Just because I haven't had my Diet Coke yet this morning> No, I don't have a drug problem. Now let's get this can open. (hands shake) OPEN! OPEN ALREADY! OPEN ALREADY YOU G0DDAM S0N 0F A B1TCH! (whoosh! glug glug glug)
Drug problem? Who, me? Hey, at least I'm not doing the black stuff. You know, the stuff from Columbia.
Sure, the MAC address is isually a part of your fixed IPv6 block, and it's particularly annoying because MicroShaft likes to use it as a unique identifer which shows up in lots of documents that you create. The default way of creating a IPv6 address includes this, even if you're using a DHCP-like protocol for the high bits (prefix) of the address. (IPv6 customer blocks are planned to be assigned as the first 64-80 bits, with the low bits being assigned by the local machine).
But even then, the ISPs may go to fixed IPv6 blocks for customers, so changing your Ethernet MAC address won't be enough. They can simply track your entire LAN full of computers through your prefix address.
Now, there's nothing that says you HAVE to use your MAC address for the low 48 bits, it just has to be unique, and that's (supposed to be) a unique identifier. (Though I have heard tales of runs of Ethernet cards with identical MAC addresses in their PROMs.) But even if you go changing that around, you may still have the same prefix assigned by your ISP every time your connect, and you can be tracked with that.
So the ISPs still need to provide a DHCP-like protocol to allow you to have a (somewhat) random prefix. But they don't have much incentive to do so, because 80-96 bits is so large, they won't run out of IPs. Right now DHCP and PPP automatic address assignment is so important because IPv4 address space is tight, and if you have a 10-to-1 modem pool, you only need an IP block large enough for your modem pool and your maximum expected number of customers who disconnect their computers when they aren't using them.
And again, even if they do, your computer could still be using the same MAC address with every prefix. So the MAC address isn't the whole problem, but it seems to be the bigger problem, because it will normally be assigned by the user's machine.
the DFN asked Netizens to ply the filters with innocuous words, names, or search requests to see what gets blocked.
And in response, dozens of/. trolls began testing just how many variations of the words "First Post" were still allowed by the slashcode lameness filters.
Yes, BOREDOM. See, when you have someone intelligent enough to be a good "IT worker" (cough), you have someone who is very susceptible to boredom. The higher the IQ, the worse the problem. And vice versa. The lower the IQ, the more boring the job the better.
There was recently a case where a police department refused to hire a guy who took their test and was over the maximum intelligence level for the position. And a court upheld it!
So the proper way is to give said employee plenty if interesting, pointful things to do (pointless makework is usually about as boring as sitting around doing nothing). And if you don't have anything good for them to do, and don't make it your responsibility as a manager to keep them from being bored, don't bitch and write them up for reading/. a lot or for doing hobby stuff like disassembling ColecoVision game ROMs on company time.
If you want Mensa-level or higher IQ employees to stay around, don't use the Mushroom Theory of Management on them. Don't Dilbert them, or they'll just farm out their resume for $10K more. And only when they're gone will you realize just how much they did in the times you weren't peeking your head into their cubicle to find them not looking busy.
There are plenty of these types out there. The qualified ones get hired extremely quickly. In the bay area hiring someone is like looking for housing.
This is why I moved to Austin, because it's one of those places where the type that has a clue gets hired quickly. I've been hacking away at computers since I was a kid in 1978, back when you had to be a Real Programmer[tm] to do anything useful with a computer, micro or otherwise.
I came here because of a strong enough computer-related job market that there would be at least a few employers who would appreciate my background more than some four-letter alphabet soup.
'The unhappy truth, the study points out, is not that there are few people available to do IT work, but that once they are hired they are often poorly managed. In addition, many IT jobs are ill-designed and boring, leading many employees to become dissatisfied and leave.'"
And read/. a lot. Like I'm doing right now. The thing I hated most about my previous job was that my immediate boss had way too many things to manage, and way too many meetings, and didn't have enough time to give me anything useful to do. In my current job, I'm waiting on stuff (mostly third party software) for some Sun boxen I've been putting together.
Not that it matters much to me yet, but all three of the managers responsible for each of the computers are hard to find, and seem to always be in meetings.
"We must be getting work done--we're certainly having enough meetings!"
The killer game for the PS2 so far is the DVD player. Apparently they've caused a real surge in demand for DVD video discs in Japan due to this being an affordable DVD player (and somewhat able to play out-of-region discs). Until the PS2, there was no ultra-cheapie DVD player like we have in the USA with the Apex, Oritron, etc. players.
PS2 games are selling in Japan in a lot less quantity (in terms of the ratio of games sold to machines sold) than Sony would like. And since modern game systems are sold very close to cost (being the razor handles), and all the profit is made in manufacturing the games (the razor blades: proprietary format, monopolistic manufacturer, or why else would we have triple-edge razor blades after all these years? fresh patents!), this is not a good thing for Sony.
Since DVD has already become well entrenched in the USA, and we already have plenty of cheap crappy (and hackable) DVD players, we don't need the PS2 to for that.
Nintendo got it right when they decided not to pay the $20 per unit licensing fee to the DVD consortium for the N^3. Why confuse customers with a half-assed DVD player when you can concentrate on making a good game system without strange hard-to-program hardware? (Anyone remember the Atari Jaguar? Like the PS2, it also had "wierd" hardware that was difficult to write code that could use it to the maximum potential.)
About the only thing you can rely on is playing most (but not all) PS1 games, so the customer droids won't mindlessly sell them off all their old PS1 stuff simply because they can't comprehend the idea of owning more than one game system at a time. And if they're playing used games... then Sony doesn't get to sell new blades! The difference is real razor blades wear out, but CD-ROMs don't.
Personally, I think most of the PS2 sales are going to be blindly on the hype of being the hottest latest thing. Little Johnny wants it because all the hype makes it sound like the most shining golden heaven thing in his current world. Little Johnny's consumerism-brainwashed mother will do everything she can to get one so her son won't grow up with a horrible inferiority complex just because he didn't get some stupid game system on its release date and then grow up to knock off liquor stores and go to jail.
The company must also provide evidence that they could not fill the position with an American worker -- usually this can be done simply by advertising the job, or providing evidence that when the position was advertised, it could not be filled by an American.
Oh, so that's why there are all those HR people who are looking for just one reason to throw your resume in the trash. It's not because they want to get through the pile as fast as possible so they can punch out and play golf, it's so they can say they "tried" to find a citizen to fill the position, then whine for an H1-B!
Mexican migrant workers are brought in to take care of "short/limited term" harvest jobs that aren't paying what local talent would accept.
Make that "...harvest jobs that aren't paying the minimum wage so they wouldn't be legal anyhow, even if they hired citizens." And the Democritters keep pushing the minimum wage up every year.
This isn't quite like the attempts to attach language like "illegal to make hyperlinks" to methamphetamine-related legislation
Well, I'll agree with you there. This is a lot more on-topic than a lot of other riders.
I've never wanted less to watch the Olympics than this year. Not only is it over-commercialized, with fascist control over merchandising, but now they're spending more time dredging up some sob story or another that each athlete had to go through before getting there. Whatever happened to the stories of the actual competitions themselves?
Or is it that now everyone wants such polished audience-targeted formula crap that they are avoiding "live" stories in favor of something that an unemployed sitcom writer can put together weeks in advance?
I haven't watched a single minute of the Olympics, other than what I see channel-surfing past it. Thank goodness it's only on one network, and not all of them!
I find the stories of Slashdot competition much more interesting. Like the Troll Vault here. 45 mod points, 24 of them "Funny"? What an amazing human^Wtroll achivement!
This reminds me of the time when AT&T came up with "1-800-OPERATOR". Well, seems lots of people couldn't spell, and tried dialing "1-800-OPERATER". Which just happened to be a random 800 number inside of MCI. Which MCI quickly routed to their own 1-800-COLLECT number!
And that's why the phone police on the TV ads now tell you to dial 1-800-CALL-ATT.
Oh and btw, from what I hear the Activision CD is a horrible port.
Well, from what I hear, it's not a port, it's an emulator running the original game ROM images. The emulator could suck, but there is no "port" to be horrible.
Emulating the Atari 2600 and its 3:1 clock-locked 1-D (yes, I said 1-D) graphics chip is a real pain in the arse.
Which, of course, is the problem with the American political system. You get to choose, alright - but from the lesser of 2 evils.
The problem in the case of the presidental elections is the Electoral College system. In order to get any electoral votes, you have to win an entire state. If you win 48% of the districts in one state, too fucking bad, you get no votes. This makes it almost impossible for 3rd party candidates to get elected to the White House. All they can do is be "spoiler" candidates, sucking votes from one of the two major parties, and causing the other candidate to win.
Just try winning a state like California, Texas, or New York, without belonging to one of the major parties.
Perhaps they will force the manufacturers to put in code that, upon hitting a commercial break, diables any fast-forwarding until the commercial break is over. This would be relatively easy to do if commercial codes were somehow encoded somewhere in an unused portion of the video signal.
I suppose this isn't impossible, if the "this is a commercial" signal were put in the vertical retrace area along with closed captioning and stuff, but then it would be easier for people to make VCRs that pause when they see that signal!
On the other hand, if they stuck in the signal for random 30 second intervals in the middle of TV shows, then the equipment would have to think twice about pausing recording. But that would only be a problem with tape-based systems. A disc-based system like Tivo can just back up when it detects a "commercial" of more than 2 minutes. Or it could let you decide for yourself (after all, humans are very good at deciding what is and is not a commercial) and use a "30 second skip" button. Which is what it does.
First, it's not because of the CPU. Hell, the first well-known stack 'sploit was in the RTM worm, which worked for two flavors of Unix on a VAX cpu.
It's because MacOS uses one big-ass shared memory space to run everything in that it's safe from being taken over by buffer overflows. Well, gee, if it's all unprotected, why is it so safe? Because while you can still crash a program with a buffer overflow, you can't predict the stack address. And the critical part of a stack overflow exploit is to get the program counter pointing to the exploit code on the stack.
And even if you could, what would you do with it? There's no shell (at least not until OS X, but that's a completely different OS) to give commands, and no root privs to exploit (actually you are "root" at all times!)
Intel is relatively low on the fault scale here. A bigger problem is the number of people running Linux distros with the same binaries in them. If you compile your own code, the stack addresses will be less predictable (though not completely unpredicatable), and you'll be in the same boat as MacOS: without a predictable stack address, there's no way to run the 'sploit code!
If we simply had more people compile code their own binaries, the problem would be reduced.
But at heart, the fault is one of languages that let you stick things into memory without any sort of range checking. Get too much data or lose the null terminator from a C string and your stack is toast.
And most of these problems happen inside of a library routine. But you can't blame the library routine when it has no way to know the size of the destination buffer. The best it can do is know where the frame pointer is and to not write past it.
If C strings were more than just bare buffers with only a lone null to save you from oblivion, the library routines could be smart enough to save your ass. So I blame C and its strings as the primary problem causing buffer overflow exploits.
Use a language with internally checked datatypes and no bare pointers like Java or Perl, and this type of exploit will go away.
In related news, Cobalt has filed lawsuits against Nestle for their Maggi beef and chicken flavored bouillon cubes, a lawsuit against Las Vegas casinos for their cube-shaped dice, lawsuits against manufacturers of children's alphabet blocks, and a class-action lawsuit against the sugar industry for sugar cubes.
If apple can sue E-machines over the iMac design, then why can't Cobalt sue over a cube design?
Seriously, though, this is even more silly than the E-machines/iMac lawsuit. I think I'll go form Teal Computer Corp, patent the color teal, then sue a few office chair manufacturers.
And didn't the NeXT cube pre-date Cobalt by a few years? And Apple bought out NeXT. So maybe Apple should try a counter-suit for Cobalt stealing THEIR design!
DRIVE! to work every day! WORK! at a boring job five days a week! SHOP! for food and other useful items! COMBAT! a house full of roaches! HAVE SEX! with your.PNG collection!
"The frame rate on this game kicks total ass! But I can't find the railgun anywhere!" - Geta Halflifer "Wow, look at those shading effects! If only Lara Croft's butt could be rendered with this kind of technology!" - D. Ruling Fanboy "Unlike Daikatana, the AI kicks ass in this game! If you get pulled over for speeding too many times, the cops really take you to jail! - S. Racer "Ook! Ook, ook, oooooook!" - The Librarian
Real Life The Ultimate Real Time 3D Experience! And it's cheat-proof, too!
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Don't worry, Microsoft is trying as hard as it can to catch up!
And bandwidth. Lots of it. Too bad I can't get my DSL line fed in intravenously.
Don't forget the $3 crack that all the /. moderators smoke.
Drug problem? Who, me? Hey, at least I'm not doing the black stuff. You know, the stuff from Columbia.
But even then, the ISPs may go to fixed IPv6 blocks for customers, so changing your Ethernet MAC address won't be enough. They can simply track your entire LAN full of computers through your prefix address.
Now, there's nothing that says you HAVE to use your MAC address for the low 48 bits, it just has to be unique, and that's (supposed to be) a unique identifier. (Though I have heard tales of runs of Ethernet cards with identical MAC addresses in their PROMs.) But even if you go changing that around, you may still have the same prefix assigned by your ISP every time your connect, and you can be tracked with that.
So the ISPs still need to provide a DHCP-like protocol to allow you to have a (somewhat) random prefix. But they don't have much incentive to do so, because 80-96 bits is so large, they won't run out of IPs. Right now DHCP and PPP automatic address assignment is so important because IPv4 address space is tight, and if you have a 10-to-1 modem pool, you only need an IP block large enough for your modem pool and your maximum expected number of customers who disconnect their computers when they aren't using them.
And again, even if they do, your computer could still be using the same MAC address with every prefix. So the MAC address isn't the whole problem, but it seems to be the bigger problem, because it will normally be assigned by the user's machine.
You misspelled "Perl Harbor". HTH. HAND.
Slashcode is intended to run with the clock set to GMT/UTC. That's why you get to metamod again sometime in the morning. (in .us)
And in response, dozens of /. trolls began testing just how many variations of the words "First Post" were still allowed by the slashcode lameness filters.
There was recently a case where a police department refused to hire a guy who took their test and was over the maximum intelligence level for the position. And a court upheld it!
So the proper way is to give said employee plenty if interesting, pointful things to do (pointless makework is usually about as boring as sitting around doing nothing). And if you don't have anything good for them to do, and don't make it your responsibility as a manager to keep them from being bored, don't bitch and write them up for reading /. a lot or for doing hobby stuff like disassembling ColecoVision game ROMs on company time.
If you want Mensa-level or higher IQ employees to stay around, don't use the Mushroom Theory of Management on them. Don't Dilbert them, or they'll just farm out their resume for $10K more. And only when they're gone will you realize just how much they did in the times you weren't peeking your head into their cubicle to find them not looking busy.
This is why I moved to Austin, because it's one of those places where the type that has a clue gets hired quickly. I've been hacking away at computers since I was a kid in 1978, back when you had to be a Real Programmer[tm] to do anything useful with a computer, micro or otherwise.
I came here because of a strong enough computer-related job market that there would be at least a few employers who would appreciate my background more than some four-letter alphabet soup.
And read /. a lot. Like I'm doing right now. The thing I hated most about my previous job was that my immediate boss had way too many things to manage, and way too many meetings, and didn't have enough time to give me anything useful to do. In my current job, I'm waiting on stuff (mostly third party software) for some Sun boxen I've been putting together.
Not that it matters much to me yet, but all three of the managers responsible for each of the computers are hard to find, and seem to always be in meetings.
"We must be getting work done--we're certainly having enough meetings!"
PS2 games are selling in Japan in a lot less quantity (in terms of the ratio of games sold to machines sold) than Sony would like. And since modern game systems are sold very close to cost (being the razor handles), and all the profit is made in manufacturing the games (the razor blades: proprietary format, monopolistic manufacturer, or why else would we have triple-edge razor blades after all these years? fresh patents!), this is not a good thing for Sony.
Since DVD has already become well entrenched in the USA, and we already have plenty of cheap crappy (and hackable) DVD players, we don't need the PS2 to for that.
Nintendo got it right when they decided not to pay the $20 per unit licensing fee to the DVD consortium for the N^3. Why confuse customers with a half-assed DVD player when you can concentrate on making a good game system without strange hard-to-program hardware? (Anyone remember the Atari Jaguar? Like the PS2, it also had "wierd" hardware that was difficult to write code that could use it to the maximum potential.)
About the only thing you can rely on is playing most (but not all) PS1 games, so the customer droids won't mindlessly sell them off all their old PS1 stuff simply because they can't comprehend the idea of owning more than one game system at a time. And if they're playing used games... then Sony doesn't get to sell new blades! The difference is real razor blades wear out, but CD-ROMs don't.
Personally, I think most of the PS2 sales are going to be blindly on the hype of being the hottest latest thing. Little Johnny wants it because all the hype makes it sound like the most shining golden heaven thing in his current world. Little Johnny's consumerism-brainwashed mother will do everything she can to get one so her son won't grow up with a horrible inferiority complex just because he didn't get some stupid game system on its release date and then grow up to knock off liquor stores and go to jail.
Oh, so that's why there are all those HR people who are looking for just one reason to throw your resume in the trash. It's not because they want to get through the pile as fast as possible so they can punch out and play golf, it's so they can say they "tried" to find a citizen to fill the position, then whine for an H1-B!
Make that "...harvest jobs that aren't paying the minimum wage so they wouldn't be legal anyhow, even if they hired citizens." And the Democritters keep pushing the minimum wage up every year.
This isn't quite like the attempts to attach language like "illegal to make hyperlinks" to methamphetamine-related legislation
Well, I'll agree with you there. This is a lot more on-topic than a lot of other riders.
Or is it that now everyone wants such polished audience-targeted formula crap that they are avoiding "live" stories in favor of something that an unemployed sitcom writer can put together weeks in advance?
I haven't watched a single minute of the Olympics, other than what I see channel-surfing past it. Thank goodness it's only on one network, and not all of them!
I find the stories of Slashdot competition much more interesting. Like the Troll Vault here. 45 mod points, 24 of them "Funny"? What an amazing human^Wtroll achivement!
And that's why the phone police on the TV ads now tell you to dial 1-800-CALL-ATT.
And you'll live like Caesar!
But what you really need is a patent for the number 13.
Oh and btw, from what I hear the Activision CD is a horrible port.
Well, from what I hear, it's not a port, it's an emulator running the original game ROM images. The emulator could suck, but there is no "port" to be horrible.
Emulating the Atari 2600 and its 3:1 clock-locked 1-D (yes, I said 1-D) graphics chip is a real pain in the arse.
Which, of course, is the problem with the American political system. You get to choose, alright - but from the lesser of 2 evils.
The problem in the case of the presidental elections is the Electoral College system. In order to get any electoral votes, you have to win an entire state. If you win 48% of the districts in one state, too fucking bad, you get no votes. This makes it almost impossible for 3rd party candidates to get elected to the White House. All they can do is be "spoiler" candidates, sucking votes from one of the two major parties, and causing the other candidate to win.
Just try winning a state like California, Texas, or New York, without belonging to one of the major parties.
Perhaps they will force the manufacturers to put in code that, upon hitting a commercial break, diables any fast-forwarding until the commercial break is over. This would be relatively easy to do if commercial codes were somehow encoded somewhere in an unused portion of the video signal.
I suppose this isn't impossible, if the "this is a commercial" signal were put in the vertical retrace area along with closed captioning and stuff, but then it would be easier for people to make VCRs that pause when they see that signal!
On the other hand, if they stuck in the signal for random 30 second intervals in the middle of TV shows, then the equipment would have to think twice about pausing recording. But that would only be a problem with tape-based systems. A disc-based system like Tivo can just back up when it detects a "commercial" of more than 2 minutes. Or it could let you decide for yourself (after all, humans are very good at deciding what is and is not a commercial) and use a "30 second skip" button. Which is what it does.
First, it's not because of the CPU. Hell, the first well-known stack 'sploit was in the RTM worm, which worked for two flavors of Unix on a VAX cpu.
It's because MacOS uses one big-ass shared memory space to run everything in that it's safe from being taken over by buffer overflows. Well, gee, if it's all unprotected, why is it so safe? Because while you can still crash a program with a buffer overflow, you can't predict the stack address. And the critical part of a stack overflow exploit is to get the program counter pointing to the exploit code on the stack.
And even if you could, what would you do with it? There's no shell (at least not until OS X, but that's a completely different OS) to give commands, and no root privs to exploit (actually you are "root" at all times!)
Intel is relatively low on the fault scale here. A bigger problem is the number of people running Linux distros with the same binaries in them. If you compile your own code, the stack addresses will be less predictable (though not completely unpredicatable), and you'll be in the same boat as MacOS: without a predictable stack address, there's no way to run the 'sploit code!
If we simply had more people compile code their own binaries, the problem would be reduced.
But at heart, the fault is one of languages that let you stick things into memory without any sort of range checking. Get too much data or lose the null terminator from a C string and your stack is toast.
And most of these problems happen inside of a library routine. But you can't blame the library routine when it has no way to know the size of the destination buffer. The best it can do is know where the frame pointer is and to not write past it.
If C strings were more than just bare buffers with only a lone null to save you from oblivion, the library routines could be smart enough to save your ass. So I blame C and its strings as the primary problem causing buffer overflow exploits.
Use a language with internally checked datatypes and no bare pointers like Java or Perl, and this type of exploit will go away.
In related news, Cobalt has filed lawsuits against Nestle for their Maggi beef and chicken flavored bouillon cubes, a lawsuit against Las Vegas casinos for their cube-shaped dice, lawsuits against manufacturers of children's alphabet blocks, and a class-action lawsuit against the sugar industry for sugar cubes.
If apple can sue E-machines over the iMac design, then why can't Cobalt sue over a cube design?
Seriously, though, this is even more silly than the E-machines/iMac lawsuit. I think I'll go form Teal Computer Corp, patent the color teal, then sue a few office chair manufacturers.
And didn't the NeXT cube pre-date Cobalt by a few years? And Apple bought out NeXT. So maybe Apple should try a counter-suit for Cobalt stealing THEIR design!
Coming soon to a mega-store near you: Real Life!
.PNG collection!
DRIVE! to work every day!
WORK! at a boring job five days a week!
SHOP! for food and other useful items!
COMBAT! a house full of roaches!
HAVE SEX! with your
"The frame rate on this game kicks total ass! But I can't find the railgun anywhere!" - Geta Halflifer
"Wow, look at those shading effects! If only Lara Croft's butt could be rendered with this kind of technology!" - D. Ruling Fanboy
"Unlike Daikatana, the AI kicks ass in this game! If you get pulled over for speeding too many times, the cops really take you to jail! - S. Racer
"Ook! Ook, ook, oooooook!" - The Librarian
Real Life The Ultimate Real Time 3D Experience! And it's cheat-proof, too!
The MSNBC story is here.
It says in there how some Napster users are using Scour instead.
I've always been partial to finding MP3s with Altavista myself.