Motorola spokesmen suggested in an our long press conference, that it is a lesser known fact, but that every other logic gate function is possible using only XOR.
I believe it's NAND which gives you every possible gate through combinations of itself.
Beisdes, I can BOOT from floppy on any PC. Can't say the same for Zip drives.
I won't argue with you on the proprietarity of the ZIP system but they are still quite popular and widespread.
Your comment on the booting is complete nonsense. You can't boot a floppy on my system because I have that option disabled. You can boot most ATAPI sources on modern computers though, and that would include ZIP disks. In fact, there is a Slackware distribution which fits on a single ZIP disk. I haven't checked into it but IIRC it is bootable.
The click of death is a problem. I have never had it happen on any of a dozen ZIP100 drives (parallel, IDE and SCSI) I've used over the past 2 years, and they receive HEAVY use with dozens of disks each.
The media itself is very rugged. I've dropped them off a desk on to a concrete floor without a problem many times. The drives are NOT quite that rugged.:-) Jaz media can't be dropped more than 1" or you will damage them.
I would reccomend CF or Click drives myself; both have larger capacity than floppies and are rugged as hell.
Given the horribly buggy and unstable state of 2.3 or 2.4,
Do ye know from what ye speak? I've been running 2.4 on a non-overclocked SMP system for close to a month now without any instability whatsoever. This is with X, VMWare, CD burning (thus using the SCSI layer and ide-scsi abstraction/emulation module), encoding MP3 and various other processor(s) intensive tasks. Oh yeah, AND running linear "RAID" and ReiserFS. Yeah, nice and unstable... I have to reboot all the time.
Re:See what happens when you rely on NT
on
Microsoft Cracked
·
· Score: 1
On a Windows machine (95/98, not sure about NT/2000), you can go into promiscious mode without being root. Since you can go into promiscious mode, you can sniff. Viola.
True, but you (or the original AC) were talking about Unix, not Windows. You can't go into promiscious mode unless you're root on Unix. And since most systems use shadow passwords, you can't get at the hashed passwords unless you're root, either. And even if you do, most recent systems use MD5 hashed passwords so you're pretty much out of luck there too.
Mind you if you're root, I wouldn't be bothering to crack the passwords; just install another user with the same UID/GID as whomever you wanted to become. Or sniff the network. Or do just about anything, really.
Of course, the optobionics device will be out of focus since the eye focusses light on the retina and not on the silicon chip.
Why wouldn't it focus on the array? I know nothing about occular biology but I believe that the eye's focus system is a closed-loop system. i.e. you know what you want to focus on and control the lens such that what you desire to see is in focus. How else could you look at your hands and then at the wall and focus on both if the lens was a fixed-focus "device"?
It has to "mark" these bad memory sectors somewhere - I'll need to look at the thing to be more informed on HOW it marks these sectors - probably in memory.
The exact register set escapes me at the moment but x86 processors (and indeed any processor with an MMU) keeps track of which pages are there and not there in hardware. The descriptor tables are kept in memory regardless of whether they're used for marking dirty pages or bad pages.
Also, wouldn't an entire page of memory be whiped out - not just one bit? I haven't looked at what these guys have done, but I wouldn't be suprised if entire 64KB pages are affected if only one bit in that page is gone.
Yes, I would assume they are marking PAGES of memory. So 64k (I thought they were 4k? I know there's a granularity bit to set this) chunks are taken out of the memory... How is this any different than the 4k clusters being taken in your ext2 FS? 64k in a (minimum) 32M DIMM is a drop in the well.
As I said before, I think it's really cool what they have been able to do. There may be some niche areas for this program to be useful. It is not, however, a good thing (IMO) to be buying bad memory just to save a buck.
Yes, it is a cool thing and will help those who either can't afford or can't wait to get their new memory in. Personally I won't use the module myself but that is no reason to go blasting it like you have. There aren't any speed hits, there aren't any vast wodges of memory taken up by it, you say it's buggy but that remains to be seen (the patch seems simple enough)... I'm just trying to figure out why you're so upset about this.
Your arguement doesn't make sense. A machine with 500M of usable RAM works just as good as a machine with 512M in almost every scenario. That's completely unlike your 5-working-cylinder car analogy.
What kind of warranties will the end user get for the memory? what kind of performance is eaten by this program? does the memory run up to spec? will it still work in 2 months?
There is no performance hit; the pages are marked bad and not used, not continuously tested. It's the same as marking a chunk of memory as invalid (causing a page fault on access) but never marking it valid again since it's never swapped back in my the vmm. I'm not well versed enough to know if memory with bad sections will get progressively worse but everything else you've mentioned is silliness.
Now what about something to make me burn less coasters?;)
Stop kicking the computer
Use better media
Use a better CDR
Try not to do anything super CPU or disk intensive while burning*
I use probably the cheapest media available (won't burn right at 4x), use an Yamaha IDE CDR with a 2MB cache and I've only ever burnt one coaster.. And I haven't a clue how it happened. Law of avaerages I guess.:-)
Seriously though... something's really wrong if you're burning lots of coasters.
* I've never had a problem with this since Linux and cdrecord seem to keep cdrecord as a high priority both CPU and I/O wise, but maybe I'm just lucky
I'm not American and as such am I not under the control of your laws.
America isn't the only country with stupid laws (and even with DMCA, it is only supported by one state IIRC?), but America does seem to be the only country which thinks that its laws apply to every country on the planet.
Security through obscurity does work, though. In combination with other measures, it can prevent an intruder from knowing which mechanisms you are using to protect something.
My apologies -- I am a supporter of security through obscurity as another layer of security for a device. I am vehemently against it as the sole security measure used in a device or system, however.
An example in the physical world would be a safe. If I safe cracker doesn't have a diagram showing the internals of the safe, he doesn't know precise places he can drill to defeat the lock mechanism.
This is an example of security through obscurity as an additional measure, which is something I agree with. My comments history doesn't go back far enough to a discussion I had with signal11 (I think) on this very example.
You folks can bleat your mantra "Security through obscurity does not work" all you want. Security through obscurity is only a component of any well designed security mechanism, and as a part of the whole, it DOES work.
I think we're on the same side of this battle... In your original post, you came across as the type who prefered to have ONLY security through obscurity. I see this is not true.
You just want everything to be Open Source and can't bear the thought that there's code out there you're not allowed to crawl through.
You know me that well, do ye?
I happen to prefer reverse engineering systems and breaking security measures. I enjoy disassembling and keeping notes and the feeling you get when you finally understand someone's system without their help. Don't go painting me up as you think you know me; Instead take a look at who I am and act accordingly.
Open source is cool, I'll admit it. However as someone who writes proprietary firmware and engineers proprietary hardware designs I understand and enjoy both sides of the arguement.
So they'd be offering exceptions to the law based on profession as opposed to, say, an applications by application basis (nMap would be kosher, but Divine Retribution wouldn't be)?. While the proposal on the whole is idiotic and insane, they can't possibly expect to limit people based on what job they currently have.
If so then the solution is simple: start up your own business and make sure you administrate at least one computer.:-)
I don't think this will make it into law but as someone who makes a living through research and development (which includes reverse-engineering, hacking, whatever you want to call it) I will fight this as best I can. Being in Canada I don't have to worry about EU and US law, although I do have to worry about our own braindead government and extradition.:-)
Security though obscurity does not work in much the same way as believing that you can fly by flapping your arms doesn't work. Or the same way that Trade Secrets are only protected so long as everyone keeps their mouth shut and nobody finds out how to do it on their own.
An example: Your have your box accepting telnet on port 22 instead of 23. That's security through obscurity. If I happen across it and find telnet reponding on an odd port, that just intensifies my curiosity. What are you trying to hide by covering it with such a thin veil of protection?
Another example: Your encrypt your sex diary by XORing with the word "sex". You don't tell anyone that you XOR it but you instead say "I've got strong security on my sex diary." Now someone like me comes along and plays around and breaks it with a lucky guess or three. What safety did your security through obscurity provide? Absolutely none.
If you're gonna do something, do it right. That includes writing software to be free from bugs and "unplanned features". If you rely on your system to be secret enough to not warrant any stronger security measures, you deserve to be rooted.
This is precisely why I make local copies of several of my favourite reference sites and put them on CD. I'm sick and fucking tired of sites disappearing on me when they were a great resource. I've got stuff from 1992 hanging around somewhere, just watiting for the time when I need that bit of information that I had the instinct to back up before it disappeared from the face of the local BBSes.
Maybe I'm just an information packrat but I'm sick to the teeth of shit disappearing on me. The pages of the 'net need to be written in indellible ink.
Why should anyone care that they don't match MS tit for tat?
I never said matching them exactly, but rather in terms of usability, integration and features.
How did they fail?
StarOffice: Huge, Slow, MDI.
KOffice/Gnome-Office: Not done, can't comment quite yet
iOffice2k: Everything is proprietary
Corel: They haven't had a good word processor since WordPerfect 5.1. Unfortunatley they're too bull-headed to realize it. Their office suite is similar in this regard.
Siag Office: no groupware
Applix: Java everything. Did I mention slow?
So you see, I have tried many different things; I'm not talking out of my ass. Some of these office suites have the ability to be great. At this point in time however none of them are capable of replacing MS Office in the workplace.
So what does that bring us now? StarOffice, the bloated hungry pig of an app (haven't checked the opensource release, hopefully that changes and they REMOVE THAT FUCKING MDI SCHEME or at least make it an option), KOffice and Gnome-Office, Applix, Corel Office, iOffice2000, Siag Office, and who else have I missed?
I love Open Source. I love selection. None of these guys get it right though; they all stop short of giving a fully integrated system which at least matches MS Office, let alone beat it. I realize that some of these aren't quite done yet but some have also been a work in progress since they've been released. Come on... If you're gonna do something, go whole hog, don't do a half-assed job about it!
Amazon.co.uk must be different to the American branch... I've had zero spam from them so far.
I don't think so... I have bought about half a dozen books and a couple movies from the American Amazon and I haven't received a single spam. Not a one.
touches his veneer desk and hopes that it is good enough...
The problem with NAT* is that it doesn't work well for any protocol that includes the IP in the data. Protocols like ICQ, IRC, et al, while buggered because they do this, cause a world of pain with NAT. IP Masq gets around this with special modules that recognize the packets and modify the data as well but that's a hack.
Other protocols, like non-passive FTP, require stateful NAT machines or more kludgy hacks. "Ok now, which internal IP just connected to anime.pr0n.net?" Incoming connections don't work at all unless you reserve the port on the NAT box and forward it off. Even then no two internal IPs can use the same port. Again, things like Apache and proftpd have ways around this but again, they're hacks on top of a system that happen to work for that particular system.
NAT isn't an end-all, be-all solution. It works amazingly well for some things, but not for others.
* - I'm leaving out many-to-many NAT here because that would require the NAT machine to listen on just as many IPs as having the machines behind the NAT on the network in the first place.
Qnx Neutrino supports Mips, PowerPC, x86 and I heard about Arm/StrongArm support but haven't seen much about it. Their latest releases are x86 only but I hope they don't completely drop the other architechtures for Qnx RTP and beyond.
My mistake... I was certain that it was x86 only. This is good if it isn't!
For smp in QNX RtP check out http://staff.qnx.com/~cdm/smp/.
How about a working link? The address gets redirected to http://www.qnx.com/company/hr/index.html~cdm/smp/ which just doesn't work at all. I tried playing with various combinations but haven't got to anything except for a careers page.
powering that evil Unisys companies line of diskless 80186 based network computers called the Icon
I've got a couple of them I'd like to hack on. When I ripped it apart I noticed the 80186 and the token ring-ish network and whatnot but I've been totally unsuccessful in getting schematics or i/o maps of the damn things. Unisys doesn't acknowledge they exist.
There just isn't that much left to dazzle us with.
How about something on the order of a 10uS* hard realtime latency? Or a microkernel architecture which blows away kernel modules?
Don't get me wrong; I'm a big Linux fan, but RTLinux (and the various other realtime variants) don't hold a candle to what QNX can do in that arena. QNX is x86 only though, and the various uClinuxes are for tons of different processors, much cheaper processors.
* - I believe this is the number. I don't think I'm far off with this number if it is wrong.
Goddamn it I forgot to close a tag. <sigh> And now the anti-spam/anti-lamer filter is kicking in.
He's a troll. And now you've bit on his hook twice!
No, he's not. Since when is trying to talk to someone considered having been trolled? Your post is more the trollish kind.
Trolls are usually bright people and tend to disguise their trolls as informed, opinionated posts with which they lure people into an angry, knee-jerk reply. "FP" isn't a troll, no matter how hard you try and say it is, and my response was neither angry nor knee-jerk.
So, considering that your post is likely the troll and not his, consider this my non angry, non knee-jerk reply "bite".
Slashdot Mirror
Motorola spokesmen suggested in an our long press conference, that it is a lesser known fact, but that every other logic gate function is possible using only XOR.
I believe it's NAND which gives you every possible gate through combinations of itself.
Beisdes, I can BOOT from floppy on any PC. Can't say the same for Zip drives.
I won't argue with you on the proprietarity of the ZIP system but they are still quite popular and widespread.
Your comment on the booting is complete nonsense. You can't boot a floppy on my system because I have that option disabled. You can boot most ATAPI sources on modern computers though, and that would include ZIP disks. In fact, there is a Slackware distribution which fits on a single ZIP disk. I haven't checked into it but IIRC it is bootable.
The click of death is a problem. I have never had it happen on any of a dozen ZIP100 drives (parallel, IDE and SCSI) I've used over the past 2 years, and they receive HEAVY use with dozens of disks each.
The media itself is very rugged. I've dropped them off a desk on to a concrete floor without a problem many times. The drives are NOT quite that rugged. :-) Jaz media can't be dropped more than 1" or you will damage them.
I would reccomend CF or Click drives myself; both have larger capacity than floppies and are rugged as hell.
Given the horribly buggy and unstable state of 2.3 or 2.4,
Do ye know from what ye speak? I've been running 2.4 on a non-overclocked SMP system for close to a month now without any instability whatsoever. This is with X, VMWare, CD burning (thus using the SCSI layer and ide-scsi abstraction/emulation module), encoding MP3 and various other processor(s) intensive tasks. Oh yeah, AND running linear "RAID" and ReiserFS. Yeah, nice and unstable... I have to reboot all the time.
On a Windows machine (95/98, not sure about NT/2000), you can go into promiscious mode without being root. Since you can go into promiscious mode, you can sniff. Viola.
True, but you (or the original AC) were talking about Unix, not Windows. You can't go into promiscious mode unless you're root on Unix. And since most systems use shadow passwords, you can't get at the hashed passwords unless you're root, either. And even if you do, most recent systems use MD5 hashed passwords so you're pretty much out of luck there too.
Mind you if you're root, I wouldn't be bothering to crack the passwords; just install another user with the same UID/GID as whomever you wanted to become. Or sniff the network. Or do just about anything, really.
Of course, the optobionics device will be out of focus since the eye focusses light on the retina and not on the silicon chip.
Why wouldn't it focus on the array? I know nothing about occular biology but I believe that the eye's focus system is a closed-loop system. i.e. you know what you want to focus on and control the lens such that what you desire to see is in focus. How else could you look at your hands and then at the wall and focus on both if the lens was a fixed-focus "device"?
Don't know much about x86 architecture, do you?
It has to "mark" these bad memory sectors somewhere - I'll need to look at the thing to be more informed on HOW it marks these sectors - probably in memory.
The exact register set escapes me at the moment but x86 processors (and indeed any processor with an MMU) keeps track of which pages are there and not there in hardware. The descriptor tables are kept in memory regardless of whether they're used for marking dirty pages or bad pages.
Also, wouldn't an entire page of memory be whiped out - not just one bit? I haven't looked at what these guys have done, but I wouldn't be suprised if entire 64KB pages are affected if only one bit in that page is gone.
Yes, I would assume they are marking PAGES of memory. So 64k (I thought they were 4k? I know there's a granularity bit to set this) chunks are taken out of the memory... How is this any different than the 4k clusters being taken in your ext2 FS? 64k in a (minimum) 32M DIMM is a drop in the well.
As I said before, I think it's really cool what they have been able to do. There may be some niche areas for this program to be useful. It is not, however, a good thing (IMO) to be buying bad memory just to save a buck.
Yes, it is a cool thing and will help those who either can't afford or can't wait to get their new memory in. Personally I won't use the module myself but that is no reason to go blasting it like you have. There aren't any speed hits, there aren't any vast wodges of memory taken up by it, you say it's buggy but that remains to be seen (the patch seems simple enough)... I'm just trying to figure out why you're so upset about this.
Your arguement doesn't make sense. A machine with 500M of usable RAM works just as good as a machine with 512M in almost every scenario. That's completely unlike your 5-working-cylinder car analogy.
What kind of warranties will the end user get for the memory? what kind of performance is eaten by this program? does the memory run up to spec? will it still work in 2 months?
There is no performance hit; the pages are marked bad and not used, not continuously tested. It's the same as marking a chunk of memory as invalid (causing a page fault on access) but never marking it valid again since it's never swapped back in my the vmm. I'm not well versed enough to know if memory with bad sections will get progressively worse but everything else you've mentioned is silliness.
Now what about something to make me burn less coasters? ;)
I use probably the cheapest media available (won't burn right at 4x), use an Yamaha IDE CDR with a 2MB cache and I've only ever burnt one coaster.. And I haven't a clue how it happened. Law of avaerages I guess. :-)
Seriously though... something's really wrong if you're burning lots of coasters.
* I've never had a problem with this since Linux and cdrecord seem to keep cdrecord as a high priority both CPU and I/O wise, but maybe I'm just lucky
Wrong. You get the full protection of the DMCA.
Bzzt! Sorry, thanks for playing.
I'm not American and as such am I not under the control of your laws.
America isn't the only country with stupid laws (and even with DMCA, it is only supported by one state IIRC?), but America does seem to be the only country which thinks that its laws apply to every country on the planet.
Security through obscurity does work, though. In combination with other measures, it can prevent an intruder from knowing which mechanisms you are using to protect something.
My apologies -- I am a supporter of security through obscurity as another layer of security for a device. I am vehemently against it as the sole security measure used in a device or system, however.
An example in the physical world would be a safe. If I safe cracker doesn't have a diagram showing the internals of the safe, he doesn't know precise places he can drill to defeat the lock mechanism.
This is an example of security through obscurity as an additional measure, which is something I agree with. My comments history doesn't go back far enough to a discussion I had with signal11 (I think) on this very example.
You folks can bleat your mantra "Security through obscurity does not work" all you want. Security through obscurity is only a component of any well designed security mechanism, and as a part of the whole, it DOES work.
I think we're on the same side of this battle... In your original post, you came across as the type who prefered to have ONLY security through obscurity. I see this is not true.
You just want everything to be Open Source and can't bear the thought that there's code out there you're not allowed to crawl through.
You know me that well, do ye?
I happen to prefer reverse engineering systems and breaking security measures. I enjoy disassembling and keeping notes and the feeling you get when you finally understand someone's system without their help. Don't go painting me up as you think you know me; Instead take a look at who I am and act accordingly.
Open source is cool, I'll admit it. However as someone who writes proprietary firmware and engineers proprietary hardware designs I understand and enjoy both sides of the arguement.
So they'd be offering exceptions to the law based on profession as opposed to, say, an applications by application basis (nMap would be kosher, but Divine Retribution wouldn't be)?. While the proposal on the whole is idiotic and insane, they can't possibly expect to limit people based on what job they currently have.
If so then the solution is simple: start up your own business and make sure you administrate at least one computer. :-)
I don't think this will make it into law but as someone who makes a living through research and development (which includes reverse-engineering, hacking, whatever you want to call it) I will fight this as best I can. Being in Canada I don't have to worry about EU and US law, although I do have to worry about our own braindead government and extradition. :-)
How does security through obscurity NOT work?
At the risk of feeding a troll...
Security though obscurity does not work in much the same way as believing that you can fly by flapping your arms doesn't work. Or the same way that Trade Secrets are only protected so long as everyone keeps their mouth shut and nobody finds out how to do it on their own.
An example: Your have your box accepting telnet on port 22 instead of 23. That's security through obscurity. If I happen across it and find telnet reponding on an odd port, that just intensifies my curiosity. What are you trying to hide by covering it with such a thin veil of protection?
Another example: Your encrypt your sex diary by XORing with the word "sex". You don't tell anyone that you XOR it but you instead say "I've got strong security on my sex diary." Now someone like me comes along and plays around and breaks it with a lucky guess or three. What safety did your security through obscurity provide? Absolutely none.
If you're gonna do something, do it right. That includes writing software to be free from bugs and "unplanned features". If you rely on your system to be secret enough to not warrant any stronger security measures, you deserve to be rooted.
Were there any mirrors ?
This is precisely why I make local copies of several of my favourite reference sites and put them on CD. I'm sick and fucking tired of sites disappearing on me when they were a great resource. I've got stuff from 1992 hanging around somewhere, just watiting for the time when I need that bit of information that I had the instinct to back up before it disappeared from the face of the local BBSes.
Maybe I'm just an information packrat but I'm sick to the teeth of shit disappearing on me. The pages of the 'net need to be written in indellible ink.
I don't know about 13 year old kids, but I spend quite a bit of time looking at goatse.cx.
If you think that's cool you should take a look at www.dolphinsex.org.
Why should anyone care that they don't match MS tit for tat?
I never said matching them exactly, but rather in terms of usability, integration and features.
How did they fail?
- StarOffice: Huge, Slow, MDI.
- KOffice/Gnome-Office: Not done, can't comment quite yet
- iOffice2k: Everything is proprietary
- Corel: They haven't had a good word processor since WordPerfect 5.1. Unfortunatley they're too bull-headed to realize it. Their office suite is similar in this regard.
- Siag Office: no groupware
- Applix: Java everything. Did I mention slow?
So you see, I have tried many different things; I'm not talking out of my ass. Some of these office suites have the ability to be great. At this point in time however none of them are capable of replacing MS Office in the workplace.Yet Another Office Suite?
So what does that bring us now? StarOffice, the bloated hungry pig of an app (haven't checked the opensource release, hopefully that changes and they REMOVE THAT FUCKING MDI SCHEME or at least make it an option), KOffice and Gnome-Office, Applix, Corel Office, iOffice2000, Siag Office, and who else have I missed?
I love Open Source. I love selection. None of these guys get it right though; they all stop short of giving a fully integrated system which at least matches MS Office, let alone beat it. I realize that some of these aren't quite done yet but some have also been a work in progress since they've been released. Come on... If you're gonna do something, go whole hog, don't do a half-assed job about it!
Amazon.co.uk must be different to the American branch... I've had zero spam from them so far.
I don't think so... I have bought about half a dozen books and a couple movies from the American Amazon and I haven't received a single spam. Not a one.
touches his veneer desk and hopes that it is good enough...
(I once was "Ungrounded Lightning Rod" but slashdot slashed off my " Rod". Is that why they call Linux a "Unix wor
I'm sorry, but this is just so damn funny... It's got to be one of the best .sigs I've seen in ages. :-)
The problem with NAT* is that it doesn't work well for any protocol that includes the IP in the data. Protocols like ICQ, IRC, et al, while buggered because they do this, cause a world of pain with NAT. IP Masq gets around this with special modules that recognize the packets and modify the data as well but that's a hack.
Other protocols, like non-passive FTP, require stateful NAT machines or more kludgy hacks. "Ok now, which internal IP just connected to anime.pr0n.net?" Incoming connections don't work at all unless you reserve the port on the NAT box and forward it off. Even then no two internal IPs can use the same port. Again, things like Apache and proftpd have ways around this but again, they're hacks on top of a system that happen to work for that particular system.
NAT isn't an end-all, be-all solution. It works amazingly well for some things, but not for others.
* - I'm leaving out many-to-many NAT here because that would require the NAT machine to listen on just as many IPs as having the machines behind the NAT on the network in the first place.
Qnx Neutrino supports Mips, PowerPC, x86 and I heard about Arm/StrongArm support but haven't seen much about it. Their latest releases are x86 only but I hope they don't completely drop the other architechtures for Qnx RTP and beyond.
My mistake... I was certain that it was x86 only. This is good if it isn't!
For smp in QNX RtP check out http://staff.qnx.com/~cdm/smp/.
How about a working link? The address gets redirected to http://www.qnx.com/company/hr/index.html~cdm/smp/ which just doesn't work at all. I tried playing with various combinations but haven't got to anything except for a careers page.
powering that evil Unisys companies line of diskless 80186 based network computers called the Icon
I've got a couple of them I'd like to hack on. When I ripped it apart I noticed the 80186 and the token ring-ish network and whatnot but I've been totally unsuccessful in getting schematics or i/o maps of the damn things. Unisys doesn't acknowledge they exist.
Does anyone have any information on them?
reason it IS making inroads is because it is free
No it isn't, at least not for commercial applications. It's a free eval and to dink around with, which is good enough for me.
Even in the commercial aspect it is a lot freer than most alternatives because it is royalty free, which is a big bonus.
There just isn't that much left to dazzle us with.
How about something on the order of a 10uS* hard realtime latency? Or a microkernel architecture which blows away kernel modules?
Don't get me wrong; I'm a big Linux fan, but RTLinux (and the various other realtime variants) don't hold a candle to what QNX can do in that arena. QNX is x86 only though, and the various uClinuxes are for tons of different processors, much cheaper processors.
* - I believe this is the number. I don't think I'm far off with this number if it is wrong.
Goddamn it I forgot to close a tag. <sigh> And now the anti-spam/anti-lamer filter is kicking in.
He's a troll.
And now you've bit on his hook twice!
No, he's not. Since when is trying to talk to someone considered having been trolled? Your post is more the trollish kind.
Trolls are usually bright people and tend to disguise their trolls as informed, opinionated posts with which they lure people into an angry, knee-jerk reply. "FP" isn't a troll, no matter how hard you try and say it is, and my response was neither angry nor knee-jerk.
So, considering that your post is likely the troll and not his, consider this my non angry, non knee-jerk reply "bite".