I agree. This story is not news. The idea of 'egress filtering' has been around for ages and is common in security-aware corporate environments and universities.
Don't let the.i386.rpm moniker fool you; the binaries are compiled with optimizations for i686, but only use the i586 instruction set (so they still run on processors that don't implement CMOV, like (some) Cyrix processors).
That, of course, excludes i686.rpms which use the full i686 instruction set.
I didnt care that the source was released for either game, I was happy with the fact that I could play them on my Linux box.
Despite being the Free software bigot that I am, I'm not all that bothered about having the source to games at release time; most of the interesting stuff is in the content these days (reflected by where the development time and effort goes, too).
I think, though, that it is good citizenship to release the source eventually though; firstly so that people can learn from it, secondly - and more importantly IMHO - so that the game can be maintained relative to future OS revisions. I've a number of DOS games that I simply cannot play (properly) any longer because my hardware doesn't have DOS drivers and they don't run under W9x/WXP nor any of the ways of getting DOS programs to run under Linux.:(
iD and Interplay/Outrage/Volition have been good sports in this regard.
None of the three standards [SCSI/SATA/PATA] is inherently less reliable than the others.
Technically, that statement is correct, of course, but in practice the interface you choose determines the quality of mechanism you can buy with it; SCSI drives are engineered with different cost/reliability/longevity assumptions and tested individually, ATA drives are batch-tested. For more details from the horse's mouth, see This paper from Seagate on the differences.
As it happens, I use quality PATA drives (WD Special Edition, right now) in all my personal systems, so I'm not even a SCSI bigot;-). I chose WD SEs because the price/performance/reliability was right for me and they are one of the few ranges of ATA drives that still come with a 3 year warranty. Most ATA drives only come with 1 year (especially OEM models) and most SCSI drives come with 5 years.
a) it doesn't take account of the window of vulnerability between discovery (or, at the very least, public disclosure) and a working patch being made available. This study does. Google finds more details for those that want 'em.
b) All Linux distros ship far more software than Microsoft does with Windows, and rarely will all of it be installed and running on a given system. If a vulnerable package isn't installed on a given system, then that system isn't vulnerable. To compare like with like, you'd need to take Windows' stats and add them to IIS, Exchange, Mozilla, Office/OpenOffice.org, Cygwin/SFU, SQL server, a bunch of free and shareware IRC clients and so on.
If folks are going to play these silly pissing contests, then the only fair way to do it is to take account of the period of vulnerability and base comparisons on "role profiles" (e.g. PHP web server, anti-spam MTA, static web server, graphical desktop).
...as the news is no longer news to me, and the articles are usually less informative than a book or a HOWTO. Occasionally I'll buy a mag for the cover DVD, or if I'm facing a long journey.
I get set plenty of freebies; Information Age and Computer Weekly being the regulars. I used to get Linux User (and I might need to have a crack at getting back on their list). I'm planning on getting a sub to lwn.net.
Finally, as far as non-computer magazines go, the Big Issue is a regular for me, along with Venue (Bristol's equivalent of 'Time Out'). From time to time, I'll pick up The Economist or Private Eye.
A lot of people identify as one, and refuse to listen to anyone that identifies as the other.
Indeed. Despite being unable to bring myself to vote for a US-style 'Libertarian' party (i.e. economically right-wing), I've noticed that I have more in common with libertarians of all hues than authoritarians than with left-wing authoritarians (e.g. some of the UK-based 'hard left' organisations). My differences of opinion with right-wing libertarians tend to come down to whether to provide a 'safety net' to unlucky souls who can't make it in their 'free market' regime, and whether to trust corporations and the free market to "do the right thing" in a timely manner (whether that's adjusting rapidly to changing circumstances, or changing gradually to avoid high levels of short-term pain - depending on the exact scenario).
Similarly, I'm quite comfortable reading well-argued right-wing commentary (e.g. from The Times or Telegraph) - despite frequently disagreeing with what's said - but cannot stand poorly-argued right-wing commentary (i.e. as is found in The Sun, The Star, the Daily Mail and Daily Express).
If you want job security, follow this to the letter. If you want to do an ethical pass-the-baton job, invert all of that article's recommendations and do that instead.;-)
Actually.. for cooking, such things are still metric. As far as I am concerned, a teaspoon is defined as 5mL, a dessertspoon is 10mL and a tablespoon is 15 mL. A cup is 250 mL.
We don't use the 'cup' as a measure in the UK (commonly, at least). For large quantities of liquid and for weights, I use imperial.
That is, if I don't just make it up as I go along.;-)
Which shows that for science and engineering, metric is the way to go
I'm British, and despite all my formal education using the metric system, I still use imperial when cooking. I use metric for anything that's scientific/technical (down to sizing furniture).
Perhaps my use of imperial in cooking is down to some subconcious desire not to reduce cooking to a form of chemistry.
Good point. Still, it shouldn't be a surprise that if they can't keep their code consistent, they aren't able to keep their branding consistent either.;-)
...except it ISN'T MSCE, but MCSE (Microsoft Certified System Engineer). MSCE would be nonsense anyway, as Microsoft is one word, and hence shouldn't warrant 'MS' in any official, marketing-sanctioned, literature.
That said, searching microsoft.com for MSCE reveals a disturbing number of hits. Looks like someone's not doing their job of protecting the brand images properly!
The idea is to make low-cost, home-grown software and is said to hold great promise for developing countries. It could leapfrog Iraq into a more competitive future.
This has happened before; when the former eastern bloc countries wanted to get on the Internet when the iron curtain came down, despite being not especially wealthy, they bought current equipment. As a result, for many years, sites in countries such as Slovenia and Poland were faster than sites in France and Germany that were making do with equipment they'd bought many years earlier.
Parent is entirely correct; even though Windows Is Not My Favourite OS, the only obviously-exploitable deficiency of Windows XP's built-in (personal) firewall is the window of time during boot when the network is up, but the firewall isn't. SP2 fixes this, I gather, in addition to adding state tracking and a sane default policy.
Incoming connections to the NetBIOS and RPC ports can be blocked, but IIRC, you need to define them yourself in the firewall GUI so that they can be.
The overlay transfer uses essentially zero cpu. In fact, if you crash the OS, the overlay transfer keeps going and the video window remains live because the southbridge is still live even if the cpu is trapped.
The PROBLEM, is that mostly the windows drivers don't use the overlay method for reasons that are lame. they use the grab-and-display method, which is dumber than dumb.
The btwincap drivers get around that issue. it's also a total nonissue in linux.
Unfortunately, overlay is incompatible with Direct Rendering (aka hardware 3D). Attempting to use overlay mode with a video card that XFree is configured to use for hardware 3D locks the entire machine hard in my experience (Bt878, ATI Rage128 pro & Radeon 7500).:(
OTOH, using grab-and-display allows apps like tvtime to do funky realtime deinterlacing and suchlike, which results in a better picure at the expense of slightly higher CPU load (though the XVideo extension helps out a lot).
I believe there is a fair degree of truth to the old maxim "5% of the worlds population owns 95% of the wealth". You and I and the others here are not likely to be in that 5%.
Actually, if you live in the west, and work with computers, you probably are.
Seeing as how these "RAID" controllers are mostly glorified ATA bus controllers, and your RAID functionality takes place almost entirely in software, the speed of your CPU and the theoretical limit of the interface are going to determine the overall speed of your "desktop RAID" configuration
...and not forgetting the efficiency of the software driver, of course...
I happily use a Promise PDC20276 together with Linux's md software RAID implementation, but I don't fool myself that it's any more than software RAID running across a couple of ATA channels. And that fact wouldn't change if I used Linux's ataraid or Promise's RAID drivers instead of md.
Jeez, you need to know assembly to tell that you have overrun your arrays in C? If that's the case, we'll never get rid of buffer overflows until we kill C and all it's siblings.
BTW, it's not the case. Segfaulting was an easy clue, and what you needed to understand is how your program was allocating memory. People need to start managing their data or the language needs to start doing it for them.
Whoah, less caffeine for this man!;-)
Seriously, I know, and knew back then, that the segfault indicated my process was overwriting someone else's memory. What I didn't know was whether it was a) a function in a library I was using, or b) my own code (which I seem to recall was something written recursively for added spice). If the latter, then I needed to know/where/ I was over-running an array, and peppering the source code with printf()s was no use (which was the original point of my post and its parent) as it made the program run "correctly".
Tell me about it; I once had a C program that segfaulted without the debugging printf()s but ran perfectly with them.
Turns out I was overruning an array, and the static strings for the debug printf()s gave my process just enough space that it stopped trying to trash another process' memory (just its own).
Luckily, as a former assembly language programmer, from the mere change in behaviour, I had an inkling of what was going on...
Slashdot Mirror
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That, of course, excludes i686.rpms which use the full i686 instruction set.
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Despite being the Free software bigot that I am, I'm not all that bothered about having the source to games at release time; most of the interesting stuff is in the content these days (reflected by where the development time and effort goes, too).
I think, though, that it is good citizenship to release the source eventually though; firstly so that people can learn from it, secondly - and more importantly IMHO - so that the game can be maintained relative to future OS revisions. I've a number of DOS games that I simply cannot play (properly) any longer because my hardware doesn't have DOS drivers and they don't run under W9x/WXP nor any of the ways of getting DOS programs to run under Linux. :(
iD and Interplay/Outrage/Volition have been good sports in this regard.
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Technically, that statement is correct, of course, but in practice the interface you choose determines the quality of mechanism you can buy with it; SCSI drives are engineered with different cost/reliability/longevity assumptions and tested individually, ATA drives are batch-tested. For more details from the horse's mouth, see This paper from Seagate on the differences.
As it happens, I use quality PATA drives (WD Special Edition, right now) in all my personal systems, so I'm not even a SCSI bigot ;-). I chose WD SEs because the price/performance/reliability was right for me and they are one of the few ranges of ATA drives that still come with a 3 year warranty. Most ATA drives only come with 1 year (especially OEM models) and most SCSI drives come with 5 years.
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b) All Linux distros ship far more software than Microsoft does with Windows, and rarely will all of it be installed and running on a given system. If a vulnerable package isn't installed on a given system, then that system isn't vulnerable. To compare like with like, you'd need to take Windows' stats and add them to IIS, Exchange, Mozilla, Office/OpenOffice.org, Cygwin/SFU, SQL server, a bunch of free and shareware IRC clients and so on.
If folks are going to play these silly pissing contests, then the only fair way to do it is to take account of the period of vulnerability and base comparisons on "role profiles" (e.g. PHP web server, anti-spam MTA, static web server, graphical desktop).
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I get set plenty of freebies; Information Age and Computer Weekly being the regulars. I used to get Linux User (and I might need to have a crack at getting back on their list). I'm planning on getting a sub to lwn.net.
Finally, as far as non-computer magazines go, the Big Issue is a regular for me, along with Venue (Bristol's equivalent of 'Time Out'). From time to time, I'll pick up The Economist or Private Eye.
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Indeed. Despite being unable to bring myself to vote for a US-style 'Libertarian' party (i.e. economically right-wing), I've noticed that I have more in common with libertarians of all hues than authoritarians than with left-wing authoritarians (e.g. some of the UK-based 'hard left' organisations). My differences of opinion with right-wing libertarians tend to come down to whether to provide a 'safety net' to unlucky souls who can't make it in their 'free market' regime, and whether to trust corporations and the free market to "do the right thing" in a timely manner (whether that's adjusting rapidly to changing circumstances, or changing gradually to avoid high levels of short-term pain - depending on the exact scenario).
Similarly, I'm quite comfortable reading well-argued right-wing commentary (e.g. from The Times or Telegraph) - despite frequently disagreeing with what's said - but cannot stand poorly-argued right-wing commentary (i.e. as is found in The Sun, The Star, the Daily Mail and Daily Express).
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See PoliticalCompass.org
(-6.62, -7.38)
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We don't use the 'cup' as a measure in the UK (commonly, at least). For large quantities of liquid and for weights, I use imperial.
That is, if I don't just make it up as I go along. ;-)
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That's not to say I don't check I've got the right order of magnitude by duplicating scaling calculations in metric, of course... ;-)
Oh, and my measuring spoons help out lots too.
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I'm British, and despite all my formal education using the metric system, I still use imperial when cooking. I use metric for anything that's scientific/technical (down to sizing furniture).
Perhaps my use of imperial in cooking is down to some subconcious desire not to reduce cooking to a form of chemistry.
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That said, searching microsoft.com for MSCE reveals a disturbing number of hits. Looks like someone's not doing their job of protecting the brand images properly!
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This has happened before; when the former eastern bloc countries wanted to get on the Internet when the iron curtain came down, despite being not especially wealthy, they bought current equipment. As a result, for many years, sites in countries such as Slovenia and Poland were faster than sites in France and Germany that were making do with equipment they'd bought many years earlier.
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Incoming connections to the NetBIOS and RPC ports can be blocked, but IIRC, you need to define them yourself in the firewall GUI so that they can be.
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The PROBLEM, is that mostly the windows drivers don't use the overlay method for reasons that are lame. they use the grab-and-display method, which is dumber than dumb.
The btwincap drivers get around that issue. it's also a total nonissue in linux.
Unfortunately, overlay is incompatible with Direct Rendering (aka hardware 3D). Attempting to use overlay mode with a video card that XFree is configured to use for hardware 3D locks the entire machine hard in my experience (Bt878, ATI Rage128 pro & Radeon 7500). :(
OTOH, using grab-and-display allows apps like tvtime to do funky realtime deinterlacing and suchlike, which results in a better picure at the expense of slightly higher CPU load (though the XVideo extension helps out a lot).
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Actually, if you live in the west, and work with computers, you probably are .
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I happily use a Promise PDC20276 together with Linux's md software RAID implementation, but I don't fool myself that it's any more than software RAID running across a couple of ATA channels. And that fact wouldn't change if I used Linux's ataraid or Promise's RAID drivers instead of md.
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BTW, it's not the case. Segfaulting was an easy clue, and what you needed to understand is how your program was allocating memory. People need to start managing their data or the language needs to start doing it for them.
Whoah, less caffeine for this man! ;-)
Seriously, I know, and knew back then, that the segfault indicated my process was overwriting someone else's memory. What I didn't know was whether it was a) a function in a library I was using, or b) my own code (which I seem to recall was something written recursively for added spice). If the latter, then I needed to know /where/ I was over-running an array, and peppering the source code with printf()s was no use (which was the original point of my post and its parent) as it made the program run "correctly".
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Turns out I was overruning an array, and the static strings for the debug printf()s gave my process just enough space that it stopped trying to trash another process' memory (just its own).
Luckily, as a former assembly language programmer, from the mere change in behaviour, I had an inkling of what was going on...
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