> if we saw how much of our income really went to the government, then we'd flip > out and be all "holy shit, taxes are too high!" He might be on to something...
This is why I truly appreciate Brian Mulroney.
If nothing else, he got rid of a hidden, difficult-to-navigate tax and replaced with a tax that is clearly visible at the cash register. Harper, on the other hand, has earned by disdain because I know TANSAAFL.
I think ALL tax, wherever possible, should be a separate line item on the bill. Especially fuel taxes. Gas is, what, 30-40 cents a litre before taxes? Have you ever noticed there is a separate line item for tax on liquor in Ontario (sometimes)?
Another thing, I think ALL people should read their pay stubs. My stupid-assed kid won't even check to see if they've added her hours correctly! Every two weeks, she checks her bank balance and it's like Christmas! No idea what's coming from her job, just "oooh, look! I have money again!"
The right PDA (e.g. iPhone) could also be a path of vulnerability -- he could log into the internal wifi network, and get hacked over the cellular network.
A SIM card swap is not a hardware modification. A SIM card is (basically) a memory card -- it is a purposefully-removable item. SIM stands for Subscriber Identity Module. Changing a SIM card is a normal operation for a GSM phone, and the only difference between Apple's phone and others' is that the SIM tray needs to be popped out with a paperclip... most phones hide it under the battery or in a tray that you can claw out with a fingernail.
The linked software, when run and activated unlocks the phone. This means that the phone will allow itself to be used with a different network's SIM.
> I generally don't take people's word for gospel when they oversimplify issues and > call people a dumbass in the middle of a civil, logical conversation.
Call me a bigot, but I call people dumbasses when it's apparent (to me) that they have difficulty stringing together coherent thoughts.
I don't think I've even seen ONE reference to ONE person EVER modifying their iPhone so that they could monkey with the hardware. Virtually EVERYONE wants to modify it so that they can run arbitrary software on it / use it on another network. Whether the hardware mods are required to achieve this goal is orthogonal to your original claim. The fact of the matter is, modifying the hardware is no-one-that-I-can-think-of's goal. People just want to use the phone as a general computing platform and/or use it on a different network.
> You can't unlock the iPhone with a software only solution.
Tell you what. Mail me your iPhone and seal the hell out of the case. I'll send it back to you unlocked.
If the seal is broken, I'll also send you $500.
If the seal is unbroken, you can send ME $5000.
Deal?
> You have to physically hack your iPhone by opening it up and > add/remove/alter electronic components to do so.
Even the original, hardware-assisted unlock did not add or remove elctronic components. In fact, the only modification that was made was raising one of the address lines so that the CPU would read memory in an unprotected area during boot up, allowing arbitrary code to be executed. This is a temporary modification and requires little more than a steady hand and an ultra-sharp paperclip. The current unlock is the same, except the arbitrary code is executed by means of a buffer overrun. That's right.
> You shouldn't be so quick with the "dumbass" moniker
> One of the videos posted on YouTube actually require a soldering iron > for cyrin' out loud. How is that NOT tweaking the electronics?
You know, if I posted a video on YouTube of me smashing a car window with a brick so that I could hotwire it -- would that imply that ALL vehicles are stolen by smashing the window? Or would it imply that ONE way to achieve that goal was to smash the window?
> How is that NOT tweaking the electronics?
Finally, I did NOT say that people were not tweaking the electronics. I stated that that was not their GOAL. Their GOAL is to be able to run arbitrary software on the phone.
I think, perhaps before you run off at the mouth, that you should either become technically competent in the field you're talking about OR increase your reading comprehension. Both would be nice, but I think either would suffice.
Nobody wants to tweak the electronics of the iPhone, you dumbass, they want to intall their own software on it.
Hey, if you bought a Dell laptop and put Linux on it, then the screen broke.. Would you expect the screen to be replaced under warranty? Or would you expect Dell to tell you to shove it up your ass?
Can you imagine the water cooler conversation about Pyblosxom? How the hell are they supposed to go back and google about it? That'd be like trying to google for the symbol that represents the artist formerly known as Prince.
I mean, really, WTF. They might as well have named it slakdfjalskdjflaskjdf!
An educated guess? (I haven't used either, but AM in the industry) -- not really.
Except for the nice tight integration with pointy-hair-endorsed mail systems, of course. There is nothing like the crack from a berry that originates from your OWN internal mail server and scheduler. They even call it "Blackberry Enterprise Server" to make sure it is fully buzzword compliant.
Oh yes, one other minor detail, RIM has managed to work out fantastic data deals with many carriers -- or rather convince them to offer them to their customers -- such that data to/from Blackberry e-mail servers is virtually free in some cases..
I'm suprised Google doesn't offer push notification of new emails. There must be a way to do this, but I haven't looked carefully at what SMS interfaces are available from J2ME.
- IIRC, HTTP bandwidth is "reduced" at the BB gateway by simplifying the HTML
- E-mail reading bandwidth is lower than traditional POP3 or IMAP implementations because of the BB gateway. It sends the message in parts, rather than the whole shebang. For example, say you get a message with a 10MB attachment. BB gateway sends (IIRC) 16KB down. That should be enough to know if you want the other ((10 * 1024) - 16) KB sent to your mobile. Chances are you don't.
I almost take back most of my post. "Almost", because, while I'm technically correct, the cases which break the Boehm (and other C) garbage collectors really have no business in 99% of C code, and can certainly be designed around if garbage collection were chosen as a memory management technique at the outset.
I actually read that page (or one like it) about 10 years ago. But I was too green back then to fully understand it, and so I promptly forgot about it.
Interestingly enough, now I know where the Macromedia guys got their ideas for the Actionscript (cum Tamarin) garbage collector. It's really quite a lot like the Boehm collector and other tweaks described in some of the linked papers. They truly have stood on the shoulders of giants.
I guess it goes to show -- no matter HOW MANY C tricks you know, there is always some guy out there the net with one that'll blow your socks off. Thanks!
C has no concept of a finalize/destruct, hence there is NO WAY (save the above Tamarin-referenced stack-walking machismo) to reclaim memory without the programmer instructing the program to do so. The C runtime simply does not have enough "knowledge" to implement garbage collection.
For example, please explain how you would implement a garbage collector to catch this:
(void)hello(); [/ecode]..that's right, there is NO WAY your_malloc() can *possibly* know that the memory returned to hello() is no longer needed for anything. The programmer MUST call your_free() on the value returned from hello().
Now, it's certainly possible for the programmer to write something (that he calls) which helps to automate this. An excellent example is the memory pool allocation scheme used in APR (apache runtime). But, the programmer must call apr_pool_destroy() to destroy what he got from apr_pool_alloc(), or the program will (gasp) leak.
Another -- completely different -- example is the garbage collector used to implement Spidermonkey. You could (if you were feeling totally insane) use it as a garbage collector for your C code. But none of your C program's memory would be freed once you rooted an object in the gc-thing tree, unless you did something to cause it to fall out of javascript scope. Again, the C programmer must take explicit action [albeit not necessarily on an alloc-by-alloc basis] to cause memory to be freed.
Just allocate a giant static array of bytes. Then write a routine which allows to indicate which of those bytes are currently allocated, and which are free for use by bits of your code.
Just don't call the giant array m. Call it, say, n. Then your code could call nalloc() to get memory.
An added bonus is that that the FIRST time you used the memory, it would be initialized to zeroes. You could write some really awesome code relying on that side effect!
> What's so special about memory management that you can't encapsulate > it in a dedicated module, and abstract it away in the form of, say, > a garbage collector?
You're kidding, right?
The ONLY garbage collector that sort-of works the way you're suggesting -- and I mean ONLY -- was written by some guys at macromedia with extremely brass balls. I mean, big ones, that hit your knees when you're walking and trip you if you're trying to run fast.
Download the source for Tamarin. You'll see what I mean.
In the meantime, think about this ONE problem: How can you tell in C if a pointer points to memory which can safetly be freed?
People these days turn their noses up a T1, but lemme tell ya - I'll take symmetric moderate bandwidth with LOW latency over high bandwidth asymmetric crap-ass backchannel high-latency ADSL shit *any day*. Even worse is that effing "wireless broadband" they're selling these days.
Throw in a squid proxy, and that'll be a *nice* connection for all 25 people -- assuming they are reading e-mail, surfing the 'net, and doing anything but gnutella or bit-torrent. Some traffic shaping should even make these usable, albeit slow during busy-hour. Even 2 or 3 P2P users won't destroy a T1, 200k per P2P client is acceptable and still leaves half the T1 empty for general purposes surfing.
Once upon a time, my office had 3 meg wireless and 768k SDSL (synchronous DSL over dry copper). I chose the SDSL for my general-purpose surfing and liked it a LOT more than the wireless connection. Now we run the whole office and development lab over T1, and frankly, there's more than enough bandwidth to go around.
I can believe that. I once coded for 53 hours straight. Once you get past 35 or so, it seems like you can go forever, as long as somebody will get you more coffee. But you know, I also felt very.. surreal.., and had a hard time breathing and my heart beat 10,000 times a minute all during the trip from the computer chair to wherever it was I slept. It wasn't my house, that was too far away. I actually got lost and forgot where I was, all I could see was emacs.
In unrelated hilarity, that code still runs, without so much as a recompile, nearly ten years later.
> I personally never found it much of a burden to enter a license key.
I actually don't mind, as long as the license key can be copied and pasted easily. There is nothing more annoying than a serial not pasting because the text field is the wrong size and the cursor doesn't jump, or it DOES jump but it reads spaces as "valid" characters, argh, that sort of thing.
I suppose the same effect could be accomplished by more diligent operation of serialz web sitez.
That worked because you were stealing RAM below "intended" for certain other things, like video cards, SCSI BIOSes, etc.
Originally, address 9fff:ffff was supposed to be the top of memory, but you could move that around. Just like moving the top or bottom of BASIC on a Commodore 64. Nothing special about the memory, it just has to be contiguous, installed, and unused.
Anyhow. The A000 block was used for VGA memory. But, if you didn't have a VGA card, and you could slide the top of DOS memory to 0xafff:ffff, you got another 128K of conventional RAM. Assume your high mem area was actually populated (e.g. you had 1024KB or more RAM installed, excluding LIM EMS cards).
B000 was for MDA (hercules) video. B800 was for CGA. C800 for your hard disk controller. (remember, debug g=c800:5?)
I think SCSI controllers usually wound up around e000, and the system BIOS around f000. But it's, ah, been a while.
Re:Back when people could actually code..
on
DOS 5 Upgrade Video
·
· Score: 1
HA!
My 6-node BBS ran with a Cyrix 486 DLC over clocked to 42 MHz! But it did start out as a 386/25.
How did you get COM5 and COM6 working? I mangled the address lines on an ISA serial card for mine and snaked over the 16-bit IRQs from a different slot. BNU FOSSIL.
Did you have two monitors going? I used to run real work from VGA and the board from the hercules card. Also handy when playing with Turbo Pascal.
Slashdot Mirror
> if we saw how much of our income really went to the government, then we'd flip
> out and be all "holy shit, taxes are too high!" He might be on to something...
This is why I truly appreciate Brian Mulroney.
If nothing else, he got rid of a hidden, difficult-to-navigate tax and replaced with a tax that is clearly visible at the cash register. Harper, on the other hand, has earned by disdain because I know TANSAAFL.
I think ALL tax, wherever possible, should be a separate line item on the bill. Especially fuel taxes. Gas is, what, 30-40 cents a litre before taxes? Have you ever noticed there is a separate line item for tax on liquor in Ontario (sometimes)?
Another thing, I think ALL people should read their pay stubs. My stupid-assed kid won't even check to see if they've added her hours correctly! Every two weeks, she checks her bank balance and it's like Christmas! No idea what's coming from her job, just "oooh, look! I have money again!"
*argh* !!!
The right PDA (e.g. iPhone) could also be a path of vulnerability -- he could log into the internal wifi network, and get hacked over the cellular network.
I think they got rid of Nixie in 1974. Presumably, he took his tube with him.
Although a Whitehouse aide may have saved some of his emissions in a safe-deposit box somewhere.
A SIM card swap is not a hardware modification. A SIM card is (basically) a memory card -- it is a purposefully-removable item. SIM stands for Subscriber Identity Module. Changing a SIM card is a normal operation for a GSM phone, and the only difference between Apple's phone and others' is that the SIM tray needs to be popped out with a paperclip... most phones hide it under the battery or in a tray that you can claw out with a fingernail.
The linked software, when run and activated unlocks the phone. This means that the phone will allow itself to be used with a different network's SIM.
> I generally don't take people's word for gospel when they oversimplify issues and
> call people a dumbass in the middle of a civil, logical conversation.
Call me a bigot, but I call people dumbasses when it's apparent (to me) that they have difficulty stringing together coherent thoughts.
I don't think I've even seen ONE reference to ONE person EVER modifying their iPhone so that they could monkey with the hardware. Virtually EVERYONE wants to modify it so that they can run arbitrary software on it / use it on another network. Whether the hardware mods are required to achieve this goal is orthogonal to your original claim. The fact of the matter is, modifying the hardware is no-one-that-I-can-think-of's goal. People just want to use the phone as a general computing platform and/or use it on a different network.
> You can't unlock the iPhone with a software only solution.
Tell you what. Mail me your iPhone and seal the hell out of the case. I'll send it back to you unlocked.
If the seal is broken, I'll also send you $500.
If the seal is unbroken, you can send ME $5000.
Deal?
> You have to physically hack your iPhone by opening it up and
> add/remove/alter electronic components to do so.
Even the original, hardware-assisted unlock did not add or remove elctronic components. In fact, the only modification that was made was raising one of the address lines so that the CPU would read memory in an unprotected area during boot up, allowing arbitrary code to be executed. This is a temporary modification and requires little more than a steady hand and an ultra-sharp paperclip. The current unlock is the same, except the arbitrary code is executed by means of a buffer overrun. That's right.
> You shouldn't be so quick with the "dumbass" moniker
Really? You wanna ask us again what a brick is?
> One of the videos posted on YouTube actually require a soldering iron
> for cyrin' out loud. How is that NOT tweaking the electronics?
You know, if I posted a video on YouTube of me smashing a car window with a brick so that I could hotwire it -- would that imply that ALL vehicles are stolen by smashing the window? Or would it imply that ONE way to achieve that goal was to smash the window?
> How is that NOT tweaking the electronics?
Finally, I did NOT say that people were not tweaking the electronics. I stated that that was not their GOAL. Their GOAL is to be able to run arbitrary software on the phone.
I think, perhaps before you run off at the mouth, that you should either become technically competent in the field you're talking about OR increase your reading comprehension. Both would be nice, but I think either would suffice.
Nobody wants to tweak the electronics of the iPhone, you dumbass, they want to intall their own software on it.
Hey, if you bought a Dell laptop and put Linux on it, then the screen broke.. Would you expect the screen to be replaced under warranty? Or would you expect Dell to tell you to shove it up your ass?
Can you imagine the water cooler conversation about Pyblosxom? How the hell are they supposed to go back and google about it? That'd be like trying to google for the symbol that represents the artist formerly known as Prince.
I mean, really, WTF. They might as well have named it slakdfjalskdjflaskjdf!
An educated guess? (I haven't used either, but AM in the industry) -- not really.
Except for the nice tight integration with pointy-hair-endorsed mail systems, of course. There is nothing like the crack from a berry that originates from your OWN internal mail server and scheduler. They even call it "Blackberry Enterprise Server" to make sure it is fully buzzword compliant.
Oh yes, one other minor detail, RIM has managed to work out fantastic data deals with many carriers -- or rather convince them to offer them to their customers -- such that data to/from Blackberry e-mail servers is virtually free in some cases..
I'm suprised Google doesn't offer push notification of new emails. There must be a way to do this, but I haven't looked carefully at what SMS interfaces are available from J2ME.
Me? I'm quite happy with http://m.gmail.com./
- IIRC, HTTP bandwidth is "reduced" at the BB gateway by simplifying the HTML
- E-mail reading bandwidth is lower than traditional POP3 or IMAP implementations because of the BB gateway. It sends the message in parts, rather than the whole shebang. For example, say you get a message with a 10MB attachment. BB gateway sends (IIRC) 16KB down. That should be enough to know if you want the other ((10 * 1024) - 16) KB sent to your mobile. Chances are you don't.
Thank you!
I almost take back most of my post. "Almost", because, while I'm technically correct, the cases which break the Boehm (and other C) garbage collectors really have no business in 99% of C code, and can certainly be designed around if garbage collection were chosen as a memory management technique at the outset.
I actually read that page (or one like it) about 10 years ago. But I was too green back then to fully understand it, and so I promptly forgot about it.
Interestingly enough, now I know where the Macromedia guys got their ideas for the Actionscript (cum Tamarin) garbage collector. It's really quite a lot like the Boehm collector and other tweaks described in some of the linked papers. They truly have stood on the shoulders of giants.
I guess it goes to show -- no matter HOW MANY C tricks you know, there is always some guy out there the net with one that'll blow your socks off. Thanks!
C has no concept of a finalize/destruct, hence there is NO WAY (save the above Tamarin-referenced stack-walking machismo) to reclaim memory without the programmer instructing the program to do so. The C runtime simply does not have enough "knowledge" to implement garbage collection.
..that's right, there is NO WAY your_malloc() can *possibly* know that the memory returned to hello() is no longer needed for anything. The programmer MUST call your_free() on the value returned from hello().
For example, please explain how you would implement a garbage collector to catch this:
[ecode]
char *hello(void)
{
char *s = your_malloc(12);
strcpy(s, "hello");
return s;
}
(void)hello();
[/ecode]
Now, it's certainly possible for the programmer to write something (that he calls) which helps to automate this. An excellent example is the memory pool allocation scheme used in APR (apache runtime). But, the programmer must call apr_pool_destroy() to destroy what he got from apr_pool_alloc(), or the program will (gasp) leak.
Another -- completely different -- example is the garbage collector used to implement Spidermonkey. You could (if you were feeling totally insane) use it as a garbage collector for your C code. But none of your C program's memory would be freed once you rooted an object in the gc-thing tree, unless you did something to cause it to fall out of javascript scope. Again, the C programmer must take explicit action [albeit not necessarily on an alloc-by-alloc basis] to cause memory to be freed.
> If only one thread is running on your computer, then no.
Counter example: Write a routine to modify **environ.
Just allocate a giant static array of bytes. Then write a routine which allows to indicate which of those bytes are currently allocated, and which are free for use by bits of your code.
Just don't call the giant array m. Call it, say, n. Then your code could call nalloc() to get memory.
An added bonus is that that the FIRST time you used the memory, it would be initialized to zeroes. You could write some really awesome code relying on that side effect!
> What's so special about memory management that you can't encapsulate
> it in a dedicated module, and abstract it away in the form of, say,
> a garbage collector?
You're kidding, right?
The ONLY garbage collector that sort-of works the way you're suggesting -- and I mean ONLY -- was written by some guys at macromedia with extremely brass balls. I mean, big ones, that hit your knees when you're walking and trip you if you're trying to run fast.
Download the source for Tamarin. You'll see what I mean.
In the meantime, think about this ONE problem: How can you tell in C if a pointer points to memory which can safetly be freed?
People these days turn their noses up a T1, but lemme tell ya - I'll take symmetric moderate bandwidth with LOW latency over high bandwidth asymmetric crap-ass backchannel high-latency ADSL shit *any day*. Even worse is that effing "wireless broadband" they're selling these days.
Throw in a squid proxy, and that'll be a *nice* connection for all 25 people -- assuming they are reading e-mail, surfing the 'net, and doing anything but gnutella or bit-torrent. Some traffic shaping should even make these usable, albeit slow during busy-hour. Even 2 or 3 P2P users won't destroy a T1, 200k per P2P client is acceptable and still leaves half the T1 empty for general purposes surfing.
Once upon a time, my office had 3 meg wireless and 768k SDSL (synchronous DSL over dry copper). I chose the SDSL for my general-purpose surfing and liked it a LOT more than the wireless connection. Now we run the whole office and development lab over T1, and frankly, there's more than enough bandwidth to go around.
You can buy data service from Iridium. It just sucks and is expensive.
But at least the latency might be acceptable for ssh.
Don't worry.
They are now making a new style of mouse, which should be much safer. I think it's made from an alloy of Uranium, Sulphur, and Boron.
> Its not cheap - but i ask you - can you name the other globally available, centrally controlled,
> free to use resource on the planet and above it?
Catholicism?
Iridium isn't free, but it's also been a God-send.
Next thing you know, Nixon will be calling in the National Guard to KILL students!
Oh, wait.. never mind, that already happened.
Yeah, and I suppose you can make the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs!
I can believe that. I once coded for 53 hours straight. Once you get past 35 or so, it seems like you can go forever, as long as somebody will get you more coffee. But you know, I also felt very .. surreal .., and had a hard time breathing and my heart beat 10,000 times a minute all during the trip from the computer chair to wherever it was I slept. It wasn't my house, that was too far away. I actually got lost and forgot where I was, all I could see was emacs.
In unrelated hilarity, that code still runs, without so much as a recompile, nearly ten years later.
Don't worry, you can download the Cliffhanger movie from the The Pirate Bay.
> I personally never found it much of a burden to enter a license key.
I actually don't mind, as long as the license key can be copied and pasted easily. There is nothing more annoying than a serial not pasting because the text field is the wrong size and the cursor doesn't jump, or it DOES jump but it reads spaces as "valid" characters, argh, that sort of thing.
I suppose the same effect could be accomplished by more diligent operation of serialz web sitez.
That worked because you were stealing RAM below "intended" for certain other things, like video cards, SCSI BIOSes, etc.
Originally, address 9fff:ffff was supposed to be the top of memory, but you could move that around. Just like moving the top or bottom of BASIC on a Commodore 64. Nothing special about the memory, it just has to be contiguous, installed, and unused.
Anyhow. The A000 block was used for VGA memory. But, if you didn't have a VGA card, and you could slide the top of DOS memory to 0xafff:ffff, you got another 128K of conventional RAM. Assume your high mem area was actually populated (e.g. you had 1024KB or more RAM installed, excluding LIM EMS cards).
B000 was for MDA (hercules) video.
B800 was for CGA.
C800 for your hard disk controller. (remember, debug g=c800:5?)
I think SCSI controllers usually wound up around e000, and the system BIOS around f000. But it's, ah, been a while.
HA!
My 6-node BBS ran with a Cyrix 486 DLC over clocked to 42 MHz! But it did start out as a 386/25.
How did you get COM5 and COM6 working? I mangled the address lines on an ISA serial card for mine and snaked over the 16-bit IRQs from a different slot. BNU FOSSIL.
Did you have two monitors going? I used to run real work from VGA and the board from the hercules card. Also handy when playing with Turbo Pascal.