If the book contains the line cp=realloc(cp,n); then "burn it! Burn it right there in the store! Burn all of them!"
I don't get it. What does this guy have against realloc()? I must be missing something here. If he intends the cp to be of type char *, then he's right that ANSI libc wants void *, but it's hardly the end of the world; I certainly wouldn't choose my book on this basis.
For my household, I see no sensible alternative here. We had a bargain, but...
they are altering the bargain. I will pray that they do not alter it any further.
For me, it's real simple. If Presenter is without major bugs and reads/writes PowerPoint files adequately in 6.0, I'll pay.
There's plenty of decent-quality free solutions out there for WP, spreadsheets, drawing, painting,
etc, and 5.2 isn't bad.
But as an instructor, PP/presentation is crucial for me; 5.2 does not do too well here, and there are no usable free
alternatives I'm aware of...
A shadow password file option was available in SunOS more than 10 years ago---well before there
were machines that provided a serious threat to
any but the most ill-chosen passwords.
Encrypted telnet was also available open source in roughly this timeframe: it was not until the patent restrictions on RSA were clarified/lifted that it was possible for such a thing as OpenSSH to even
exist.
Joke. The word you're looking for is joke. The plan is apparently to take 30 (excuse me, 28) days to fix the accumulated security-related bugs in umpty-million lines of software written over 15 years, and then start adding new security-related bugs to the morass again.
<mimic who="Steve Martin">Good plan!</mimic>
I bought our TiVo based on an infomercial.
An infomercial. Never before, nor since, have I been tempted to buy anything I saw on an infomercial. This was so cool it overcame my huge resistance to this form of marketing.
If this is the best they can do for a marketing
campaign, they need a new ad agency. Try this for
a 60 second spot: just show a split screen, with
the guy on the right channel surfing in the usual bored and miserable fashion, and the
guy on the left picking a cool show out of his
TiVo playlist of cool shows and watching it for a while... Enough said.
Everyone we've ever shown our TiVo to has wanted one. Several of them have got one. It
can't be hard to sell a product like that.
Have 350 Deb machines to manage? Check out
FAI. We're using it with about
20 machines, and it works OK. Initial setup
is a pain, but once that's done, it's quite
powerful and flexible.
Re:Moving away from X
on
Xfree86 4.2.0 Out
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Should the Unix/Linux world move away from X? Redesign a graphical layer from the ground up, supporting antialiasing, transparency, enhanced programming environment, and a new, well defined and examined user interface?
No. Antialiasing and transparency are most of
the way into the X server already. Any enhanced
programming environment or better user interface
is unlikely to be more difficult to implement on
top of the X server than atop some from-scratch thing.
Basically, the X protocol does all the hard parts of a window system fairly nicely. Its rendering functionality was until recently unfortunate, but Packard's client-side rendering via the Render extension
appears to be adequate for anything anyone wants
to do with GUIs these days.
The current client-side libraries are not so good, but
this can be fixed without changing the X server or
protocol. See XCB for one proposed step in that direction.
IMHO, if one-tenth the energy that was put into
whining about X and flailing at never-quite-ready
replacement rendering systems went into these sorts of things instead, we'd have a nicer-than-Mac/Windows desktop GUI for free by now.
The poster child in this story cracks me
up. He's found a way to parlay a bank loan
of $10,000 into a business that rakes in a cool
$3,500/month (70 customers @ $50/month). That's
$42,000/year, folks, before taxes and costs
of doing business.
In other words, if he is
working the business entirely by himself, Marlon
Schafer has payed $10,000 for the privilege of
having a mediocre-paying tech job. Better yet,
both he and the authors of this article are apparently highly impressed by this shrewd move: no regrets here!
I think it is terrific that he is helping out
his rural customers in this way, but if Mr. Schafer wants to make any reasonable amount
of money, he should
really consider changing his pricing structure
or expanding his customer base.
A problem is NP-complete if it is NP-hard
and in NP. A problem is in NP if a guess of
the answer can be checked in polynomial time.
A problem is NP-hard if being able to solve
it in polytime means
being able to solve any problem in NP
in polytime. To prove P=NP, it is sufficient
to find a polytime algorithm for an NP-hard
problem. (I believe I have seen a result
that suggests that there cannot be a non-constructive proof that P=NP, but I can't offer
a reference offhand.)
As other posters have pointed out, "in polytime" is not a panacea: the polynomial
might be unbelievably bad, the memory requirements
of the algorithm might be unreasonably large,
etc. (But n^3 is way better than
2^n even for large n: do the math.) There
is a belief in the business known as the
Polynomial Thesis which suggests that anytime
there's a polynomial algorithm, there's a low-order polynomial algorithm.
All the encryption schemes you have ever
heard of are in NP: if you can guess the key,
you can quickly check that it works. This is
true for both private key schemes (trivially)
and public key schemes (guess the factorization
of the product of two large primes, and you
can certainly check it quickly by multiplication). The crypto arms race would
then turn to algorithms that use the power
of the NP-solver to encrypt: there are results
that suggest that this is possible.
Most practical problems which are compute-bound are in NP, and thus tractable
for an NP-solver. This includes such things as
production scheduling and many kinds of gene
and protein sequencing and folding. A few
practical problems are believed or known not to be in NP,
such as general-purpose planning (PSPACE complete) and checking computer programs for
infinite loops (semi-decidable).
Hope this helps. For more information, check
out the classic book by Garey and Johnson.
Buffer overflows are inexcusable in 2001
on
Solaris, AIX Login Hole
·
· Score: 5, Informative
There are at least 3 sure-fire solutions for
eliminating all stack-overwriting buffer overflows in security-critical programs:
Write the programs in a programming language
which automatically allocates memory.
Formally prove the buffer usage of the programs
to be safe.
Use a C compilation/linking system which
guarantees that memory cannot be overwritten.
None of these solutions (except
maybe #1) are easy, but none of
them are beyond the state of the art,
either. Given this, I find it inexcusable
that these buffer overflows keep popping up.
IMHO the rules are simple:
If you want your program to have privilege,
use development techniques that ensure its
security.
It is not OK to trust legacy C
programs to be secure: they are full of security
holes until proven otherwise.
Did too! Did too read the article! I understand that it was your request.
I simply think that the
Debian folks should have ignored their own guidelines in this case, by grandfathering LDP
documents. The license is not particularly onerous,
and it's hard for me to see how it helps the cause
to reject it, at least for existing documents.
The whole flap certainly makes me more sanguine
about my recent decision to release a couple of
fairly substantial pieces of freely available software under
non-GPL licenses. I agonized a bit over this
decision, as I support the basic ideals of the
FSF, but ultimately decided I had little time to waste being hassled over the licensing
of stuff I was giving away.
"Non-Free" As In "Shut Up"
on
The LDP and Debian
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Ooh, it's sure easy to see how the
LDP license would destroy the Free Software community if it were allowed to persist.
Good thing that those alert folks at Debian are
on the case: I'd hate to think they just had
their heads in the usual location. I'm sure there
will be no problem locating the authors
of two-thirds of the Linux documentation and persuading them to fiddle with licensing issues.
And a good thing, too, because it would be horrific if everyone just started automatically sticking the "Non-Free" pool
into their sources.list. After all,
it isn't like most people run Debian just because
they want a Free As In Beer distro which
is easy to upgrade!
Hats off to the Deb folks! I'm sure glad I recently donated cash to their cause!
I thought that name
was familiar! Gary Taubes' excellent
book on the genesis of "Cold Fusion", Bad Science, gives a thorough and not particularly kind account of
Prof. Hagelstein's role in those events.
SF is much harder than fantasy to
predict in this regard.
Lem is a fine choice: his writing will
surely stand the test of time. I would
also guess Cordwainer Smith's amazing work
will continue to age well. Roger Zelazny,
perhaps. Fritz Leiber, almost certainly.
Ursula LeGuin, I fear. Phillip Dick.
Harlan Ellison.
What do all these authors have in common?
They represent SF that has survived the march
of science. All of these authors wrote SF
30 years ago that is still interesting to read
today, for the science and for the amazing ideas, as well as the amazing writing. Bad SF dates rapidly and completely. This stuff
will endure.
I just set up my Linux boxes to do UDF packet
writing on my CD-RW drives. It seems to work
great, and is a truly handy storage format.
Could somebody clarify for me why I would
replace my apparently perfectly good CD-RW drives with
CD-MRW capable ones? I guess there must be some
technical advantage to the MRW format. Speed?
Reliability? Certainly can't be portability:
one of the reasons I chose CD-RW packet is that
I can read it on most boxes these days.
As a practicing AI researcher, I'm as puzzled
as some of the other posters about what the news
is here. Any decent introductory textbook
on AI written in the
last few years (I'm currently teaching from
the new Nilsson text) has a
chapter on GAs and GP. They have much promise,
but other standard AI techniques work much better on almost all practical
problems.
Let's try to keep the "news", and not
just the "for nerds," folks...
Remember how, in Star Trek, it was/is
the rule when citing history to give
3 sources: two of which you've heard of,
and one which is apparently post 21st-century? You
know, Kirk will talk about e.g. ``defenders of freedom like Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Ankuba of Sirius 43.''
Meaning no disrespect to the fine work of any of the recipients of this generous prize, but...
If you can get your LCD controller to run at
60-80Hz, you should be able to implement this
technique in software: compute change-corrected
frames, where the ``feed-forward'' bits disappear
faster than the human persistence rate. There's
plenty of CPU for this, and the psychovisuals help:
any reasonable transient errors in the LCD response
are likely to be masked by the fact that the changing pixels are likely changing due to motion...
I had always just sort of assumed that controllers already did this, since it's so
obvious. Even better would be to have the
controller actually measure the pixel modulation
(which it it should be able to do using the
same mechanism it uses to change it) and use
feedback, which would likely provide
even faster response.
Sadly, at the end of the day, the 40Hz limit
on skewing reasonably priced panels over the full
range will continue to be a problem. With feedback and feedforward techniques, can one use
higher pixel modulation voltages to improve this
as well? I don't know, but I would guess one could...
By the way, I don't think about the "Open Source community" as a distinct entity. There are two movements afoot: the Free Software Movement, whose focus is the political and ethical issues of software freedom, and the Open Source Movement, whose focus is to avoid political issues of freedom, and to talk about the technological benefits of "Open Source". The movements differ greatly because their fundamental philosophies and motivations are different.
However, together we form one community---the same community that started in 1984 when the Free Software Movement started. In 1998, within that community, we had another movement start up with a different focus, but we've always been together in one community. Thus, I hope you'll think of the community as including both the Free Software Movement and the Open Source Movement, and remember that it originally started as the Free Software community. At the very least, please call it the "Free Software and Open Source community", so that Free Software isn't left completely out of the picture.
One of the reasons I have been hesitant to put my software under the GPL is that increasingly, the FSF seems intent on drawing battle lines between the ``true believers'' and the ``unbelievers'' of the Giving Away Software (GAS) movement[*]. In support of this goal, RMS, BMK, and others seem to be attempting to rewrite history in two important ways.
First, they claim that the genesis of the GAS movement was the Free Software movement. As someone who was there, I assure you that this is just silly. I suspect I gave away as much software before there was an FSF as I have given away since. In those days, we didn't worry much about software licenses: recall that it's only been since Apple v. Franklin in 1983 that has even been clear that copyright applies to binary-format software!
The second myth being propagated is that the GAS software we use today is mostly FSF, or originated with FSF software. In particular, the FSF would like you to forget that GNU stands for ``GNU's Not UNIX,'' and that this was as much a protest against the UNIX philosophy as it was against AT&T's proprietary kernels (which were in any case distributed to educational institutions under an essentially GAS license). I know the authors of a few of the GNU utilities, and can assure you that their contributions had as much to do with the existence of a supporting umbrella for their work as any deep philosophical ideas about Software Freedom.
I am unsure what I believe about the idea that ``software should be free.'' But I am sure that those who claim the work of others as their own deserve no respect in an intellectual community. IMHO, RMS and his followers have recently verged dangerously upon the margin of this tactic.
---
* Another unfortunate tactic of the FSF is to take words like ``free'' that are potentially ambiguous but have accepted meanings within the software community, adapt them to their own ends, and then claim that those who ``misuse'' them are in error. The ``Open Source'' movement was in large part an attempt to give a name to the GAS concept inclusive of Free software. Of course, now BMK wants us to distinguish between these two (and give ``Free Software'' the pride of first place, no less), forcing me to change terminology yet again...
My wife walked in just a bit ago with the manual set for my original IBM PC, which went to the dump just a few days ago, to ask me if I still needed the manuals. I paid extra for one of those manuals, to get the best part: full schematics. Yes, for those of you who don't recall, the original IBM PC came with the option of complete schematics. I built some add-ons for that box using that information.
How cool would it be if modern mobos routinely provided complete schematics and chip docs online? You know, so that you could build drivers?
My IBM PC served me for only a few years, but I had big fun with it during that time. I wish I could say I miss it.
I've heard a lot of FUD lately about how
ARIN was going to limit the amount of IPv6 space
given out so that it could lease the addresses
and make money. The proposed policy, if adopted, appears
to mitigate that fear. As the document says:
...unwarranted conservatism acts as a disincentive in a marketplace
already dampened by other factors.
Slashdot Mirror
If the book contains the line cp=realloc(cp,n); then "burn it! Burn it right there in the store! Burn all of them!"
I don't get it. What does this guy have against realloc()? I must be missing something here. If he intends the cp to be of type char *, then he's right that ANSI libc wants void *, but it's hardly the end of the world; I certainly wouldn't choose my book on this basis.
For my household, I see no sensible alternative here. We had a bargain, but... they are altering the bargain. I will pray that they do not alter it any further.
For me, it's real simple. If Presenter is without major bugs and reads/writes PowerPoint files adequately in 6.0, I'll pay. There's plenty of decent-quality free solutions out there for WP, spreadsheets, drawing, painting, etc, and 5.2 isn't bad. But as an instructor, PP/presentation is crucial for me; 5.2 does not do too well here, and there are no usable free alternatives I'm aware of...
A shadow password file option was available in SunOS more than 10 years ago---well before there were machines that provided a serious threat to any but the most ill-chosen passwords.
Encrypted telnet was also available open source in roughly this timeframe: it was not until the patent restrictions on RSA were clarified/lifted that it was possible for such a thing as OpenSSH to even exist.
Uh, Office?
Is this a hoax?
Joke. The word you're looking for is joke. The plan is apparently to take 30 (excuse me, 28) days to fix the accumulated security-related bugs in umpty-million lines of software written over 15 years, and then start adding new security-related bugs to the morass again.
<mimic who="Steve Martin">Good plan!</mimic>
I bought our TiVo based on an infomercial. An infomercial. Never before, nor since, have I been tempted to buy anything I saw on an infomercial. This was so cool it overcame my huge resistance to this form of marketing.
If this is the best they can do for a marketing campaign, they need a new ad agency. Try this for a 60 second spot: just show a split screen, with the guy on the right channel surfing in the usual bored and miserable fashion, and the guy on the left picking a cool show out of his TiVo playlist of cool shows and watching it for a while... Enough said.
Everyone we've ever shown our TiVo to has wanted one. Several of them have got one. It can't be hard to sell a product like that.
Have 350 Deb machines to manage? Check out FAI. We're using it with about 20 machines, and it works OK. Initial setup is a pain, but once that's done, it's quite powerful and flexible.
No. Antialiasing and transparency are most of the way into the X server already. Any enhanced programming environment or better user interface is unlikely to be more difficult to implement on top of the X server than atop some from-scratch thing.
Basically, the X protocol does all the hard parts of a window system fairly nicely. Its rendering functionality was until recently unfortunate, but Packard's client-side rendering via the Render extension appears to be adequate for anything anyone wants to do with GUIs these days.
The current client-side libraries are not so good, but this can be fixed without changing the X server or protocol. See XCB for one proposed step in that direction.
IMHO, if one-tenth the energy that was put into whining about X and flailing at never-quite-ready replacement rendering systems went into these sorts of things instead, we'd have a nicer-than-Mac/Windows desktop GUI for free by now.
The poster child in this story cracks me up. He's found a way to parlay a bank loan of $10,000 into a business that rakes in a cool $3,500/month (70 customers @ $50/month). That's $42,000/year, folks, before taxes and costs of doing business.
In other words, if he is working the business entirely by himself, Marlon Schafer has payed $10,000 for the privilege of having a mediocre-paying tech job. Better yet, both he and the authors of this article are apparently highly impressed by this shrewd move: no regrets here!
I think it is terrific that he is helping out his rural customers in this way, but if Mr. Schafer wants to make any reasonable amount of money, he should really consider changing his pricing structure or expanding his customer base.
A problem is NP-complete if it is NP-hard and in NP. A problem is in NP if a guess of the answer can be checked in polynomial time. A problem is NP-hard if being able to solve it in polytime means being able to solve any problem in NP in polytime. To prove P=NP, it is sufficient to find a polytime algorithm for an NP-hard problem. (I believe I have seen a result that suggests that there cannot be a non-constructive proof that P=NP, but I can't offer a reference offhand.)
As other posters have pointed out, "in polytime" is not a panacea: the polynomial might be unbelievably bad, the memory requirements of the algorithm might be unreasonably large, etc. (But n^3 is way better than 2^n even for large n: do the math.) There is a belief in the business known as the Polynomial Thesis which suggests that anytime there's a polynomial algorithm, there's a low-order polynomial algorithm.
All the encryption schemes you have ever heard of are in NP: if you can guess the key, you can quickly check that it works. This is true for both private key schemes (trivially) and public key schemes (guess the factorization of the product of two large primes, and you can certainly check it quickly by multiplication). The crypto arms race would then turn to algorithms that use the power of the NP-solver to encrypt: there are results that suggest that this is possible.
Most practical problems which are compute-bound are in NP, and thus tractable for an NP-solver. This includes such things as production scheduling and many kinds of gene and protein sequencing and folding. A few practical problems are believed or known not to be in NP, such as general-purpose planning (PSPACE complete) and checking computer programs for infinite loops (semi-decidable).
Hope this helps. For more information, check out the classic book by Garey and Johnson.
There are at least 3 sure-fire solutions for eliminating all stack-overwriting buffer overflows in security-critical programs:
None of these solutions (except maybe #1) are easy, but none of them are beyond the state of the art, either. Given this, I find it inexcusable that these buffer overflows keep popping up.
IMHO the rules are simple:
Did too! Did too read the article! I understand that it was your request.
I simply think that the Debian folks should have ignored their own guidelines in this case, by grandfathering LDP documents. The license is not particularly onerous, and it's hard for me to see how it helps the cause to reject it, at least for existing documents.
The whole flap certainly makes me more sanguine about my recent decision to release a couple of fairly substantial pieces of freely available software under non-GPL licenses. I agonized a bit over this decision, as I support the basic ideals of the FSF, but ultimately decided I had little time to waste being hassled over the licensing of stuff I was giving away.
Ooh, it's sure easy to see how the LDP license would destroy the Free Software community if it were allowed to persist. Good thing that those alert folks at Debian are on the case: I'd hate to think they just had their heads in the usual location. I'm sure there will be no problem locating the authors of two-thirds of the Linux documentation and persuading them to fiddle with licensing issues.
And a good thing, too, because it would be horrific if everyone just started automatically sticking the "Non-Free" pool into their sources.list. After all, it isn't like most people run Debian just because they want a Free As In Beer distro which is easy to upgrade!
Hats off to the Deb folks! I'm sure glad I recently donated cash to their cause!
Probably a coincidence that "Nancy" is Australian slang for a "lady of the evening" (c.f. "Lil McGill" in the Beatles' Rocky Raccoon).
I thought that name was familiar! Gary Taubes' excellent book on the genesis of "Cold Fusion", Bad Science, gives a thorough and not particularly kind account of Prof. Hagelstein's role in those events.
SF is much harder than fantasy to predict in this regard.
Lem is a fine choice: his writing will surely stand the test of time. I would also guess Cordwainer Smith's amazing work will continue to age well. Roger Zelazny, perhaps. Fritz Leiber, almost certainly. Ursula LeGuin, I fear. Phillip Dick. Harlan Ellison.
What do all these authors have in common? They represent SF that has survived the march of science. All of these authors wrote SF 30 years ago that is still interesting to read today, for the science and for the amazing ideas, as well as the amazing writing. Bad SF dates rapidly and completely. This stuff will endure.
I just set up my Linux boxes to do UDF packet writing on my CD-RW drives. It seems to work great, and is a truly handy storage format.
Could somebody clarify for me why I would replace my apparently perfectly good CD-RW drives with CD-MRW capable ones? I guess there must be some technical advantage to the MRW format. Speed? Reliability? Certainly can't be portability: one of the reasons I chose CD-RW packet is that I can read it on most boxes these days.
I'm obviously missing something here...
As a practicing AI researcher, I'm as puzzled as some of the other posters about what the news is here. Any decent introductory textbook on AI written in the last few years (I'm currently teaching from the new Nilsson text) has a chapter on GAs and GP. They have much promise, but other standard AI techniques work much better on almost all practical problems.
Let's try to keep the "news", and not just the "for nerds," folks...
Remember how, in Star Trek, it was/is the rule when citing history to give 3 sources: two of which you've heard of, and one which is apparently post 21st-century? You know, Kirk will talk about e.g. ``defenders of freedom like Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Ankuba of Sirius 43.''
Meaning no disrespect to the fine work of any of the recipients of this generous prize, but...
If you can get your LCD controller to run at 60-80Hz, you should be able to implement this technique in software: compute change-corrected frames, where the ``feed-forward'' bits disappear faster than the human persistence rate. There's plenty of CPU for this, and the psychovisuals help: any reasonable transient errors in the LCD response are likely to be masked by the fact that the changing pixels are likely changing due to motion...
I had always just sort of assumed that controllers already did this, since it's so obvious. Even better would be to have the controller actually measure the pixel modulation (which it it should be able to do using the same mechanism it uses to change it) and use feedback, which would likely provide even faster response.
Sadly, at the end of the day, the 40Hz limit on skewing reasonably priced panels over the full range will continue to be a problem. With feedback and feedforward techniques, can one use higher pixel modulation voltages to improve this as well? I don't know, but I would guess one could...
By the way, I don't think about the "Open Source community" as a distinct entity. There are two movements afoot: the Free Software Movement, whose focus is the political and ethical issues of software freedom, and the Open Source Movement, whose focus is to avoid political issues of freedom, and to talk about the technological benefits of "Open Source". The movements differ greatly because their fundamental philosophies and motivations are different.
However, together we form one community---the same community that started in 1984 when the Free Software Movement started. In 1998, within that community, we had another movement start up with a different focus, but we've always been together in one community. Thus, I hope you'll think of the community as including both the Free Software Movement and the Open Source Movement, and remember that it originally started as the Free Software community. At the very least, please call it the "Free Software and Open Source community", so that Free Software isn't left completely out of the picture.
One of the reasons I have been hesitant to put my software under the GPL is that increasingly, the FSF seems intent on drawing battle lines between the ``true believers'' and the ``unbelievers'' of the Giving Away Software (GAS) movement[*]. In support of this goal, RMS, BMK, and others seem to be attempting to rewrite history in two important ways.
First, they claim that the genesis of the GAS movement was the Free Software movement. As someone who was there, I assure you that this is just silly. I suspect I gave away as much software before there was an FSF as I have given away since. In those days, we didn't worry much about software licenses: recall that it's only been since Apple v. Franklin in 1983 that has even been clear that copyright applies to binary-format software!
The second myth being propagated is that the GAS software we use today is mostly FSF, or originated with FSF software. In particular, the FSF would like you to forget that GNU stands for ``GNU's Not UNIX,'' and that this was as much a protest against the UNIX philosophy as it was against AT&T's proprietary kernels (which were in any case distributed to educational institutions under an essentially GAS license). I know the authors of a few of the GNU utilities, and can assure you that their contributions had as much to do with the existence of a supporting umbrella for their work as any deep philosophical ideas about Software Freedom.
I am unsure what I believe about the idea that ``software should be free.'' But I am sure that those who claim the work of others as their own deserve no respect in an intellectual community. IMHO, RMS and his followers have recently verged dangerously upon the margin of this tactic.
---
* Another unfortunate tactic of the FSF is to take words like ``free'' that are potentially ambiguous but have accepted meanings within the software community, adapt them to their own ends, and then claim that those who ``misuse'' them are in error. The ``Open Source'' movement was in large part an attempt to give a name to the GAS concept inclusive of Free software. Of course, now BMK wants us to distinguish between these two (and give ``Free Software'' the pride of first place, no less), forcing me to change terminology yet again...
I find the prominent Adam's Apple on that ``woman'' rather, er, disturbing...
My wife walked in just a bit ago with the manual set for my original IBM PC, which went to the dump just a few days ago, to ask me if I still needed the manuals. I paid extra for one of those manuals, to get the best part: full schematics. Yes, for those of you who don't recall, the original IBM PC came with the option of complete schematics. I built some add-ons for that box using that information.
How cool would it be if modern mobos routinely provided complete schematics and chip docs online? You know, so that you could build drivers?
My IBM PC served me for only a few years, but I had big fun with it during that time. I wish I could say I miss it.
I've heard a lot of FUD lately about how ARIN was going to limit the amount of IPv6 space given out so that it could lease the addresses and make money. The proposed policy, if adopted, appears to mitigate that fear. As the document says:
(Now let's get IPv6 fielded! I'm ready...)