In my opinion, between the danger of worms transmitted above the application level and the existence of uneducated users (in many cases, uneducatable) as well as the whole physical security issue, even an internal network is not to be trusted (though few are actually worse than the Internet, except for pervasive wireless networks that don't use a strong, non-WEP encryption solution.) VPNs can definitely be very useful, but placing using them only at the outer edges of your network (e.g. internet-based links) leaves you wide open to any form of attack that originates from inside, which is always a danger no matter how good your external defenses are.
Personally I don't think that physical seperation is necessary if you're going to be using a strong VPN, because of the fact that you can make it so that the only traffic that passes back and forth is through a VPN and is then no less secure (if anything more secure, except for the purposes of physical security) than if traffic were being passed over the internet. You also get the advantage of increased throughput, a single (or fewer) physical sites to manage, and lower bandwidth costs. Every little bit helps...
In any case, it is my opinion that any computer which can communicate with others on the internet, no matter how well-restricted such communications are, should itself be considered non-trustworthy. It might be safer for being behind a firewall, but it can still grab a trojan or worm either through accidental or intentional means and become a staging point for internal attacks. It is for this reason that I personally believe that it is imperative to ensure that every computer on a network is secure and has personal firewalling of some form installed (if you're dealing with *nix workstations this is a no-brainer for a competent admin; Windows boxen will benefit greatly from simple solutions such as Tiny Personal Firewall.)
This all goes double for boxen which are physically located outside of the network and which VPN inside (this is the reason for that last paragraph's worth of rambling.) A certain amount of distrust should be exercised for computers which can find themselves poorly protected from the dangers of the internet at times, and as such it is not only necessary to keep such boxes under close scrutiny and send their traffic through a decent firewall, but also to either educate users (as well as possible) on good security or require as a matter of policy that they utilize certain security measures (a personal firewall combined with a regularly-updated antivirus application is a potent combination that goes a long way towards keeping a computer clean.) Assuming that a VPN is a safe connection is a recipe for disaster; it prevents others from listening in but otherwise it is no better than any other old TCP/IP connection.
VPNs, of course, can be quite useful on an internal network. Packet sniffers tend to have difficulty picking up on SSH as it is, but put that through a 1028-bit encrypted tunnel and it become exponentially more difficult to crack apart (and such layering protects you from vulnerability as there are now *two* effective locks which must be picked in order to gain entry.) It isn't going to make a difference between two servers connected with a crossover cable and which enjoy strict physical security, but when traffic is being passed over a network with old windows 95 boxen running Outlook, it pays to be prudent. Such encrypted seperation, when used intelligently, can often eliminate the need to physically seperate network segments when connectivity can be useful.
Oh, one last point: if you're using a WLAN, it's only logical that unless it's strictly for visitors doing web surfing and chatting on AIM, a VPN is useful there as well. WEP is both less useful and far less effective.
As for a good VPN technology to use for any application, IPSEC is always handy (and enjoys excellent and robust out-of-the-box support in the more recent revisions of... almost everything.)
Sorry if this seems a bit unclear, but I've had a long day.:)
The difference is that you don't get to request the files like you do with other p2p clients - just recieve broadcasts to channels you subscribe to. You do, however, get the benefits of shared bandwidth (to an extent.)
I like to think of it as a blogging version of BitTorrent.
Once it matures, it has the potential to become (IMO) a fantastic content distribution system. BitTorrent for one-time grabs, Konspire2B for repeat visitors. Since it encrypts outgoing traffic and only the owner of a channel can distribute on said channel, it may even see support in places where p2p technology is otherwise a dirty word. I, for one, will be showing this system to my boss. I can't talk much about it, but this just might be a solution to an interesting networking problem I've found. ^_^
I've been working here for some time as their resident linux freak / tech support slave / biased security know-it-all / networking software guru / site surveyer. I don't have an easily definable job title (I just HAD to be a religious/. reader, didn't I?) but I was originally hired for tech support so that's what I get referred to as. We're based out of Lake Mary but we work just about anywhere that has adequate demand, particularly in central and northern Florida.
We're actually working on getting an entire town in Louisiana, St. Joseph, up and running. Last I heard, we were doing it with a whopping TWO ACCESS POINTS and no range extenders. In a rural area. Two towers, two T1s, no other cabling outside of the towers themselves.
We've also got some interesting stuff in the works for Orange and Volusia counties, under the Wireless Law vendor. Basically, insanely-secure wifi for courtrooms. Biometrics, encryption that'd make the NSA hate us, our families, and our pets if we sold it on the open market, the works.;)
Despite St. Louis being swamp/forest area, we've been able to get a connection using 802.11b via an integrated laptop card from as much as 2 miles *outside of town.*
Depending on the local topography and what man-made structures might be available, we might or might not want to build a tower or two to provide coverage in your area. If you have a few tall buildings that get enough clearance above the trees, rooftops alone might suffice.
Our antennas, which utilize some dead-sexy proprietary technology that *still* makes me drool, can keep up a connection to the average laptop for up to three miles in open-air under ideal circumstances; the worst range I've seen was 1/2-mile and that was with an *entire office building* between me and the nearest antenna, using a low-power Linksys 802.11b CompactFlash card in my PDA (Sharp Zaurus 5500 ^_^), with the antenna being only a few stories off the ground.
We've yet to see anybody do that without using a system that looks like a cold-war-era radar dish, let alone push that kind of signal through an entire building and into the rear parking lot successfully. Even the radar-looking setups don't do that as well as we do, despite being several times the size.
We don't even need to over-amp the antennas.
We also implement some decent QoS that, instead of simply capping your bandwidth like a cable modem, just gives you a "fair share" of what's available.
We can run from anything as simple as a 56k modem up to a set of full data T1s *per antenna*, the main limitation being the 802.11b protocol's limited bandwidth. This will go farther once 802.11g is finalized. In addition, we can (of course) set up range extenders with our antennas to make the most of a single pipe.
If you're ever going to be in the Maitland area just north of Orlando, contact us and we'll see about doing a demonstration of our technology at the local testing site. We have other locations in the works in Florida, but this is the only one we currently use for demos.
For more information, visit http://www.hbwireless.com/ and read up. Contact info sits up there as well. I'm known in the company simply as "Ken" if anyone asks.:)
Can't say I disagree with Linus's logic, but I don't know if this was that great of a decision politically-speaking. It might not matter, but if anything linux *needs* support from big players like Intel and vice versa in order to grow. This won't necessarily hurt, but I doubt it can help matters on the Intel front.
All the more reason to run ZoneAlarm or Tiny Personal Firewall on the Winblows computers, or to use a properly configured *nix on your desktop.
Of course, I can see a lot of students just unplugging their ethernet wiring on the day the RIAA comes to do the scan... and if they do a scan, there may be some potential for a lawsuit in retaliation.
Actually, overclocked a Celeron can outrun a PII/III quite easily. The main things are cache and FSB - the celeron at the time the PIII came out had much faster (if much smaller) cache, and if you brought the FSB up from 66 to closer to 100 (PIIIs ran at 100) then you could match, if not exceed, an equivalent PIII.
My celerons run at 525, and perform comparably to a 550mhz PII.
Of course, a stock 550mhz Celeron would be slower than either.
1 ghz celery is hardly a pos, except in comparison to the fastest stuff out there. Not too long ago a gigahertz of anything was considered fast.
My computer is a dual celeron 366, overclocked to 525mhz. It barely handles xine (at stock speed, it's slightly choppy and I'm about as good a tweaker as they come.)
I never got to try mplayer since the only distro I've ever used with X on this box is Mandrake and mplayer won't compile with the version of gcc that came with it, but when I finally get around to making Gentoo work I'll see how it compares.
Until then, xine is king.
Hell, it blows PowerDVD away in my equally-well-tweaked win98SE and win2k... damn impressive considering PDVD's status as the king of proprietary players and the fact that xine is running a CSS decrypter built entirely by reverse engineering.
Actually, it's 16M Flash and 64M RAM. Normally, the default Sharp rom loads the Flash into RAM on a 32-meg ramdisk, and applications are installed onto this ramdisk. Alternatively, applications can be installed onto other media, namely an SD or CF card. The Flash memory is untouched outside of upgrades.
OpenZaurus, however, which is a Debian-based community-produced distribution that's mostly binary-compatible, boots directly from flash using the JFFS2 driver which makes it writable. This way, reboots won't screw over your data. From there, you have a choice of memory configurations such as 32M ramdisk and 32M RAM, where you'd install most new applications to the ramdisk. There are others, like 16/48 and 0/64, which requires that you are either very frugal with the Flash memory usage or you have a card slipped in somewhere.
Personally, I use the 0/64 configuration and I have a 128M SD card which all my software and application data goes onto, and a 64M CF card that does document transfers and storage. I plan to get a Microdrive CF card so I can go the extra mile and get a few hours of music on the thing.
The new Zaurus actually has only 32M of RAM, and 64M of "protected Flash" whatever the fsck that is. Flash is nice and fast for storage compared to the alternatives, but I'd miss the RAM. Personally, I think that this cripples the new Z somewhat. I don't know how the 206mhz ARM on the 5500 compares to the 400mhz XScale on the 5600, though (I doubt the X-scale is twice as fast.) I won't miss not having built-in speaker and mic (I can always get a much better headset if I wanted that functionality, or build a much better one to clip on; and my ear-clip headphones that I got for it are quite badass.)
I am kinda pissed that Sharp still hasn't updated the kernel for the old model.. It still runs 2.4.6! The OpenZaurus distribution is working on bringing over a recent reversion, and are recieving some help with the proprietary modules like the SD driver, but personally I think Sharp should have addressed the kernel obsolescence issue some time ago.
It was probably a joke or something. More likely than not, the tramp would've lost his/her balance well before freezing in place. To freeze while walking out of the blue like that doesn't happen unless it's EXTREMELY cold (think antarctic) or you're playing Diablo II.
Of course. Think about it: just for one example, what if someone sat down one evening and seriously made Outlook Express secure? BILLIONS of dollars in repair costs saved worldwide. Driver support extended to other OSs, as well - offering more choices. WINE would begin to kick ass. Possibly offer MUCH better network transparency in Windows more akin to that in *nix. Improved security in Windows so it won't have stupid holes like raw socket access to anything that wants it. Improved compatibility with Windows protocols in *nixs. NTFS support in *nix that's safe. *nix bootloaders like GRUB able to boot NT, 9x, even DOS "kernels" directly instead of relaying through native loaders. The possibilities are limitless. And, there are sure as hell a ton of programmers out there who are Win-only for whatever inane reason who'd have a lot of interest in, at the very least, seeing how M$ implements higher-level API functions, for example. All in all, open Windows source would result in massive improvements in both Windows and *nix. M$ won't be able to make money off of it using the same business model they currently rely upon (pay per license or face rabid lawyers) however, and as a result it'd never happen.
The GPL doesn't say anything about not being able to sell the finished product. In fact, IIRC, it doesn't say anything at all about redistribution as long as the source is made available at no additional fee. In other words, a distro like Red Hat could stop offering FREE downloads of their ISOs and only sell their distribution at $300,000 per download, and as long as the source is included, that's perfectly legal. Perfectly stupid as well, but hey - it's just a bad hypothetical example.
Now, all of the GPL components that StarOffice employs are the same as the GPL components in OpenOffice - in other words, their modifications to the actual GPL'd software are still fully available. StarOffice could just as well be a retail version of OpenOffice, re-branded, without source... As long as they make no unpublished modifications to the GPL'd sources and still keep OpenOffice available for download, they're in the clear. However, StarOffice isn't just a boxed OpenOffice - they include 3rd-party, proprietary components. This is also done in many, many Linux distributions, many of which ship without source in the box. RedHat and Mandrake, for example. But, THE GPL COMPONENTS ARE STILL, FOR ALL INTENTS AND PURPOSES, AVAILABLE AS SOURCE AT NO ADDITIONAL FEE THAT IS IDENTICAL TO THE SOURCE USED TO COMPILE THE BOXED VERSION. Therefore, it's all legal.
Economically speaking as opposed to legally speaking, purchasing the retail versions or support contracts have considerable value, esp. to the less-experienced end users, and businesses with little, no, inexperienced, or understaffed IS departments. In the event of retail boxed packages, also to those with limited or no internet connectivity who are unable to download the software. While true geeks with broadband won't see a need to buy RedHat in a box (or even to download such an easy distro as RedHat, if they're true geeks...) Joe Shmoe who's trying his hand at learning *nix and doesn't have a CD writer or broadband will find boxed RedHat, boxed StarOffice, et al. to be a godsend.
Hell, I personally would have purchased a number of apps in retail form if only they were up-to-date enough... Not because of skill (I have successfully built OpenBSD-based firewalls and made it through a Linux From Scratch install with no difficulty, to offer a short list of qualifications) but because I lack decent connectivity.
Not to mention, getting proprietary add-ons can be useful sometimes. Like if you need Adabas D in StarOffice or PartitionMagic in your Linux distro of choice (some people do) or whatever.
Why can't unsolicited spammers be considered terrorists just like crackers?
Then again, Microsoft hasn't been hurt enough by spamming yet, for that to happen. Only when spamming gets to a puppet master will the puppets (aka Congress) do something about it.
Actually, three years ago I had an old Apple Powerbook 520 that I used mostly for retrogaming, Filemaker development, and schoolwork, and I was asked ONCE in about 5 round trips to turn it on. While the batteries worked just fine and were charged, the internal battery was bad... So, I either had to keep it in sleep mode or find a wall outlet whenever I wanted to use it on the go.
Good thing I planned on using it during the flight.
We (the/. crowd) can rip off the PVC ghetto bot, cover it in paper machet armor (not like it would make a difference anyway against ramming or flipping), write JonKatz on two sides, write Alex Chiu on the other two, and stick a picture of the AYB alien on the top. Battlebot fodder that represents the three most hated presences on the Internet, getting mauled in its first match.
We'd have to make sure there'd be a visible Windows logo too. Maybe have it light up when the bot dies. I'm thinking BatSignal here.
What would really be great would be if it actually won a match.
Although actually, knowing how junkyards come into play, there IS a decent weapon available - the phallic sonic ramrod. Take any working, but junked vibrator (just be sure to wear gloves...), overclock it (double the voltage, stick a Peltier in there, etc. etc.) attach a sharpened roof nail to the end, and voila - a ramrod that vibrates the opposition apart while offering a superb visual effect for prime-time TV. Extra points for getting somebody to use it as originally intended without serious injury.
Ironic that the while the opening paragraph talks about attention, 90% of/. readers won't even view the article, and of those that do, 98% will scroll past most of it just like I did.
What, is Katz just a random troll that Taco picked out for posting privelidges or something?!
So, now we're going to see laptop-battery-powered hearts. Probably only a matter of time before they're implanted inside of patients themselves. My only concern is this: What happens when those lithium-ion batteries EXPLODE? Better make sure to keep Dell and Apple away from this one...
GRUB would probably be the ideal choice if you're going to be multibooting, at least... In simplest form, it will pass control onto another bootsector, and you can also write a loader within GRUB itself. I think it also supports booting via bootp, but I'm not so sure about that. You might want to look into an x86 emulator that supports networking as an easy fix, and just use GRUB's network capabilities (I know it supports "downloading OS images over a network", but by what protocols, is unknown to me and not in the FAQ) or something similar to boot XINU over the virtual network.
I'm not familiar with bootp and tftp and the like, but if it works simply by passing control over to some other executable, you should be able to just save that executable in raw form as a file and have GRUB boot it via the "chainload" feature. From there, you'll just have to hack whatever code there is that pulls data from the server, to read it from the local disk instead. GRUB's own source should include formative practical examples on this seeing as it includes code to natively read a number of filesystems, and you may have to write drivers for XINU itself to do i/o locally rather than over the network - but you probably already knew that, didn't you?
Sadly, I can't offer any examples or whatnot seeing as I don't know assembler or even any basic OS design fundamentals... but I've gotten GRUB to multiboot over six vary different OSs at once, so I can vouch that if anything is capable of doing this and saving you time, it's GRUB.
Good luck, and be sure to report back on your results.
Actually, there's a few spelling errors but no serious grammatical errors. With your attitude, however, I wouldn't trust you within 4 keystrokes of a compiler. In other words, stick to Windows.:D
What is wrong with the security model?
1. That it isn't perfect (the fact that nothing else is either is irrelevant).
2. That he's probably a jaded fan of NT, OS/2, or some other non-UNIX OS.
I too would like some legitimate argument, but not enough people will read your comment in particular for that to happen.
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In my opinion, between the danger of worms transmitted above the application level and the existence of uneducated users (in many cases, uneducatable) as well as the whole physical security issue, even an internal network is not to be trusted (though few are actually worse than the Internet, except for pervasive wireless networks that don't use a strong, non-WEP encryption solution.) VPNs can definitely be very useful, but placing using them only at the outer edges of your network (e.g. internet-based links) leaves you wide open to any form of attack that originates from inside, which is always a danger no matter how good your external defenses are.
:)
Personally I don't think that physical seperation is necessary if you're going to be using a strong VPN, because of the fact that you can make it so that the only traffic that passes back and forth is through a VPN and is then no less secure (if anything more secure, except for the purposes of physical security) than if traffic were being passed over the internet. You also get the advantage of increased throughput, a single (or fewer) physical sites to manage, and lower bandwidth costs. Every little bit helps...
In any case, it is my opinion that any computer which can communicate with others on the internet, no matter how well-restricted such communications are, should itself be considered non-trustworthy. It might be safer for being behind a firewall, but it can still grab a trojan or worm either through accidental or intentional means and become a staging point for internal attacks. It is for this reason that I personally believe that it is imperative to ensure that every computer on a network is secure and has personal firewalling of some form installed (if you're dealing with *nix workstations this is a no-brainer for a competent admin; Windows boxen will benefit greatly from simple solutions such as Tiny Personal Firewall.)
This all goes double for boxen which are physically located outside of the network and which VPN inside (this is the reason for that last paragraph's worth of rambling.) A certain amount of distrust should be exercised for computers which can find themselves poorly protected from the dangers of the internet at times, and as such it is not only necessary to keep such boxes under close scrutiny and send their traffic through a decent firewall, but also to either educate users (as well as possible) on good security or require as a matter of policy that they utilize certain security measures (a personal firewall combined with a regularly-updated antivirus application is a potent combination that goes a long way towards keeping a computer clean.) Assuming that a VPN is a safe connection is a recipe for disaster; it prevents others from listening in but otherwise it is no better than any other old TCP/IP connection.
VPNs, of course, can be quite useful on an internal network. Packet sniffers tend to have difficulty picking up on SSH as it is, but put that through a 1028-bit encrypted tunnel and it become exponentially more difficult to crack apart (and such layering protects you from vulnerability as there are now *two* effective locks which must be picked in order to gain entry.) It isn't going to make a difference between two servers connected with a crossover cable and which enjoy strict physical security, but when traffic is being passed over a network with old windows 95 boxen running Outlook, it pays to be prudent. Such encrypted seperation, when used intelligently, can often eliminate the need to physically seperate network segments when connectivity can be useful.
Oh, one last point: if you're using a WLAN, it's only logical that unless it's strictly for visitors doing web surfing and chatting on AIM, a VPN is useful there as well. WEP is both less useful and far less effective.
As for a good VPN technology to use for any application, IPSEC is always handy (and enjoys excellent and robust out-of-the-box support in the more recent revisions of... almost everything.)
Sorry if this seems a bit unclear, but I've had a long day.
The sun is outside; it's all bright and stuff. Geeks stay indoors for a reason. So yah, I'd say we hate sun this week.
Correct me if I'm wrong, I haven't researched this, but I'm pretty sure of it...
Didn't the 2.2 kernel have SMP support well before IBM became an active part of the Linux community?
I do seem to recall it being there, but it was quite some time ago.
It's a bit more like BitTorrent.
The difference is that you don't get to request the files like you do with other p2p clients - just recieve broadcasts to channels you subscribe to. You do, however, get the benefits of shared bandwidth (to an extent.)
I like to think of it as a blogging version of BitTorrent.
Once it matures, it has the potential to become (IMO) a fantastic content distribution system. BitTorrent for one-time grabs, Konspire2B for repeat visitors. Since it encrypts outgoing traffic and only the owner of a channel can distribute on said channel, it may even see support in places where p2p technology is otherwise a dirty word. I, for one, will be showing this system to my boss. I can't talk much about it, but this just might be a solution to an interesting networking problem I've found. ^_^
I was thinking more along the lines of "Please don't rape my mind!"
*shudder*
what's funny is... I'm gonna be peeved if they leave that scene out, yet if I do see it it's gonna fuck up my head.
Gainax... we hatessss it! We hatessss it forever!
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those! XD
http://www.hbwireless.com/
/. reader, didn't I?) but I was originally hired for tech support so that's what I get referred to as. We're based out of Lake Mary but we work just about anywhere that has adequate demand, particularly in central and northern Florida.
;)
:)
I've been working here for some time as their resident linux freak / tech support slave / biased security know-it-all / networking software guru / site surveyer. I don't have an easily definable job title (I just HAD to be a religious
We're actually working on getting an entire town in Louisiana, St. Joseph, up and running. Last I heard, we were doing it with a whopping TWO ACCESS POINTS and no range extenders. In a rural area. Two towers, two T1s, no other cabling outside of the towers themselves.
We've also got some interesting stuff in the works for Orange and Volusia counties, under the Wireless Law vendor. Basically, insanely-secure wifi for courtrooms. Biometrics, encryption that'd make the NSA hate us, our families, and our pets if we sold it on the open market, the works.
Despite St. Louis being swamp/forest area, we've been able to get a connection using 802.11b via an integrated laptop card from as much as 2 miles *outside of town.*
Depending on the local topography and what man-made structures might be available, we might or might not want to build a tower or two to provide coverage in your area. If you have a few tall buildings that get enough clearance above the trees, rooftops alone might suffice.
Our antennas, which utilize some dead-sexy proprietary technology that *still* makes me drool, can keep up a connection to the average laptop for up to three miles in open-air under ideal circumstances; the worst range I've seen was 1/2-mile and that was with an *entire office building* between me and the nearest antenna, using a low-power Linksys 802.11b CompactFlash card in my PDA (Sharp Zaurus 5500 ^_^), with the antenna being only a few stories off the ground.
We've yet to see anybody do that without using a system that looks like a cold-war-era radar dish, let alone push that kind of signal through an entire building and into the rear parking lot successfully. Even the radar-looking setups don't do that as well as we do, despite being several times the size.
We don't even need to over-amp the antennas.
We also implement some decent QoS that, instead of simply capping your bandwidth like a cable modem, just gives you a "fair share" of what's available.
We can run from anything as simple as a 56k modem up to a set of full data T1s *per antenna*, the main limitation being the 802.11b protocol's limited bandwidth. This will go farther once 802.11g is finalized. In addition, we can (of course) set up range extenders with our antennas to make the most of a single pipe.
If you're ever going to be in the Maitland area just north of Orlando, contact us and we'll see about doing a demonstration of our technology at the local testing site. We have other locations in the works in Florida, but this is the only one we currently use for demos.
For more information, visit http://www.hbwireless.com/ and read up. Contact info sits up there as well. I'm known in the company simply as "Ken" if anyone asks.
Can't say I disagree with Linus's logic, but I don't know if this was that great of a decision politically-speaking. It might not matter, but if anything linux *needs* support from big players like Intel and vice versa in order to grow. This won't necessarily hurt, but I doubt it can help matters on the Intel front.
All the more reason to run ZoneAlarm or Tiny Personal Firewall on the Winblows computers, or to use a properly configured *nix on your desktop.
Of course, I can see a lot of students just unplugging their ethernet wiring on the day the RIAA comes to do the scan... and if they do a scan, there may be some potential for a lawsuit in retaliation.
Actually, overclocked a Celeron can outrun a PII/III quite easily. The main things are cache and FSB - the celeron at the time the PIII came out had much faster (if much smaller) cache, and if you brought the FSB up from 66 to closer to 100 (PIIIs ran at 100) then you could match, if not exceed, an equivalent PIII.
My celerons run at 525, and perform comparably to a 550mhz PII.
Of course, a stock 550mhz Celeron would be slower than either.
1 ghz celery is hardly a pos, except in comparison to the fastest stuff out there. Not too long ago a gigahertz of anything was considered fast.
My computer is a dual celeron 366, overclocked to 525mhz. It barely handles xine (at stock speed, it's slightly choppy and I'm about as good a tweaker as they come.)
I never got to try mplayer since the only distro I've ever used with X on this box is Mandrake and mplayer won't compile with the version of gcc that came with it, but when I finally get around to making Gentoo work I'll see how it compares.
Until then, xine is king.
Hell, it blows PowerDVD away in my equally-well-tweaked win98SE and win2k... damn impressive considering PDVD's status as the king of proprietary players and the fact that xine is running a CSS decrypter built entirely by reverse engineering.
Reynold's or Glad?
Actually, it's 16M Flash and 64M RAM. Normally, the default Sharp rom loads the Flash into RAM on a 32-meg ramdisk, and applications are installed onto this ramdisk. Alternatively, applications can be installed onto other media, namely an SD or CF card. The Flash memory is untouched outside of upgrades.
OpenZaurus, however, which is a Debian-based community-produced distribution that's mostly binary-compatible, boots directly from flash using the JFFS2 driver which makes it writable. This way, reboots won't screw over your data. From there, you have a choice of memory configurations such as 32M ramdisk and 32M RAM, where you'd install most new applications to the ramdisk. There are others, like 16/48 and 0/64, which requires that you are either very frugal with the Flash memory usage or you have a card slipped in somewhere.
Personally, I use the 0/64 configuration and I have a 128M SD card which all my software and application data goes onto, and a 64M CF card that does document transfers and storage. I plan to get a Microdrive CF card so I can go the extra mile and get a few hours of music on the thing.
The new Zaurus actually has only 32M of RAM, and 64M of "protected Flash" whatever the fsck that is. Flash is nice and fast for storage compared to the alternatives, but I'd miss the RAM. Personally, I think that this cripples the new Z somewhat. I don't know how the 206mhz ARM on the 5500 compares to the 400mhz XScale on the 5600, though (I doubt the X-scale is twice as fast.) I won't miss not having built-in speaker and mic (I can always get a much better headset if I wanted that functionality, or build a much better one to clip on; and my ear-clip headphones that I got for it are quite badass.)
I am kinda pissed that Sharp still hasn't updated the kernel for the old model.. It still runs 2.4.6! The OpenZaurus distribution is working on bringing over a recent reversion, and are recieving some help with the proprietary modules like the SD driver, but personally I think Sharp should have addressed the kernel obsolescence issue some time ago.
It was probably a joke or something. More likely than not, the tramp would've lost his/her balance well before freezing in place. To freeze while walking out of the blue like that doesn't happen unless it's EXTREMELY cold (think antarctic) or you're playing Diablo II.
Of course. Think about it: just for one example, what if someone sat down one evening and seriously made Outlook Express secure? BILLIONS of dollars in repair costs saved worldwide. Driver support extended to other OSs, as well - offering more choices. WINE would begin to kick ass. Possibly offer MUCH better network transparency in Windows more akin to that in *nix. Improved security in Windows so it won't have stupid holes like raw socket access to anything that wants it. Improved compatibility with Windows protocols in *nixs. NTFS support in *nix that's safe. *nix bootloaders like GRUB able to boot NT, 9x, even DOS "kernels" directly instead of relaying through native loaders. The possibilities are limitless. And, there are sure as hell a ton of programmers out there who are Win-only for whatever inane reason who'd have a lot of interest in, at the very least, seeing how M$ implements higher-level API functions, for example. All in all, open Windows source would result in massive improvements in both Windows and *nix. M$ won't be able to make money off of it using the same business model they currently rely upon (pay per license or face rabid lawyers) however, and as a result it'd never happen.
The GPL doesn't say anything about not being able to sell the finished product. In fact, IIRC, it doesn't say anything at all about redistribution as long as the source is made available at no additional fee. In other words, a distro like Red Hat could stop offering FREE downloads of their ISOs and only sell their distribution at $300,000 per download, and as long as the source is included, that's perfectly legal. Perfectly stupid as well, but hey - it's just a bad hypothetical example.
Now, all of the GPL components that StarOffice employs are the same as the GPL components in OpenOffice - in other words, their modifications to the actual GPL'd software are still fully available. StarOffice could just as well be a retail version of OpenOffice, re-branded, without source... As long as they make no unpublished modifications to the GPL'd sources and still keep OpenOffice available for download, they're in the clear. However, StarOffice isn't just a boxed OpenOffice - they include 3rd-party, proprietary components. This is also done in many, many Linux distributions, many of which ship without source in the box. RedHat and Mandrake, for example. But, THE GPL COMPONENTS ARE STILL, FOR ALL INTENTS AND PURPOSES, AVAILABLE AS SOURCE AT NO ADDITIONAL FEE THAT IS IDENTICAL TO THE SOURCE USED TO COMPILE THE BOXED VERSION. Therefore, it's all legal.
Economically speaking as opposed to legally speaking, purchasing the retail versions or support contracts have considerable value, esp. to the less-experienced end users, and businesses with little, no, inexperienced, or understaffed IS departments. In the event of retail boxed packages, also to those with limited or no internet connectivity who are unable to download the software. While true geeks with broadband won't see a need to buy RedHat in a box (or even to download such an easy distro as RedHat, if they're true geeks...) Joe Shmoe who's trying his hand at learning *nix and doesn't have a CD writer or broadband will find boxed RedHat, boxed StarOffice, et al. to be a godsend.
Hell, I personally would have purchased a number of apps in retail form if only they were up-to-date enough... Not because of skill (I have successfully built OpenBSD-based firewalls and made it through a Linux From Scratch install with no difficulty, to offer a short list of qualifications) but because I lack decent connectivity.
Not to mention, getting proprietary add-ons can be useful sometimes. Like if you need Adabas D in StarOffice or PartitionMagic in your Linux distro of choice (some people do) or whatever.
Why can't unsolicited spammers be considered terrorists just like crackers?
Then again, Microsoft hasn't been hurt enough by spamming yet, for that to happen. Only when spamming gets to a puppet master will the puppets (aka Congress) do something about it.
Actually, three years ago I had an old Apple Powerbook 520 that I used mostly for retrogaming, Filemaker development, and schoolwork, and I was asked ONCE in about 5 round trips to turn it on. While the batteries worked just fine and were charged, the internal battery was bad... So, I either had to keep it in sleep mode or find a wall outlet whenever I wanted to use it on the go. Good thing I planned on using it during the flight.
Will anyone that didn't see this coming, please raise your hand?
::crickets::
We (the /. crowd) can rip off the PVC ghetto bot, cover it in paper machet armor (not like it would make a difference anyway against ramming or flipping), write JonKatz on two sides, write Alex Chiu on the other two, and stick a picture of the AYB alien on the top. Battlebot fodder that represents the three most hated presences on the Internet, getting mauled in its first match.
We'd have to make sure there'd be a visible Windows logo too. Maybe have it light up when the bot dies. I'm thinking BatSignal here.
What would really be great would be if it actually won a match.
Although actually, knowing how junkyards come into play, there IS a decent weapon available - the phallic sonic ramrod. Take any working, but junked vibrator (just be sure to wear gloves...), overclock it (double the voltage, stick a Peltier in there, etc. etc.) attach a sharpened roof nail to the end, and voila - a ramrod that vibrates the opposition apart while offering a superb visual effect for prime-time TV. Extra points for getting somebody to use it as originally intended without serious injury.
Ironic that the while the opening paragraph talks about attention, 90% of /. readers won't even view the article, and of those that do, 98% will scroll past most of it just like I did.
What, is Katz just a random troll that Taco picked out for posting privelidges or something?!
So, now we're going to see laptop-battery-powered hearts. Probably only a matter of time before they're implanted inside of patients themselves. My only concern is this: What happens when those lithium-ion batteries EXPLODE? Better make sure to keep Dell and Apple away from this one...
GRUB would probably be the ideal choice if you're going to be multibooting, at least... In simplest form, it will pass control onto another bootsector, and you can also write a loader within GRUB itself. I think it also supports booting via bootp, but I'm not so sure about that. You might want to look into an x86 emulator that supports networking as an easy fix, and just use GRUB's network capabilities (I know it supports "downloading OS images over a network", but by what protocols, is unknown to me and not in the FAQ) or something similar to boot XINU over the virtual network.
I'm not familiar with bootp and tftp and the like, but if it works simply by passing control over to some other executable, you should be able to just save that executable in raw form as a file and have GRUB boot it via the "chainload" feature. From there, you'll just have to hack whatever code there is that pulls data from the server, to read it from the local disk instead. GRUB's own source should include formative practical examples on this seeing as it includes code to natively read a number of filesystems, and you may have to write drivers for XINU itself to do i/o locally rather than over the network - but you probably already knew that, didn't you?
Sadly, I can't offer any examples or whatnot seeing as I don't know assembler or even any basic OS design fundamentals... but I've gotten GRUB to multiboot over six vary different OSs at once, so I can vouch that if anything is capable of doing this and saving you time, it's GRUB.
Good luck, and be sure to report back on your results.
Actually, there's a few spelling errors but no serious grammatical errors. With your attitude, however, I wouldn't trust you within 4 keystrokes of a compiler. In other words, stick to Windows. :D
What is wrong with the security model?
1. That it isn't perfect (the fact that nothing else is either is irrelevant).
2. That he's probably a jaded fan of NT, OS/2, or some other non-UNIX OS.
I too would like some legitimate argument, but not enough people will read your comment in particular for that to happen.