally (yet plenty of youtube videos), but I have seen evidence of the Stop n' Swap thing, which may be related to the unicorn fountain in that extra gameplay was to be accessible via an addon hard drive to the Nintendo 64 but was never sold in the US (yet the Japanese Zelda/BK never included any of these features despite briefly selling the hard drive).
The Banjo-Kazooie Stop n' Swap relied on early Nintendo 64 models having nvram retain data while you could swap cartridges, theoretically between Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie so as to access secrets in the sequel based on progress in the first, but the idea was never finished in the sequel to the end of the nvram feature in later N64 models. Whether or not the OOT cavern relied on the hard drive (or didn't at the last minute) remains a secret lost with time.
My favorite recent glitch was in Perfect Dark Zero for the Xbox 360: I used to get in a rocket pack, and break through the glass roof of the mall so you could land and walk on the barrier that prevents people from going too high. Used to freak people out, because you could shoot through it and the rocket pack had infinite ammo, leading to a very scared group of people on the ground below (in the city and desert maps, at least).
I think Rare patched this up recently, but I remember having loads of fun with that. Just walking on the barrier, watching the others shoot two rounds then stare in amazement was such an ego boost. Other than that, I haven't found very many other (useful) glitches in recent games, nor do I play them enough to find them or hear about them. In fact, I think my Xbox Live subscription expired like 3 months ago...
To the contrary, I know a local company that deployed an IBM iSeries (previously AS/400) mainframe in their main office, serving two other locations connected via a metropolitan-area T1 line. The machine itself was pretty expensive, yet covered by a 5 or 10 year (can't remember) warranty. The machine would actually call a support technician out to the site whenever it detected an issue with itself, and this has kept their uptime at an astonishing rate, aided by a decent UPS and the hot-swappable hardware.
They've been doing this for many years, and even though their first IT technician whom set this up passed away long since, they've kept the same infrastructure for all these years and it hasn't failed them. They also do this to remain backward-compatible with the older mainframe tapes, which has proven successful. Even at the busiest times, the mainframe is only at 10% utilization, even though it is a pretty low-end model.
This has amazed me about IBM support, and since then I've always weighed IBM as a candidate in new networks, although many of them are too small size or budget-wise to deploy a mainframe. But this is the support I've come to associate IBM with, can't speak for their phone support although everyone seems to outsource to India for phone support these days (a problem I have frequently with Cisco). But this support with Sun's hardware running Linux for cheap was one thing I was longing for with this merger.
Two kernels? At the same time? I'll be in my bunk.
That's essentially what cooperative Linux does, runs a Linux kernel and the NT kernel at the same time, often with a special X emulator to get full-blown Linux apps running in Windows userspace with better support than with Cygwin. I still can't wrap my head around how the two kernels yield to each other in respect to the PC architecture, but it's an interesting project - guaranteed to keep you in your bunk for a while;)
And it would aid the economy in the sense of the two pooling their money, and centralizing their spending. It would also aid us in the IT field, as the post-merger IBM would sell Sparc AND POWER hardware, with the option of Solaris or Linux on either one (theoretically), all bundled with IBM's famous support. IBM owning the rights to Java would work wonders for the Java community, especially in the Linux aspect, and IBM would have probably contributed more to StarOffice/OpenOffice using some Lotus material. I was really looking forward to the two becoming one, needless to say, especially for more formidable Microsoft competition (from both a business stance and IT stance).
But ah well, IBM withdrew, so It'll just go back to Sun barely remaining a company, and IBM being competition on a fairly peer-to-peer level with them and Microsoft when it comes time to design new network infrastructures. If Red Hat bought Sun, I don't know if it would be as much of a benefit as if IBM and Sun merged, but for Sun anything is better than their current status - I just wish they would have seen that more clearly when IBM offered them a healthy current-economy-sum for their company.
Not to mention Android using the linux kernel with a netbsd userland.
And the Debian/Ubuntu package repositories are full of openbsd-derived packages, many of which I run on servers due to my familiarity with them. Apple runs a modified FreeBSD kernel (XNU) with a mixed userland, and OpenSolaris has almost all pure SysV-derived apps just to add to add to all of the confusion.
The OS I was referring to in my comment is just stock-kernel Ubuntu 8.10. The laptop is a dual core Pentium, 2GB ram, no swap partition used. I run compiz as a WM, for eye candy's sake, and this may contribute to the fan issue, but I just checked system monitor and Firefox alone takes up 384MB of ram and averages around 15% CPU. I found some Flash running in the ads of some pages, contrary to what I said above, as well as some JavaScript in a few tabs I forgot about.
If anything, the hard drive is the biggest bottleneck of the system, but I'm thinking about writing a piece on a news website I run (thecoffeedesk.com) about which browser would be best suited for a Linux installation on ARM. I'm going to compare memory usage, average CPU usage, and anything else that comes to mind (I'm open to suggestions). I want to compare Opera, Firefox 3, Seamonkey, and Epiphany in this respect to see which is better suited resource-wise even though I'm not running ARM.
I know benchmarks have been done before, but I'm out to see which browser could run with the smallest footprint while running full-blown web apps (I'll use Google Docs in my example, suggest others if you'd like). I don't have any idea how much memory comes on a standard ARM netbook, or what the default clock speed is, for that matter (and whether they use SSDs), so if anyone has more information than the Wikipedia article can offer, be my guest.
They are the only chips that you can program and keep your sanity.
I completely agree. The most elegant assembly I've even written, easy to optimize, and without all the legacy underpinnings of x86. Apparently the GNU folk can agree as well, because the output of any of my compiled C programs run better on an older ARM than a newer x86 chip (this is on Linux, btw).
Web browsers are interpreters, which are going to be slower than machines that run pre-compiled code
It's worse than that: In addition to HTML, a web browser must parse/interpret JavaScript, Java, CSS, XHTML, Flash (if Adobe ever gets onboard), and regular XML just to display the modern, JavaScript-heavy web application. This gets resource intensive if, say, using an app such as Google Docs on a netbook with little memory, since the browser keeps the DOM structure in memory, and it gets exponential if the user has multiple tabs open with an app/page in each.
A server pre-parsing HTML would mean a browser/server handshake, something IE and IIS could easily do moreso than Apache(2)/Lighttpd and Firefox/Safari/Chrome. Opera does this with their mobile platform, but it is still far from perfecting JavaScript precompilation or even delegating this to the lower-resource device at the client end.
Google was contemplating compiling JavaScript to pure native code in a story I read here on/. a while back, but how well they would maintain this for both x86 AND ARM remains another story, in addition to all of the other problems that could ensue, especially at the security level (a bug in the JS parser leading to direct remote code execution, etc.).
It's problems like these that keep 300Mhz netbooks with little RAM from being very efficient with full-scale web apps. Just my firefox I'm running now, I have about 20 tabs (mostly regular HTML) open and it runs up my dual-core CPU so high that my fan is running (not much in the background), and it eats memory like crazy. But as far as MS breaking the Wintel relationship to pursue ARM-based netbooks, I don't see it happening unless something drastic happens.
I've actually heard Linus complain about this on the lkml, and this is about where Reiser chimed in about metadata. I like metadata and all, but having an intact file is more important to me than a missing file (yet having the metadata for the missing file intact). I don't even search my disks hardly ever, since I keep everything logically organized myself, so metadata is one of those features (next to indexing) that I don't even appreciate, although I'm sure there are users that do.
If I knew a little bit more about modern filesystems, I'd write a patch for this and send it upstream but it might be too late to be accepted for fear of breaking compatibility despite the fact ext4 is still in beta, and the operating systems that use it are either in beta or not meant to be production-quality. Still, might give it a try.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't confuse "specification" with "implementation." Nowhere in the article is Mono mentioned, as it is a non-Microsoft application of the CLI specification. I was specifically referring to Microsoft-published software, and as mentioned above in a separate thread, I was correct in referring to the bytecode (CIL) with respect to how it can be interpreted by a Microsoft VM on either architecture. Obvious by my confusion with the command-line, I wasn't even aware there was an approved specification for .NET's VM (or any Microsoft product, for that matter). But regardless of whether it's standardized for all to use or not, the article focuses on Microsoft. Even if it were not standardized they could continue to publish VMs on their own platform as far as I'm aware.
I hate Slashdot sometimes.
Nowhere in the article did I say that CIL executes anything. Every instance of CIL was meant to refer to the intermediate bytecode itself, which can be JIT compiled by a virtual machine (the CLR everyone here who clearly did not comprehend the article thinks I'm confusing it for). Re-read the article carefully, keeping this in mind, and I might not appear as stupid as everyone here believes me to be regarding a subject that they themselves must not completely understand.
This guy is a complete moron. First, it's called the CLI, not the CIL. Second, it's called the Windows Runtime or WinRT and it runs .NET apps and HTML5/js apps. This is all quite plain to anyone that has even a tiny understanding of the system. This architecture diagram has been posted for quite some time, and clearly shows C# and VB as well as C/C++ apps running under WinRT/Metro.
Hi, I'm the "complete moron" who wrote the article. I most definitely meant CIL and not CLI, as I was referring to the Common Intermediate Language, and not the Command Line Interface. One is used to interact with an operating system through mostly text (curses and cursor-based terminal graphics being a stark exception), and the other allows multiple human-written programming languages to be compiled to a common bytecode form for interpretation by a .NET virtual machine runtime, and the basis of this article was that the same VM can be ported to Windows 8 on ARM in place of Metro apps. And your diagram does not clearly note anywhere that it is valid for Windows 8 on ARM as it is for x86/x86-64. Next time, don't be so quick to jump to conclusions and throw the words "moron" and "idiot" around. Thank you in advance.
Successful exploitation requires that a threaded Multi-Processing Module is used and that the mod_proxy_ftp module is enabled. (...) An error in the included APR-util library can be exploited to trigger hangs in the prefork and event MPMs on Solaris.
And the second (first in order on the site) unpatched vulnerability deals strictly with a mod_ftp input validation issue. Again, I rarely even see mod_ftp even used as opposed to an entirely seperate FTP server daemon but disabling the faulty module is simple enough in environments requiring absolute security.
And input validation issues are usually patched fairly quickly anyways, I mean come on, this is 2009 and there are too many developers for the project that wouldn't let this sort of thing continue for this amount of time. Not to mention the fact that these unpatched vulnerabilities are nothing compared to the olde IIS Webdav exploit of a few years ago - too bad there wasn't a community aware of it sooner other than the underground black hats already using it to their advantage by the time it was brought to the attention of MS.
Users don't read dialog boxes. It could've had red flashing lights around it, and it wouldn't have mattered.
Yeah I get those at the bottom of websites all the time, usually because I'm the Xth visitor etc. For some reason, the prize is always a bunch of forms to fill out promising more prizes. (this is a joke, by the way)
Pictures and the Mother's day rush killed our 2Mbps cable bandwidth; here's a "mirror":
Netbooks are making huge waves within the hardware and software industries today, but not many would believe that the whole Netbook craze actually started back around 1996 with the Toshiba Libretto 70CT. Termed technically as a subnotebook because of its small dimensions (given below), the computer is the first that fits all of the qualifications of being what we would call a Netbook today, due in part to its built-in Infrared and PCMCIA hardware, and itâ(TM)s (albeit early) web browsing software. The First Netbook Computer
The First Netbook Computer
The hardware includes the two (potentially) wireless PCMCIA and Infrared network connections, Windows 95 OSR 2 with Internet Explorer 2.0, a whole 16MB of RAM and a 120Mhz Intel Pentium processor (weâ(TM)re flying now!).
A further look at the hardware reveals even more Netbook-ish hardware/software trends (and pictures below), given todayâ(TM)s standards for Netbook qualifications.
The Libretto (70CT) was certainly not the first small (8â) form factor laptop produced in the early 90â(TM)s, but it was the first to be considered a Netbook given todayâ(TM)s standards because of itâ(TM)s PCMCIA and Infrared connections, used for wireless network connectivity and possibly even via a phone card. The inclusion of Internet Explorer 2.0 within the software also contributes to its ability to be officially termed a âoeNetbookâ (more on this below).
The hardware includes an 8â wide, 5â deep and almost 1.5â form factor containing a whopping 16MB of RAM, a 120Mhz Intel Pentium processor (with added MMX technology!) and a whole 30-45 minutes of battery life.
The software running on the âoeNetbookâ is Windows 95 OSR2, with Included Internet Explorer 2.0 and the Windows 95 Plus! pack of software. The mouse is the nub/nipple/clit mouse, given the lack of trackpad hardware and the only alternative being the bulky ball-based mice of the time, and the actual mouse buttons are mounted on the back.
I donâ(TM)t consider Internet Explorer 2.0 being the most supported browser for web-based applications (hell, I donâ(TM)t even support 6 or 7), and 16MB doesnâ(TM)t sound like a whole lot of RAM for storing a large web page and JavaScript into memory along with the operating system, but around the year 1996 this laptop/subnotebook/netbook would meet all the requirements given its environment to be called a Netbook as we would today.
Other hardware besides what was listed above includes a (HiFi?) 1/4â sound port on the back, a mono speaker on the front above the mouse, and a proprietary docking port on the bottom.
The Pentium MMX and bulky battery connector doesnâ(TM)t exactly make this ACPI-lacking portable the most environmentally-friendly book of all time, but it is certain that it must have gotten the job done in its time.
The screen was a very low-resolution (640Ã--480) 5â LCD screen, leaving enough room on the front for the mouse, speaker, power button, and all-too-important logos of Intel and Toshiba.
While I write this largely with humorous intent, it is worth noting the satire I intend to make of the industryâ(TM)s buzzwords for modern products that sometimes have been out for quite a while, e.g. cloud computing versus clustering/distributed applications and âoehigh-speed Internetâ versus what a T1/ATM connection was over decade ago.
Also, something patent trolls working for Toshiba might wish to investigate are the 22 patents listed on the bottom of the Libretto model (pictured below). What these patents cover and how many modern netbooks/subnotebooks violate these are unknown to me, although Iâ(TM)m sure you could find a few with the right research as these patents were approved less than 25 years ago.
Picture Gallery
These (possibly slow-loading) pictures display several features of the computer, displaying as many of its features as possible (and probably killing our bandwidth): (and indeed they did)
Never was a nail except for the Ruby community that was in denial.
The same thing I said about six months ago - look at the comments on the article. Ruby/Rails never reached the support it needed to be widely deployed, and it's less likely for an ISP/host to deploy a framework than a well-established language. Case in point: more Perl deployments by hosts than Ruby or rails, not to mention PHP/ASP.NET.
"A European Union directive, which Britain was instrumental in devising, comes into force which will require all internet service providers to retain a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/technologynews/5105
Yeah, they forgot a few basic HTML tokens.
buying Sun out and firing all OOo devs would *seriously* hurt it as a project
In that case, since Sun is taking the role of old yeller, we should start learning more about the source code so as to keep the project alive after Sun.
Sorry, not nvram - RAMBUS memory (you know, that shitty memory popular during the Windows ME era).
$post =~ s/nvram/rambus/g
I have not laughed that hard in a long time. It reminds me of The Onion video on the subject, and it's even sadder because I know somebody who even dropped out of college to wait on tables just to have more time to play WoW. It's really sad, actually, but you made me laugh at it.
There is a hidden cavern down there that looks like it was going to be something that wasn't included in the game
Too bad the mods won't scroll this far, but there's a whole story behind that little cavern - it was rumored to be some kind of fountain, don't quote me on this but I believe a "unicorn fountain" (no BS) that was scrapped in the end. There were found to be little traces of graphics from this fountain buried here and there within the game cartridge, but no playable version of the fountain was uncovered.
This secret, alongside the Banjo-Kazooie Stop n' Swop conspiracies, are amongst the Nintendo 64's greatest mysteries. I haven't seen the cavern myself personally (yet plenty of youtube videos), but I have seen evidence of the Stop n' Swap thing, which may be related to the unicorn fountain in that extra gameplay was to be accessible via an addon hard drive to the Nintendo 64 but was never sold in the US (yet the Japanese Zelda/BK never included any of these features despite briefly selling the hard drive).
The Banjo-Kazooie Stop n' Swap relied on early Nintendo 64 models having nvram retain data while you could swap cartridges, theoretically between Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie so as to access secrets in the sequel based on progress in the first, but the idea was never finished in the sequel to the end of the nvram feature in later N64 models. Whether or not the OOT cavern relied on the hard drive (or didn't at the last minute) remains a secret lost with time.
(he's referring to the hot coffee mod buried within the game, reachable only via hacking)
My favorite recent glitch was in Perfect Dark Zero for the Xbox 360: I used to get in a rocket pack, and break through the glass roof of the mall so you could land and walk on the barrier that prevents people from going too high. Used to freak people out, because you could shoot through it and the rocket pack had infinite ammo, leading to a very scared group of people on the ground below (in the city and desert maps, at least).
I think Rare patched this up recently, but I remember having loads of fun with that. Just walking on the barrier, watching the others shoot two rounds then stare in amazement was such an ego boost. Other than that, I haven't found very many other (useful) glitches in recent games, nor do I play them enough to find them or hear about them. In fact, I think my Xbox Live subscription expired like 3 months ago...
To the contrary, I know a local company that deployed an IBM iSeries (previously AS/400) mainframe in their main office, serving two other locations connected via a metropolitan-area T1 line. The machine itself was pretty expensive, yet covered by a 5 or 10 year (can't remember) warranty. The machine would actually call a support technician out to the site whenever it detected an issue with itself, and this has kept their uptime at an astonishing rate, aided by a decent UPS and the hot-swappable hardware.
They've been doing this for many years, and even though their first IT technician whom set this up passed away long since, they've kept the same infrastructure for all these years and it hasn't failed them. They also do this to remain backward-compatible with the older mainframe tapes, which has proven successful. Even at the busiest times, the mainframe is only at 10% utilization, even though it is a pretty low-end model.
This has amazed me about IBM support, and since then I've always weighed IBM as a candidate in new networks, although many of them are too small size or budget-wise to deploy a mainframe. But this is the support I've come to associate IBM with, can't speak for their phone support although everyone seems to outsource to India for phone support these days (a problem I have frequently with Cisco). But this support with Sun's hardware running Linux for cheap was one thing I was longing for with this merger.
Two kernels? At the same time? I'll be in my bunk.
That's essentially what cooperative Linux does, runs a Linux kernel and the NT kernel at the same time, often with a special X emulator to get full-blown Linux apps running in Windows userspace with better support than with Cygwin. I still can't wrap my head around how the two kernels yield to each other in respect to the PC architecture, but it's an interesting project - guaranteed to keep you in your bunk for a while ;)
And it would aid the economy in the sense of the two pooling their money, and centralizing their spending. It would also aid us in the IT field, as the post-merger IBM would sell Sparc AND POWER hardware, with the option of Solaris or Linux on either one (theoretically), all bundled with IBM's famous support. IBM owning the rights to Java would work wonders for the Java community, especially in the Linux aspect, and IBM would have probably contributed more to StarOffice/OpenOffice using some Lotus material. I was really looking forward to the two becoming one, needless to say, especially for more formidable Microsoft competition (from both a business stance and IT stance).
But ah well, IBM withdrew, so It'll just go back to Sun barely remaining a company, and IBM being competition on a fairly peer-to-peer level with them and Microsoft when it comes time to design new network infrastructures. If Red Hat bought Sun, I don't know if it would be as much of a benefit as if IBM and Sun merged, but for Sun anything is better than their current status - I just wish they would have seen that more clearly when IBM offered them a healthy current-economy-sum for their company.
Not to mention Android using the linux kernel with a netbsd userland.
And the Debian/Ubuntu package repositories are full of openbsd-derived packages, many of which I run on servers due to my familiarity with them. Apple runs a modified FreeBSD kernel (XNU) with a mixed userland, and OpenSolaris has almost all pure SysV-derived apps just to add to add to all of the confusion.
I was looking forward to the merger, actually.
Then he'll just have to virtualize the older virtualization software in the newer virtualization software.
Why does this sound like a version of the "sup dawg" meme, a la this?
The OS I was referring to in my comment is just stock-kernel Ubuntu 8.10. The laptop is a dual core Pentium, 2GB ram, no swap partition used. I run compiz as a WM, for eye candy's sake, and this may contribute to the fan issue, but I just checked system monitor and Firefox alone takes up 384MB of ram and averages around 15% CPU. I found some Flash running in the ads of some pages, contrary to what I said above, as well as some JavaScript in a few tabs I forgot about.
If anything, the hard drive is the biggest bottleneck of the system, but I'm thinking about writing a piece on a news website I run (thecoffeedesk.com) about which browser would be best suited for a Linux installation on ARM. I'm going to compare memory usage, average CPU usage, and anything else that comes to mind (I'm open to suggestions). I want to compare Opera, Firefox 3, Seamonkey, and Epiphany in this respect to see which is better suited resource-wise even though I'm not running ARM.
I know benchmarks have been done before, but I'm out to see which browser could run with the smallest footprint while running full-blown web apps (I'll use Google Docs in my example, suggest others if you'd like). I don't have any idea how much memory comes on a standard ARM netbook, or what the default clock speed is, for that matter (and whether they use SSDs), so if anyone has more information than the Wikipedia article can offer, be my guest.
They are the only chips that you can program and keep your sanity.
I completely agree. The most elegant assembly I've even written, easy to optimize, and without all the legacy underpinnings of x86. Apparently the GNU folk can agree as well, because the output of any of my compiled C programs run better on an older ARM than a newer x86 chip (this is on Linux, btw).
Web browsers are interpreters, which are going to be slower than machines that run pre-compiled code
It's worse than that: In addition to HTML, a web browser must parse/interpret JavaScript, Java, CSS, XHTML, Flash (if Adobe ever gets onboard), and regular XML just to display the modern, JavaScript-heavy web application. This gets resource intensive if, say, using an app such as Google Docs on a netbook with little memory, since the browser keeps the DOM structure in memory, and it gets exponential if the user has multiple tabs open with an app/page in each.
/. a while back, but how well they would maintain this for both x86 AND ARM remains another story, in addition to all of the other problems that could ensue, especially at the security level (a bug in the JS parser leading to direct remote code execution, etc.).
A server pre-parsing HTML would mean a browser/server handshake, something IE and IIS could easily do moreso than Apache(2)/Lighttpd and Firefox/Safari/Chrome. Opera does this with their mobile platform, but it is still far from perfecting JavaScript precompilation or even delegating this to the lower-resource device at the client end.
Google was contemplating compiling JavaScript to pure native code in a story I read here on
It's problems like these that keep 300Mhz netbooks with little RAM from being very efficient with full-scale web apps. Just my firefox I'm running now, I have about 20 tabs (mostly regular HTML) open and it runs up my dual-core CPU so high that my fan is running (not much in the background), and it eats memory like crazy. But as far as MS breaking the Wintel relationship to pursue ARM-based netbooks, I don't see it happening unless something drastic happens.
Perhaps they should worry less about the 3 guys who can be bothered to figure out how to tether their netbook and add some more pipes instead...
I believe the correct term is "tubes".
I've actually heard Linus complain about this on the lkml, and this is about where Reiser chimed in about metadata. I like metadata and all, but having an intact file is more important to me than a missing file (yet having the metadata for the missing file intact). I don't even search my disks hardly ever, since I keep everything logically organized myself, so metadata is one of those features (next to indexing) that I don't even appreciate, although I'm sure there are users that do.
If I knew a little bit more about modern filesystems, I'd write a patch for this and send it upstream but it might be too late to be accepted for fear of breaking compatibility despite the fact ext4 is still in beta, and the operating systems that use it are either in beta or not meant to be production-quality. Still, might give it a try.