EVERYONE forgets that this legistlation does NOT CROSS BORDERS. Companies outside the USA (like in Canada or overseas) are not subject to this. Oopsie daisie. Call centers in Sudbury, Ontario will still be interrupting your dinner.
I run a Linux-based firewall that I threw together a few years back for about $90 CAD - a Compaq Prolinea of some sort, Pentium-90. Nowadays a comparable machine would be around $35 CAD I'm guessing, so like $23 for all you american folk. Recently I threw together "electricjesus", my OpenBSD box, for a lot less than $90 CAD - and to be honest the only thing that DID work from my scrap parts box was the ethernet card and the hard drive. My total list of expenditures:
- $7.50 for an ISA vga card (only necessary to actually make the thing boot, never gets any use) - somewhere in the neighborhood of $25 for a p166mmx + board combo. - $10 CAD for two sticks of 16meg 72-pin ram to throw in the bloody thing. - $7.50 CAD for a floppy drive.
All in all, I spent $50, plus 15% tax, CAD. (plus whatever the parts I already had cost, negligible I'd imagine). Don't even need a floppy drive or CD-ROM permanently in there - I just downloaded OpenBSD from their FTP site. Using the above script, or a slightly more complicated one, one saves a good amount of money and in the process LEARNS something about networking, so that when "EverQuest doesn't fucking work", I know how to get around it via port-forwarding or whatever. Best part is, I know enough to figure out how to fix it on my friends' hardware-based routers (they honestly shouldn't sell those things without a mandatory training course or something... some wouldn't believe the amount of times someone has complained to me that "my ICQ file sends don't work!"... when I tell them to go check their router settings they ask me "what's a router?")
The only annoyances are things like MSN file transfers and non-PASV ftp, where the protocol actually has IP addresses embedded into them. There are some reliable and not-so-reliable ip_masq_* Linux kernel modules for that, I know, and OpenBSD probably has great ways of handling things comme ca. And hell, you can configure iptables (under Linux) to lock your network down like the Virgin Mary's underpants... running nmap on my Internet IP will more often than not tell yo u that my host isn't even up. That's more than enough security for the home user.
Why in HELL would a nuclear reactor controller need a winmodem? Or for that matter, 239 executable file formats? In the open source world (and even in the commercial UNIX world), support for just one can generally get the job done, though emulation is nice and occasionally useful. 239? What the fsck.
What you've described seems to stray from the general idea of commercial Unices being "tight" and mission-specific. It sounds like a myth, to be honest, and if not a myth than not worth $39,000. I certainly wouldn't trust something so bloated with my backyard nuclear reactor.
I'd tend to agree with this. Or if not one unified widget toolkit, at least a framework that could offer a lot more interoperability between them, and I'm talking about a lot more than Qt/GTK+ clipboard integration, sorry RedHat.
Just an update/correction, As recorded by Zappadoodle they finally DID fix it. Still, you can see from this (and the inordinate amount of time it took for them to address this bug) that Microsoft's main focus is obviously somewhere other than stability and security. Penguin POWER.:D
True enough. It doesn't shut down on a divide by zero. I can attest to this. It does, however, shut down on a printing of a tab character followed by several backspace characters to the console. It's a well documented bug in Windows NT, 2000 and even XP. As far as I know there have been no service packs/critical updates that have addressed this issue (I've seen it work on the machines at school and they keep fairly up to date).
Now we have some real question. Why would a robust industry-standard operating system have such a fatal flaw? Why would an exception in WinNT Console Services (CSRSS.EXE) cause a kernel panic? Granted, to get anything useful done in NT you need a command shell, but are console services THAT essential? And what MILITARY organization in their right mind uses software from a company that hasn't even ADDRESSED this known bug in the year-and-some since it was first publically discussed?
Information on said bug can be found in 2600 Magazine Volume 19 #2, or here.
Thanks for pointing that out. I was wondering if anyone would...
And might I comment on the cleverness of your signature...I figured I'd paste it and compile it. (Nothing better to do...history paper in the works). Good one, Rupert. =)
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EVERYONE forgets that this legistlation does NOT CROSS BORDERS. Companies outside the USA (like in Canada or overseas) are not subject to this. Oopsie daisie. Call centers in Sudbury, Ontario will still be interrupting your dinner.
I run a Linux-based firewall that I threw together a few years back for about $90 CAD - a Compaq Prolinea of some sort, Pentium-90. Nowadays a comparable machine would be around $35 CAD I'm guessing, so like $23 for all you american folk. Recently I threw together "electricjesus", my OpenBSD box, for a lot less than $90 CAD - and to be honest the only thing that DID work from my scrap parts box was the ethernet card and the hard drive. My total list of expenditures:
- $7.50 for an ISA vga card (only necessary to actually make the thing boot, never gets any use)
- somewhere in the neighborhood of $25 for a p166mmx + board combo.
- $10 CAD for two sticks of 16meg 72-pin ram to throw in the bloody thing.
- $7.50 CAD for a floppy drive.
All in all, I spent $50, plus 15% tax, CAD. (plus whatever the parts I already had cost, negligible I'd imagine). Don't even need a floppy drive or CD-ROM permanently in there - I just downloaded OpenBSD from their FTP site. Using the above script, or a slightly more complicated one, one saves a good amount of money and in the process LEARNS something about networking, so that when "EverQuest doesn't fucking work", I know how to get around it via port-forwarding or whatever. Best part is, I know enough to figure out how to fix it on my friends' hardware-based routers (they honestly shouldn't sell those things without a mandatory training course or something... some wouldn't believe the amount of times someone has complained to me that "my ICQ file sends don't work!"... when I tell them to go check their router settings they ask me "what's a router?")
The only annoyances are things like MSN file transfers and non-PASV ftp, where the protocol actually has IP addresses embedded into them. There are some reliable and not-so-reliable ip_masq_* Linux kernel modules for that, I know, and OpenBSD probably has great ways of handling things comme ca. And hell, you can configure iptables (under Linux) to lock your network down like the Virgin Mary's underpants... running nmap on my Internet IP will more often than not tell yo u that my host isn't even up. That's more than enough security for the home user.
Why in HELL would a nuclear reactor controller need a winmodem? Or for that matter, 239 executable file formats? In the open source world (and even in the commercial UNIX world), support for just one can generally get the job done, though emulation is nice and occasionally useful. 239? What the fsck.
What you've described seems to stray from the general idea of commercial Unices being "tight" and mission-specific. It sounds like a myth, to be honest, and if not a myth than not worth $39,000. I certainly wouldn't trust something so bloated with my backyard nuclear reactor.
I'd tend to agree with this. Or if not one unified widget toolkit, at least a framework that could offer a lot more interoperability between them, and I'm talking about a lot more than Qt/GTK+ clipboard integration, sorry RedHat.
VNC, my good man.
Just an update/correction, As recorded by Zappadoodle they finally DID fix it. Still, you can see from this (and the inordinate amount of time it took for them to address this bug) that Microsoft's main focus is obviously somewhere other than stability and security. Penguin POWER. :D
True enough. It doesn't shut down on a divide by zero. I can attest to this. It does, however, shut down on a printing of a tab character followed by several backspace characters to the console. It's a well documented bug in Windows NT, 2000 and even XP. As far as I know there have been no service packs/critical updates that have addressed this issue (I've seen it work on the machines at school and they keep fairly up to date).
Now we have some real question. Why would a robust industry-standard operating system have such a fatal flaw? Why would an exception in WinNT Console Services (CSRSS.EXE) cause a kernel panic? Granted, to get anything useful done in NT you need a command shell, but are console services THAT essential? And what MILITARY organization in their right mind uses software from a company that hasn't even ADDRESSED this known bug in the year-and-some since it was first publically discussed?
Information on said bug can be found in 2600 Magazine Volume 19 #2, or here.
Thanks for pointing that out. I was wondering if anyone would... And might I comment on the cleverness of your signature...I figured I'd paste it and compile it. (Nothing better to do...history paper in the works). Good one, Rupert. =)