This is true, and not long ago I spent several hours attempting to get SuSE 7.1 to install on my SparcStation 20. Unfortunately, despite a reasonable amount of experience with linux on multiple platforms, I had very little luck.
The SparcStation has no CD drive, so I was forced to choose between booting from a disk or from RARP/TFTP. I was unable to boot from the disk image supplied because it was too large by a few k to fit onto a floppy, and the network installer seemed dead set on finding a file on the CD which just isn't there. In fact, because the installer provided such meaningless error messages, the only way for me to find out what file the installer was looking for was to run a sniffer on the machine I was serving the CD image from.
I was able to get rescue mode running on the machine, but because I don't have enough experience with SuSE, I was unsure of how to attempt a manual install.
Eventually, I just gave up and installed good ol' Redhat 6.2 on the box with no trouble at all. Sure, it's not quite state of the art, but since I later discovered that the machine only has an 8 bit video card, I'm not going to miss XFree 4 or the latest versions of Gnome and KDE too much.
Has anyone else had better luck than me with SuSE 7.1 sparc? Would you care to share some advice?
In the Star Wars films, George Lucas makes lavish use of computer- generated characters and scenes, but they never overwhelm the intriguing characters at the center of the saga.
You mean like the painfully idiotic Jar-Jar, or like the only-gets-one-lame-line presumably evil Darth Maul? Thank god for that.
At my school and many other colleges, there are lots of poorly locked-down internet terminals in out of the way places. Now, suppose someone was to find a nook in the ceiling in which to stash a box, connect it to the network in the place of an internet terminal (same jack, same IP address), and then have it IP masq the connection to said terminal.
I honestly can't imagine anyone finding out about the thing for years, assuming you don't do anything overly noticible with it. The network would still have the same number of computers using the same IP addresses, and nobody would ever notice that the IP address of the internet terminal has been changed to 10.0.0.2.
I'm not sure how useful this sort of thing would be, but I'm sure most enterprising hackers could find something to do with such a box.
To bypass the ads in Windows AIM, you comment out TWO LINES in a config file. That's hardly what I'd call "hacking the client." And as you yourself point out, the TOC protocol is a completely-legit way to access the service without ads.
The second way is to intentionally add small errors to the track. The CD reader skips over the errors, while the CD-ROM reader trys to re-read the area, attempting to solve the disparity between the data and the error-correcting data. Since the disparity is intentional, it never suceeds, and determines that the disk is corrupt.
Hm. I wonder whether tools like cdparanoia could defeat this scheme. I know cdparanoia will reread any areas it gets errors on repeatedly, with the intent to eventually get the correct data, despite scratches, etc. I'm not sure what happens if even after multiple attempts, no data can be retrieved.
In any case, I can't see it being difficult to hack a version of cdparanoia that will only attempt a read X times, then give up and move on, allowing easy ripping of the cds.
Theoretically, AOL should never block TIK or TNT (the Emacs client for AIM), because they were the originators of both programs. While both are licensed under the GPL and have been taken up by the open source community since AOL decided to stop their development, the code is still copyright AOL corp. It would be an interesting precendent to say the least if AOL were to start blocking access by its own alternative software.
Here, here. Also, be sure to check out The Parking Lot is Full and The Thin H Line, two other great comics that will never be mentioned on anyone's top 100 list ever.
You're partially right... in most cases, any attempted copy protection is doomed to fail, with the only clear exception being games which must connect to a server in order to function (Q3A, UO, various Blizzard products, etc.).
In all cases where the functioning of a product is not directly tied to a specific remote server, the product's protection scheme can and will be subverted, whether by warez kiddies or annoyed IT people. It's as simple as going into the program code with a debugger, finding the instruction that calls the protection scheme procedure, and turning that JMP or CALL into a NOP. This would be as effective for boot-time checks as for install-time checks, and would inevitably be widely avalible and used.
The only way Microsoft or other manufacturers of non-server dependant software can stop this solution is by making changes to their products which are so intrusive that consumers would not put up with it; imagine if Whistler was designed from the ground up to use only a proprietary alternative to TCP/IP which connected to a microsoft proxy and was translated and sent on to the rest of the internet. While it would then be possible to authenticate users infallibly, no one would stand for the loss of performance and lack of privacy.
Now, as for, oh, the study of adult art, or porn through the ages (Digression - why, oh, why do you spell it pr0n?)
Obviously you are not versed on your Jargon File. I quote:
pr0n//
[Usenet, IRC] Pornography. Originally this referred only to Internet porn but since then it has expanded to refer to just about anything. The term comes from the warez kiddies tendency to replace letters with numbers. At some point on IRC someone mistyped, swapped the middle two letters, and the name stuck, then propagated over into mainstream hacker usage. Compare filk, grilf, hing and newsfroup.
Call Darth Vader a gay sadomasochist in a comment and you get nailed as a Troll.
Call Darth Vader a gay sadomasochist on a web page and you get a story on slashdot.
That's funny, but it's also pretty sad. I can't be the only person here who found the page not only not unamusing but also really intolerant. I'm sure that the gay readership of Slashdot is offended by such poor humor at their expense. There's no way this link would have been posted if it were making fun of Vader as being black or Jewish.
As far as I can tell, the objection to most of the domains suggested was that it would be difficult to ensure that the content of the sites recieving, for example,.kids or.xxx, would actually have that type of content. Isn't it a little late to start trying to make people stick to the suggested uses for their domains? Honestly, most.com sites aren't companies (winehq.com), most.org sites aren't non-profit organizations (slashdot.org, although they used to be), and most.net sites aren't ISPs (freshmeat.net).
Trying to force sites to conform to their top level domain name is bad idea, if only because of the administrative nightmare that would ensue, but that doesn't mean new TLDs which might possibly be misused shouldn't be created, since such activity already goes on rampantly.
Is anyone besides me saddened by the continuting trend of new and promising technology being immediately conscripted for use in war? I realize a lot of money stands to be made by selling to the military, but it seems as though the computing field as a whole is drifting slowly towards being less a tool for creation and more a tool for destruction, which raises ethical questions.
Precisely because of the versatility of computers which has made them such a success, nearly any work done in many areas of the field such as hardware, security, or even graphics could easily be adapted for military use without the knowledge of the engineers or programmers who did the work. While a machinist can refuse to work in a shop which manufactures guns, it's not so easy for an principled engineer to avoid developing hardware with military applications. Worse still, any GPL software which the military of any country finds useful might easily be adapted into a tool of destruction, completely against the wishes of the people who developed it.
I'm probably taking the issue a bit far, but it is something to think about as you're writing that clone of Scorched Earth.
The machines will almost certainly not run Linux or another other current OS. In a combat situation, it simply doesn't make sense for the computers the troops are using to have more than basic functionality, as the more complicated it is, the more attention will have to be put into using it.
I would imagine the basic idea of a wearable military computer would be to transmit terrain data and specific messages from commanding officers, and as such would be built to do just that with a minimum of user interaction. The machine will probably run a custom bare bones OS/application combination and will function more like an advanced GPS device than a desktop machine.
After all, do we really need our soldiers to be checking their email, buying stocks or talking to their buddies on AIM in the middle of a fight?
While it's true that THE AUTHORS haven't been updating their page as regularly as they used to, there have still been semiregular updates of the strip for the year or so I've been following it.
There has, however, been a major restructuring of the site, including moving archives and images to seperate servers under the.yellow5.com domain, and the addition of an ad banner, about which I'm ambivalent. While I think THE AUTHORS deserve to be rewarded for their hard work, it's annoying to have to look at animated banners, even on pages you support (so everyone buy shirts).
Also, several new Pokey-related projects are in the works:
New POKEY SHIRTS!
A POKEY COMPUTER GAME, called Mutton Kombat. Unfortunately, being developed only for Mac at the current time, but ports are under discussion.
Sure, the products Novell makes are going out of style pretty fast, no matter which direction you see the market going in, but simply because something is obsolete doesn't mean that it's going to stop being used. After all, if something works for the job, there's no reason to replace it. How many slashdot readers still have old 486s lying around because they're cheap and effective for certain tasks?
At the university I attend, a large number of servers are run on what I would consider to be outdated hardware and software (think VMS/VAX), and there is little talk of replacing it. Also, the local school system in my area uses Novell servers for simple file sharing, and I fail to see why money should be spent to either buy expensive software (Win2k) or hire expensive administrators (Linux) to replace something that does its job perfectly well.
It's somewhat offtopic, but what you're looking for is covered by the Framebuffer HOWTO, avalible here. Your console resolution should be reasonably easy to change in most situations, and some distros (like Linux PPC) even ship with a higher resolution enabled by default.
Simply because most people believe that the net has had a positive effect on their social interaction doesn't necessarily mean that it has. It seems to me that before any realistic conclusions can be drawn about the matter, there should be an actual psychological study done which rates the net's effects based on actual evidence. It's just as logical to conclude from these findings that net use leads to denial as that it has no social drawbacks.
I'm not entirely sure how this would work, but I can't help but think that television stations shouldn't have full rights to all of their content. In order to be able to offer public access to any of its content at any time, one would think the station would have to do quite a bit of renegotiation with the owners of said content. Normally, money exchanges hands each time something is broadcast, but this idea wouldn't work quite the same way with digital content. Does anyone have any more details or speculation on how this might be accomplished?
"The Panoram PV290 DSK is compatible with nearly all computing platforms including Apple Mac OS, HP, SGI, Sun and Windows/NT."
While I can't imagine the monitor not being Linux and *BSD compatible, it's interesting to note just who they think their target market is. After all, if you're willing to shell out hundreds for an overpriced OS and the hardware to run it, you're obviously overfunded enough for this sort of thing.
I actually had an idea along these lines while looking over the rules for RoboWars on their website (the British version). One of the really important objectives for robots in that series is mobility - many of the challenges involve knocking things over or avoiding obstacles such as the hostile house robots, pits, and uneven terrain. I thought that a robot which moves by bouncing or jumping, rather than rolling or walking, might be ideal for overcoming such difficulties, as well as confounding the usual combat techniques used by other robots. The fact that NASA would be interested in similar techniques for their exploration robots suggests that maybe RoboWars isn't quite as inapplicable to real life as one might think.
Now if only NASA could build its robots on something closer to a RoboWars budget...
Slashdot Mirror
This is true, and not long ago I spent several hours attempting to get SuSE 7.1 to install on my SparcStation 20. Unfortunately, despite a reasonable amount of experience with linux on multiple platforms, I had very little luck.
The SparcStation has no CD drive, so I was forced to choose between booting from a disk or from RARP/TFTP. I was unable to boot from the disk image supplied because it was too large by a few k to fit onto a floppy, and the network installer seemed dead set on finding a file on the CD which just isn't there. In fact, because the installer provided such meaningless error messages, the only way for me to find out what file the installer was looking for was to run a sniffer on the machine I was serving the CD image from.
I was able to get rescue mode running on the machine, but because I don't have enough experience with SuSE, I was unsure of how to attempt a manual install.
Eventually, I just gave up and installed good ol' Redhat 6.2 on the box with no trouble at all. Sure, it's not quite state of the art, but since I later discovered that the machine only has an 8 bit video card, I'm not going to miss XFree 4 or the latest versions of Gnome and KDE too much.
Has anyone else had better luck than me with SuSE 7.1 sparc? Would you care to share some advice?
In the Star Wars films, George Lucas makes lavish use of computer- generated characters and scenes, but they never overwhelm the intriguing characters at the center of the saga.
You mean like the painfully idiotic Jar-Jar, or like the only-gets-one-lame-line presumably evil Darth Maul? Thank god for that.
Wondering what badgers eat? Visit WhatBadgersEat.com!
At my school and many other colleges, there are lots of poorly locked-down internet terminals in out of the way places. Now, suppose someone was to find a nook in the ceiling in which to stash a box, connect it to the network in the place of an internet terminal (same jack, same IP address), and then have it IP masq the connection to said terminal.
I honestly can't imagine anyone finding out about the thing for years, assuming you don't do anything overly noticible with it. The network would still have the same number of computers using the same IP addresses, and nobody would ever notice that the IP address of the internet terminal has been changed to 10.0.0.2.
I'm not sure how useful this sort of thing would be, but I'm sure most enterprising hackers could find something to do with such a box.
To bypass the ads in Windows AIM, you comment out TWO LINES in a config file. That's hardly what I'd call "hacking the client." And as you yourself point out, the TOC protocol is a completely-legit way to access the service without ads.
Hm. I wonder whether tools like cdparanoia could defeat this scheme. I know cdparanoia will reread any areas it gets errors on repeatedly, with the intent to eventually get the correct data, despite scratches, etc. I'm not sure what happens if even after multiple attempts, no data can be retrieved.
In any case, I can't see it being difficult to hack a version of cdparanoia that will only attempt a read X times, then give up and move on, allowing easy ripping of the cds.
Can't do without them, eh? Don't worry, that's all part of their master plan...
Theoretically, AOL should never block TIK or TNT (the Emacs client for AIM), because they were the originators of both programs. While both are licensed under the GPL and have been taken up by the open source community since AOL decided to stop their development, the code is still copyright AOL corp. It would be an interesting precendent to say the least if AOL were to start blocking access by its own alternative software.
Warning: Not for the easily offended.
You're partially right... in most cases, any attempted copy protection is doomed to fail, with the only clear exception being games which must connect to a server in order to function (Q3A, UO, various Blizzard products, etc.).
In all cases where the functioning of a product is not directly tied to a specific remote server, the product's protection scheme can and will be subverted, whether by warez kiddies or annoyed IT people. It's as simple as going into the program code with a debugger, finding the instruction that calls the protection scheme procedure, and turning that JMP or CALL into a NOP. This would be as effective for boot-time checks as for install-time checks, and would inevitably be widely avalible and used.
The only way Microsoft or other manufacturers of non-server dependant software can stop this solution is by making changes to their products which are so intrusive that consumers would not put up with it; imagine if Whistler was designed from the ground up to use only a proprietary alternative to TCP/IP which connected to a microsoft proxy and was translated and sent on to the rest of the internet. While it would then be possible to authenticate users infallibly, no one would stand for the loss of performance and lack of privacy.
Obviously you are not versed on your Jargon File. I quote:
pr0n //
[Usenet, IRC] Pornography. Originally this referred only to Internet porn but since then it has expanded to refer to just about anything. The term comes from the warez kiddies tendency to replace letters with numbers. At some point on IRC someone mistyped, swapped the middle two letters, and the name stuck, then propagated over into mainstream hacker usage. Compare filk , grilf , hing and newsfroup .
Call Darth Vader a gay sadomasochist on a web page and you get a story on slashdot.
That's funny, but it's also pretty sad. I can't be the only person here who found the page not only not unamusing but also really intolerant. I'm sure that the gay readership of Slashdot is offended by such poor humor at their expense. There's no way this link would have been posted if it were making fun of Vader as being black or Jewish.
As far as I can tell, the objection to most of the domains suggested was that it would be difficult to ensure that the content of the sites recieving, for example, .kids or .xxx, would actually have that type of content. Isn't it a little late to start trying to make people stick to the suggested uses for their domains? Honestly, most .com sites aren't companies (winehq.com), most .org sites aren't non-profit organizations (slashdot.org, although they used to be), and most .net sites aren't ISPs (freshmeat.net).
Trying to force sites to conform to their top level domain name is bad idea, if only because of the administrative nightmare that would ensue, but that doesn't mean new TLDs which might possibly be misused shouldn't be created, since such activity already goes on rampantly.
Is anyone besides me saddened by the continuting trend of new and promising technology being immediately conscripted for use in war? I realize a lot of money stands to be made by selling to the military, but it seems as though the computing field as a whole is drifting slowly towards being less a tool for creation and more a tool for destruction, which raises ethical questions.
Precisely because of the versatility of computers which has made them such a success, nearly any work done in many areas of the field such as hardware, security, or even graphics could easily be adapted for military use without the knowledge of the engineers or programmers who did the work. While a machinist can refuse to work in a shop which manufactures guns, it's not so easy for an principled engineer to avoid developing hardware with military applications. Worse still, any GPL software which the military of any country finds useful might easily be adapted into a tool of destruction, completely against the wishes of the people who developed it.
I'm probably taking the issue a bit far, but it is something to think about as you're writing that clone of Scorched Earth.
The machines will almost certainly not run Linux or another other current OS. In a combat situation, it simply doesn't make sense for the computers the troops are using to have more than basic functionality, as the more complicated it is, the more attention will have to be put into using it.
I would imagine the basic idea of a wearable military computer would be to transmit terrain data and specific messages from commanding officers, and as such would be built to do just that with a minimum of user interaction. The machine will probably run a custom bare bones OS/application combination and will function more like an advanced GPS device than a desktop machine.
After all, do we really need our soldiers to be checking their email, buying stocks or talking to their buddies on AIM in the middle of a fight?
Please read this FAQ.
There has, however, been a major restructuring of the site, including moving archives and images to seperate servers under the .yellow5.com domain, and the addition of an ad banner, about which I'm ambivalent. While I think THE AUTHORS deserve to be rewarded for their hard work, it's annoying to have to look at animated banners, even on pages you support (so everyone buy shirts).
Also, several new Pokey-related projects are in the works:
New POKEY SHIRTS! A POKEY COMPUTER GAME, called Mutton Kombat. Unfortunately, being developed only for Mac at the current time, but ports are under discussion.
If you're up to it, check out some of my personal favorites:
THE ABANDONED CASTLE
POKEY AND THE MOON-CHEESE
WE ARE NOT LOST
POKEY HAS UNTERNET
POKEY IN MONOCHROME
THE DEVIL
NO ID MEANS NO WHISKEY
POOR SKEPTOPOTAMUS
PENNIES FROM HEAVEN
POKEY AND MEATSPACE
ADIEU, MR DEBUSSY!
YES!!!
You could have at least gone to the trouble of copying it somewhere else, rather than blatantly whoring the link from my post.. .
Honestly, the things people will do to try to get karma.
Interested parties wishing to save the resource-challenged people at Keybowl a hard time might try some of the following URLs:
s ets/228347/p86-mcalindon/p86-mcalindon.pdf
. jpg
A PDF File about the Keybowl
http://www.acm.org/pubs/articles/proceedings/as
A mirrored copy of an image of the thing
http://www.brandeis.edu/~ekendall/large_keybowl
Sure, the products Novell makes are going out of style pretty fast, no matter which direction you see the market going in, but simply because something is obsolete doesn't mean that it's going to stop being used. After all, if something works for the job, there's no reason to replace it. How many slashdot readers still have old 486s lying around because they're cheap and effective for certain tasks?
At the university I attend, a large number of servers are run on what I would consider to be outdated hardware and software (think VMS/VAX), and there is little talk of replacing it. Also, the local school system in my area uses Novell servers for simple file sharing, and I fail to see why money should be spent to either buy expensive software (Win2k) or hire expensive administrators (Linux) to replace something that does its job perfectly well.
It's somewhat offtopic, but what you're looking for is covered by the Framebuffer HOWTO, avalible here. Your console resolution should be reasonably easy to change in most situations, and some distros (like Linux PPC) even ship with a higher resolution enabled by default.
Simply because most people believe that the net has had a positive effect on their social interaction doesn't necessarily mean that it has. It seems to me that before any realistic conclusions can be drawn about the matter, there should be an actual psychological study done which rates the net's effects based on actual evidence. It's just as logical to conclude from these findings that net use leads to denial as that it has no social drawbacks.
I'm not entirely sure how this would work, but I can't help but think that television stations shouldn't have full rights to all of their content. In order to be able to offer public access to any of its content at any time, one would think the station would have to do quite a bit of renegotiation with the owners of said content. Normally, money exchanges hands each time something is broadcast, but this idea wouldn't work quite the same way with digital content. Does anyone have any more details or speculation on how this might be accomplished?
"The Panoram PV290 DSK is compatible with nearly all computing platforms including Apple Mac OS, HP, SGI, Sun and Windows/NT."
While I can't imagine the monitor not being Linux and *BSD compatible, it's interesting to note just who they think their target market is. After all, if you're willing to shell out hundreds for an overpriced OS and the hardware to run it, you're obviously overfunded enough for this sort of thing.
I actually had an idea along these lines while looking over the rules for RoboWars on their website (the British version). One of the really important objectives for robots in that series is mobility - many of the challenges involve knocking things over or avoiding obstacles such as the hostile house robots, pits, and uneven terrain. I thought that a robot which moves by bouncing or jumping, rather than rolling or walking, might be ideal for overcoming such difficulties, as well as confounding the usual combat techniques used by other robots. The fact that NASA would be interested in similar techniques for their exploration robots suggests that maybe RoboWars isn't quite as inapplicable to real life as one might think.
Now if only NASA could build its robots on something closer to a RoboWars budget...