Just an observation, but this story has the "Security" icon, while the story about Windows critical flaws has the "Bugs" icon. Both stories deal with bugs or "vulnerabilities" that compromise security on the affected machines.
Now, my opinion of MS is not that great, but this just seems wrong.
It's been awhile since i've played with it much, but VideoLAN may do what you like. The coolest thing about it, imho, is that it's cross-platform i.e. you can run the server on a Linux / BSD / OSX machine if you like, and the client on Windows (or vice versa).
There are APIs (in *nix and Win32) that allow a program to run as any user, but the user's information must be known to do this i.e. username, password, etc. Anyone can write a third-party app to do this, and it doesn't mean the OS is insecure.
What we mean by "insecurity" here is being able to run code as a particular user _without_ having to know that user's info i.e. stack trashing, buffer overruns, or taking advantage of an error in another program (i.e. VPC) to do your nasty stuff.
Another case in point -- running a dictionary attack against a host to find out names / passwords does not mean the OS the host is running is insecure, even if the attack succeeds. It means the _host_ is not secure. If I use standard dictionary words for username and password of my root (or any other) account on my Linux box, and someone does a dictionary attack and finds them out, it's not Linux's fault -- it's mine.
... are the things that meant the most to me. Spend some time with him, go somewhere really cool, have an incredibly wonderful and intimate conversation, witness a beautiful sunset, stay up all night and contemplate the stars, the planet, and the joy of being with one another. Sing him a song if you're inclined!
These all last much longer, and go much deeper, than any consumable, in my opinion.
The _day_ I purchase APP for my iBook 700 (which has been sent back to Apple 4 times for this problem in 11 months), Apple does the right thing imho. Oh well -- i'm covered for lots of other things, so it's cool.
What i'm wondering is this: will they replace the board with a newer, better designed board that doesn't exhibit the problem? Yes, it's very laudable that they'll repair them without charge if this is found to be the issue, but i'd rather not have a laptop that dies every 3 months, regardless of whether the repairs are free. At least this means that I can sell my iBook 700 (and 900) and get the G4 model, without feeling like scum. I want to turn people _on_ to Apple, not sell them something that will turn them _off_.
... i've had in the last 5 years has involved Linux somewhat, and i've historically been a Windows developer (since 1990). In 1998 I started seriously looking at this *nix thing, and i'm glad I did, because everyone who has ever employed me, while most running Windows to some degree, has put a lot of effort into making sure their code is cross-platform and runs on Linux (and sometimes Solaris and Mac OSX) as well. My current employer sees Linux as a way to avoid the "Microsoft Tax" and is all too happy to pay me to make sure my code runs as well on Linux as it does on Windows. I kid thee not -- my *nix skills, while not equal to my Windows skills yet (but getting closer all of the time) are helping to keep me employed.
... still have it, too (though I doubt if it works anymore). 1802 8-bit processor, an anomaly for its' time because it has so many registers as compared to other 8-bit CPUs, 2K RAM, 1861 video... you didn't bother with CHIP-8, you went straight to 1802 machine code. I learned _so_ much about computers with that little board!
... without disrupted audio every 2m 25s into a piece. Yes, this is a 2G iPod, yes it's running v1.3 firmware, and yes MP3s play just fine. However, when I try to play an AIFF or SD2 file on it, at 2:25 into the piece (and every 2:25 thereafter) the audio stutters for 2-3 seconds. Funnily enough, a few seconds before this happens (every 2:20s or so) I can feel the hard disk in the iPod thrashing about a bit.
I've provided feedback to Apple about it, but I don't know if anything will come of it. I _do_ hope so, as this was one of the biggest reasons I bought the iPod to begin with (to take a lot of _uncompressed_ audio with me to listen to).
I don't think this is the case at all -- a lot of people would be tres miffed at Apple if they did this. I would think, due to the open-source nature of Darwin, that any incompatabilities would be worked out for new processor upgrade cards -- witness Sonnet and others being able to make 10.2.x run on them.
Can I help? Seriously, i've been quite enamored with streaming media, MPEG (ISO / IEC 13818-x), RTP / RTSP, experience-over-IP, interactive digital television, etc. for years now. My last two positions were in this space, and wow... i'd love to help with this stuff. I've done set-top stuff, analog and digital, nifty nifty nifty... is this going to be open-source from the beginning or only released that way when it's finished?
Forgive me, this kind of stuff just really excites me a lot:-)
... these wonderful technologies that we develop (hw / sw / net / etc.) could actually truly _help_ people?
Seriously -- this seems to be the aim of so many developments, to "help make the world a better place via this-and-that," but as an engineer -- and also a human being -- living in these times, it's sometimes hard to really believe that we are improving things on a human level.
So if technology is developed that can actually help people identify with themselves and others, if software can assist in helping people find their place in the human social fabric; wow, color me hopeful!
... a very big thing that you need to do is believe in yourself. I kid thee not, this is one of the most important skills (and it _is_ a skill I think, so many aspects of modern society seem to encourage the opposite) you can develop.
I'm not saying practice vanity, or proclaim yourself some sort of hotshot gods-gift-to-swdev, or adopt a glib or cavalier attitude. I'm saying be confident about yourself and your abilities. If you don't know something, don't doubt that you can learn it, and if you do know something, don't doubt that you can learn more about it and / or use that knowledge to learn something else. If someone doesn't believe in you, jettison that person from your circle and replace them with someone who does. The old adage about not giving others the power to cut you down definitely applies.
People who believe in themselves and their capacities are successful (however you define it) far more than not. Take this to heart, please.
I thought that our dear federal government, with the help of Mr. Boies, _won_ the antitrust case against MS? I thought that our dear government just decided to not punish them, or at least not to punish them to the degree that they could have?
A couple of years ago, my brother called me up and said "do you want an iBook?" I said "Sure, what's up?" His story was that a friend of his got it when he enlisted in the Army, he was discharged early for some reason and got to keep it, and he needed $$$ so he sold it to my brother, who gave it to me. I don't know if this story is true, but the iBook had OS9, 96MB RAM and the Airport card. This was the original tangerine 300mhz model.
So I pose, if this is true, and the Army buys computers in bulk for general-purpose use without regard to what applications they might be used for, a.) why they chose the iBook then, and b.) why they didn't this time. Are the old iBooks somehow more durable than the new (they're definitely a lot heavier)?
I bought a 700mhz Apple iBook when the MicroCenter in LosSantaSunnyMountainTinoVale had the sale on the previous models for $899 (DVD / CD-RW Combo drive included). I can truly say that this thing:
a.) rocks (it's more than fast enough to compile and run the stuff I work on)
b.) is tough (my 90lb floppy-eared best friend has repeatedly stepped on it, and it takes it and seems to ask for more)
c.) easily outdoes my previous laptop (a 500mhz Apple Pismo PowerBook, circa 2000) in durability, coolness (physical heat generated as well as hipness), speed and price...
... and I sold my Pismo for $800 on craigslist.org as well:-)
I've been involved in a lot of P2P work, and it is definitely a wonderful technology, and it also solves a big problem -- it is an enabler for reaching ever-larger numbers of people / clients. P2P systems can be implemented such that the more clients participate, the more room there is for clients to participate. Like the article says, P2P solves the "my parent node failed" problem pretty well (by dynamically reconnecting to another parent node).
Really -- if you want examples of P2P use that aren't the often over-hyped file-sharing scenarios, imagine an FTP server that can scale really well, i.e. the more people who are using it, the more capacity it has. Imagine SOMA FM being able to stream to orders of magnitude more people than it does now, by having clients on fat pipes reflect the stream they're getting to others. Sure, there are still problems to solve in this case (latency, especially for live-as-it-happens type content) but the potential, I think, is incredible.
... and this is it. How dare they proclaim GNOME as LAME, when GNOME clearly isn't *smile*.
This reminds me of something that happened at my last job. We were using LAME to encode MP3 frame headers so we could then stream them along to our super-funky P2P-erm, "bandwidth harvesting" system. When one of the marketing people asked us for some details about the tools we used, we said "Well, the MP3 encoder we use is LAME." "What?" he inquired. "Yes, we use the LAME MP3 encoder," we repeated. He said, "Well, couldn't you find a better one?" We explained it to him. He became flustered, saying "no customer is going to want to purchase our product if we use that! You guys need to find some Really Cool MP3 Encoder (RCME) or something, and quick!"
We laughed. And laughed. And laughed:-)
This is seriously cool stuff -- the IEC-13818-x spec (MPEG2) is fascinating stuff, and set-top boxes are very cool platforms to code to. There are lots of ways to enable interactivity in television -- the XML-based trigger info can be snarfed from an ethernet network (I used to code to the PowerTV API, and it had a version of BSD sockets on it to receive data from the set-top's ethernet port). It could be another elementary stream encoded in the MPEG PS itself. it doesn't even need to be a digital signal -- it could live in the VBI with closed-captioning and other stuff (this is how WebTV, Wink and others work). It could even be on a sideband-type thing, i.e. transmitted on a different frequency than the picture. This isn't even touching on the services that could be enabled with the DSM-CC portion of the MPEG spec.
... and yes, it will be used for advertising, but it also enables much cooler things. Imagine interactive children's programs -- that big black box so often used as an electronic babysitter has some truly awesome education potential, and interactivity only makes that better. Technology doesn't always have to be seen as some sort of Orwellian or Matrix-type enabler for the pot-planting of humankind... it can be a window to a great and vast world.
Damn, I first learned C, as well as 68000 assembly, on an Atari 1040ST, using the Metacomco (sp?) compiler back in 1986 (coming from an 1802-based RCA VIP, and 8-bit Atari XL, quite a jump!) It rocked. Later, I bought one of those too-cool SH204 shoebox 20MB hard drives, and then a bunch of MIDI stuff.
I still sort of miss those days -- I dunno, I like variety, and I was bummed when Commodore and Atari stopped producing Amigas and STs, respectively. I've been a Windows developer since 1990, and it's gotten so homogenous now that the only way it seemed fun again was to decide to focus more on cross-platform development. So, I started (and continue) learning and using Linux, Mac OSX, Solaris, POSIX APIs, etc.
I think this is far from useless, even "without free codecs." One of the coolest things about the Apple Darwin Streaming Server (also open-source) is that it's a good reference implementation on RTSP / RTP. In other words, if reading the RFCs just leaves you with a bunch of questions, and maybe a "sure would like to see it work" hunger in yer belly, then you can build it, run it, play with it, and suddenly those RFCs make a lot more sense. Reference implementations (and multiple ones at that) are always good -- everyone interested gets educated by actually seeing the stuff go, putting breakpoints where they want, and really making the concepts gel in their head.
Yes, this is all funny and stuff, but there is some truth to it. Apple seems to have the vision that computers are far too important, powerful (as in empowering the individual) and effective (as in being able to effect a positive change in people's lives, by virtue of empowerment) to be difficult to use. In other words, computers can be personal, and they _need_ to be more personal if they are to realize some of their potential to really help people. They should be more transparent, and as easy to use as they are now, they need to be made even easier (this also means more approachable).
I remember way back when I was an 1802 machine language programmer. I thought this little RCA VIP single-board thing was the coolest; I could play games (as long as I wrote them), sample music (as long as I wrote the sampler), study electronics, etc. It was a lot of fun, it impacted my life in a big way. Apple seems to understand that modern pooters can impact people in a big way as well, and you shouldn't have to be a brainiac or a programmer to use them. MS I think also has people who think along these lines, but Apple seems to be far more effective at it i.e. they seem to take it to heart a lot more. I think this is a laudable goal.
... because anyone can go to http://www.ansi.org and purchase PDFs that _fully_ document any of the standards there. We did this at my previous employer a few years ago when we were doing heavy research into digital television, MPEG2, etc. Yes, they were a bit expensive, but not outrageous (I think IEC 13818 -- MPEG2 a/v/systems/DSM-CC were about $800 or so for all of them).
I repeat -- FULLY document -- how to encode / decode / transport, everything. With this kind of documentation, you can bring up an MPEG file with a freakin' hex editor and figure out where the headers / frames / slices are, and if you're particularly keen on it, the data in them. As part of a project working with Windows Media, we are _continually_ distressed by it's "black box" nature, and MS does not give out WM protocol licenses to just anyone (we tried, and tried, and failed). We send stuff in, WMVCORE or whatever does some magic, and hopefully stuff comes out the other end. If it doesn't, we can make a few somewhat educated guesses, but in the end we always need to pay $$$, call MS, and have them tell us that "Yes, that's a bug with the WMFSDK, sorry, you'll have to hack around it."
I'll take something fully documented (even if it's not open-source and even if I need to pay for the specs) over something only partially documented, delivered with binaries that do magic, any day.
The version of gcc3.1 that came with 10.2 had an irritating bug which resulted in code with local static variables in templated classes to not link. I don't know if the problem was with the C++ compiler or ld, but this version fixes that (just tried it), yippee!
Slashdot Mirror
Now, my opinion of MS is not that great, but this just seems wrong.
Regards,
John
Regards,
John
What we mean by "insecurity" here is being able to run code as a particular user _without_ having to know that user's info i.e. stack trashing, buffer overruns, or taking advantage of an error in another program (i.e. VPC) to do your nasty stuff.
Another case in point -- running a dictionary attack against a host to find out names / passwords does not mean the OS the host is running is insecure, even if the attack succeeds. It means the _host_ is not secure. If I use standard dictionary words for username and password of my root (or any other) account on my Linux box, and someone does a dictionary attack and finds them out, it's not Linux's fault -- it's mine.
Regards,
John
These all last much longer, and go much deeper, than any consumable, in my opinion.
Regards,
John
What i'm wondering is this: will they replace the board with a newer, better designed board that doesn't exhibit the problem? Yes, it's very laudable that they'll repair them without charge if this is found to be the issue, but i'd rather not have a laptop that dies every 3 months, regardless of whether the repairs are free. At least this means that I can sell my iBook 700 (and 900) and get the G4 model, without feeling like scum. I want to turn people _on_ to Apple, not sell them something that will turn them _off_.
Regards,
John
Regards,
John
Regards,
John
... without disrupted audio every 2m 25s into a piece. Yes, this is a 2G iPod, yes it's running v1.3 firmware, and yes MP3s play just fine. However, when I try to play an AIFF or SD2 file on it, at 2:25 into the piece (and every 2:25 thereafter) the audio stutters for 2-3 seconds. Funnily enough, a few seconds before this happens (every 2:20s or so) I can feel the hard disk in the iPod thrashing about a bit.
I've provided feedback to Apple about it, but I don't know if anything will come of it. I _do_ hope so, as this was one of the biggest reasons I bought the iPod to begin with (to take a lot of _uncompressed_ audio with me to listen to).
Regards,
John
Regards,
John
Regards,
John
Forgive me, this kind of stuff just really excites me a lot :-)
Regards,
John"People don't like fire poked ... poked in their noses."
Regards,
John
Seriously -- this seems to be the aim of so many developments, to "help make the world a better place via this-and-that," but as an engineer -- and also a human being -- living in these times, it's sometimes hard to really believe that we are improving things on a human level.
So if technology is developed that can actually help people identify with themselves and others, if software can assist in helping people find their place in the human social fabric; wow, color me hopeful!
Regards,
John
I'm not saying practice vanity, or proclaim yourself some sort of hotshot gods-gift-to-swdev, or adopt a glib or cavalier attitude. I'm saying be confident about yourself and your abilities. If you don't know something, don't doubt that you can learn it, and if you do know something, don't doubt that you can learn more about it and / or use that knowledge to learn something else. If someone doesn't believe in you, jettison that person from your circle and replace them with someone who does. The old adage about not giving others the power to cut you down definitely applies.
People who believe in themselves and their capacities are successful (however you define it) far more than not. Take this to heart, please.
Regards,
John
Regards,
John
So I pose, if this is true, and the Army buys computers in bulk for general-purpose use without regard to what applications they might be used for, a.) why they chose the iBook then, and b.) why they didn't this time. Are the old iBooks somehow more durable than the new (they're definitely a lot heavier)?
Regards,
John
a.) rocks (it's more than fast enough to compile and run the stuff I work on)
b.) is tough (my 90lb floppy-eared best friend has repeatedly stepped on it, and it takes it and seems to ask for more)
c.) easily outdoes my previous laptop (a 500mhz Apple Pismo PowerBook, circa 2000) in durability, coolness (physical heat generated as well as hipness), speed and price ...
... and I sold my Pismo for $800 on craigslist.org as well :-)
Regards,
John
Really -- if you want examples of P2P use that aren't the often over-hyped file-sharing scenarios, imagine an FTP server that can scale really well, i.e. the more people who are using it, the more capacity it has. Imagine SOMA FM being able to stream to orders of magnitude more people than it does now, by having clients on fat pipes reflect the stream they're getting to others. Sure, there are still problems to solve in this case (latency, especially for live-as-it-happens type content) but the potential, I think, is incredible.
Regards,
John
This reminds me of something that happened at my last job. We were using LAME to encode MP3 frame headers so we could then stream them along to our super-funky P2P-erm, "bandwidth harvesting" system. When one of the marketing people asked us for some details about the tools we used, we said "Well, the MP3 encoder we use is LAME." "What?" he inquired. "Yes, we use the LAME MP3 encoder," we repeated. He said, "Well, couldn't you find a better one?" We explained it to him. He became flustered, saying "no customer is going to want to purchase our product if we use that! You guys need to find some Really Cool MP3 Encoder (RCME) or something, and quick!" We laughed. And laughed. And laughed :-)
Regards,
John
Regards,
John
I still sort of miss those days -- I dunno, I like variety, and I was bummed when Commodore and Atari stopped producing Amigas and STs, respectively. I've been a Windows developer since 1990, and it's gotten so homogenous now that the only way it seemed fun again was to decide to focus more on cross-platform development. So, I started (and continue) learning and using Linux, Mac OSX, Solaris, POSIX APIs, etc.
Regards,
John
I think this is far from useless, even "without free codecs." One of the coolest things about the Apple Darwin Streaming Server (also open-source) is that it's a good reference implementation on RTSP / RTP. In other words, if reading the RFCs just leaves you with a bunch of questions, and maybe a "sure would like to see it work" hunger in yer belly, then you can build it, run it, play with it, and suddenly those RFCs make a lot more sense. Reference implementations (and multiple ones at that) are always good -- everyone interested gets educated by actually seeing the stuff go, putting breakpoints where they want, and really making the concepts gel in their head.
Regards
John
I remember way back when I was an 1802 machine language programmer. I thought this little RCA VIP single-board thing was the coolest; I could play games (as long as I wrote them), sample music (as long as I wrote the sampler), study electronics, etc. It was a lot of fun, it impacted my life in a big way. Apple seems to understand that modern pooters can impact people in a big way as well, and you shouldn't have to be a brainiac or a programmer to use them. MS I think also has people who think along these lines, but Apple seems to be far more effective at it i.e. they seem to take it to heart a lot more. I think this is a laudable goal.
Regards,
John
I repeat -- FULLY document -- how to encode / decode / transport, everything. With this kind of documentation, you can bring up an MPEG file with a freakin' hex editor and figure out where the headers / frames / slices are, and if you're particularly keen on it, the data in them. As part of a project working with Windows Media, we are _continually_ distressed by it's "black box" nature, and MS does not give out WM protocol licenses to just anyone (we tried, and tried, and failed). We send stuff in, WMVCORE or whatever does some magic, and hopefully stuff comes out the other end. If it doesn't, we can make a few somewhat educated guesses, but in the end we always need to pay $$$, call MS, and have them tell us that "Yes, that's a bug with the WMFSDK, sorry, you'll have to hack around it."
I'll take something fully documented (even if it's not open-source and even if I need to pay for the specs) over something only partially documented, delivered with binaries that do magic, any day.
Regards,
John
It _is_ nice to see Apple listening to us :-)
Regards,
John