*shrug* I can't comment on the autokill thing. That's how the NFS implementation in all the distros I've ever used worked. Unix is Unix, except for all the different little quirks.;)
BTW: I just checked RedHat 8.0 for the autokill "feature". Looks like they fixed it. I just ran "/etc/init.d/nfs start" and it started, didn't bitch about/etc/exports only containing a single '#', and allowed me to then add an export using exportfs and I mounted it successfully afterwards. I even tried it after completely deleting/etc/exports. Still ran fine.
Long story short, the autokill is gone in RedHat 8. That's good in my book. I never liked that behaviour either. As for the >2GB files. I'm running a test right now just for shits and giggles, but I don't see why it wouldn't work. As long as the file system can handle the destination file's size, nfs3 should behave admirably. (BTW, Solaris 8 uses nfs ver3 last I checked.)
the command that is equivalent to 'share' is 'exportfs', it can usually be found in/usr/sbin/.
It allows you to push NFS exports to the kernel and nfsd without having to edit/etc/exports. Thus, they do not persist across reboots. However, you cannot use exportfs until nfsd is running, and nfsd will auto kill itself if/etc/exports is completely empty. So you must share at least 1 directory tree in/etc/exports before you can use exportfs.
I believe Solaris has this same problem with share though. I don't remember these days, it's been a while since my SCSA cert. (Heh, i guess that's what man pages are for:)
Honestly, I'm not surprised by this. eBay has had a poorly implemented feedback system for quite a while now. The main problem with feedback, is that the other guy gets to see the feedback you left right away. This causes 2 problems.
Firstly, no one wants to be the first to leave feedback, since they are then helpless to react if they leave nice feedback and get bad feedback in return. Secondly, the idea that you can retaliate to the feedback you were given is completely fucked.
The best way to fix eBay's feedback system is to make a transaction's feedback completely invisible until the transaction is fully completed. That means that you don't get to see what feedback the other guy is leaving you until you've BOTH left feedback. This keeps everyone honest. If the deal goes sour in one person's eyes, then it will be reflected appropriately.
The biggest drawback to this system is the ability to stall feedback from showing. By never leavnig feedback, you could effectively keep a transaction in limbo. Thus, if you knew you fucked the other guy over, you could easily just never leave feedback and your rating would be unaffected. The solution to this is to enforce a timelimit on feedback. Once the other person leaves feedback, you have 30 days to leave feedback of your own. If you let the time limit pass, then you are assumed to have left neutral feedback, and a nice generic comment. Something like "".
Anyways, until eBay fixes this, I pretty much ignore the raw numbers that feedback provides. The aggregate data is completely useless. *shrug* Maybe they'll catch a clue and fix it one day.
Hardware SSL encryption engines are already available as PCI expansion cards. They've been available for years. I'm not a buff on TCPA by any means, but TCPA really seems to look like just another integrated peripheral that is probably better off being an expansion card. (Kind of like integrated AGP video. Mmmmm....S3VirgE MX! lol)
Honestly, how many applications are going to use SSL encryption so often that the CPU is incapable of performing the additional grunt work? Even if every website on the Internet was SSL encrypted, your old 233Mhz Pentium still has a shitload of spare cycles to throw at en/decoding the data streams. The only systems that really benefit from the hardware encoder/decoder are secure webservers. The ability to offload that little bit of processing gives them the ability to handle a few more requests per second.
As for the secure storage of SSL keys. I can't wait until my mainboard dies, and I can't get my keys off the damn chip. I suppose you could buy another identical board and attempt to swap the chips, but I'll warn you right now that surface mount soldering by hand is an extreme bitch.
And it really isn't like you're going to get that much extra security out of the deal. So your keys aren't on the harddrive anymore. So now people can't get your keys by stealing your tape backups anymore. What happens when you have a fire? Hope you have a really good memory and a nice hex editor to retype the keys with. And what is to stop any processes at all from reading all the keys out and emailing them to a hotmail account? Only allow priviledged processes to access the chip? How do you define with process is priviledged?
Sorry, but I'll stick to the expansion cards. At least if something bad happens I can replace those relatively cheaply and easily.
Re:We are behind the rest of the world on this one
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PC Baangs In America
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Well, that would be the advantage to bringing your own PC. The business plan doesn't have an admission fee. Just rentals and food. So if you bring your own PC, then you don't pay to play. If I had to charge admission, I'd charge less to people that bring their own equipment. The fact that they are bringing a PC in means that they are likely to stay longer, since it is such a bitch to set up and tear down all the time.
I'd also have adjusted hours to make it worth while. Open all night on fridays and saturdays, that sort of thing. Having a nearby motel would be helpful, as it would give people a place to sleep if they got desperate.
I'd also enforce a headphones rule. No external speakers allowed, as it makes it too easy for people to blast their m4d @ss syst3mz and ruin the fun for others. I'd have ambient music playing, with a web-based jukebox interface for requests. If you don't have any headphones, I'd have plenty to sell you. Some cheap, some not.
Monitor size I could care less about. All the systems available for rent would have either 17 or 19 inch monitors. If you want to bring your badass 21", be my guest. The spacing of the stations would allow enough room for it.
I'd also have events probably every month or so. Winners get stuff like free rentals, new video cards, new headphones, new mice, new PCs, cash, etc. All depending on how big the event was supposed to be.
The place would, of course, have broadband access to the internet, and would have a few game servers running that were public to the net as well as internally. I'd also provide a few dialup points for access to the building for people that want to game with good ping times at home. (For a fee of course).
Eventually, I'd like to open up additional locations, and get dedicated connections between them, so that people on the LAN can play others from across the state, country, etc. I'd probably strike a deal with an ISP to provide low ping game servers to their clients as well, in exchange for discounted monthly fees on the dedicated lines.
But, I can go on all day about my nifty little dream. The hard part is making it a reality.:)
We are behind the rest of the world on this one
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PC Baangs In America
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The US is behind the rest of the world when it comes to businesses making money off the LAN Party concept. They've been doing it in Japan, Korea, the Phillipenes, etc, for quite a while now. You'll find a few in the US that do alright. Mainly in large cities like New York. Still, it is nothing like the number of them in other countries.
I was thinking of starting one around my area, but the upfront investment is more than I can afford at the moment. I need to wait for better locations to open up anyways. You need to find someplace fairly large (but not too large), with really low rent.
Location is key, at least with my idea it is. I didn't read the article (typical Slashdot:), so I don't know if they let you take your own PCs in, but I would. Because of this, you need to be in a nice enough location that people don't mind too much about tearing down their own PCs to set them up on the LAN. I would, of course, also rent PCs out to people that don't want to use their own.
The potential for theft shouldn't be too much of a problem. Just make sure the business PCs are clearly marked, and take a collateral upon renting that you give back when they return it. Drivers licenses would probably be good. Wouldn't hurt to require a social security card or credit card upon first rental either. *shrug*
Well, someday I'll start it up. Maybe in another couple years.
You're absolutely right. It's much better to teach our children how to use specific applications, rather than how to user computers in general. Are you fucking mad????
I've been to college (CS major), been around computers my ENTIRE life, and been deep in Unix for the past 7 years. (And I'm only 24.)
You know what I do with User Manuals? I throw them the fuck away, because I understand how computers work, and the thought process that developers are going through when they write software. Because of this understanding, I'm able to be proficient at new software within a matter of minutes, and an expert within a few days.
I think we are better off teaching our children the fundemental computer application TYPES. Fuck the specific apps. MS Word and Open Office are the same as far as 90% of users are concerned. They provide text formatting, spell check, and can print.
Instead of teaching Visual Basic, teach them programming concepts. Variables, loops, arrays, functions, data structures. Visual Basic is a syntax. You can take the same basic concepts and apply them to C, Java, Fortran, Shell scripting, etc.
Instead of Excel, teach them about SPREADSHEETS. How they work. Some cells contain data, some contain functions. What good are spreadsheets? When should we use them?
Don't teach Access. Teach database concepts. Tables, select statements, how joins work. How to think like a database optimizer to keep your statements from taking 9 years to complete.
Instead of Internet Explorer, teach them about the internet in general. What is it? How does it work? How to I make a website? How do you make dynamic websites? How do I find the information I'm looking for on the internet?
Computers are general machines. They are completely programmable, and to teach our children any specific application is a sure waste of time. Any application you teach them in 5th grade can easily be obsolete by the time they graduate highschool. Teach them the real fundamentals, and they'll have the knowldege to adapt to the industry as it changes.
And don't whine about having to relearn computers after school. Buttons are buttons, a cursor is a cursor, an icon is an icon, and a command line is a command line. The desktop paradigm hasn't changed since Xerox invented the fucking thing. When it happened, everyone relearned the interface. When it happens again, everyone will again relearn. (Including the "lucky" children that were taught the way you seem to prefer.) However, when the paradigm shifts, those with the true fundamental knowledge will adapt more quickly. The rest will be playing catch-up.
On a more personal note, I could give less of a fuck what the school system teaches when it comes to computers. I've had a computer my whole life, and so will my children, and you can bet your ass that they will know how things really work in the 5th grade, just as I did.
I was just thinking. What happens if you downloaded a bunch of songs that they distribute on physical media and get taken to court by them. You could easily argue that you had heard that they were willingly distributing garbage files on the P2P networks, and were merely trying to aquire some examples of them to see what all the fuss is about.
Since they are placing the garbage up there themselves, wouldn't that imply that they were approving download and listening of the garbage files? The real files got in the way, and you were busted before you had a chance to delete them.
Seems to me that they were better off before, simply sueing the file distributors as they find them. *shrug* Just thought I'd share that little thought.:)
Why don't they use this opportunity to create a large searchable database of every species while they are at it.
They could include information such as name, ncientific name (the latin? stuff), physical Description, a few photographs of male and female specimins, eating preferences, defense mechanisms, known locations of presence, and other various notes.
When it comes to the carnavores, you could make entries in their diet link to the victims' records.
Then just make it searchable. Filterable by geographical area, species, keywords, etc. Very powerful. Then all you need is to make it publically available. Read-only of course.
Everyone is complaining that Palladium will kill open source on Win32. I can't help but agree, but there is another angle to this as well. What happens to the small programming shops? I can think of plenty of times when one of my previously employing companies wrote small (sometimes throwaway) apps for clients. Sometimes it was for data massaging, sometimes it was a quick front end to something normally complicated.
The cold fact is that I can't see small businesses providing custom software solutions for clients surviving if Palladium is released. The cost to have throw away apps signed (not to mention the time delay involved) will utterly destroy them.
Unless of course the application signing is much simpler than that. Simply trusting a company as a whole, rather than a particular application. Trusting an entire company will allow small businesses to sign their own code. Of course, that also means that the DRM is pointless because a single hacked network will result in signed viruses.
If MS goes ahead with Palladium, I'll be keeping my eye out for the first virus to fool the OS into rejecting every app, regardless of signature. Perfect DOS attack. Can't do anything but reinstall from the installation media, if your DRM bios will let you that is...
If this bugs you, just make a change to the link layer drivers. Pad with nuls again, like it is supposed to, rather than garbage data. The downside to this is there will be a speed hit, since you are wasting time fscking with small packets to make sure they are secured. But, given the speed of modern systems vs the speed of ethernet, I highly doubt you'll notice.
Honestly, the big problem here is going to be MS. I doubt they'll introduce a fix at all.
Everyone here pretty much agrees on the same thing when it comes to eBooks. The DRM in them isn't worth a squirt of piss. Still, even if you had some magic DRM algorithm that was 100% impossible to break (which we all know eBooks do NOT have), the viewer still has to be able to read the damn thing, so it has to be displayed in an unencoded form. Attach homebrewed screenshot app here, insert optical character recognition there, and viola! Instant DRM-free eBook! Time for the usual distribution channels! IRC, 0day ftp sites, eDonkey, FastTrack, Gnutella. Thank you for your contribution to society Hamilton Press! You know we really, uh..appreciate it. lmao!
I suspect that this will last for about 6 months. Then the publishers will start whining 'foul'.
Thinking about this has stirred up an interesting idea though. The only way to make money from eBooks is to devise a method to make people want to pay for information that they could otherwise get for free. So what about providing useful services for a flat monthly fee?
How about the ability to search for text strings throughout an entire library of books. That could certainly make research a little easier. You want to know all about Albert Einstein? SURE! Here is every document he authored, every biography, every newpaper that mentioned him, and every other book or magazine that's referred to him in existance. If done correctly, you could even get search results back in under 2.4 seconds like Google.
Now I'm not saying that full text indexes are the killer app that will make people pay for electronic access to published works, but its a start....
Just tried it out. It is close, but not quite. The author himself recognizes some fundemental problems with color depth variation between Xservers. The interface could use some work as well, but that is to be expected from a thesis project. (At least I _believe_ it was a thesis project. I didn't look very hard to verify that.)
Only two things really need to be done to make xmove better. #1- Integrate the functionality into X and the Xlibs so that every X application ran has this functionality already built in. This will allow you to easily fix the color depth problem, and will also remove the need for a separate xmove and xmovectrl. All you'd really need then is xmovectrl (probably renamed to just xmove). Fussing with getting xmove set up in advance is just simply too much trouble.
#2- Fix the ssh tunneling problem. It probably has to do with the funky redirection that ssh does to X sessions. So I don't blame xmove directly. In fact, I don't even care if ssh is used at all, I just want some form of encryption. I don't fancy having my raw X11 sessions flying across public and/or insecure networks. Again, tying this into the Xserver and the Xlibs would make this easier.
#3- Add the ability to configure the default behaviour for broken X sessions. It would make more sense to have broken sessions auto kick all client apps into suspend mode, rather than letting them die just because your Xserver croaked. (Thourhg I would squeeze that in there.:)
That's pretty much it. I'm going to start using xmove for a few X apps that I always wanted to be able to push off onto my rackmount vs always running on my desktop. I appreciate the tip, by the way. xmove and dtach are going to be quite useful combined. (I don't like screens. It tried to do too much. dtach is really simple)
Hrm.. Actually, I find the window managers used in unix desktops much more productive than anything MS ever came up with. Window shading, virtual desktops, and multiple workspaces (not the same as virtual desktops) just by themselves make the OS faster to use. Most people have to start closing windows when they start running out of desktop real estate. I just switch to another workspace and keep going. It makes development MUCH more productive, I can tell you that much right now. One workspace for reading API documentation, another (sometimes two) for writing code, and another for checking my email, surfing the web when I need another reference or a quick break, and for playing music. Depending on the app, I sometimes even use ANOTHER for testing the app.
Windows is far from having the best interface IMHO. It definitely has the most popular, but popularity rarely has anything to do with functionality. (More often it has to do with pressure to conform.)
Don't get me wrong. I think XWindows itself is a fucking joke. Shared memory doesn't help it's situation. Windows update speed is STILL an issue from time to time, and the current implementation of remotely running apps is getting old. What I'd really like to see is the ability to start a gui app from over the network, and dynamically detach it from your XServer without killing it. Letting it run headless in the background for a while, and then reattaching it on a different machine (or even locally on that previously remote machine) so that you can check up on it.
Basically, I want RDP with by the application granularity. Now THAT would be an advantage system admins! In fact, without that killer feature and without even taking shell scripting and regular expressions into account, unix desktops still beat the piss out of the Windows XP (and earlier) desktop environments. IMHO of course.;)
Hard drive permissions in what respect? Ext2 (and derived) filesystems rely completely on the OS to enforce the permissions. So essentially, the minute you get root access in the OS, you can do whatever you please with the data on the drive.
FAT32 has no native permissions at all. Any permissions that are percieved on FAT32 under Linux is because of the parameters (or lack thereof) given to the 'mount' command.
As for NTFS, that's a whole new ballgame. I'm not into NTFS so much. I try to stay away from it when I can. Still, we have an NTFS read-only driver for Linux. So you can at least extract what you want from the drive before you reinstall it. (Which, BTW, is what 90% of calls to MS support end up being. They try about 5 different things, and then tell you that the OS is hosed beyond repair, reinstall and restore from backups.)
Wow, that's pretty weak on Microsoft's part. Everything I hear about SATA is that the interface the OS speaks with is much like PATA. One person even said that the current IDE drivers for Linux should already support SATA (though I'm not 100% sure if I believe that one).
Still, you'd think that a company that actually gets paid for making an OS would be on top of an industry wide evolution such as SATA and would have code already written that works, and are simply waiting for the target to quit moving so they can bundle it in a service pack.
Oh well, chalk up another negative on my MS board of shame. Crap like this is why I switched to Linux.
I don't think these geniuses performed the hot swap correctly.
Windows should absolutely NOT report the drive with a letter after you've properly taken out the drive. This is because you are supposed to UMOUNT the fcsking drive before you do it! (There is a windows equivalent to a umount in the drive manager.) This is sort of important considering that any good OS will cache reads and write to physical disks to improve I/O speeds. Pulling a live drive out of a system is likely to create unusable filesystems on that drive.
BTW: If done correctly, you can easily remove drives from parallel ATA controllers already. In fact, you can buy caddies and mounts for hot swapping ATA/100 drives from a bunch of vendors on pricewatch.
Oh well, at least they thought they were helping. lmao!
I remember back when I was probably about 3 or 4 years old, I reached up and turned the lights on in my parent's basement. Everything before that was tranquil blackness. No sound, no images, no feeling, just kind of floating in blackness. Then I turned on the lights.
Suddenly I could see and hear. I remember running (well, since I was a toddler, it was probably more like toddling) over to the other side of the basement to play with legos with my cousin Matt. Of course, I didn't know his name at the time, but he was about my age and he had legos, so it was all good.
That is my earliest memory. After that I remember a bunch of things. Day care: picking on an older kid named Reese, called him Reese's pieces and he'd chase my other cousin and I around a bit. Toddler memories are pretty few and far between relative to my other childhood memories, but there are still a substanstial number of them.
Same here. I played for about 5 months. On and off, sometimes really on. Could never reach level 20. I topped off at 19 as a Ranger, and had a bitch of a time killing anything worth xp. After wasting a month of my time swaying between levels 18 and 19, I quit.
Fuck it, don't have time for something like that. I'm the sort that will play a game for all it is worth until I reach the end, and then I shelve it. If there are multiplayer features, like quake and empire earth and such, then I usually hang on to it for LAN parties. Beyond that, I rarely play it again.
My EQ experience was way back in the day though. Back when it first came out. I remember bitching about the lack of horses for the longest time. I found out that after a few expansion packs they finally had horses. I still have the box and all of its contents here. I should probably sell it on eBay, since I'll never play it again.
Sigh... Come on people. You all root for the Athlon when it is clocked well under the P4, yet you believe that SGI's MIPS line is crap when it tops out at 700Mhz???
Sun's UltraSPARC III Cu tops out at 1.05Ghz last I checked. Does that mean that the P4 at 3Ghz stomps the hell out of it? If you said yes, you are a fucking idiot.
People, the Unix world is far far different from what you are used to in PC land. High speed backplanes, dedicated busses, huge amount of L1 cache, insane L2 cache, incredibly efficient cpu designs (where 1 clock per instruction is pretty much the norm and cache misses don't occur every 3 operations), hot swap damn-near-everything, upwards of 72 processors and 288 GB of RAM...
It all adds up to a fucking badass machine that smacks the piss out of any PC on the planet when it comes to getting its job done. Don't compare apples to oranges. The applications these machines are designed for do not include Quake 3. The benchmarks you have memorized don't mean a damn thing in this realm, so go back home.
Getting back to the article, I'm glad to see SGI coming out with a new CPU. I still see a few SGIs in the wild now and again. If they lock down Irix a bit more security wise and expand their target market, they might be a decent competitor for Sun within the next 10 years. I don't see them winning any shining star awards right off the bat, but if they are persistant they'll do alright in the long run.
It all comes down to usabily. It has nothing to do with development models, and everything to do with making it easy to use.
That means that software installation has to be simple. Pop in a disk, and run./install.bin, or double click it from a GUI. Same applies for downloaded applications. One single self extracting image that installs the application on any distro.
However, to do this we need standardization. And I don't mean LSB, I mean what libraries are available on a vanilla system. In order to make software run on any distro, you need to know what libraries you can expect the OS to provide, and which ones you'll need to package with your application. LSB doesn't cover that, I believe that United Linux does.
A little over a year ago I made a journal entry about all of this. Most of the problems it brings up are still accurate. Check it out.
Autopackage sounds a lot like my pet project Linstaller. I stopped development a while back to get my CCNE and haven't restarted it since. One problem I ran into was what libraries you could expect to be installed on any given platform. Sure, there's the LSB, but does the LSB specify a base set of packages that make up a desktop or a server?
My aim was a little different from yours though. I was going for complete binary packaging from beginning to end. No source building, as automated./configure; make; make install;s tend to make distro specific code. Instead I left the cross distro compiling up to the packager. All I provided was an archive format and a self extracting gui or command line installer that totaled under 50k of overhead. I stopped around the middle of implementing the scripting language backend. I didn't like the way it was going, and as I said earlier, CCNE was calling to me.
Maybe I should start it back up. It's not like I have much else going on lately. hmm...
I imagine that the shiny lizard-like shape intimidates burglars, making them want to run away.
Please... This has got to be one of the lamest gadgets I've ever heard of. You'll get better performance out of a few well placed web cams, some infrared motion detectors, and a smoke alarm or two. At least then you won't have to worry about the batteries wearing down every other day.
"Burnt smell"... hehe, that sounds real technical. Oh well. It's their money they dumped into R&D. I suppose they'll have to learn for themselves that the consumer market for such a device isn't large enough to sustain production.
Slashdot Mirror
*shrug* ;)
/etc/exports only containing a single '#', and allowed me to then add an export using exportfs and I mounted it successfully afterwards. I even tried it after completely deleting /etc/exports. Still ran fine.
I can't comment on the autokill thing. That's how the NFS implementation in all the distros I've ever used worked. Unix is Unix, except for all the different little quirks.
BTW: I just checked RedHat 8.0 for the autokill "feature". Looks like they fixed it. I just ran "/etc/init.d/nfs start" and it started, didn't bitch about
Long story short, the autokill is gone in RedHat 8. That's good in my book. I never liked that behaviour either. As for the >2GB files. I'm running a test right now just for shits and giggles, but I don't see why it wouldn't work. As long as the file system can handle the destination file's size, nfs3 should behave admirably. (BTW, Solaris 8 uses nfs ver3 last I checked.)
the command that is equivalent to 'share' is 'exportfs', it can usually be found in /usr/sbin/.
/etc/exports. Thus, they do not persist across reboots. However, you cannot use exportfs until nfsd is running, and nfsd will auto kill itself if /etc/exports is completely empty. So you must share at least 1 directory tree in /etc/exports before you can use exportfs.
:)
It allows you to push NFS exports to the kernel and nfsd without having to edit
I believe Solaris has this same problem with share though. I don't remember these days, it's been a while since my SCSA cert. (Heh, i guess that's what man pages are for
Honestly, I'm not surprised by this. eBay has had a poorly implemented feedback system for quite a while now. The main problem with feedback, is that the other guy gets to see the feedback you left right away. This causes 2 problems.
Firstly, no one wants to be the first to leave feedback, since they are then helpless to react if they leave nice feedback and get bad feedback in return. Secondly, the idea that you can retaliate to the feedback you were given is completely fucked.
The best way to fix eBay's feedback system is to make a transaction's feedback completely invisible until the transaction is fully completed. That means that you don't get to see what feedback the other guy is leaving you until you've BOTH left feedback. This keeps everyone honest. If the deal goes sour in one person's eyes, then it will be reflected appropriately.
The biggest drawback to this system is the ability to stall feedback from showing. By never leavnig feedback, you could effectively keep a transaction in limbo. Thus, if you knew you fucked the other guy over, you could easily just never leave feedback and your rating would be unaffected. The solution to this is to enforce a timelimit on feedback. Once the other person leaves feedback, you have 30 days to leave feedback of your own. If you let the time limit pass, then you are assumed to have left neutral feedback, and a nice generic comment. Something like "".
Anyways, until eBay fixes this, I pretty much ignore the raw numbers that feedback provides. The aggregate data is completely useless. *shrug* Maybe they'll catch a clue and fix it one day.
Hardware SSL encryption engines are already available as PCI expansion cards. They've been available for years. I'm not a buff on TCPA by any means, but TCPA really seems to look like just another integrated peripheral that is probably better off being an expansion card. (Kind of like integrated AGP video. Mmmmm....S3VirgE MX! lol)
Honestly, how many applications are going to use SSL encryption so often that the CPU is incapable of performing the additional grunt work? Even if every website on the Internet was SSL encrypted, your old 233Mhz Pentium still has a shitload of spare cycles to throw at en/decoding the data streams. The only systems that really benefit from the hardware encoder/decoder are secure webservers. The ability to offload that little bit of processing gives them the ability to handle a few more requests per second.
As for the secure storage of SSL keys. I can't wait until my mainboard dies, and I can't get my keys off the damn chip. I suppose you could buy another identical board and attempt to swap the chips, but I'll warn you right now that surface mount soldering by hand is an extreme bitch.
And it really isn't like you're going to get that much extra security out of the deal. So your keys aren't on the harddrive anymore. So now people can't get your keys by stealing your tape backups anymore. What happens when you have a fire? Hope you have a really good memory and a nice hex editor to retype the keys with. And what is to stop any processes at all from reading all the keys out and emailing them to a hotmail account? Only allow priviledged processes to access the chip? How do you define with process is priviledged?
Sorry, but I'll stick to the expansion cards. At least if something bad happens I can replace those relatively cheaply and easily.
Well, that would be the advantage to bringing your own PC. The business plan doesn't have an admission fee. Just rentals and food. So if you bring your own PC, then you don't pay to play. If I had to charge admission, I'd charge less to people that bring their own equipment. The fact that they are bringing a PC in means that they are likely to stay longer, since it is such a bitch to set up and tear down all the time.
:)
I'd also have adjusted hours to make it worth while. Open all night on fridays and saturdays, that sort of thing. Having a nearby motel would be helpful, as it would give people a place to sleep if they got desperate.
I'd also enforce a headphones rule. No external speakers allowed, as it makes it too easy for people to blast their m4d @ss syst3mz and ruin the fun for others. I'd have ambient music playing, with a web-based jukebox interface for requests. If you don't have any headphones, I'd have plenty to sell you. Some cheap, some not.
Monitor size I could care less about. All the systems available for rent would have either 17 or 19 inch monitors. If you want to bring your badass 21", be my guest. The spacing of the stations would allow enough room for it.
I'd also have events probably every month or so. Winners get stuff like free rentals, new video cards, new headphones, new mice, new PCs, cash, etc. All depending on how big the event was supposed to be.
The place would, of course, have broadband access to the internet, and would have a few game servers running that were public to the net as well as internally. I'd also provide a few dialup points for access to the building for people that want to game with good ping times at home. (For a fee of course).
Eventually, I'd like to open up additional locations, and get dedicated connections between them, so that people on the LAN can play others from across the state, country, etc. I'd probably strike a deal with an ISP to provide low ping game servers to their clients as well, in exchange for discounted monthly fees on the dedicated lines.
But, I can go on all day about my nifty little dream. The hard part is making it a reality.
The US is behind the rest of the world when it comes to businesses making money off the LAN Party concept. They've been doing it in Japan, Korea, the Phillipenes, etc, for quite a while now. You'll find a few in the US that do alright. Mainly in large cities like New York. Still, it is nothing like the number of them in other countries.
:), so I don't know if they let you take your own PCs in, but I would. Because of this, you need to be in a nice enough location that people don't mind too much about tearing down their own PCs to set them up on the LAN. I would, of course, also rent PCs out to people that don't want to use their own.
I was thinking of starting one around my area, but the upfront investment is more than I can afford at the moment. I need to wait for better locations to open up anyways. You need to find someplace fairly large (but not too large), with really low rent.
Location is key, at least with my idea it is. I didn't read the article (typical Slashdot
The potential for theft shouldn't be too much of a problem. Just make sure the business PCs are clearly marked, and take a collateral upon renting that you give back when they return it. Drivers licenses would probably be good. Wouldn't hurt to require a social security card or credit card upon first rental either. *shrug*
Well, someday I'll start it up. Maybe in another couple years.
You're absolutely right. It's much better to teach our children how to use specific applications, rather than how to user computers in general. Are you fucking mad????
I've been to college (CS major), been around computers my ENTIRE life, and been deep in Unix for the past 7 years. (And I'm only 24.)
You know what I do with User Manuals? I throw them the fuck away, because I understand how computers work, and the thought process that developers are going through when they write software. Because of this understanding, I'm able to be proficient at new software within a matter of minutes, and an expert within a few days.
I think we are better off teaching our children the fundemental computer application TYPES. Fuck the specific apps. MS Word and Open Office are the same as far as 90% of users are concerned. They provide text formatting, spell check, and can print.
Instead of teaching Visual Basic, teach them programming concepts. Variables, loops, arrays, functions, data structures. Visual Basic is a syntax. You can take the same basic concepts and apply them to C, Java, Fortran, Shell scripting, etc.
Instead of Excel, teach them about SPREADSHEETS. How they work. Some cells contain data, some contain functions. What good are spreadsheets? When should we use them?
Don't teach Access. Teach database concepts. Tables, select statements, how joins work. How to think like a database optimizer to keep your statements from taking 9 years to complete.
Instead of Internet Explorer, teach them about the internet in general. What is it? How does it work? How to I make a website? How do you make dynamic websites? How do I find the information I'm looking for on the internet?
Computers are general machines. They are completely programmable, and to teach our children any specific application is a sure waste of time. Any application you teach them in 5th grade can easily be obsolete by the time they graduate highschool. Teach them the real fundamentals, and they'll have the knowldege to adapt to the industry as it changes.
And don't whine about having to relearn computers after school. Buttons are buttons, a cursor is a cursor, an icon is an icon, and a command line is a command line. The desktop paradigm hasn't changed since Xerox invented the fucking thing. When it happened, everyone relearned the interface. When it happens again, everyone will again relearn. (Including the "lucky" children that were taught the way you seem to prefer.) However, when the paradigm shifts, those with the true fundamental knowledge will adapt more quickly. The rest will be playing catch-up.
On a more personal note, I could give less of a fuck what the school system teaches when it comes to computers. I've had a computer my whole life, and so will my children, and you can bet your ass that they will know how things really work in the 5th grade, just as I did.
Cheers!
I was just thinking. What happens if you downloaded a bunch of songs that they distribute on physical media and get taken to court by them. You could easily argue that you had heard that they were willingly distributing garbage files on the P2P networks, and were merely trying to aquire some examples of them to see what all the fuss is about.
:)
Since they are placing the garbage up there themselves, wouldn't that imply that they were approving download and listening of the garbage files? The real files got in the way, and you were busted before you had a chance to delete them.
Seems to me that they were better off before, simply sueing the file distributors as they find them. *shrug* Just thought I'd share that little thought.
Probably about as soon as Microsoft ports it to SPARC/Solaris and signs a distribution contract with Sun.
Why don't they use this opportunity to create a large searchable database of every species while they are at it.
They could include information such as name, ncientific name (the latin? stuff), physical Description, a few photographs of male and female specimins, eating preferences, defense mechanisms, known locations of presence, and other various notes.
When it comes to the carnavores, you could make entries in their diet link to the victims' records.
Then just make it searchable. Filterable by geographical area, species, keywords, etc. Very powerful. Then all you need is to make it publically available. Read-only of course.
Everyone is complaining that Palladium will kill open source on Win32. I can't help but agree, but there is another angle to this as well. What happens to the small programming shops? I can think of plenty of times when one of my previously employing companies wrote small (sometimes throwaway) apps for clients. Sometimes it was for data massaging, sometimes it was a quick front end to something normally complicated.
The cold fact is that I can't see small businesses providing custom software solutions for clients surviving if Palladium is released. The cost to have throw away apps signed (not to mention the time delay involved) will utterly destroy them.
Unless of course the application signing is much simpler than that. Simply trusting a company as a whole, rather than a particular application. Trusting an entire company will allow small businesses to sign their own code. Of course, that also means that the DRM is pointless because a single hacked network will result in signed viruses.
If MS goes ahead with Palladium, I'll be keeping my eye out for the first virus to fool the OS into rejecting every app, regardless of signature. Perfect DOS attack. Can't do anything but reinstall from the installation media, if your DRM bios will let you that is...
If this bugs you, just make a change to the link layer drivers. Pad with nuls again, like it is supposed to, rather than garbage data. The downside to this is there will be a speed hit, since you are wasting time fscking with small packets to make sure they are secured. But, given the speed of modern systems vs the speed of ethernet, I highly doubt you'll notice.
Honestly, the big problem here is going to be MS. I doubt they'll introduce a fix at all.
Everyone here pretty much agrees on the same thing when it comes to eBooks. The DRM in them isn't worth a squirt of piss. Still, even if you had some magic DRM algorithm that was 100% impossible to break (which we all know eBooks do NOT have), the viewer still has to be able to read the damn thing, so it has to be displayed in an unencoded form. Attach homebrewed screenshot app here, insert optical character recognition there, and viola! Instant DRM-free eBook! Time for the usual distribution channels! IRC, 0day ftp sites, eDonkey, FastTrack, Gnutella. Thank you for your contribution to society Hamilton Press! You know we really, uh..appreciate it. lmao!
I suspect that this will last for about 6 months. Then the publishers will start whining 'foul'.
Thinking about this has stirred up an interesting idea though. The only way to make money from eBooks is to devise a method to make people want to pay for information that they could otherwise get for free. So what about providing useful services for a flat monthly fee?
How about the ability to search for text strings throughout an entire library of books. That could certainly make research a little easier. You want to know all about Albert Einstein? SURE! Here is every document he authored, every biography, every newpaper that mentioned him, and every other book or magazine that's referred to him in existance. If done correctly, you could even get search results back in under 2.4 seconds like Google.
Now I'm not saying that full text indexes are the killer app that will make people pay for electronic access to published works, but its a start....
Just tried it out.
:)
It is close, but not quite. The author himself recognizes some fundemental problems with color depth variation between Xservers. The interface could use some work as well, but that is to be expected from a thesis project. (At least I _believe_ it was a thesis project. I didn't look very hard to verify that.)
Only two things really need to be done to make xmove better.
#1- Integrate the functionality into X and the Xlibs so that every X application ran has this functionality already built in. This will allow you to easily fix the color depth problem, and will also remove the need for a separate xmove and xmovectrl. All you'd really need then is xmovectrl (probably renamed to just xmove). Fussing with getting xmove set up in advance is just simply too much trouble.
#2-
Fix the ssh tunneling problem. It probably has to do with the funky redirection that ssh does to X sessions. So I don't blame xmove directly. In fact, I don't even care if ssh is used at all, I just want some form of encryption. I don't fancy having my raw X11 sessions flying across public and/or insecure networks. Again, tying this into the Xserver and the Xlibs would make this easier.
#3- Add the ability to configure the default behaviour for broken X sessions. It would make more sense to have broken sessions auto kick all client apps into suspend mode, rather than letting them die just because your Xserver croaked. (Thourhg I would squeeze that in there.
That's pretty much it. I'm going to start using xmove for a few X apps that I always wanted to be able to push off onto my rackmount vs always running on my desktop.
I appreciate the tip, by the way. xmove and dtach are going to be quite useful combined. (I don't like screens. It tried to do too much. dtach is really simple)
Hrm..
;)
Actually, I find the window managers used in unix desktops much more productive than anything MS ever came up with. Window shading, virtual desktops, and multiple workspaces (not the same as virtual desktops) just by themselves make the OS faster to use. Most people have to start closing windows when they start running out of desktop real estate. I just switch to another workspace and keep going. It makes development MUCH more productive, I can tell you that much right now. One workspace for reading API documentation, another (sometimes two) for writing code, and another for checking my email, surfing the web when I need another reference or a quick break, and for playing music. Depending on the app, I sometimes even use ANOTHER for testing the app.
Windows is far from having the best interface IMHO. It definitely has the most popular, but popularity rarely has anything to do with functionality. (More often it has to do with pressure to conform.)
Don't get me wrong. I think XWindows itself is a fucking joke. Shared memory doesn't help it's situation. Windows update speed is STILL an issue from time to time, and the current implementation of remotely running apps is getting old. What I'd really like to see is the ability to start a gui app from over the network, and dynamically detach it from your XServer without killing it. Letting it run headless in the background for a while, and then reattaching it on a different machine (or even locally on that previously remote machine) so that you can check up on it.
Basically, I want RDP with by the application granularity. Now THAT would be an advantage system admins! In fact, without that killer feature and without even taking shell scripting and regular expressions into account, unix desktops still beat the piss out of the Windows XP (and earlier) desktop environments. IMHO of course.
Hard drive permissions in what respect?
Ext2 (and derived) filesystems rely completely on the OS to enforce the permissions. So essentially, the minute you get root access in the OS, you can do whatever you please with the data on the drive.
FAT32 has no native permissions at all. Any permissions that are percieved on FAT32 under Linux is because of the parameters (or lack thereof) given to the 'mount' command.
As for NTFS, that's a whole new ballgame. I'm not into NTFS so much. I try to stay away from it when I can. Still, we have an NTFS read-only driver for Linux. So you can at least extract what you want from the drive before you reinstall it. (Which, BTW, is what 90% of calls to MS support end up being. They try about 5 different things, and then tell you that the OS is hosed beyond repair, reinstall and restore from backups.)
Wow, that's pretty weak on Microsoft's part.
Everything I hear about SATA is that the interface the OS speaks with is much like PATA. One person even said that the current IDE drivers for Linux should already support SATA (though I'm not 100% sure if I believe that one).
Still, you'd think that a company that actually gets paid for making an OS would be on top of an industry wide evolution such as SATA and would have code already written that works, and are simply waiting for the target to quit moving so they can bundle it in a service pack.
Oh well, chalk up another negative on my MS board of shame. Crap like this is why I switched to Linux.
I don't think these geniuses performed the hot swap correctly.
Windows should absolutely NOT report the drive with a letter after you've properly taken out the drive. This is because you are supposed to UMOUNT the fcsking drive before you do it! (There is a windows equivalent to a umount in the drive manager.) This is sort of important considering that any good OS will cache reads and write to physical disks to improve I/O speeds. Pulling a live drive out of a system is likely to create unusable filesystems on that drive.
BTW: If done correctly, you can easily remove drives from parallel ATA controllers already. In fact, you can buy caddies and mounts for hot swapping ATA/100 drives from a bunch of vendors on pricewatch.
Oh well, at least they thought they were helping. lmao!
I remember back when I was probably about 3 or 4 years old, I reached up and turned the lights on in my parent's basement. Everything before that was tranquil blackness. No sound, no images, no feeling, just kind of floating in blackness. Then I turned on the lights.
Suddenly I could see and hear. I remember running (well, since I was a toddler, it was probably more like toddling) over to the other side of the basement to play with legos with my cousin Matt. Of course, I didn't know his name at the time, but he was about my age and he had legos, so it was all good.
That is my earliest memory. After that I remember a bunch of things. Day care: picking on an older kid named Reese, called him Reese's pieces and he'd chase my other cousin and I around a bit. Toddler memories are pretty few and far between relative to my other childhood memories, but there are still a substanstial number of them.
So Dr Freude (sp?), what is the verdict?
You only need to escape quotes that are the same as you are using to encapsulate the sting literal to begin with.
//wrong //right //right
//wrong //right //right
For example:
echo "this is an "example" quote";
echo 'this is an "example" quote';
echo "this is an \"example\" quote";
echo 'this is an 'example' quote';
echo "this is an 'example' quote";
echo 'this is an \'example\' quote';
It's actually better than ASP IMHO. ASP requires you escape all double quotes, since that is all you can encapsulate strings in to begin with.
Same here.
I played for about 5 months. On and off, sometimes really on. Could never reach level 20. I topped off at 19 as a Ranger, and had a bitch of a time killing anything worth xp. After wasting a month of my time swaying between levels 18 and 19, I quit.
Fuck it, don't have time for something like that. I'm the sort that will play a game for all it is worth until I reach the end, and then I shelve it. If there are multiplayer features, like quake and empire earth and such, then I usually hang on to it for LAN parties. Beyond that, I rarely play it again.
My EQ experience was way back in the day though. Back when it first came out. I remember bitching about the lack of horses for the longest time. I found out that after a few expansion packs they finally had horses. I still have the box and all of its contents here. I should probably sell it on eBay, since I'll never play it again.
Sigh...
Come on people. You all root for the Athlon when it is clocked well under the P4, yet you believe that SGI's MIPS line is crap when it tops out at 700Mhz???
Sun's UltraSPARC III Cu tops out at 1.05Ghz last I checked. Does that mean that the P4 at 3Ghz stomps the hell out of it? If you said yes, you are a fucking idiot.
People, the Unix world is far far different from what you are used to in PC land. High speed backplanes, dedicated busses, huge amount of L1 cache, insane L2 cache, incredibly efficient cpu designs (where 1 clock per instruction is pretty much the norm and cache misses don't occur every 3 operations), hot swap damn-near-everything, upwards of 72 processors and 288 GB of RAM...
It all adds up to a fucking badass machine that smacks the piss out of any PC on the planet when it comes to getting its job done. Don't compare apples to oranges. The applications these machines are designed for do not include Quake 3. The benchmarks you have memorized don't mean a damn thing in this realm, so go back home.
Getting back to the article, I'm glad to see SGI coming out with a new CPU. I still see a few SGIs in the wild now and again. If they lock down Irix a bit more security wise and expand their target market, they might be a decent competitor for Sun within the next 10 years. I don't see them winning any shining star awards right off the bat, but if they are persistant they'll do alright in the long run.
It all comes down to usabily. It has nothing to do with development models, and everything to do with making it easy to use. That means that software installation has to be simple. Pop in a disk, and run ./install.bin, or double click it from a GUI. Same applies for downloaded applications. One single self extracting image that installs the application on any distro.
However, to do this we need standardization. And I don't mean LSB, I mean what libraries are available on a vanilla system. In order to make software run on any distro, you need to know what libraries you can expect the OS to provide, and which ones you'll need to package with your application. LSB doesn't cover that, I believe that United Linux does.
A little over a year ago I made a journal entry about all of this. Most of the problems it brings up are still accurate. Check it out.
Autopackage sounds a lot like my pet project Linstaller. I stopped development a while back to get my CCNE and haven't restarted it since. One problem I ran into was what libraries you could expect to be installed on any given platform. Sure, there's the LSB, but does the LSB specify a base set of packages that make up a desktop or a server?
./configure; make; make install;s tend to make distro specific code. Instead I left the cross distro compiling up to the packager. All I provided was an archive format and a self extracting gui or command line installer that totaled under 50k of overhead. I stopped around the middle of implementing the scripting language backend. I didn't like the way it was going, and as I said earlier, CCNE was calling to me.
My aim was a little different from yours though. I was going for complete binary packaging from beginning to end. No source building, as automated
Maybe I should start it back up. It's not like I have much else going on lately. hmm...
I imagine that the shiny lizard-like shape intimidates burglars, making them want to run away.
Please... This has got to be one of the lamest gadgets I've ever heard of. You'll get better performance out of a few well placed web cams, some infrared motion detectors, and a smoke alarm or two. At least then you won't have to worry about the batteries wearing down every other day.
"Burnt smell"... hehe, that sounds real technical. Oh well. It's their money they dumped into R&D. I suppose they'll have to learn for themselves that the consumer market for such a device isn't large enough to sustain production.