Regarding Q3A key generators... Graeme Devine of id software recently said in an interview (or was it his plan file?) that none of the so-called key generators work, and in fact, most of them were trojans that do nasty things to the losers trying to use them. This is not surprising.
The assumption behind the concept of a key generator is that there is some algorithm used to expand a small key space into a large one. By finding the algorithm, a hacker could easily guess a key in the small space and expand it to a valid key in the large space. However, There is no reason to believe that ID did that at all.
Q3A CD keys are long. Mine is 16 characters of alphanumerics. That gives a gigantic search space: 36^16, a 64-bit number.
I expect they just created a database of 64-bit random numbers, just enough for as many CD's as they sell. Then they just have to guard that database very, very carefully. If that's how they did it, there is NO WAY to generate a fake key other than guessing. If there are 10 million valid keys, then you would have a one in 795866110994640088 chance of randomly guessing one of them.
The only hope for cheaters would be to steal one of the correct keys!
Obviously there would need to be some way to deal with people who had their keys stolen and whatnot. But overall, I think it would be tremendously effective.
After reading the article, I'm just depressed. But, I had kind of a neat idea for hitting cheaters back - hard. The wailing and gnashing of teeth would be heard far and wide...
Now, in Quake III, each player has a unique CD key that identifies them with the master server. This is used to prevents piracy.
Imagine if some of the countermeasures described in the article were implemented in a really subtle way... not to prevent cheating, but to just detect it, and detect it carefully and explicitly. Let that system run for a few months or so and collect a big blacklist of the cheater's unique CD keys, without anyone knowing about it.
Then the sting... (insert evil laughter here...) ban them from playing in regular games. Set up another "master" server just for the cheaters, listing servers that explicitly allowed cheating, and only let the cheaters play on those servers.
Oh yeah... make sure the delay before people got put on the blacklist was long enough that the fsckers couldn't return the game and get their money back.
Maybe that would teach the little bastards! Please, ID software! Do this for DOOM 2000!
Did you really expect that a document designed to help people get their apps running on Linux would say...
Yes, you may have written your application in C, and you may have heard that Linux is a good platform for applications written in C. But really, you should throw it away, and retrain all your programmers, and get all new development tools and fscking
REWRITE YOUR APP in Sather or Ruby, just to show how FSCKING MODERN you are.
Yeah, that would certainly convince Adobe to port Photoshop to Linux! Great idea!
(snort.) Chill out. It's just a recommendation for people who are trying to get their application to run on as many Linux'es as possible. Most of those applications are written in C and C++. If you had read the document, you would note that most of the major distributions are already compliant. If you want to write your app in some other language, how does this document change anything for you?
This is a good thing. Now that it's out there, maybe people will use it instead of just releasing their app for Red Hat 6.2! That is the problem this document is addressing. Now, all the Pointy Haired Bosses who make the decisions will at least think about all the other Linuxes besides Red Hat.
For the rest of you, who have actually read the document... I have only one comment. I'm a little suprised that they recommend only X 3.3.6, and don't mention X 4.0.x. Are there backwards compatibility issues with the 4.0 series, or are they just not considered stable enough?
Certainly some science fiction authors have described near-future scenarios in which hacking genes is as easy and commonplace as hacking computer code is today.
Just like Moore's law affects the computer industry, a similar law (heh. Hunkapiller's law?) affects biotech. Those gene sequencer machines are expensive - like early mainframes - but they are several orders of magnitude cheaper and faster than the old manual techniques for gene sequencing.
If gene sequencing really does turn out to be useful, of course the machines to do it will get cheaper and faster. Since cheaper usually also means smaller... eventually we might very well see gene sequencers that fit on a desktop.
But why would a normal person want a gene sequencer on their desktop? you ask... Well, I don't know. But similar questions were asked about computers. I would not be surprised if everyone has their own gene sequencer in 20 years, and they do all sorts of things with them that we can't even imagine now.
The last modified dates doesn't prove much. It is very likely that he, like other small web site owners, periodically edits the files on his own computer at work or home, and then uploads them all at once to the server.
However, it is interesting that a quick check of the google, hotbot, yahoo, and altavista search engines does not seem to turn up any matches for "corinthians.com" that actually point to www.corinthians.com.
That might indicate that the web site just got put up in the last little while, since the search engines haven't found it yet.
Nonetheless, even if the web site just went up in the last month... if the current owner isn't actually squatting with intent to resell the site to the highest bidder, but really wants to use it, and he got it before the soccer club, he should be allowed to keep it.
I mean... I hope nobody comes for my web site. I want to keep it, even though I don't have much there now. What if some company demands I hand it over? That would suck. I already use it quite a bit for email.
Your understanding of components is limited. "Stringing together programs" is not components.
Why? Well, a lot of reasons. One: There is no error handling. Piping text files is one way. There is no way to pass error messages "back" down the pipe. Have you ever tried to debug a complicated shell script that uses a bunch of pipes?
Two: Pipes can't really pass structured data. How do you push a linked list through a pipe? How about a hash table?
Three: All of those "components" are really programs, and their communication is inefficient. Running your example would start at least three full-blown programs, and these programs have to communicate through text files - so data gets copied repeatedly from one address space to another. This is inefficient. If it was a real program using real components, the data would be loaded into memory once, and each object could access it. Much faster!
Yes, on Unix, everything is a file. Probably a text file. So Unix is really good at text files. Did I mention that it's also really good at text files? Yup, if you want to process text files, Unix is great!
X Windows is only the most OBVIOUS problem, because when you are working with graphics, piping files just doesn't cut it anymore. But if Unix had been built on a real component model, and not just the idea of piping text files around, then everything would be better, even at the command prompt. And, XWindows could have used a more powerful system, and then it would have had real cut and paste, real printing capability, real font handling, etc.
So if you agree with Miguel about X, you should also agree with him about Unix in general. The problem with Unix is that the unidirectional piping of unstructured files is not a powerful enough communications model.
This is why Miguel likes Windows: despite all the problems, Windows at least has real components. For TEN YEARS NOW, since Windows 3.0, you have been able to paste a complex object like a drawing into another complex object, like a spreadsheet.
Unix has only begun to pick up this capability in the last year with KDE and Gnome! Ten years late! (More if you consider the Macintosh!)
You really need to read the Unix Haters Handbook. They have a whole chapter on this, which demonstrates very conclusively that this is NOT the way to do reusable code.
Yes, you can build up big complicated things by piping together commands, and redirecting stuff, and using sed and awk and perl and grep and find and all the rest.
THIS IS A CRAPPY WAY TO WRITE SOFTWARE.
If you change any component, it will break. It will not be portable because every Unix out there has different options for all those commands, and they mean slightly different things. Even worse, there is no error handling. Since all your data is a text stream, dealing with binary data, or heaven help us, actual structured data, (like records, or objects, or whatever your favorite language calls them) is painful or impossible.
You claim "we've got reusable code running out of our ears". Yeah right. I challenge you to build a sophisticated, portable, maintainable application out of that so-called reusable code.
Even worse, there is no excuse for this state of affairs. Before Unix was even invented, there were LispStations. On those machines, instead of text streams, there were functions. Functions with error handling, defined interfaces, and even fancy stuff like introspection.
Unix could have been better.
Nonetheless, I still like Linux better than anything else out there right now... because it has source, it can be improved. The object models that KDE and Gnome are moving toward sound like a great start. They may not be perfect, but hey... what is?
Correction: Q3A uses T&L if it is available in the video hardware. So far the only cards on the market that do it are the NVidia GeForce, GeForce 2, and ATI Radeon.(The Quake 3 Arena engine is also the only game engine on the market which uses dual processors if they are available. )
That is, Quake 3 Area, (and other games using the Quake 3 engine,) ARE the new games.
I don't think Unreal Tournament uses T&L, however, as it is basically the Unreal engine which came out way back in... 1997 I think? It's been tweaked and enhanced, but has the same basic capabilities.
If it was fast, I would like it for all sorts of simple things. For instance, in Quake III, I want to leave my fingers over a small set of command keys and mouse buttons. This slows me down for switching weapons. If I could just say "rocket" to switch to the rocket launcher, that would make me a little more competitive.
In text editors, I would like to say "oops" and automatically have the last word deleted. That would definitely speed me up, but my cubicle neighbors might get tired of hearing a constant stream of "oops... oops... oops" over the wall. I bet it wouldn't be hard to patch that into emacs...
Bruce's description of a voice-controlled car stereo is also good. This is especially interesting to me, because I am thinking of building an MP3 player for my car that will be a full X86 computer. How do you do a user interface that allows you to scroll through hundreds of albums and thousands of songs? While driving?
Voice command seems like the best solution. Say "Play... U2... Zooropa... Lemon", or "Play... Beethoven... Sixth Symphony". (imagine a little chime from the computer during each "..." to indicate it "got" it and is ready for more input.)
I should be able to operate that while driving without driving off the road. And, a well written voice command program could be pretty accurate for that application, since the set of valid inputs is reasonably small at each step.
I'm enthusiastic about the possibilities. I predict that once people have this, they will wonder how they ever survived with out it. Just like wheels on mice!
You have apparently confused the speed of the interface with the speed of the device.
Serial ATA is just a faster interface. That only helps getting stuff out of the on-drive cache (typically about 1 MB). The real problem is just getting the bits off of the drive platter is still slow. So slow, in fact, that for casual applications there is little difference between the old UDMA and even the new ATA-66.
It's a mechanical problem, not an interface problem
By the way, why doesn't someone make a PCI controller card that presents a fast, low-overhead SCSI interface to the CPU and software, but is really a smart RAID controller for a bunch of cheap IDE drives in a RAID config?
Imagine hooking up five of those Maxtor 80GB drives in a striped config, set up to look like a single, wicked-fast 400 GB SCSI drive?
"I wrote 'Microsoft's a monopolist' and the [New York] Times wanted to edit it to say, 'Microsoft is innovative.'"
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. "All the news that's fit to print... except if it challenges the status quo." Not the first time, either.
Bah. Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Re:This is nice, but when will they drop a camera.
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Helicopter In Space
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· Score: 2
Nice concept. What if it gets there and all you get is an unchanging yellow blur in front of the camera? Think of the view through your windshield driving in think fog. Or in heavy snow.
However... I suppose that we know enough about the chemical composition of the gas giant atmospheres to determine some wavelengths of electomagnetic radiation for which most of the fog would be transparent. If the camera was sensitive to those frequencies, maybe there would be something to see.
But I bet it would just be thick, pea-soup fog. And probably dark, more than a few KM down. Are there any planetary scientists reading that could provide some facts?
I like the idea of a balloon floating around Jupiter with instruments. It sounds like a pretty fool-proof probe design.
I'll leave aside the question of if fair use allows this or not.
Are you SURE this works for quake III? I'm pretty sure that every client who connects to a Quake III server is required, by the server, to have a unique CD key. Furthermore, the CD ROM must be in the drive for the game to work.
So, I think you are wrong. But I'm not 100% sure and would welcome a more authoritative answer.
Remember that the whole concept of "Intellectual Property" is essentially a fiction - a construct of the copyright laws.
What the government gives, they can take away. True, they can't take away someone's intellectual property without compensation - but they can just change the rules of the game to redefine intellectual property.
I don't believe the definition of what is and is not copyrightable is part of the constitution.
If RobertGormleyLinux can pony up 4 thousand dollars, it gets a spot. Or, if it is a non-profit, and has more than 4 thousand users, it gets a spot. Maybe not perfect, but it's a start, isn't it?
As far as difficulty of certification - yeah, it wouldn't be easy. That's why the certification group would need to have some money.
"Linux Compatible" would have to be defined rather carefully. There might have to be quite a bit of fine print. But...
At least when you went out to buy a bunch of 100-Mbit network cards, if there was a "Linux Compatible" penguin logo on it, and a note like
This product is supported and tested on Linux Kernel 2.2.10 and up, as included in RedHat 5.2 or higher, SUSE 6.1 or higher, Mandrake 6.0 or higher, and Debian 2.5 or higher. Other distributions will likely work as well.
Frankly, that would give me a warm fuzzy feeling and I'd be a lot happier about buying those cards. Even if I was running RobertGormleyLinux 1.1 - after all, if I was eleet enough to run that, I would know what kernel version and patches I had...:-)
Obviously things are trickier for software. Still, I think it would be better than what the Linux world has now...
The rc.d stuff isn't that bad. There's two main styles of doing it (Sys V or BSD) and a few variations. Perhaps one of the things the hypothetical org could do is help standardize things, or write some nice flexible installation scripts that deal with the differences out there.
Yes, but the effect is the same. If the conspirators get arrested, they will realize that either:
1. Their encryption was broken 2. Or, they were bugged (but why?) 3. Or, one of their members is a traitor 4. They screwed up some other way that got the cops onto them.
If they are confident enough to rule out #3 and #4, 1 is the only other choice.
So assume they get their day in court. Even if the Secret Service doesn't present evidence from broken encryption, (and instead uses evidence from regular bugging, search and seizure, whatever) the question still arises: Why were these people under investigation in the first place?
What got the Secret Service looking at them? Was it just because they were using PGP? Not likely - too many people use PGP for them all to be checked out. So, their messages must have been cracked and scanned for incriminating phrases.
The conspirators lawyer will ask for sure. And the secret will be out. Or at least, people will be suspicious. If it happens a few times, people will believe the NSA can crack PGP.
This hasn't happened yet. So either the NSA cannot crack PGP, or they have been very very cautious how they have used the ability.
Yeah, and people who don't like smoking should just stop.
And people who are just desparate for their next fix, spending their welfare dollars on crack should just stop.
It's an addiction for people. Even if they know it's stupid, they can't stop.
While I agree with your sentiment on some things, sometimes people do need to be protected from themselves.
Unless you like a relentlessly darwinistic sort of society. In that case, maybe you think we should get rid of welfare, medicare, and the rest.
The weak, and the dumb, and the addicted, and the suicidally hopeless can just suffer or die. After all, we wouldn't want to interfere with anyone's freedom, would we?
Personally, I don't like the idea. Sometimes, imposing morals on people is good for them. What do you think laws are, anyway?
It doesn't suprise me to hear that the NSA is used by other organizations to break encrypted documents.
However, I would bet that a lot of those documents were encrypted using regular DES. The NSA can probably break DES in a minute or two by brute-force, using specialized hardware.
However... Suppose they can break Triple-DES, or Blowfish, or RSA, or whatever.
It is important to note that it would be difficult for them to safely use that information.
If the FBI/NSA/CIA/DOJ/DOD/whatever ever did something using knowlege that could have only been obtained by breaking one of those codes, the cat would be out of the bag.
The situation is very similar to Bobby Shaftoe's division in the Cryptonomicon, which had the job of running around creating plausible "cover stories" to explain why the Allies knew so much.
For the NSA et. al. to USE information they got from breaking 3DES or one of the other "strong" systems, they would first have to create a plausible alternative way for them to have obtained that information. And, that would have to be a legal way if they wanted to use it in court.
Now, they may do that. Apparently, they get a lot of "anonymous tips". Uh huh. But if there are say, three or four people in a conspiracy to cream-pie the president, and they only communicate through PGP, with good passphrases, and they are careful about Van Eck and other bugging... if they get caught and dragged in front of a judge, how will the Secret Service present the evidence?
As soon as the secret is out, people would switch encryption methods. (Well, some people. The people who care enough to use encryption, anyway.)
Yes, that would be nice. Now that MySQL is GPL, it would be possible to do something like the Windows Registry, but properly.
I like text config files too... sometimes... but it can be so damn confusing finding the file you need. Especially when you go back and forth between several flavors of Unix. On FreeBSD, the Apache config file is... um... I think/usr/local/etc/apache/apache.conf. But under Linux it's... um.../usr/etc/apache.conf. Or is it? Damn! time to run find again...
And where was that php3.ini again? ARRRGH!
Unfortunately, it's too late to change things. Although it would be possible to make a distribution of Linux with all the settings and configurations stored in a nice MySQL database, with a nice text mode tool for editing it (or just run mysql -u root -p config if you are the command-line type...)
it's too late. It would be incompatible with all the other stuff out there, and as soon as Apache, or PHP, or Bind, or ifconfig, or ANYTHING was revised, you would be in a race to keep up.
No, Unix is stuck with a zillion text mode files, all with incompatible syntax, different naming conventions, and poor documentation.
The only glimmer of light is the File System Standard. Maybe, eventually, all the Free Unixes of the world will agree on it, and at least I will know WHERE to find the file I want.
(not that NT is always an improvement... who can remember where the hosts file lives on an NT system? Somewhere under \system32\drivers, I think?)
Another book that Unix developers should all read is the Unix Haters Handbook. It comes with the Unix Barf Bag, a cool desktop accessory for the budding Unix guru!
It has a lot of well reasoned, well documented complaints about the suckage of various Unix flavors. It is mostly pre-Linux, (and Linux and friends have fixed a lot of the problems) but many of their complaints are applicable.
Top Unix problems, IMHO:
X Windows. bleah. Too many sacrifices were made for the network transparency. Still no anti-aliased fonts! Font handling in general sucks, because the client and the server have no standard way of communicating font metrics.
Printing, and What You See Is What You Get. This was the most significant improvement of Windows 3.x over DOS. The driver of the desktop publishing revolution was Macs and the LaserWriter. In comparasion, printing sucks on Linux. Don't tell me about TeX, or troff - I know. (shudder).
Basic local area networking and file sharing. This is sooo simple in Windows. You right click a folder... share as... change the default permissions... and a few seconds later all the other windows machines can see it. On Linux I'm often reduced to using ftp. What about NFS you say? Not a File System. NFS is fundamentally broken. The idea behind it was a stateless protocol - the problem is, a file system is nothing BUT state. Plus you have to edit configuration files... groan.
Web Browser. Mozilla is getting there... slowly... please...
The "Everything is A Text File" attitude. This is great for quick hacks, but a lousy way to build software. Think I'm wrong? Read the book. At least Gnome and KDE are abandoning this for actual component systems.
But hey. For a lot of things, Unix is great! I run my home server with Mandrake 7.1, but my workstation usually runs Windows 2000. At work I use FreeBSD, and my firewall is OpenBSD.
And, free software is slowly but surely fixing most of those problems. Just don't forget: it isn't there yet. For some people, and some things, Linux still sucks.
Besides certifying hardware, there's all sorts of other things that such a joint business could do... sponsor benchmarks, pay for proper documentation of the kernel internals, negotiate with hardware vendors, etc.
Also, it would provide a unified "Linux" company that could help provide some focus for the rest of the business world when they deal with the Linux community. Right now, Red Hat seems to get that honor. And, no disrespect intended to Red Hat, but they aren't Linux, even though people talk about "Linux 6.2"...
Companies that ought to sponsor such a venture, each putting up a small amount of money:
Red Hat
Mandrake
VA Linux
Andover
SUSE
[your favorite distribution]
IBM
others?
Non profit orgs like Debian should get representation for free. RMS, ESR, and other deserving people should be involved in some way that isn't a burden for them, and helps keep the thing rolling in the right direction.
The company could make money by trademarking a logo and licensing it to hardware manufacturers who pass the Linux compatibility test.
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Regarding Q3A key generators... Graeme Devine of id software recently said in an interview (or was it his plan file?) that none of the so-called key generators work, and in fact, most of them were trojans that do nasty things to the losers trying to use them. This is not surprising.
The assumption behind the concept of a key generator is that there is some algorithm used to expand a small key space into a large one. By finding the algorithm, a hacker could easily guess a key in the small space and expand it to a valid key in the large space. However, There is no reason to believe that ID did that at all.
Q3A CD keys are long. Mine is 16 characters of alphanumerics. That gives a gigantic search space: 36^16, a 64-bit number.
I expect they just created a database of 64-bit random numbers, just enough for as many CD's as they sell. Then they just have to guard that database very, very carefully. If that's how they did it, there is NO WAY to generate a fake key other than guessing. If there are 10 million valid keys, then you would have a one in 795866110994640088 chance of randomly guessing one of them.
The only hope for cheaters would be to steal one of the correct keys!
Obviously there would need to be some way to deal with people who had their keys stolen and whatnot. But overall, I think it would be tremendously effective.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
After reading the article, I'm just depressed. But, I had kind of a neat idea for hitting cheaters back - hard. The wailing and gnashing of teeth would be heard far and wide...
Now, in Quake III, each player has a unique CD key that identifies them with the master server. This is used to prevents piracy.
Imagine if some of the countermeasures described in the article were implemented in a really subtle way... not to prevent cheating, but to just detect it, and detect it carefully and explicitly. Let that system run for a few months or so and collect a big blacklist of the cheater's unique CD keys, without anyone knowing about it.
Then the sting... (insert evil laughter here...) ban them from playing in regular games. Set up another "master" server just for the cheaters, listing servers that explicitly allowed cheating, and only let the cheaters play on those servers.
Oh yeah... make sure the delay before people got put on the blacklist was long enough that the fsckers couldn't return the game and get their money back.
Maybe that would teach the little bastards! Please, ID software! Do this for DOOM 2000!
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Did you really expect that a document designed to help people get their apps running on Linux would say...
Yeah, that would certainly convince Adobe to port Photoshop to Linux! Great idea!
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
...pure bigotry...
(snort.) Chill out. It's just a recommendation for people who are trying to get their application to run on as many Linux'es as possible. Most of those applications are written in C and C++. If you had read the document, you would note that most of the major distributions are already compliant. If you want to write your app in some other language, how does this document change anything for you?
This is a good thing. Now that it's out there, maybe people will use it instead of just releasing their app for Red Hat 6.2! That is the problem this document is addressing. Now, all the Pointy Haired Bosses who make the decisions will at least think about all the other Linuxes besides Red Hat.
For the rest of you, who have actually read the document... I have only one comment. I'm a little suprised that they recommend only X 3.3.6, and don't mention X 4.0.x. Are there backwards compatibility issues with the 4.0 series, or are they just not considered stable enough?
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Well, that's amusing but not entirely true...
Certainly some science fiction authors have described near-future scenarios in which hacking genes is as easy and commonplace as hacking computer code is today.
Just like Moore's law affects the computer industry, a similar law (heh. Hunkapiller's law?) affects biotech. Those gene sequencer machines are expensive - like early mainframes - but they are several orders of magnitude cheaper and faster than the old manual techniques for gene sequencing.
If gene sequencing really does turn out to be useful, of course the machines to do it will get cheaper and faster. Since cheaper usually also means smaller... eventually we might very well see gene sequencers that fit on a desktop.
But why would a normal person want a gene sequencer on their desktop? you ask... Well, I don't know. But similar questions were asked about computers. I would not be surprised if everyone has their own gene sequencer in 20 years, and they do all sorts of things with them that we can't even imagine now.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Obviously, people didn't read the tests very carefully.
Solaris had big numbers for the SQL tests. Unfortunately, those were in seconds -- so Solaris actually did very POORLY on the SQL tests.
Please, everyone, read carefully. There's some good info on those slides but it is not clearly presented.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
The last modified dates doesn't prove much. It is very likely that he, like other small web site owners, periodically edits the files on his own computer at work or home, and then uploads them all at once to the server.
However, it is interesting that a quick check of the google, hotbot, yahoo, and altavista search engines does not seem to turn up any matches for "corinthians.com" that actually point to www.corinthians.com.
That might indicate that the web site just got put up in the last little while, since the search engines haven't found it yet.
Nonetheless, even if the web site just went up in the last month... if the current owner isn't actually squatting with intent to resell the site to the highest bidder, but really wants to use it, and he got it before the soccer club, he should be allowed to keep it.
I mean... I hope nobody comes for my web site. I want to keep it, even though I don't have much there now. What if some company demands I hand it over? That would suck. I already use it quite a bit for email.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
No. Unix does suck in this area.
Your understanding of components is limited. "Stringing together programs" is not components.
Why? Well, a lot of reasons. One: There is no error handling. Piping text files is one way. There is no way to pass error messages "back" down the pipe. Have you ever tried to debug a complicated shell script that uses a bunch of pipes?
Two: Pipes can't really pass structured data. How do you push a linked list through a pipe? How about a hash table?
Three: All of those "components" are really programs, and their communication is inefficient. Running your example would start at least three full-blown programs, and these programs have to communicate through text files - so data gets copied repeatedly from one address space to another. This is inefficient. If it was a real program using real components, the data would be loaded into memory once, and each object could access it. Much faster!
Yes, on Unix, everything is a file. Probably a text file. So Unix is really good at text files. Did I mention that it's also really good at text files? Yup, if you want to process text files, Unix is great!
X Windows is only the most OBVIOUS problem, because when you are working with graphics, piping files just doesn't cut it anymore. But if Unix had been built on a real component model, and not just the idea of piping text files around, then everything would be better, even at the command prompt. And, XWindows could have used a more powerful system, and then it would have had real cut and paste, real printing capability, real font handling, etc.
So if you agree with Miguel about X, you should also agree with him about Unix in general. The problem with Unix is that the unidirectional piping of unstructured files is not a powerful enough communications model.
This is why Miguel likes Windows: despite all the problems, Windows at least has real components. For TEN YEARS NOW, since Windows 3.0, you have been able to paste a complex object like a drawing into another complex object, like a spreadsheet.
Unix has only begun to pick up this capability in the last year with KDE and Gnome! Ten years late! (More if you consider the Macintosh!)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
You really need to read the Unix Haters Handbook. They have a whole chapter on this, which demonstrates very conclusively that this is NOT the way to do reusable code.
Yes, you can build up big complicated things by piping together commands, and redirecting stuff, and using sed and awk and perl and grep and find and all the rest.
THIS IS A CRAPPY WAY TO WRITE SOFTWARE.
If you change any component, it will break. It will not be portable because every Unix out there has different options for all those commands, and they mean slightly different things. Even worse, there is no error handling. Since all your data is a text stream, dealing with binary data, or heaven help us, actual structured data, (like records, or objects, or whatever your favorite language calls them) is painful or impossible.
You claim "we've got reusable code running out of our ears". Yeah right. I challenge you to build a sophisticated, portable, maintainable application out of that so-called reusable code.
Even worse, there is no excuse for this state of affairs. Before Unix was even invented, there were LispStations. On those machines, instead of text streams, there were functions. Functions with error handling, defined interfaces, and even fancy stuff like introspection.
Unix could have been better.
Nonetheless, I still like Linux better than anything else out there right now... because it has source, it can be improved. The object models that KDE and Gnome are moving toward sound like a great start. They may not be perfect, but hey... what is?
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Correction: Q3A uses T&L if it is available in the video hardware. So far the only cards on the market that do it are the NVidia GeForce, GeForce 2, and ATI Radeon.(The Quake 3 Arena engine is also the only game engine on the market which uses dual processors if they are available. )
That is, Quake 3 Area, (and other games using the Quake 3 engine,) ARE the new games.
I don't think Unreal Tournament uses T&L, however, as it is basically the Unreal engine which came out way back in... 1997 I think? It's been tweaked and enhanced, but has the same basic capabilities.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
If it was fast, I would like it for all sorts of simple things. For instance, in Quake III, I want to leave my fingers over a small set of command keys and mouse buttons. This slows me down for switching weapons. If I could just say "rocket" to switch to the rocket launcher, that would make me a little more competitive.
In text editors, I would like to say "oops" and automatically have the last word deleted. That would definitely speed me up, but my cubicle neighbors might get tired of hearing a constant stream of "oops... oops... oops" over the wall. I bet it wouldn't be hard to patch that into emacs...
Bruce's description of a voice-controlled car stereo is also good. This is especially interesting to me, because I am thinking of building an MP3 player for my car that will be a full X86 computer. How do you do a user interface that allows you to scroll through hundreds of albums and thousands of songs? While driving?
Voice command seems like the best solution. Say "Play... U2... Zooropa... Lemon", or "Play... Beethoven... Sixth Symphony". (imagine a little chime from the computer during each "..." to indicate it "got" it and is ready for more input.)
I should be able to operate that while driving without driving off the road. And, a well written voice command program could be pretty accurate for that application, since the set of valid inputs is reasonably small at each step.
I'm enthusiastic about the possibilities. I predict that once people have this, they will wonder how they ever survived with out it. Just like wheels on mice!
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Buy another hard drive and mirror the first one.
With the low prices and insane capacities of hard drives now, that honestly seems like the best thing.
For example, backing up your 5-10 GB can be done at least twice on the $129 dollar Seagate 20GB drive I bought last month.
Then just use CD-R's for the really critical stuff, and stick them in a safety deposit box.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Whoa there.
You have apparently confused the speed of the interface with the speed of the device.
Serial ATA is just a faster interface. That only helps getting stuff out of the on-drive cache (typically about 1 MB). The real problem is just getting the bits off of the drive platter is still slow. So slow, in fact, that for casual applications there is little difference between the old UDMA and even the new ATA-66.
It's a mechanical problem, not an interface problem
By the way, why doesn't someone make a PCI controller card that presents a fast, low-overhead SCSI interface to the CPU and software, but is really a smart RAID controller for a bunch of cheap IDE drives in a RAID config?
Imagine hooking up five of those Maxtor 80GB drives in a striped config, set up to look like a single, wicked-fast 400 GB SCSI drive?
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Indeed! I had to shake my head when I saw this:
"I wrote 'Microsoft's a monopolist' and the [New York] Times wanted to edit it to say, 'Microsoft is innovative.'"
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. "All the news that's fit to print... except if it challenges the status quo." Not the first time, either.
Bah.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Nice concept. What if it gets there and all you get is an unchanging yellow blur in front of the camera? Think of the view through your windshield driving in think fog. Or in heavy snow.
However... I suppose that we know enough about the chemical composition of the gas giant atmospheres to determine some wavelengths of electomagnetic radiation for which most of the fog would be transparent. If the camera was sensitive to those frequencies, maybe there would be something to see.
But I bet it would just be thick, pea-soup fog. And probably dark, more than a few KM down. Are there any planetary scientists reading that could provide some facts?
I like the idea of a balloon floating around Jupiter with instruments. It sounds like a pretty fool-proof probe design.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Do they run under Windows?
Just curious.
I thought (and I may have got this wrong) that Corel was doing a lot of work on Wine, but was using it as a library, not an emulation layer.
Apparently, Wine can be used either way?
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
I'll leave aside the question of if fair use allows this or not.
Are you SURE this works for quake III? I'm pretty sure that every client who connects to a Quake III server is required, by the server, to have a unique CD key. Furthermore, the CD ROM must be in the drive for the game to work.
So, I think you are wrong. But I'm not 100% sure and would welcome a more authoritative answer.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Well...
Remember that the whole concept of "Intellectual Property" is essentially a fiction - a construct of the copyright laws.
What the government gives, they can take away. True, they can't take away someone's intellectual property without compensation - but they can just change the rules of the game to redefine intellectual property.
I don't believe the definition of what is and is not copyrightable is part of the constitution.
So I think Congress could do this no problem.
I'm not a lawyer, etc.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
If RobertGormleyLinux can pony up 4 thousand dollars, it gets a spot. Or, if it is a non-profit, and has more than 4 thousand users, it gets a spot. Maybe not perfect, but it's a start, isn't it?
As far as difficulty of certification - yeah, it wouldn't be easy. That's why the certification group would need to have some money.
"Linux Compatible" would have to be defined rather carefully. There might have to be quite a bit of fine print. But...
At least when you went out to buy a bunch of 100-Mbit network cards, if there was a "Linux Compatible" penguin logo on it, and a note like
Frankly, that would give me a warm fuzzy feeling and I'd be a lot happier about buying those cards. Even if I was running RobertGormleyLinux 1.1 - after all, if I was eleet enough to run that, I would know what kernel version and patches I had...
Obviously things are trickier for software. Still, I think it would be better than what the Linux world has now...
The rc.d stuff isn't that bad. There's two main styles of doing it (Sys V or BSD) and a few variations. Perhaps one of the things the hypothetical org could do is help standardize things, or write some nice flexible installation scripts that deal with the differences out there.
It couldn't hurt, could it?
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Yes, but the effect is the same. If the conspirators get arrested, they will realize that either:
1. Their encryption was broken
2. Or, they were bugged (but why?)
3. Or, one of their members is a traitor
4. They screwed up some other way that got the cops onto them.
If they are confident enough to rule out #3 and #4, 1 is the only other choice.
So assume they get their day in court. Even if the Secret Service doesn't present evidence from broken encryption, (and instead uses evidence from regular bugging, search and seizure, whatever) the question still arises: Why were these people under investigation in the first place?
What got the Secret Service looking at them? Was it just because they were using PGP? Not likely - too many people use PGP for them all to be checked out. So, their messages must have been cracked and scanned for incriminating phrases.
The conspirators lawyer will ask for sure. And the secret will be out. Or at least, people will be suspicious. If it happens a few times, people will believe the NSA can crack PGP.
This hasn't happened yet. So either the NSA cannot crack PGP, or they have been very very cautious how they have used the ability.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Simply, if you don't like gambling, don't do it.
Yeah, and people who don't like smoking should just stop.
And people who are just desparate for their next fix, spending their welfare dollars on crack should just stop.
It's an addiction for people. Even if they know it's stupid, they can't stop.
While I agree with your sentiment on some things, sometimes people do need to be protected from themselves.
Unless you like a relentlessly darwinistic sort of society. In that case, maybe you think we should get rid of welfare, medicare, and the rest.
The weak, and the dumb, and the addicted, and the suicidally hopeless can just suffer or die. After all, we wouldn't want to interfere with anyone's freedom, would we?
Personally, I don't like the idea. Sometimes, imposing morals on people is good for them. What do you think laws are, anyway?
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
It doesn't suprise me to hear that the NSA is used by other organizations to break encrypted documents.
However, I would bet that a lot of those documents were encrypted using regular DES. The NSA can probably break DES in a minute or two by brute-force, using specialized hardware.
However... Suppose they can break Triple-DES, or Blowfish, or RSA, or whatever.
It is important to note that it would be difficult for them to safely use that information.
If the FBI/NSA/CIA/DOJ/DOD/whatever ever did something using knowlege that could have only been obtained by breaking one of those codes, the cat would be out of the bag.
The situation is very similar to Bobby Shaftoe's division in the Cryptonomicon, which had the job of running around creating plausible "cover stories" to explain why the Allies knew so much.
For the NSA et. al. to USE information they got from breaking 3DES or one of the other "strong" systems, they would first have to create a plausible alternative way for them to have obtained that information. And, that would have to be a legal way if they wanted to use it in court.
Now, they may do that. Apparently, they get a lot of "anonymous tips". Uh huh. But if there are say, three or four people in a conspiracy to cream-pie the president, and they only communicate through PGP, with good passphrases, and they are careful about Van Eck and other bugging... if they get caught and dragged in front of a judge, how will the Secret Service present the evidence?
As soon as the secret is out, people would switch encryption methods. (Well, some people. The people who care enough to use encryption, anyway.)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Yes, that would be nice. Now that MySQL is GPL, it would be possible to do something like the Windows Registry, but properly.
/usr/local/etc/apache/apache.conf. But under Linux it's... um... /usr/etc/apache.conf. Or is it? Damn! time to run find again...
I like text config files too... sometimes... but it can be so damn confusing finding the file you need. Especially when you go back and forth between several flavors of Unix. On FreeBSD, the Apache config file is... um... I think
And where was that php3.ini again? ARRRGH!
Unfortunately, it's too late to change things. Although it would be possible to make a distribution of Linux with all the settings and configurations stored in a nice MySQL database, with a nice text mode tool for editing it (or just run mysql -u root -p config if you are the command-line type...)
it's too late. It would be incompatible with all the other stuff out there, and as soon as Apache, or PHP, or Bind, or ifconfig, or ANYTHING was revised, you would be in a race to keep up.
No, Unix is stuck with a zillion text mode files, all with incompatible syntax, different naming conventions, and poor documentation.
The only glimmer of light is the File System Standard. Maybe, eventually, all the Free Unixes of the world will agree on it, and at least I will know WHERE to find the file I want.
(not that NT is always an improvement... who can remember where the hosts file lives on an NT system? Somewhere under \system32\drivers, I think?)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
It has a lot of well reasoned, well documented complaints about the suckage of various Unix flavors. It is mostly pre-Linux, (and Linux and friends have fixed a lot of the problems) but many of their complaints are applicable.
Top Unix problems, IMHO:
But hey. For a lot of things, Unix is great! I run my home server with Mandrake 7.1, but my workstation usually runs Windows 2000. At work I use FreeBSD, and my firewall is OpenBSD.
And, free software is slowly but surely fixing most of those problems. Just don't forget: it isn't there yet. For some people, and some things, Linux still sucks.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Besides certifying hardware, there's all sorts of other things that such a joint business could do... sponsor benchmarks, pay for proper documentation of the kernel internals, negotiate with hardware vendors, etc.
Also, it would provide a unified "Linux" company that could help provide some focus for the rest of the business world when they deal with the Linux community. Right now, Red Hat seems to get that honor. And, no disrespect intended to Red Hat, but they aren't Linux, even though people talk about "Linux 6.2"...
Companies that ought to sponsor such a venture, each putting up a small amount of money:
Non profit orgs like Debian should get representation for free. RMS, ESR, and other deserving people should be involved in some way that isn't a burden for them, and helps keep the thing rolling in the right direction.
The company could make money by trademarking a logo and licensing it to hardware manufacturers who pass the Linux compatibility test.
This would be a good thing!
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)