When I was 15, I had a bicycle wreck where I received major road-rash on my entire left side. Unable to tolerate the pain that evening enough to sleep, I went to the emergency room, where I was given codeine. That helped a lot.
The next morning, I had to take a shower. Expecting that to hurt a lot, I, for some reason, decided to see if I could "shut off" the pain while exposing the road-rash to the running water.
Somehow I did some mental twist that completely shut off the pain.
My interpretation/guess at the time was that the codeine taught my brain a technique to shut off the pain. This would be interesting if true.
I've been able to repeat this several times since then, but not with headaches.
Took neural anatomy years later, where I found out that facial nerves don't come from the spine. I also found out that the spine itself has controllers that control muscles. The brain controls those controllers. My interpretation/guess is that I need the spinal controllers to control pain, and I don't have those for facial (sinus?) pain.
I'm uncomfortable calling this "placebo" effect. Seems like its something else. But maybe that's because here I have a mechanism, and I prefer to label only the mysterious as "placebo".
Something may be odd with this pdf. My debian system freaked (load average spike, failed attempt to make network connection) when I opened it with evince.
Once he had made that decision, why should TiVO now screw around with his set???
As for why he had it plugged into the phone: well, its his system dammit, and he can do what he wants with it!
He. Called. Them. Up.
He wanted others to spend money to give him something for free, and now it has bit him. Boo hoo.
Exactly! TiVO chose to "upgrade" his system even though he is not a subscriber. He did not!
As a Lifetime subscriber, I'm annoyed that they are wasting time and money supporting deadbeats, making it easier for TiVo to go out of business and my losing my subscription money.
On the other hand, if they are going to support deadbeats, having them run the latest software is surely the cheaper solution.
If he was a hacker instead of a script kiddy, then he would have gone to the tivo-hacker sites, and figured out how to set the time himself.
Me? I look forward to buying new TiVo hardware in a year or so, and hacking the old box.
Most copyrights (and this whole legislation) protect the music industry, middlemen that don't produce the works being protected. I'm all for paying the producers of the artistic works I read or listen to, but don't care at all about paying middlemen now made obsolete by a new technology that now automates the function of distribution, and who significantly dilute my payment to the producer of the work. In worst case, the artists don't see a penny of the price I pay for a CDrom.
Most discussion of Napster seems to equate the producer of the work (the artist) with the distributor of the work (the music industry). We don't need the music industry (as a distributor of media) any longer, so we should not pay them welfare.
We do need the artists, and need to compensate them for the stuff that they produce.
Let's be clear in stating that we want to protect the producers (the artists), not the middlemen (the distributors). This legislation is protecting the distibutors, not the artists, and it is blocking a new distribution technology that largely obsoletes the old distribution technology.
Protecting the artist in this new distribution technology is something I don't see discussed, since the distributor is always being confused with the artist. And there is some work to be done in protecting artists.
So next, people will start putting up highly reflective satellites so they can't be "accidentally" vacuumed. Sooner or later one of these guys will get hit by something big and shatter into lots of unvacuumable reflective debris.
Along another train of thought: I wanna put a cluster of these lasers on a Bussard Ramjet to vaporize everything in its path to fuel grade ions. Hmm, might need a Deathstar in tow in case of planets getting in the way... >8)
I worked for a guy once, on an SGI with a really loud fan. The reason was that it was quiet when new, but so quiet, that he didn't hear it when it stopped spinning. The machine cooked, and cost him several thousand dollars to repair. After that, he make sure you could hear the fan, a very comforting sound to him now.
We want open source, and we want security. Switching back to closed-source isn't going to solve anything.
Quake is a game. We can try bunches of things, since we can afford to blow it. What do we do when serious programs need similar protection and we can't afford to fail?
With a game, we don't have to get it right the first time! We can try things and incrementally evolve the correct solution. Different people will have different pieces of the puzzle, and enter in at different points in time.
I propose that what you really want for Quake is to see the source your opponent is using. So you want authentication and revocation. Some cheats will be cool, and evolve the client. Some cheats will be stupid and/or pointless, and you will want to revoke them.
One possible approach is to have people register their sources to trusted authentication servers which will hand them back authenticated binaries whose signatures quake servers can accept or deny. If I think someone is cheating, then I can go look at their sources. And perhaps have some sort of voting scheme where some clients are declared "stupid cheats" and their access to quake servers denied.
My idea needs work, but it's a good starting point. I'm trying to stay brief, so am not going into a lot of detail.
Thanks for the info. Your idea's been added to my bag of tricks to try today.
Sleeping on it helped.
It'll be cool if I can find a superblock and a reasonable number of files on the first disk too (if I give up on the idea of paying $100's of dollars to recover overwritten bits).
My first and central problem is to figure out what, if anything, the weird geometry on the second disk implies. If all the blocks are currently available (and no extra ones), then things should work okay.
This exceeds all the horror stories I've heard of NT installs taking over entire single disks (my occasional forays into its installation have found it quite well behaved). Even in the horror stories, you could hide your stuff on secondary disks.
I'm paid to hack linux kernels and compilers. I've installed Redhat 4.2, 5.0, 5.1, 5.2, 6.0, and even 6.1, all in several different ways. I've even rebuilt entire Redhat installation disks with variants of the C compiler. Always, I was given the explicit option to specify which partitions to overwrite during an install, and which to leave as is.
Thirty minutes ago, or so, I attempted an install of Redhat 6.1. When it started installing, but before I noticed something was strange and CTL-ALT-DEL'd it, it had repartitioned the first disk completely, mke2fs'ing all the tiny little bizarre extended partitions (not even using the last cylinder [?!?]). The second disk now has no partition table, and a really strange looking geometry. The data on the first disk is probably mostly hosed, but hopefully the very very important data on the second disk is recoverable, though probably expensive.
I claim this is grosser negligence on Redhat's part than Melissa was on Microsoft's part. There was no apparent intent by Microsoft for there to be a Melissa virus, but there was apparent intent on Redhat's part to repartition and mke2fs ALL of my disks, something they have never done before. And a worse nightmare than I've heard of Microsoft doing to Linux partitions (never to me).
So, is it bad only when Microsoft screws you, or is it also bad when Redhat screws you?
PS. I'm taking the night off while my mind boggles. I'll look into spending serious money recovering what I can tomorrow.
Keep open source. Sign binaries for publically available (in a secure location) source files.
You think someone is cheating? Look at their source from the repository and see if you like it (and cross-breed it with your own source, and submit the offspring for signing). If you don't like it, vote with your companions to have it rejected from your server. [Some server-communities will like the cheat, and some won't.]
This requires a sane voting system, and multiple servers with moderately attentive and responsive server gods (or good automation). Different servers should have the different policies and accept and reject lists. "Genetic diversity" will be important. Voting acceptance and rejection will promote evolutionary progress. Some forks will die off, and some won't.
This way, cool cheats will make it into publically available source, while various mechanisms for rejecting stupid cheats can be explored by various server gods.
This requires servers that can compile sources for all the supported platforms, in sandboxes that prevent people from exploiting the compile-and-cryptographically-sign-the-binaries server.
I don't like amazon because I like being able to see what I am buying before I pay for it. Any money I send Amazon's way is not going to locally owned bookstores, or at least to a chain bookstore that at least bothers to put up a showroom near to me. If we put the showrooms out of business, then I am in trouble.
On the other hand, amazon puts up a really interesting cross-reference service. Sure its full of hype, but its still useful to me.
I thought it kind of strange to whine about the one-click patent in the same breath as noting that amazon is still losing money. A patent for one-click was awarded to amazon, and amazon is trying to use that patent for exactly the purpose that patents were designed for, presumably in hopes of slowing down that leak, and maybe someday becoming profitable.
The idea that they got such a patent in the first place is the part that is seemingly absurd. Why do you guys want to swat wasps one at a time instead of going after the nest: the US legal and patent systems?
Hello! This is now, not the past golden age [of hacking]. And, its not a global village, its a global big city. Anonymity runs amuck.
The cyberspace street lights are being removed because they help the thieves see our unlocked doors The thieves have been ghostlike and hard to see in the past, and now we blind everyone and ourselves in hopes of confusing those ghosts. I can't watch the traffic on my computer or my net. I can't browse DNS. I can't query sendmail daemons to debug the spelling of addresses. I can't finger. And the list grows and grows. My ability to see and correct my and my client's environment has been severely eroded in the name of security. (?!?)
But that makes the ghosts even harder for accidental witnesses to see. Unlike breaking in your front door in real life, where witnesses are hard to avoid, cyberspace is becoming more and more opaque, and cyberspace crimes harder and harder to witness by (nosey!) bystanders.
So! Given these trends, what other choice is there but to try to prevent the kids from doing this stuff in the first place?
If you want to fight the new puritanism, my suggestion is to instead build tools so bystanders can easily see all the script kiddies and their elders running around poking into places where they shouldn't. And start re-building a culture where they get redirected in more positive directions, instead of getting more and more punished at younger and younger ages.
How active is a script kiddy going to be when e "sees" hundreds or thousands of disapproving eyes staring and commenting on their every move?
One of the major things traditional mail has going for it that email doesn't is the fact that, for the most part, signing a letter (marking it as authentic) is easier to do, or, at least, the technology to do so is much more common, and is much more widely understood.
I'm out several hundred dollars because someone cashed my IRS refund check three months after I reported it missing. In the three or so years following the initial loss, the only response from the IRS to them having me fill out the same form over and over again ("no, I did not benefit from the cashing of this check." etc) was them sending me a photocopy of the cashed check.
On the back of the photocopied check was my name, signed in a hand that in no way resembled mine.
I'm hard pressed to imagine that written signatures mean a d*mn thing. The bank that cashed this check certainly didn't perform authentication of my identity. So I while the "technology to do so is much more common", it certainly is not "much more widely understood".
C will never be as secure as Java. C simply isn't appropriate for an OS.
The assertion that Java will never be as fast as C is absurd. There are a number of issues that need to be worked out before "Java > C", but they are happening, incremental step by incremental step. (Hopefully this process will succeed before Java dies an unnatural death, but the effort will help other related languages that will follow). Java got big enough that the tremendous effort required to develop the needed compiler technology could finally be directed at a modern programming language instead of only at the hoary old relics Fortran and C.
Oh and by the way, your statement should also have read "C will never be as fast as Fortran. It simply isn't appropriate for an OS."
But the real criticism that I am currently wondering about is whether Java could be sufficiently better than C for reasoning about Real Time OS's. There are other languages much better than either. Multimedia is Real Time, and predictable and bounded execution times might be more important than speed. And "predictable-to-compilers" execution paths probably are likely to be highly susceptible to heavy optimization.
While the apparent death of JavaOS is disappointing, it hardly spells the end of "Java in the Kernel".
How old are you anyway? At least 15 to 20 years old? Your development has gotten so slow that you probably haven't added any height whatever for at least a year, if not longer. You probably have added weight (bloat) since you stopped developing.
Its probably time to replace you. You've stopped making progress.
I think you may have simplified things too much. I've been told that in teaching large college freshman classes in computing that have PC (Windows) and Mac sections, that the students in the PC sections come out understanding the inner mechanics of the OS, while the students in the Mac sections tend not to. (This data is about three years old).
I take this to mean that PC's still suffer from the "command"ism that you are accusing Unixes of, and that the two are more similar than what you are indicating.
Since Windows labors more under the burden of "backward compatibility" than the numerous Unix windows systems, it seems reasonable to wonder if one of those latter systems will both pass up Windows in functionality for non-experts AND win the global popularity lottery.
Slashdot Mirror
.. taken over by extroverts
When I was 15, I had a bicycle wreck where I received major road-rash on my entire left side. Unable to tolerate the pain that evening enough to sleep, I went to the emergency room, where I was given codeine. That helped a lot. The next morning, I had to take a shower. Expecting that to hurt a lot, I, for some reason, decided to see if I could "shut off" the pain while exposing the road-rash to the running water. Somehow I did some mental twist that completely shut off the pain. My interpretation/guess at the time was that the codeine taught my brain a technique to shut off the pain. This would be interesting if true. I've been able to repeat this several times since then, but not with headaches. Took neural anatomy years later, where I found out that facial nerves don't come from the spine. I also found out that the spine itself has controllers that control muscles. The brain controls those controllers. My interpretation/guess is that I need the spinal controllers to control pain, and I don't have those for facial (sinus?) pain. I'm uncomfortable calling this "placebo" effect. Seems like its something else. But maybe that's because here I have a mechanism, and I prefer to label only the mysterious as "placebo".
Something may be odd with this pdf. My debian system freaked (load average spike, failed attempt to make network connection) when I opened it with evince.
As for why he had it plugged into the phone: well, its his system dammit, and he can do what he wants with it!
He. Called. Them. Up.
He wanted others to spend money to give him something for free, and now it has bit him. Boo hoo.
Exactly! TiVO chose to "upgrade" his system even though he is not a subscriber. He did not!
As a Lifetime subscriber, I'm annoyed that they are wasting time and money supporting deadbeats, making it easier for TiVo to go out of business and my losing my subscription money. On the other hand, if they are going to support deadbeats, having them run the latest software is surely the cheaper solution.
If he was a hacker instead of a script kiddy, then he would have gone to the tivo-hacker sites, and figured out how to set the time himself.
Me? I look forward to buying new TiVo hardware in a year or so, and hacking the old box.
Most discussion of Napster seems to equate the producer of the work (the artist) with the distributor of the work (the music industry). We don't need the music industry (as a distributor of media) any longer, so we should not pay them welfare.
We do need the artists, and need to compensate them for the stuff that they produce.
Let's be clear in stating that we want to protect the producers (the artists), not the middlemen (the distributors). This legislation is protecting the distibutors, not the artists, and it is blocking a new distribution technology that largely obsoletes the old distribution technology.
Protecting the artist in this new distribution technology is something I don't see discussed, since the distributor is always being confused with the artist. And there is some work to be done in protecting artists.
I bet that the Y2K bug has an "off-by-one" error.
Tune in tonight to find out if I'm right...
So next, people will start putting up highly reflective satellites so they can't be "accidentally" vacuumed. Sooner or later one of these guys will get hit by something big and shatter into lots of unvacuumable reflective debris.
Along another train of thought: I wanna put a cluster of these lasers on a Bussard Ramjet to vaporize everything in its path to fuel grade ions. Hmm, might need a Deathstar in tow in case of planets getting in the way... >8)
I worked for a guy once, on an SGI with a really loud fan. The reason was that it was quiet when new, but so quiet, that he didn't hear it when it stopped spinning. The machine cooked, and cost him several thousand dollars to repair. After that, he make sure you could hear the fan, a very comforting sound to him now.
Quake is a game. We can try bunches of things, since we can afford to blow it. What do we do when serious programs need similar protection and we can't afford to fail?
With a game, we don't have to get it right the first time! We can try things and incrementally evolve the correct solution. Different people will have different pieces of the puzzle, and enter in at different points in time.
I propose that what you really want for Quake is to see the source your opponent is using. So you want authentication and revocation. Some cheats will be cool, and evolve the client. Some cheats will be stupid and/or pointless, and you will want to revoke them.
One possible approach is to have people register their sources to trusted authentication servers which will hand them back authenticated binaries whose signatures quake servers can accept or deny. If I think someone is cheating, then I can go look at their sources. And perhaps have some sort of voting scheme where some clients are declared "stupid cheats" and their access to quake servers denied.
My idea needs work, but it's a good starting point. I'm trying to stay brief, so am not going into a lot of detail.
Sleeping on it helped.
It'll be cool if I can find a superblock and a reasonable number of files on the first disk too (if I give up on the idea of paying $100's of dollars to recover overwritten bits).
My first and central problem is to figure out what, if anything, the weird geometry on the second disk implies. If all the blocks are currently available (and no extra ones), then things should work okay.
This exceeds all the horror stories I've heard of NT installs taking over entire single disks (my occasional forays into its installation have found it quite well behaved). Even in the horror stories, you could hide your stuff on secondary disks.
I'm paid to hack linux kernels and compilers. I've installed Redhat 4.2, 5.0, 5.1, 5.2, 6.0, and even 6.1, all in several different ways. I've even rebuilt entire Redhat installation disks with variants of the C compiler. Always, I was given the explicit option to specify which partitions to overwrite during an install, and which to leave as is.
Thirty minutes ago, or so, I attempted an install of Redhat 6.1. When it started installing, but before I noticed something was strange and CTL-ALT-DEL'd it, it had repartitioned the first disk completely, mke2fs'ing all the tiny little bizarre extended partitions (not even using the last cylinder [?!?]). The second disk now has no partition table, and a really strange looking geometry. The data on the first disk is probably mostly hosed, but hopefully the very very important data on the second disk is recoverable, though probably expensive.
I claim this is grosser negligence on Redhat's part than Melissa was on Microsoft's part. There was no apparent intent by Microsoft for there to be a Melissa virus, but there was apparent intent on Redhat's part to repartition and mke2fs ALL of my disks, something they have never done before. And a worse nightmare than I've heard of Microsoft doing to Linux partitions (never to me).
So, is it bad only when Microsoft screws you, or is it also bad when Redhat screws you?
PS. I'm taking the night off while my mind boggles. I'll look into spending serious money recovering what I can tomorrow.
You think someone is cheating? Look at their source from the repository and see if you like it (and cross-breed it with your own source, and submit the offspring for signing). If you don't like it, vote with your companions to have it rejected from your server. [Some server-communities will like the cheat, and some won't.]
This requires a sane voting system, and multiple servers with moderately attentive and responsive server gods (or good automation). Different servers should have the different policies and accept and reject lists. "Genetic diversity" will be important. Voting acceptance and rejection will promote evolutionary progress. Some forks will die off, and some won't.
This way, cool cheats will make it into publically available source, while various mechanisms for rejecting stupid cheats can be explored by various server gods.
This requires servers that can compile sources for all the supported platforms, in sandboxes that prevent people from exploiting the compile-and-cryptographically-sign-the-binaries server.
On the other hand, amazon puts up a really interesting cross-reference service. Sure its full of hype, but its still useful to me.
I thought it kind of strange to whine about the one-click patent in the same breath as noting that amazon is still losing money. A patent for one-click was awarded to amazon, and amazon is trying to use that patent for exactly the purpose that patents were designed for, presumably in hopes of slowing down that leak, and maybe someday becoming profitable.
The idea that they got such a patent in the first place is the part that is seemingly absurd. Why do you guys want to swat wasps one at a time instead of going after the nest: the US legal and patent systems?
If you have an endless stream of dozens of wasps in your home, do you just keep dealing with the wasps, or do you locate the nest?
In this analogy, etoys is the current wasp buzzing around our heads, and the US legal system is the nest.
Why are we blaming etoys instead of the judge?
The cyberspace street lights are being removed because they help the thieves see our unlocked doors The thieves have been ghostlike and hard to see in the past, and now we blind everyone and ourselves in hopes of confusing those ghosts. I can't watch the traffic on my computer or my net. I can't browse DNS. I can't query sendmail daemons to debug the spelling of addresses. I can't finger. And the list grows and grows. My ability to see and correct my and my client's environment has been severely eroded in the name of security. (?!?)
But that makes the ghosts even harder for accidental witnesses to see. Unlike breaking in your front door in real life, where witnesses are hard to avoid, cyberspace is becoming more and more opaque, and cyberspace crimes harder and harder to witness by (nosey!) bystanders.
So! Given these trends, what other choice is there but to try to prevent the kids from doing this stuff in the first place?
If you want to fight the new puritanism, my suggestion is to instead build tools so bystanders can easily see all the script kiddies and their elders running around poking into places where they shouldn't. And start re-building a culture where they get redirected in more positive directions, instead of getting more and more punished at younger and younger ages.
How active is a script kiddy going to be when e "sees" hundreds or thousands of disapproving eyes staring and commenting on their every move?
I'm out several hundred dollars because someone cashed my IRS refund check three months after I reported it missing. In the three or so years following the initial loss, the only response from the IRS to them having me fill out the same form over and over again ("no, I did not benefit from the cashing of this check." etc) was them sending me a photocopy of the cashed check.
On the back of the photocopied check was my name, signed in a hand that in no way resembled mine.
I'm hard pressed to imagine that written signatures mean a d*mn thing. The bank that cashed this check certainly didn't perform authentication of my identity. So I while the "technology to do so is much more common", it certainly is not "much more widely understood".
C will never be as secure as Java. C simply isn't appropriate for an OS.
The assertion that Java will never be as fast as C is absurd. There are a number of issues that need to be worked out before "Java > C", but they are happening, incremental step by incremental step. (Hopefully this process will succeed before Java dies an unnatural death, but the effort will help other related languages that will follow). Java got big enough that the tremendous effort required to develop the needed compiler technology could finally be directed at a modern programming language instead of only at the hoary old relics Fortran and C.
Oh and by the way, your statement should also have read "C will never be as fast as Fortran. It simply isn't appropriate for an OS."
But the real criticism that I am currently wondering about is whether Java could be sufficiently better than C for reasoning about Real Time OS's. There are other languages much better than either. Multimedia is Real Time, and predictable and bounded execution times might be more important than speed. And "predictable-to-compilers" execution paths probably are likely to be highly susceptible to heavy optimization.
While the apparent death of JavaOS is disappointing, it hardly spells the end of "Java in the Kernel".
How old are you anyway? At least 15 to 20 years old? Your development has gotten so slow that you probably haven't added any height whatever for at least a year, if not longer. You probably have added weight (bloat) since you stopped developing.
Its probably time to replace you. You've stopped making progress.
I think you may have simplified things too much. I've been told that in teaching large college freshman classes in computing that have PC (Windows) and Mac sections, that the students in the PC sections come out understanding the inner mechanics of the OS, while the students in the Mac sections tend not to. (This data is about three years old).
I take this to mean that PC's still suffer from the "command"ism that you are accusing Unixes of, and that the two are more similar than what you are indicating.
Since Windows labors more under the burden of "backward compatibility" than the numerous Unix windows systems, it seems reasonable to wonder if one of those latter systems will both pass up Windows in functionality for non-experts AND win the global popularity lottery.