Video games are really processor-dependent. Most other applications are hard drive-dependent to some extent or another. Indexing a database is really a way to test the speed of your hard drive for any DB of significant size (nobody keeps a 500GB DB in RAM:)
The only other application I can think of that's comparatively CPU-dependent is raytracers and the like, and the problem with using them as benchmarks is that the length of time they take to produce a picture will obviously depend on the complexity of the picture. Q3/UT/etc. generate pictures of roughly fixed complexity, saving you the trouble, and also do so in a time-optimized kind of way (while raytracers tend to be more optimized towards producing beautiful results).
I notice your usage of the 11/780. Now that's stoneage... the thing dies when it gets more than about four users. Compare a modern PC to an 88x0, and you'll get closer.
Of course, modern micros are still impressively powerful. But none of them run DCL or TPU, wah.
Given that state of things, why would people switch? FireWire is technologically superior to USB2, faster, and has far more products available for it.
In the PC world, you need a recent micro to make either reasonably useful, so there's no legacy advantage to USB2 either. It's not like you can use USB2 devices on USB1. Sure, you can upgrade to a USB2 controller and keep all your USB1 devices, but you can do that if you plug in a FireWire card too.
Northern Lights is a contractor. (We're not arguing about that. We're technically arguing about whether they're a sub-contractor.)
You seem to believe that everything that receives government money is a contractor. This would make, for example, the BBC a contractor. This is my final post.
Contractors get paid, and they get to decide how they are to fulfill their requirements. In-Q-Tel has no autonomy: anytime the CIA wants to change its marching orders, it just says aye.
We have a similar concept here in Canada: We call them Crown Corporations. The CBC (and its bigger cousin the BBC) is not a contractor, providing television services for the government of Canada. It's a part of the government. It's just not organized like a typical government agency, but rather organized like a corporation.
I wonder: Have you ever worked for a government contractor, or in government? The difference is pretty huge. (I've done both.)
Except that this was exactly how a lot of the search engines said that they would make money. They would advertise themselves by setting up the free web-search services, and then make deals with private organizations to index their files. The public search becomes an ad for the moneymaking indexing venture.
That was how OpenText and that crew wanted to make their first billion, anyway, IIRC.
It's just that they thought that lots of companies would want their services, and not sign them to exclusive contracts as it appears the CIA has done here. So they'd keep the public sites up to attract more clients. The exclusivity of this contract makes the public site redundant.
CMOS can be rewritten, yes. There's a way to deal with that too. Set up the CMOS the way you want it, and burn a copy of it on a PROM; replace the CMOS chip.
I admit that this is beyond my level of expertise. But there are ways. It's just that the more paranoid you have to be, the more ways you use.
If you're truly paranoid, don't send logs over the network to another system.
Print them. Have a hardcopy printer connected to the firewall, a fast one with a big buffer. Send all your firewall logs to it, at least except for the ones which update fourteen times a second.;)
The ideal firewall has no netatalk, samba, or nfs capability.
That's right, noncommercial use is presumptively fair. That doesn't mean automatically fair. Presumptively fair just means that the copyright holder has to defeat the presumption: it sets up a higher bar.
Odds are that duplication for archival would go over that bar.
However, we may never know what those justices would have thought; the main aim of the DMCA IMO was to overturn Sony v. Universal anyway.
Solaris has too much of a fondness for spawning daemons. It's also the OS of choice for university systems, which is where a lot of kiddies learn their trade.
And then there's the whole sunrpc issue.
As for running a Mac-based firewall: It's impractical with Classic, unfortunately. Classic is great for not spawning daemons randomly (which is why certain elements of the DoD switch over to it for their webservers), but it doesn't have any reasonable proxy solutions available.
OS X, of course, is a different matter. I'm not sure how secure X is in general, but of course it's got all the *nix proxies available to it.
Then again, I wouldn't want to run a Linux firewall either. Same problem as Solaris, except for the sunrpc obsession.:) I'd probably use a *BSD solution.
I should also comment on your abuse of my handle. It's a reference to a classic British SF novel which you evidently haven't read. I usually go by the nick Haflinger. Between these two nicks, you should be able to figure out which novel I'm talking about, unless of course you're an illiterate peckerhead.
Typical arrogant Brit bullshit. Sigh. Read my other post to another Brit. I'll explain in more detail right now. Fair use is unique to the U.S., at least in the Anglo-American world; what the Commonwealth uses is a concept called fair dealing, which is considerably more restrictive.
Fair dealing shows up in the U.K., Canada, Australia... probably all of the Commonwealth, those are just the copyright acts I've read.
As it so happens, I live in a country which has a very similar Copyright Act to yours (or theirs; perhaps you're not a Brit, but you certainly write like one).
Okay. 2-6 are probably all okay according to Sony v. Universal, as long as you don't keep the tape for archival purposes. You're watching a show that you're legally entitled to watch, just at a different time from when the original broadcaster put it on. It's when you keep tapes lying around that the law gets messy.
1 is questionable, and not a matter of settled law, at least not in the U.S. AFAIK. There are two possible sub-branches. I will deal with each of them in turn.
My brother records a show on a channel I do not pay for but have available to me if I'm willing to pay and sends (either on VHS tape or digitally) it to me.
This probably isn't what you meant. But in this case you're almost certainly breaking the law. Effectively, you're using your brother's VCR to reduce your cable bill. You could get the show (and tape it to watch whenever you wanted) just by paying your cable company some more money (and possibly buying a VCR). I'd have a Real Hard Time arguing fair use here.
My brother who is living in a different state records a show on a channel that is not available in my area and sends (either on VHS tape or digitally) it to me.
This is probably what you meant. And it's tricky. Sony v. Universal doesn't deal with it. The entertainment industry would say that the right thing to do is to lobby your cable company to add the channel you want, or get DirecTV or something like that. You might say "But I can't get DirecTV because I live in an apartment building, and my cable company won't listen." It'd be a fun argument. However, given the rulings in the 2600 cases, I suspect you'd lose in the current U.S. judicial climate.
Most exploits require writing to some files in/usr or/etc. If/usr is a CDROM - or better yet if / is a CDROM, then a lot of them get blotto'ed immediately.
Your point is, of course, fundamentally correct; however, physically write-protecting the drive by making it a CDROM is another step in protecting your box, which is excessive for many uses (like, well, a home LAN:), but certainly not all: the more layers of protection, the more protection you have.
Under the landmark Sony v. Universal case, the U.S. Supreme Court decided not to ban VCRs because they could be used for time-shifting: i.e. watching Starsky & Hutch (or whatever people watched back in the '70s:) at a different time than whenever NBC (or whoever) decided to show it.
They decided that this was a fair use.
It's not actually stated, but it's pretty strongly implied in the decision that the now-common act of building ad-free libraries of TV shows is illegal.
And it's certain that distributing videotape copies of shows is illegal. It's a violation of copyright, not saved by fair use, even in the U.S.
Of course, people do it all the time. This is just one of the many inanities of copyright law in the modern era.
Another inanity: The U.S. is the only country in the Western world with a fair use doctrine in copyright law. That means that probably time-shifting is illegal in every other First World country. However, the movie industry knows that if they were to, say, sue to stop Brits having VCRs, they'd win the lawsuit but then the Brits would change copyright law - to make it weaker - and they don't want that.
Lots of people are already trading media on CDRs. They rely on Gnutella/Kazaa/Usenet/etc. to get New Stuff, and then the one person with a large pipe burns the New Stuff and starts bringing it around. Believe me, the filesharing piracy is just the tip of the iceberg.
Mainly, NAT can be persuaded to become bidirectional with relative ease. That is, you can trick it into giving access to machines behind the firewall. This is especially easy if there are servers behind the firewall.
The explanation on how is technical in the extreme, and while I mostly understand it, I don't trust myself to explain it correctly; I'll recommend the Zwicky book again, perhaps I should put it in my sigfile.:) If you're broke, go find your local university's library. Any decent uni library and many crappy ones will have at least the first edition of Zwicky.
The simple answer, though: SOCKS4/5 is a server, and NAT is a router solution. Routers route packets around the 'net. They are designed to pass them back and forth. Servers, on the other hand, just receive packets, process them, and decide what to do with them.
I talked about this a bit more in a BSD thread just earlier today: go here to see my other comment.
Now, don't get me wrong; NAT is much better than just having an open connection. But it will usually pass ICMP packets, and that's an enormous security hole. Dumb network admins usually deal with it by blocking all ICMP packets, which of course breaks a whole pile of things. The better solution is to just not ever route packets from the 'net past the firewall. They should all be caught at the firewall and fed through some kind of proxy before they ever touch the inside. That can only be done if you give up NAT.
Firewire? Haven't seen a single firewire product, seen some firewire/ports/ on mac computers at schools, but never seen an actual firewire DEVICE except for over in the mac area in CompUSA. And one or two devices online.
Somebody obviously hasn't been spending much time in the camcorder section of the Sony Store.:)
Your point is mostly accurate when considering the iMacs. However, consider the PowerMac, which has PCI slots, and things get complicated.
Even the iMac is configurable though. One of the really beautiful things about MacOS is how well the USB/FireWire support works. The core API is completely rock-solid; although the Poorly Written Driver problem occasionally rears its ugly head, as long as drivers are sanely written it's possible to string an impressive variety of USB devices off of a Mac.
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Video games are really processor-dependent. Most other applications are hard drive-dependent to some extent or another. Indexing a database is really a way to test the speed of your hard drive for any DB of significant size (nobody keeps a 500GB DB in RAM :)
The only other application I can think of that's comparatively CPU-dependent is raytracers and the like, and the problem with using them as benchmarks is that the length of time they take to produce a picture will obviously depend on the complexity of the picture. Q3/UT/etc. generate pictures of roughly fixed complexity, saving you the trouble, and also do so in a time-optimized kind of way (while raytracers tend to be more optimized towards producing beautiful results).
You haven't been reading my posts. :)
I use the word micro to distinguish the computers I actually own from the ones I miss dearly. ;)
I notice your usage of the 11/780. Now that's stoneage... the thing dies when it gets more than about four users. Compare a modern PC to an 88x0, and you'll get closer.
Of course, modern micros are still impressively powerful. But none of them run DCL or TPU, wah.
It could be because most of the SoundJam design team went to work on iTunes... ;)
Rio shipped with a stripped-down version of SoundJam, complete with mildly annoying ads. Yes, I like iTunes much better.
More people have FireWire than USB2, right now.
Given that state of things, why would people switch? FireWire is technologically superior to USB2, faster, and has far more products available for it.
In the PC world, you need a recent micro to make either reasonably useful, so there's no legacy advantage to USB2 either. It's not like you can use USB2 devices on USB1. Sure, you can upgrade to a USB2 controller and keep all your USB1 devices, but you can do that if you plug in a FireWire card too.
Northern Lights is a contractor. (We're not arguing about that. We're technically arguing about whether they're a sub-contractor.)
You seem to believe that everything that receives government money is a contractor. This would make, for example, the BBC a contractor. This is my final post.
Contractors get paid, and they get to decide how they are to fulfill their requirements. In-Q-Tel has no autonomy: anytime the CIA wants to change its marching orders, it just says aye.
We have a similar concept here in Canada: We call them Crown Corporations. The CBC (and its bigger cousin the BBC) is not a contractor, providing television services for the government of Canada. It's a part of the government. It's just not organized like a typical government agency, but rather organized like a corporation.
I wonder: Have you ever worked for a government contractor, or in government? The difference is pretty huge. (I've done both.)
Except that this was exactly how a lot of the search engines said that they would make money. They would advertise themselves by setting up the free web-search services, and then make deals with private organizations to index their files. The public search becomes an ad for the moneymaking indexing venture.
That was how OpenText and that crew wanted to make their first billion, anyway, IIRC.
It's just that they thought that lots of companies would want their services, and not sign them to exclusive contracts as it appears the CIA has done here. So they'd keep the public sites up to attract more clients. The exclusivity of this contract makes the public site redundant.
How about this definition: A contractor is a private entity with a contract.
Duh.
The CIA gives In-Q-Tel orders, they don't sign deals.
CMOS can be rewritten, yes. There's a way to deal with that too. Set up the CMOS the way you want it, and burn a copy of it on a PROM; replace the CMOS chip.
I admit that this is beyond my level of expertise. But there are ways. It's just that the more paranoid you have to be, the more ways you use.
If you're truly paranoid, don't send logs over the network to another system.
Print them. Have a hardcopy printer connected to the firewall, a fast one with a big buffer. Send all your firewall logs to it, at least except for the ones which update fourteen times a second. ;)
The ideal firewall has no netatalk, samba, or nfs capability.
That's right, noncommercial use is presumptively fair. That doesn't mean automatically fair. Presumptively fair just means that the copyright holder has to defeat the presumption: it sets up a higher bar.
Odds are that duplication for archival would go over that bar.
However, we may never know what those justices would have thought; the main aim of the DMCA IMO was to overturn Sony v. Universal anyway.
Solaris has too much of a fondness for spawning daemons. It's also the OS of choice for university systems, which is where a lot of kiddies learn their trade.
And then there's the whole sunrpc issue.
As for running a Mac-based firewall: It's impractical with Classic, unfortunately. Classic is great for not spawning daemons randomly (which is why certain elements of the DoD switch over to it for their webservers), but it doesn't have any reasonable proxy solutions available.
OS X, of course, is a different matter. I'm not sure how secure X is in general, but of course it's got all the *nix proxies available to it.
Then again, I wouldn't want to run a Linux firewall either. Same problem as Solaris, except for the sunrpc obsession. :) I'd probably use a *BSD solution.
I should also comment on your abuse of my handle. It's a reference to a classic British SF novel which you evidently haven't read. I usually go by the nick Haflinger. Between these two nicks, you should be able to figure out which novel I'm talking about, unless of course you're an illiterate peckerhead.
Typical arrogant Brit bullshit. Sigh. Read my other post to another Brit. I'll explain in more detail right now. Fair use is unique to the U.S., at least in the Anglo-American world; what the Commonwealth uses is a concept called fair dealing, which is considerably more restrictive.
Fair dealing shows up in the U.K., Canada, Australia... probably all of the Commonwealth, those are just the copyright acts I've read.
How about, once a lifetime. That should be enough to conclude MS Proxy is --- not so good. :)
Solaris can be frightening at times. I'm not sure I would really want to run a firewall on it. (Lovely machines though.)
However, 3 or 4 times a year comes into the "or so" part of my post. :)
Check with a British IP lawyer before either:
As it so happens, I live in a country which has a very similar Copyright Act to yours (or theirs; perhaps you're not a Brit, but you certainly write like one).
Okay, I should have said Western European, sorry. :)
I was trying to exclude Russia et al., didn't get quite specific enough.
Okay. 2-6 are probably all okay according to Sony v. Universal, as long as you don't keep the tape for archival purposes. You're watching a show that you're legally entitled to watch, just at a different time from when the original broadcaster put it on. It's when you keep tapes lying around that the law gets messy.
1 is questionable, and not a matter of settled law, at least not in the U.S. AFAIK. There are two possible sub-branches. I will deal with each of them in turn.
This probably isn't what you meant. But in this case you're almost certainly breaking the law. Effectively, you're using your brother's VCR to reduce your cable bill. You could get the show (and tape it to watch whenever you wanted) just by paying your cable company some more money (and possibly buying a VCR). I'd have a Real Hard Time arguing fair use here.
This is probably what you meant. And it's tricky. Sony v. Universal doesn't deal with it. The entertainment industry would say that the right thing to do is to lobby your cable company to add the channel you want, or get DirecTV or something like that. You might say "But I can't get DirecTV because I live in an apartment building, and my cable company won't listen." It'd be a fun argument. However, given the rulings in the 2600 cases, I suspect you'd lose in the current U.S. judicial climate.
Does that help?
Most exploits require writing to some files in /usr or /etc. If /usr is a CDROM - or better yet if / is a CDROM, then a lot of them get blotto'ed immediately.
Your point is, of course, fundamentally correct; however, physically write-protecting the drive by making it a CDROM is another step in protecting your box, which is excessive for many uses (like, well, a home LAN :), but certainly not all: the more layers of protection, the more protection you have.
They're both illegal.
Under the landmark Sony v. Universal case, the U.S. Supreme Court decided not to ban VCRs because they could be used for time-shifting: i.e. watching Starsky & Hutch (or whatever people watched back in the '70s :) at a different time than whenever NBC (or whoever) decided to show it.
They decided that this was a fair use.
It's not actually stated, but it's pretty strongly implied in the decision that the now-common act of building ad-free libraries of TV shows is illegal.
And it's certain that distributing videotape copies of shows is illegal. It's a violation of copyright, not saved by fair use, even in the U.S.
Of course, people do it all the time. This is just one of the many inanities of copyright law in the modern era.
Another inanity: The U.S. is the only country in the Western world with a fair use doctrine in copyright law. That means that probably time-shifting is illegal in every other First World country. However, the movie industry knows that if they were to, say, sue to stop Brits having VCRs, they'd win the lawsuit but then the Brits would change copyright law - to make it weaker - and they don't want that.
Lots of people are already trading media on CDRs. They rely on Gnutella/Kazaa/Usenet/etc. to get New Stuff, and then the one person with a large pipe burns the New Stuff and starts bringing it around. Believe me, the filesharing piracy is just the tip of the iceberg.
Mainly, NAT can be persuaded to become bidirectional with relative ease. That is, you can trick it into giving access to machines behind the firewall. This is especially easy if there are servers behind the firewall.
The explanation on how is technical in the extreme, and while I mostly understand it, I don't trust myself to explain it correctly; I'll recommend the Zwicky book again, perhaps I should put it in my sigfile. :) If you're broke, go find your local university's library. Any decent uni library and many crappy ones will have at least the first edition of Zwicky.
The simple answer, though: SOCKS4/5 is a server, and NAT is a router solution. Routers route packets around the 'net. They are designed to pass them back and forth. Servers, on the other hand, just receive packets, process them, and decide what to do with them.
I talked about this a bit more in a BSD thread just earlier today: go here to see my other comment.
Now, don't get me wrong; NAT is much better than just having an open connection. But it will usually pass ICMP packets, and that's an enormous security hole. Dumb network admins usually deal with it by blocking all ICMP packets, which of course breaks a whole pile of things. The better solution is to just not ever route packets from the 'net past the firewall. They should all be caught at the firewall and fed through some kind of proxy before they ever touch the inside. That can only be done if you give up NAT.
Somebody obviously hasn't been spending much time in the camcorder section of the Sony Store. :)
Your point is mostly accurate when considering the iMacs. However, consider the PowerMac, which has PCI slots, and things get complicated.
Even the iMac is configurable though. One of the really beautiful things about MacOS is how well the USB/FireWire support works. The core API is completely rock-solid; although the Poorly Written Driver problem occasionally rears its ugly head, as long as drivers are sanely written it's possible to string an impressive variety of USB devices off of a Mac.