EA Games canceled the first version of The Sims Online, if I remember correctly. It sucked, and they didn't want to tarnish their own good name. It seems all noble and stuff, but they're just trying to make a buck, or in this case, save a buck by not shipping and marketing something that just won't sell. Not that I fault them, it's just good business to pull crap before it gets expensive.
...hanging from the center of mass at geosynchronous orbit...
The way I read it, this is only the initial phase (38,000 km). Teathers are sent out in both directions, making the total length 100,000 km. When it's done, there's considerable force on the base.
You make a good point about where the break in the teather is made. But if more of the teather is beyond the 38,000 km mark, there's less of a chance that even a high break would cause a problem.
Oh well. So much for arm chair orbital mechanics, right?
Ok, here's another idea. Why don't they make a fleet of garbage collecting space robots that go out and find materials to make the cable on orbit? Then, they just launch the factory fleet, order them to begin work, then sit back and wait for the cable to come down in a few decades. The only real obsitcal is finding suitable materials on orbit. But there's so much junk up there, maybe it's possible.
IANAUE (I Am Not An Uber Engineer), but I should hope that they'd design the thing to have a way to eject the whole thing away from earth. If there was some problem, they could detonate explosives at the base, and the whole thing would centrifugally fly away from earth rather than fall back down.
"Parallel and Distributed Programming Using C++ provides an up-close look at how to build software that can take advantage of multiprocessor computers. Simple approaches for programming parallel virtual machines are presented, and the basics of cluster application development are explained. Through an easy-to-understand overview of multithreaded programming, this book also shows you how to write software components that work together over a network to solve problems and do work." - Amazon
-- Your Friendly Neighborhood Product Placement Troll
Then there was (and is) the concept of phone hacking, or phreaking. That wouldn't require a computer at all. No, it wasn't contagious to the person on the other end,;-) But there was always the problem of "social engineering." The process is less like a virus and more like a worm. Fancy that.
So in an alternate universe, I could see people needing a license to use a telephone. A means to track down and prosecute inappropriate usage. Why not.
I must say I am thoroughly disappointed with this book. The book's description, as well as other readers' comments led me to believe that this book would have been more than just a compilation of information that could be freely obtained at the dozens of security related web sites. Sadly, this was not the case.
The bulk of the book merely describes (mostly outdated) common attacks/vulnerabilities, without getting into much detail why they exist and the underlying explanations on how they are exploited. As such the book reads like "For Vulnerability X, Install patch Y" without getting into more detail. Heck, even Microsoft's Security Bulletins give more info that this!
Many of the "75 Top Hack Attacks" that the book promises can be freely found online (check CERT's site).
The general impression I get from reading this book is that the author tried his best to fill up space in order to deliver an impressively thick book. Was it a requirement that he include SCREENSHOTS of various hacking tools/trojans, including step-by-step INSTALL SCREENSHOTS for the included TigerSuite software? (If you don't know how to install software then you need to develop more skills before learning about hacking!). Did he HAVE to include the useless 10 year old 'how to build a modem filter' BBS textfile (which by the way doesn't filter noise on modern modems)? Did the publisher mandate that he include 9 PAGES of Decimal-to-Hex conversion tables when you could use, say, Windows Calculator to do any needed conversions?
Another thing I disliked was that Windows XP as well as Wireless networks (802.11/WEP were glossed over) were not really covered in the sort of detail that I desired.
And, although I appreciate that a basic understanding of the x86 instruction set is required for better understanding low level security issues, I really don't see the point to Chapter 13's discussion on programming "How to Draw Circles in DOS mode" using the VESA bios interface. This is, in my opinion, not relevant considering the book's topic, so why include it? (A better choice would be explaining how the stack is used in high level languages (C, C++) and how buffer overrun hacks work). If you want to learn C, Assembly, or graphics programming buy a book dedicated to these topics. I think it's safe to say that the average reader will NOT become a programmer after reading the "Crash course in C" - it's an unreaslistic expectation.
And to top it all off, the final insult to readers is the interruption of the author's hacking experience "Intuitive Intermission" with the phrase "... to be continued in: Hack Attacks Denied, 2nd Edition". I guess both the author and publisher want you to buy both books!
My chief complaint with the book is that it doesn't seem to know who the reader is. In some areas the author gets down-and-dirty technical (x86 assembly/C programming) while in others he doesn't really explain details or just mentions things in passing (case in point: nowhere does he explain workings of a typical buffer overrun exploit, etc). Also, the author really does not give advice on how to secure or harden systems, aside from "install the update patch". For a book whose focus is security/hacking that's a pretty fatal flaw.
Like I said earlier, this book really seems to me like the author just threw any material that he could find that was remotely related to hacking and presto, one hacking book ready to ship!
If you are new to either the computer or security-related fields then perhaps this book may be of some value to you. If you are not an absolute beginner and know how to search the web, then I'd say that you probably don't need this book. Even if you do buy this book, it, like
Re:disappointed
on
Back To SCO
·
· Score: 2, Informative
emptylines=0; function parse_dir () { for file in $1/*; do if [ -d "$file" ]; then parse_dir $file; else while read line; do if [ "$line" = "" ]; then emptylines=$[$emptylines+1]; echo $emptylines; fi; done
Somehow, saying "First actual case of bug being found" seems fake to me. It's like finding cavalry sword from the first world war with the inscription, "Corporal James Smith, Third Mounted Infantry, World War One." You'd know that even if the sword was real, the inscription was years after WWII, making it less valuable, and lessening it's voracity.
Or is this the first actual case because they suspected before there were actual bugs in the system but never found them?
Then again maybe it was just prophetic. Like NASA when the STS missions launch(ed): "3...2...1...Liftoff! [message about this mission and it's 'first' for space here]"
Keep in mind, the Mac OS X Hint about installing JBuilder is for versions beyond 7. In fact, that hint is for JB9. If you go to the macintosh forum on Borland's news group, this is all they talk about now. No real support there anymore. Yet, JBuilder 8 and 9 are able to create OS X native loaders. They just never worked until this MRJ Update.;-)
where did you hear Borland dropped Mac support because of language adherence?
Actually, I cannot reveal my source on that. Officially, Borland claims that the SDK just came too late for OS X which is a valid reason in and of itself. JBuilder has to not only have 1.4.1 for source development, JB8 and greater had to be able to run under 1.4.1. But that doesn't explain the lack of JBuilder 9 support, so it has to be something else. And that fact was confirmed to me personally. I wish I had more details, sorry. If that fact is wrong, I'd love to be corrected by someone who knows otherwise.
Also, look at what SDK OS X exposes - J2SE. It's up to the third parties like Macromedia to expose the J2EE layers on OS X. Borland wants to push J2EE as much as possible, but doesn't want to get into the J2EE design on OS X business like Macromedia has. To this day, OS X cannot support the Borland Application Server because of this. Who's fault is it? Well, if Apple could sell more XServe boxes, then maybe more third parties would take notice.
Anyway, I can't use JB7 anymore. Not sure who to blame for that. I have a TiBook 667 MHz w/1024 Megs of memory. JB7 is so slow, it's unusable. I just thought I was to blame because I didn't want to pony up the dough and upgrade to a newer TiBook. But when I opened the same project in NetBeans, I could actually get to work - even in debug mode.
Furthermore, even JBuilder 9 on Windows doesn't support the Tomcat Manager out of the box, where NetBeans does. It's a big advangage for me to be able to modify a servlet or non-JSP Java class and not have to restart Tomcat. In NetBeans, I just access the manager context and inform it that I need to restart it. Yes, I loose the sessions, but I have a way of reloading their states as well.
I don't expect even JBuilder 10 to support this functionality. It's a small but powerful feature that isn't even exposed by the IDE. Borland has a very good signal to noise ratio on features, but this is one "must have" that has never made it.
Apple had an appauling track record with Java until fairly recently...
It's still pretty bad, according to Borland. Yes, the deltas are quick, but the adherence to the actual Java Language Specification is still pretty appalling.
Apple still has the balls to show JBuilder on the main page all this time, even though they broke JB7 when 1.4.1 first came out. Because of these adherence problems and the native loader breakage (even though Apple supplied a workaround for them), Borland hasn't felt that OS X has been "prime time" so JBuilder versions 8, 9, and likely 10 will be without an OS X version - even though there are Linux and Solaris versions. I'm talking about official support, you can still force JBuilder 8, 9, and 10 to run on OS X, but Borland doesn't officially recognize it.
Thankfully, JBuilder 7 has been fixed in this Java Update from Apple. Hopefully, this will bring OS X back into the Borland fold.
Yes, Java + OS X makes me happy too. I personally have not had the issues Borland points out with the MRJ. I think Borland is crying sour grapes because of political pressure from Microsoft's.NET platform. So I said screw it and went NetBeans for a while.
I've been pretty happy with NetBeans, and have had great success at mixing platforms. I can work on the same CVS tree using JBuilder on OS X and Windows, as well as NetBeans on OS X and Windows. Just takes an Ant script to allow NetBeans to use the same project tree as JBuilder.
Check out my personal web site, coded entirely in NetBeans on Mac OS X. Umkay?
It's simple. SCO is offering the license so they can use it as evidence in court, when it gets to that. That way, they can claim damages based on all of the unlicensed clients, which they will also define. It's like they're printing their own money.
Slashdot Mirror
EA Games canceled the first version of The Sims Online, if I remember correctly. It sucked, and they didn't want to tarnish their own good name. It seems all noble and stuff, but they're just trying to make a buck, or in this case, save a buck by not shipping and marketing something that just won't sell. Not that I fault them, it's just good business to pull crap before it gets expensive.
Oh, you're right. What was I thinking.
Dude, they're talking on the phone. It's not like they're next to eachother in line to buy food stamps or something.
...hanging from the center of mass at geosynchronous orbit...
The way I read it, this is only the initial phase (38,000 km). Teathers are sent out in both directions, making the total length 100,000 km. When it's done, there's considerable force on the base.
You make a good point about where the break in the teather is made. But if more of the teather is beyond the 38,000 km mark, there's less of a chance that even a high break would cause a problem.
Oh well. So much for arm chair orbital mechanics, right?
Ok, here's another idea. Why don't they make a fleet of garbage collecting space robots that go out and find materials to make the cable on orbit? Then, they just launch the factory fleet, order them to begin work, then sit back and wait for the cable to come down in a few decades. The only real obsitcal is finding suitable materials on orbit. But there's so much junk up there, maybe it's possible.
IANAUE (I Am Not An Uber Engineer), but I should hope that they'd design the thing to have a way to eject the whole thing away from earth. If there was some problem, they could detonate explosives at the base, and the whole thing would centrifugally fly away from earth rather than fall back down.
"Parallel and Distributed Programming Using C++ provides an up-close look at how to build software that can take advantage of multiprocessor computers. Simple approaches for programming parallel virtual machines are presented, and the basics of cluster application development are explained. Through an easy-to-understand overview of multithreaded programming, this book also shows you how to write software components that work together over a network to solve problems and do work." - Amazon
--Your Friendly Neighborhood Product Placement Troll
nobody ever caught a virus from a telephone
;-) But there was always the problem of "social engineering." The process is less like a virus and more like a worm. Fancy that.
Then there was (and is) the concept of phone hacking, or phreaking. That wouldn't require a computer at all. No, it wasn't contagious to the person on the other end,
So in an alternate universe, I could see people needing a license to use a telephone. A means to track down and prosecute inappropriate usage. Why not.
From: Anthony <xxx@yyy>
Date: Fri Sep 12, 2003 6:14:34 PM US/Pacific
To: holden@netspace.net.au
Subject: Slashdot Is About To Strike
I know it's not enough time to do anything, but Slashdot is about to link to your site.
Enjoy,
Anthony
7:10:23 - 7:50:14 PM - CmdrTaco gets up off the john, horrified because the bathroom fan still isn't on.
It's funny because it rhymes, and it's about CmdrTaco pooping.
Then how the heck did the 18th Amendment get voted in under those conditions??
There might be more linux servers out there.
Hey, ether way, that's stunning news, isn't it?
I must say I am thoroughly disappointed with this book. The book's description, as well as other readers' comments led me to believe that this book would have been more than just a compilation of information that could be freely obtained at the dozens of security related web sites. Sadly, this was not the case.
The bulk of the book merely describes (mostly outdated) common
attacks/vulnerabilities, without getting into much detail why they exist and the underlying explanations on how they are exploited. As such the book reads like "For Vulnerability X, Install patch Y" without getting into more detail. Heck, even Microsoft's Security Bulletins give more info that this!
Many of the "75 Top Hack Attacks" that the book promises can be freely found online (check CERT's site).
The general impression I get from reading this book is that the author tried his best to fill up space in order to deliver an impressively thick book. Was it a requirement that he include SCREENSHOTS of various hacking tools/trojans, including step-by-step INSTALL SCREENSHOTS for the included TigerSuite software? (If you don't know how to install software then you need to develop more skills before learning about hacking!). Did he HAVE to include the useless 10 year old 'how to build a modem filter' BBS textfile (which by the way doesn't filter noise on modern modems)? Did the publisher mandate that he include 9 PAGES of Decimal-to-Hex conversion tables when you could use, say, Windows Calculator to do any needed conversions?
Another thing I disliked was that Windows XP as well as Wireless networks (802.11/WEP were glossed over) were not really covered in the sort of detail that I desired.
And, although I appreciate that a basic understanding of the x86 instruction set is required for better understanding low level security issues, I really don't see the point to Chapter 13's discussion on programming "How to Draw Circles in DOS mode" using the VESA bios interface. This is, in my opinion, not relevant considering the book's topic, so why include it? (A better choice would be explaining how the stack is used in high level languages (C, C++) and how buffer overrun hacks work). If you want to learn C, Assembly, or graphics programming buy a book dedicated to these topics. I think it's safe to say that the average reader will NOT become a programmer after reading the "Crash course in C" - it's an unreaslistic expectation.
And to top it all off, the final insult to readers is the interruption of the author's hacking experience "Intuitive Intermission" with the phrase "... to be continued in: Hack Attacks Denied, 2nd Edition". I guess both the author and publisher want you to buy both books!
My chief complaint with the book is that it doesn't seem to know who the reader is. In some areas the author gets down-and-dirty technical (x86 assembly/C programming) while in others he doesn't really explain details or just mentions things in passing (case in point: nowhere does he explain workings of a typical buffer overrun exploit, etc). Also, the author really does not give advice on how to secure or harden systems, aside from "install the update patch". For a book whose focus is security/hacking that's a pretty fatal flaw.
Like I said earlier, this book really seems to me like the author just threw any material that he could find that was remotely related to hacking and presto, one hacking book ready to ship!
If you are new to either the computer or security-related fields then perhaps this book may be of some value to you. If you are not an absolute beginner and know how to search the web, then I'd say that you probably don't need this book. Even if you do buy this book, it, like
emptylines=0; function parse_dir () { for file in $1/*; do if [ -d "$file" ]; then parse_dir $file; else while read line; do if [ "$line" = "" ]; then emptylines=$[$emptylines+1]; echo $emptylines; fi; done
It don't work none.
"What we've gone through in the last several years has caused some people to question 'Can we trust Microsoft?'" - Steve Ballmer
"I don't know what a monopoly is until somebody tells me." - Steve Ballmer
"I think it would be absolutely reckless and irresponsible for anyone to try and break up this company [Microsoft]." - Steve Ballmer
"We [Microsoft] don't have a monopoly. We have market share. There's a difference." - Steve Ballmer
"Accessible design is good design." - Steve Ballmer, Microsoft, CEO, June 13, 2001
"I have four words for you: I LOVE THIS COMPANY, YEAH!" - Steve Ballmer ballmer_dance.mpg
You can't make this stuff up.
Somehow, saying "First actual case of bug being found" seems fake to me. It's like finding cavalry sword from the first world war with the inscription, "Corporal James Smith, Third Mounted Infantry, World War One." You'd know that even if the sword was real, the inscription was years after WWII, making it less valuable, and lessening it's voracity.
Or is this the first actual case because they suspected before there were actual bugs in the system but never found them?
Then again maybe it was just prophetic. Like NASA when the STS missions launch(ed): "3...2...1...Liftoff! [message about this mission and it's 'first' for space here]"
You'd think after two decades of working at Sun, they could've found a better picture!
... ( <seinfeldian-disgust> Newman! </seinfeldian-disgust> )
Yeah, he looks like Alfred E. Newman
Keep in mind, the Mac OS X Hint about installing JBuilder is for versions beyond 7. In fact, that hint is for JB9. If you go to the macintosh forum on Borland's news group, this is all they talk about now. No real support there anymore. Yet, JBuilder 8 and 9 are able to create OS X native loaders. They just never worked until this MRJ Update. ;-)
where did you hear Borland dropped Mac support because of language adherence?
Actually, I cannot reveal my source on that. Officially, Borland claims that the SDK just came too late for OS X which is a valid reason in and of itself. JBuilder has to not only have 1.4.1 for source development, JB8 and greater had to be able to run under 1.4.1. But that doesn't explain the lack of JBuilder 9 support, so it has to be something else. And that fact was confirmed to me personally. I wish I had more details, sorry. If that fact is wrong, I'd love to be corrected by someone who knows otherwise.
Also, look at what SDK OS X exposes - J2SE. It's up to the third parties like Macromedia to expose the J2EE layers on OS X. Borland wants to push J2EE as much as possible, but doesn't want to get into the J2EE design on OS X business like Macromedia has. To this day, OS X cannot support the Borland Application Server because of this. Who's fault is it? Well, if Apple could sell more XServe boxes, then maybe more third parties would take notice.
Anyway, I can't use JB7 anymore. Not sure who to blame for that. I have a TiBook 667 MHz w/1024 Megs of memory. JB7 is so slow, it's unusable. I just thought I was to blame because I didn't want to pony up the dough and upgrade to a newer TiBook. But when I opened the same project in NetBeans, I could actually get to work - even in debug mode.
Furthermore, even JBuilder 9 on Windows doesn't support the Tomcat Manager out of the box, where NetBeans does. It's a big advangage for me to be able to modify a servlet or non-JSP Java class and not have to restart Tomcat. In NetBeans, I just access the manager context and inform it that I need to restart it. Yes, I loose the sessions, but I have a way of reloading their states as well.
I don't expect even JBuilder 10 to support this functionality. It's a small but powerful feature that isn't even exposed by the IDE. Borland has a very good signal to noise ratio on features, but this is one "must have" that has never made it.
Warning, the above code is intended for educational purposes only. Do not embed it in any web page.
Apple had an appauling track record with Java until fairly recently...
.NET platform. So I said screw it and went NetBeans for a while.
It's still pretty bad, according to Borland. Yes, the deltas are quick, but the adherence to the actual Java Language Specification is still pretty appalling.
Apple still has the balls to show JBuilder on the main page all this time, even though they broke JB7 when 1.4.1 first came out. Because of these adherence problems and the native loader breakage (even though Apple supplied a workaround for them), Borland hasn't felt that OS X has been "prime time" so JBuilder versions 8, 9, and likely 10 will be without an OS X version - even though there are Linux and Solaris versions. I'm talking about official support, you can still force JBuilder 8, 9, and 10 to run on OS X, but Borland doesn't officially recognize it.
Thankfully, JBuilder 7 has been fixed in this Java Update from Apple. Hopefully, this will bring OS X back into the Borland fold.
Yes, Java + OS X makes me happy too. I personally have not had the issues Borland points out with the MRJ. I think Borland is crying sour grapes because of political pressure from Microsoft's
I've been pretty happy with NetBeans, and have had great success at mixing platforms. I can work on the same CVS tree using JBuilder on OS X and Windows, as well as NetBeans on OS X and Windows. Just takes an Ant script to allow NetBeans to use the same project tree as JBuilder.
Check out my personal web site, coded entirely in NetBeans on Mac OS X. Umkay?
It's simple. SCO is offering the license so they can use it as evidence in court, when it gets to that. That way, they can claim damages based on all of the unlicensed clients, which they will also define. It's like they're printing their own money.
Remember, friends don't let friends claim amnesty.
Actually, the companies that matter are the small businesses. Who do you think the Fortune 500-size companies do business with?
In case the site is slow, here is a mirror.
Martin Studio Slashdot Policy
It's just an experiment.
The site is slow, here is a mirror.
Martin Studio Slashdot Policy