The kind that understands people like my father, who doesn't know anything about domain names, IP addresses, etc. He groks phone numbers.
Taco asks if anyone else thinks mapping numbers to names to numbers is "horribly stupid"... The whole idea of domain names is to provide =one= way to make it easier for humans to access the system. There is nothing wrong with adding another.
And there is already a mapping scheme in place to convert names to telephone numbers. 1-800-FLOWERS, 1-800-COLLECT, 1-888-TELL-FOX... In order for this scheme to work, it should handle the alphanumeric mapping
tr/a-z/A-Z/;
tr/A-Z/22233344455566677778889999/;
to (yes, Taco) map the letters to (phone) numbers, to map the numbers to (DNS) letters, to map to (IP) numbers, to map to ARP numbers, to map to inodes, to map to sectors.... That's what we have operating systems and protocols for. Think of Encapsulation, Information-Hiding, and Buzzwords Like That. So that a computer-illiterate CEO doesn't have to know a thing about VoIP. He just dials the number to Taiwan, and lets the geeks take care of what's under the hood. --------------------
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Unless you have 10-digit dialing, you can't have an exchange and an area code be the same,
Sure you can. What changed a few years ago, to free up both ACs with middle digit >1 and exchanges with middle digit ifyou start with a 1, the next thing must be the area code even if it's the same.
When 1+ dialling came into effect, they had a jingle on the TV and radio, at least around these parts:
Dial 1, plus the area code, if it's different from your own, plus the number!
So, the only restriction is on local exchanges and area codes. Here in Kansas City, there can't be any 913-816-xxxx numbers or 816-913-xxxx numbers, but Southwestern Bell is absolutely free to use those exchanges in, say, Paola, KS and St. Joseph, MO, with no trouble at all. We also couldn't use 913-913-xxxx or 816-816-xxxx here locally, because it is permittedfor us to dial our own area code for a local call. But there's still no reason why those can't be used away from the state line.
For those truly massive metros that require multiple area codes, it would be necessary that none of the area code numbers be used as exchanges in any of them. But there are 792 (8 * 99, because an exchange can't end in 11) theoretically possible exchanges for each area code, so even if scores of them are declared ineligible, we're talking about well over seven million potential numbers per area code. Allowing for some underuse in various exchanges, let's make it an even five million.
We've got 640 (8 * 80, excluding xyy patterns) possible geographic area codes, even allowing for massive expansion of non-geographic codes. Since each state, province, and district requires one area code, even if there are much less than five million phones, we ought to knock that number down to 600.
By my math, that gives us 3 billion geographically-allocated numbers in North America right now, and we're nowhere near needing that many. --------------------
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Traditionally, people haven't had to dial the area code to make a local call. (Even more traditionally, toll calls had to be operator-assisted, but that's probably before many/. readers were born.) I used to live in a small town with a special shortcut code that allowed 5-digit local dialling! As the article indicates, we Kansas Citians have to dial the area code to make a local call across the state line. [Actually, there are a few numbers double-mapped, so that they can be reached in 7 digits from either side.] It irks me to have to dial the extra 3 digits to phone The Bride of Monster at her place of employ in the State of Misery.
But this is a relatively new thing even for us. Until a year ago, Southwestern Bell simply avoided assigning the same exchanges (those ten-thousand number blocks the article refers to) on both sides of the line, at least within the metro area. Just a few years ago, they divided the 913 (Kansas) AC, splitting off the larger part as 785, and 816 (Missouri) to create 660 in the rural areas. In doing so, they freed up over half the exchanges in each area code, but still claim that forcing us to use 10 digits is necessary.
I understand that 10-digit dialling is a must for New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and a few other areas that just have too many phone lines to fit. Lots of companies test market their new products in KC because we're a good cross-section of America. And I think our Dial 10 change a year ago was precisely a test of customer reaction to the system. We didn't react as violently as the poor schmucks in Californication that dial a 1 for all calls, even local ones!
You mean the makers of the Pentium, with the infamous FPU bug? The folks who were so embarrassed by it that all of their processors now have the ability to load bugfix microcode at boot time? Which, by the way, might be part of what's going on with the Crusoe chips. The story opens with: [emphasis mine]
Transmeta said in a statement that the recall would take in ``fewer than 300'' NEC computers at risk of failing
if the user reinstalled operating software.
This suggests to me that the units in question might already include some bugfix code, which would be subject to being wiped out by a certain well-known operating system's scorched-earth treatment of custom bootloaders like LILO or GRUB.
Which is wrong. There is no process for certifying the (national total) "popular vote" because such a thing does not legally exist. There are something on the order of 2 million absentee ballots nationwide that have not been, and will not be, counted, because they do not affect the outcome of their respective states. For demographic reasons that should be obvious, [The sort of people who expect to be away from home on election day tend to be higher income levels, or military, either of which correlate to Repo] absentee voters go Repo, so Bush would be expected to pick up enough votes there to actually pass Gore in the mythical PV.
One great thing about the Electoral College is that, instead of having to contest every ballot in every precinct in every county in every state (and the District of Columbia), we only need to put the process under such scrutiny when and where the margin is as small as in Florida this year.
In geek terms:
Think of the EC as well-written modular code
that allows bugs to be easily isolated, and PV as a great heaping mass of spaghetti.
I know my apartment is behind a Linksys router, and we have 4 connections, however we have one computer that is the dedicated incoming access server. This doesn't really help the other computers on the network, but it is a partial solution to the problem.
Well, it helps a bunch. The entire idea of NAT/masquerade firewalling is to deny all incoming connections to the firewall. So set up in the DMZ either Napster, or better yet a middleman to connect the two TCP streams (each of which is originated from the peers).
It comes with the territory. Since the firewall presents a single IP to the world, there will be problems when two things want to act as a server at the same time. To make matters worse, the box inside the firewall has no idea what IP/port combo is seen by the outside.
Since it's the NAT machine that is breaking the notion of IP<=>machine equivalence, it's up to those who want to run multiple servers behind a NAT firewall to be creative. We need to share some of the information that is normally hidden from the firewalled machine. With that in mind, here is the essence of an appropriate protocol for setting up on-the-fly "tunnels" through the firewall"
Box asks firewall for a (semi)persistent peer-to-peer port it can use, rather like obtaining a DHCP lease (but probably with much shorter term for security reasons). Part of the request datagram is a pointer to an.rc with the rules to define how to manage this port.
If box has permission from the firewall's owner to do this, firewall says "Fine. You can be UDP Port 2345 (on RealIP x.x.x.x, just in case firewall got this from an upstream DHCP server), and I won't use that port for anything else until __. Meanwhile, your daemon, abiding by your.rc, is listening".
Box can now let p2p network know its current address.
Outsider asks to connect to that port, and request is handled by daemon.
If that request is authorized by the.rc, then daemon obtains a new port number and registers that TCP port for the exclusive use of the IP address of the UDP datagram.
Daemon sends back UDP datagram to the port the guest box got from its firewall, informing it of the TCP port, and notifies parent application behind firewall that someone is calling.
Guest then initiates a TCP connection, using the specific port number.
Firewall allows this very specific connection to be established.
When connection ends, box can update the.rc for its daemon, or tell firewall it's done with the UDP port altogether.
I include the extra step of doing the UDP so that the firewall never opens a TCP port to the world, just to a single IP. If the p2p server can handle this negotiation, it can be skipped. From a security standpoint, I'd much prefer to just let the DMZ play middleman between the two machines, but if it's absolutely necessary to open a temporary hole, this would be the way to do it.
Now someone can tell me the problem with this approach.
If I'm lucky I'll get a computer illiterate judge who thinks "MP3 format file" is some kind of arcane technical jargon that no ordinary person could be expected to understand.
If you were the Half Price lawyer how would you explain this to the judge?
#include<ianal.h>
Since the TOS (Respondent's Exhibit "1") spells out that Half Price is the sole judge of violations, I'd explain to the judge that it's the plaintiff's burden of proof to show that my client had abused its discretion somehow. [The Florida Supremes wouldn't hear this one, because the TOS gives Kentucky jurisdiction.] But that would be after I made a motion to dismiss on the grounds that plaintiff could show no damage, given the fine print: emphasis mine
11.1.
USE OF THE COMPANY'S SERVICES AND PRODUCTS IS AT CUSTOMER'S SOLE RISK. NEITHER THE COMPANY NOR ITS EMPLOYEES, AGENTS, RESELLERS THIRD PARTY INFORMATION PROVIDERS, MERCHANTS LICENSERS OR THE LIKE, MAKE ANY WARRANTIES, INCLUDING ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, THAT THE COMPANY'S SERVICES AND PRODUCTS WILL NOT BE INTERRUPTED OR BE ERROR FREE; NOR DO THEY MAKE ANY WARRANTY AS TO THE RESULTS THAT MIGHT BE OBTAINED FROM THE USE OF THE COMPANY'S SERVICES AND PRODUCTS OR AS TO THE ACCURACY, OR RELIABILITY OF ANY INFORMATION SERVICE OR MERCHANDISE CONTAINED OR PROVIDED THROUGH THE COMPANY'S SERVICE, UNLESS OTHERWISE EXPRESSLY STATED IN THIS AGREEMENT. THIS INCLUDES LOSS OF DATA, WHETHER RESULTING FROM DELAYS, ON DELIVERIES, WRONG DELIVERY, AND ANY AND ALL SERVICE INTERRUPTIONS CAUSED BY THE COMPANY AND ITS EMPLOYEES OR OTHER CAUSES.
Then, if the judge somehow decided that damages could still exist, they'd be quite limited:
11.2. THE SOLE CUMULATIVE LIABILITY OF THE COMPANY FOR ALL CLAIMS MADE BY THE CUSTOMER, OR ANY OTHER PARTY, REGARDLESS OF FORM, INCLUDING ANY CAUSE OF ACTION BASED ON CONTRACT, TORT OR STRICT LIABILITY, SHALL NOT EXCEED THE TOTAL AMOUNT OF ALL FEES AND CHARGES PAID TO THE COMPANY BY THE CUSTOMER
Plaintiff's attorney already having advised him of this, there wouldn't be enough of a judgement to pay the attorney, so the case doesn't even get to a judge in the first place.
As long as they have a clear policy on such matters,
Damn straight they do. As the update to the original story suggests, I grepped the company's Terms of Service: (emphasis mine)
4.1.5. The storage and distribution of
MP3 format files via the Company network is prohibited.
I don't know how much clearer it can get.
YAUUSSS (Yet Another Un(der)researched, Unnecessarily Sensationalist Slashdot Story), I'm afraid.
As others have pointed out, you can try to defeat their 'bot by naming files.%6D%70%33 or similar, hoping that the browser translates the hex to ascii. Hell, you can call them.em-pee-three and ask your users to rename them, if they possess sufficient clues to do that (and Explorer isn't configured to hide file extensions for their protection <spit> - that's why I suggest a really funky extension, BTW). Beating a killbot isn't all that different from beating a spambot.
But a heavy-download site is still a violation of other TOS provisions. And if the admins catch you...
The Company will be the sole and final arbiter as to Websites or usages of resources that constitute violation or intent to violate our policies. Those Customers found in
violation of these policies are subject to a $300.00 service charge for each instance of violation, exclusive of charges for the bandwidth and/or other resources utilized.
They can define an "instance" per file, or per download, and make "half-price" pretty damned expensive in a hurry.
So, as the great philosopher Harry Callahan* said:
You gotta ask yourself one question: "Do I feel lucky today?" Well, do ya... punk?
*Yes, I know he's a fictitious character. There is ample evidence to suggest that Socrates is, too, but that doesn't stop people from quoting "him" to bolster their positions. And Net Kops probably have that"Go ahead... make my day" attitude.
Oh. This isn't the Hitchhiker's Guide...
The article states:
Developers may purchase the cryptographic certificates used to create such a signature from Verisign Inc.--Microsoft has no say in determining who may receive such certificates or what software may be signed.
So, there's no reason why someone like the FSF couldn't get a certificate in the name of "Unknown Author", and release the certificate to the community. Here's how it would work:
Admin turns on this paranoid checking to keep viri from executing.
User says "I can't run FOOBAR.EXE, and I need it to get my job done."
Admin runs virus scan, possibly turns program loose on a quarantine machine running an emulator, and satisfies himself that it's safe.
Admin uses the certificate to sign FOOBAR.
Result?
User is happy because he gets to run FOOBAR.
Admin is happy because he doesn't have to wipe every machine on his network whenever a new trojan sneaks in.
Bean-counters are happy that the certificate is free as in beer.
Slashdotters are happy that it is free as in speech.
Depending on how much it costs to get the certificates, some admins might even want to buy their own, and require everything to be certified by them, even locking out MS-authorized "upgrades".
Dispassionate business people don't give away money, therefore some other consideration must have been present in the transaction. That invisible consideration WILL be taxed, just like any barter transaction will be taxed.
Close enough, then, for the IRS to impute:
Dispassionate programmers don't give away programs....
How are they planning to do that? I for one wouldn't mind paying 50% taxes on a 0 dollar purchase...
Well, folks, our Infernal Revenue Service, long the leader in mind-boggling leaps of logic, is way ahead of you on this. It's called "imputed income". Let's say I borrow a thousand bucks from my father to buy a new computer. If he doesn't charge me "enough" (or any) interest, the IRS will "impute" that he could have gotten a certain "applicable federal rate" on his money, and will tax him on the money he didn't get from me.
"There is no way that 3500 elderly Jewish people voted for Pat Buchanan."
I really can't stand it when the "experts" use this "there's no way" line. First of all, there are Gentiles living in that county, too. Just because Buchanan's (media-influenced?) image is that of a neo-Nazi doesn't mean that every Jew will automatically reject him, even in favor of a co-religioninist Veep candidate.
According to a report I heard on the radio yesterday, Independent and Reform registered voters in the county number over 15,000, so it's not the least bit difficult to imagine that a quarter of them would vote for a Reform candidate. But since "we all know" all of the voters in Florida are elderly Jews who vote the straight (D) ticket in lockstep, there simply must be Something Going On Here.
It reminds me of a baseball game I saw on TV years ago. The late KC Royals shortstop Fred Patek was thrown out stealing second base. The umpire had his thumb out as soon as the ball hit the glove, long before Patek reached the bag... but the tag was not applied until after his foot touched second. The ump never even looked, having decided "There is no way this guy beats the tag". Ever since that day, I've been suspicious of people who decide something must be impossible, and never consider any other possibility.
Umpires (and election officials) should not be in the business of deciding how people should have voted. If they are allowed to do so, then they can throw out election results any time they want, which scares me far more than either Bush or Gore being elected via a recount of the actual ballots cast in accordance with the rules established before the election.
The best solution, in my humble opinion, is that a no loopholes time limit be placed on all copyrights beyond which they cannot be held. This would force companies to take a harder look at whether they can make enough money quickly enough to justify product development. It might harm R&D in a small way, things that wouldn't provide enough return during the copyright period just wouldn't get done, but it might also improve competition and swing a little of the power away from big business.
Have you ever heard of "orphan drugs"?
There are some medical conditions from which so few people suffer, that (after subtracting the lengthy FDA approval process from the statutory 17 year patent term) there is just no way to justify further research. While I think the ex post facto extension of copyright or patent terms we've seen in recent years is absurd, I do think it'd be a good idea for future patents on technology subject to regulatory approval have the expiry "clock" start with that approval, allowing the full 17 years to recoup the R&D.
DISCLAIMER: The Bride of Monster has Myasthenia Gravis, an "orphan disease". She has taken the same medication for decades, because nothing new has been developed. So I'm prejudiced? Maybe.
What I really want to see is how a Transmeta chip will "emulate" the "virtual processor" that this Virtual Assembler assembles to!
Virtualizing the hardware allows bullet-proof systems, that absolutely can not crash (IBM S/390 virtual machines, for example), can be painlessly debugged without requiring any debugging info to be compiled into the "object" code (but it helps to have a separate map file), intermediate compilation/assembly into p-code that is truly portable across architectures. You can use other languages to compile and link p-code, not just this VA thing. When you're dealing with multi-processing, especially of the mutant variety described for the PS2, it may be easier to deal with the associated issues at the p-code interpreter level than to try writing a universal kernel. Who cares if the virtual machine "forks", so long as the definition of the VM itself remains stable?
If you have closed-source p-code, you can still throw it on new hardware and expect it to work, without having to buy an upgrade (or worse, curse the fact that the vendor has gone t.u.). You can run the p-code in its own VM with tweaked versions of the libraries it calls to hook in functionality the original author never intended... In other words, it's a new level for geeks like us to play with!
But it's not a revolutionary idea... Didn't UCSD do this back in the '70s? Didn't Sun (Java) do this in the '90s?
Why does bush never seem to answer questions with a straight answer.
A question should be puncuated with a question mark, not a period. And a proper name such as Bush or America[n] should be capitalized.
Almost every time ive seen him answer a questionj on TV he seems to go off on a tangent talking about the issues that the "american public" wants to know, for example, in the encryption question he(or his aids) went off talking about consumers right to privacy on e-commerce sites but the question was about encryption export controls.
The pronoun "I" should be capitalized, even in contractions such as "I've". Oh. A "contraction" is a compression of one or more words by eliminating some letters. Like "I have" or "do not". Wherever those letters are removed, we put an apostrophe in to represent the "hidden" letters. A person who assists is called an "aide" (so two or more would be "aides"); an inanimate object or abstract form of assistance is an "aid". Here's (Hey! That's a contraction! So's "that's"...) an example of a visual aid: [Preview]. I suggest that you let it aid you in composing any future posts critical of others' grammar. If you do that, you might also notice that the quoted sentence is a horrible run-on, which should be separated into two, by converting the comma after "know" into a period, and making the next letter a capital: "For..."
Another thiong that really bugs me is his constant use of bad grammer when he has a "masters degree" in business from HARVARD, dont you have to know basic grammer to even get into HARVARD. I just wish the elections were after Febuary so that I could vote...
Unless you learn a lot between now and February, you'll have proven that you don't have to know basic grammar (as opposed to knowing [Kelsey?] Grammer, which perhaps a state Governor might), or spelling for that matter, to vote.
You've got to give Linux-Mandrake publisher Mandrakesoft credit; their distribution deal with MacMillan Software is spreading their latest release to places Linux has never gone before, including Wal-Mart and other major retail chain stores.
I bought my first copy of Mandrake (6.0) at Wally World over a year ago. What am I missing here?
I just want to make it clear to the readers here at Salo... uh, Slashdot that I wanted to answer your questions, really I did. But, you see, I put the questions, and my answers, along with the first draft of Love Story and my field notes from Love Canal, in that Lockbox I invented. After the last debate, I planted another great big kiss on Tipper, and the key fell out of my pocket.
whether the FBI should actually be allowed to take his computer stuff (even his books) is a different question.
It certainly is.
IMNSHO, there is absolutely no reason why LEOs should have a warrant to seize disks, CDs, etc. when on a fishing expe... uh, investigating a crime. They can copy whatever they need to another drive. Even books could be taken to the station to scan/microfiche any marginal notes that might seem relevant, and then returned promptly to the "suspect".
This is the difference between gathering information for an investigation, and asset forfeiture (spit).
The translation process, which Transmeta calls "code morphing," is a performance bottleneck. But once translated, the code is stored in a special portion of RAM for quick access the next time it is needed, which tends to speed things up again.
Sounds reasonable. What does it take to dump this "special portion of RAM" to the HD (possibly in a separate filesystem, especially if your emulator is running Win), which the emulator would associate with the i86 (or whatever) binary file? The emulator would probably need the date/time stamp of the binary to make sure it hadn't been modified since the last run... better do a checksum, too, just in case... Certain anti-viral properties suggest themselves here. Then, when the program is executed again, the i86 binary need not be loaded, and the translation doesn't need to be done at all.
Further on-the-fly optimizations for loops, etc. could be performed. This could also be handed off to a dedicated deep optimizer that runs the machine at full speed while plugged in to the wall, as the owner sleeps. Set up the benchmark software this way, and allow the optimizer to run, then see how it does.
A somewhat unrelated thought is that a machine running an emulator can do debugging without requiring any special support in the i86 "object code" itself. A compiler can build a separate map file for the emulator's use in setting breakpoints, and as an added bonus, use the same info to 'optimize the optimization'. Once again, the map file need not be visible to the OS running on the virtual machine, just so that the real chip can find it and make good use of it.
I think the idea is good though. Redhat could just keep spooling ISOs at 56k so that even modem users could dip in to it and then maybe at 256k which most cable and dsl subscribers should be able to get and you could have a background process that plucks them off the wire and assembles the ISO on your disk.
That's a good start, but even better would be to use a protocol that assumes that packets will be lost, like the one that some tape drives use:
(where ^ means exclusive-or). Depending on the typical dropout rate, the number of packets checksummed (here it's 2) could be adjusted.
For example, if we're transmitting 1024 packets with 4 packets per parity group, then 256 packets of xors 1st would be from packets 1, 257, 513, and 769; 2nd is 2, 258, 514, and 770... 256th is 256, 512, 768, and 1024.
For those with a perfect connection, there is no waiting at all. For those with tolerable dropouts, only a 25% increase in the total size of the transmission, which would of course repeat. You could pick up the channel at any point, (including during the parity portion), and pick up the whole show without waiting to sync (because once 4 of the 5 packets in a parity group are received, the 5th can be reconstructed).
Perhaps a second channel could use different redundancy (like 8 packets per parity group?)
Now that I think about it, when you burn a CD, some sort of redundancy like this is built in, although I don't know the details....
Slashdot Mirror
Taco asks if anyone else thinks mapping numbers to names to numbers is "horribly stupid"... The whole idea of domain names is to provide =one= way to make it easier for humans to access the system. There is nothing wrong with adding another.
And there is already a mapping scheme in place to convert names to telephone numbers. 1-800-FLOWERS, 1-800-COLLECT, 1-888-TELL-FOX... In order for this scheme to work, it should handle the alphanumeric mapping
to (yes, Taco) map the letters to (phone) numbers, to map the numbers to (DNS) letters, to map to (IP) numbers, to map to ARP numbers, to map to inodes, to map to sectors.... That's what we have operating systems and protocols for. Think of Encapsulation, Information-Hiding, and Buzzwords Like That. So that a computer-illiterate CEO doesn't have to know a thing about VoIP. He just dials the number to Taiwan, and lets the geeks take care of what's under the hood.--------------------
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
When 1+ dialling came into effect, they had a jingle on the TV and radio, at least around these parts:
So, the only restriction is on local exchanges and area codes. Here in Kansas City, there can't be any 913-816-xxxx numbers or 816-913-xxxx numbers, but Southwestern Bell is absolutely free to use those exchanges in, say, Paola, KS and St. Joseph, MO, with no trouble at all. We also couldn't use 913-913-xxxx or 816-816-xxxx here locally, because it is permittedfor us to dial our own area code for a local call. But there's still no reason why those can't be used away from the state line.For those truly massive metros that require multiple area codes, it would be necessary that none of the area code numbers be used as exchanges in any of them. But there are 792 (8 * 99, because an exchange can't end in 11) theoretically possible exchanges for each area code, so even if scores of them are declared ineligible, we're talking about well over seven million potential numbers per area code. Allowing for some underuse in various exchanges, let's make it an even five million.
We've got 640 (8 * 80, excluding xyy patterns) possible geographic area codes, even allowing for massive expansion of non-geographic codes. Since each state, province, and district requires one area code, even if there are much less than five million phones, we ought to knock that number down to 600.
By my math, that gives us 3 billion geographically-allocated numbers in North America right now, and we're nowhere near needing that many.
--------------------
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
But this is a relatively new thing even for us. Until a year ago, Southwestern Bell simply avoided assigning the same exchanges (those ten-thousand number blocks the article refers to) on both sides of the line, at least within the metro area. Just a few years ago, they divided the 913 (Kansas) AC, splitting off the larger part as 785, and 816 (Missouri) to create 660 in the rural areas. In doing so, they freed up over half the exchanges in each area code, but still claim that forcing us to use 10 digits is necessary.
I understand that 10-digit dialling is a must for New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and a few other areas that just have too many phone lines to fit. Lots of companies test market their new products in KC because we're a good cross-section of America. And I think our Dial 10 change a year ago was precisely a test of customer reaction to the system. We didn't react as violently as the poor schmucks in Californication that dial a 1 for all calls, even local ones!
--------------------
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
--------------------
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
One great thing about the Electoral College is that, instead of having to contest every ballot in every precinct in every county in every state (and the District of Columbia), we only need to put the process under such scrutiny when and where the margin is as small as in Florida this year.
In geek terms:
--------------------
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
It comes with the territory. Since the firewall presents a single IP to the world, there will be problems when two things want to act as a server at the same time. To make matters worse, the box inside the firewall has no idea what IP/port combo is seen by the outside.
Since it's the NAT machine that is breaking the notion of IP<=>machine equivalence, it's up to those who want to run multiple servers behind a NAT firewall to be creative. We need to share some of the information that is normally hidden from the firewalled machine. With that in mind, here is the essence of an appropriate protocol for setting up on-the-fly "tunnels" through the firewall"
- Box asks firewall for a (semi)persistent peer-to-peer port it can use, rather like obtaining a DHCP lease (but probably with much shorter term for security reasons). Part of the request datagram is a pointer to an
.rc with the rules to define how to manage this port.
- If box has permission from the firewall's owner to do this, firewall says "Fine. You can be UDP Port 2345 (on RealIP x.x.x.x, just in case firewall got this from an upstream DHCP server), and I won't use that port for anything else until __. Meanwhile, your daemon, abiding by your
.rc, is listening".
- Box can now let p2p network know its current address.
- Outsider asks to connect to that port, and request is handled by daemon.
- If that request is authorized by the
.rc, then daemon obtains a new port number and registers that TCP port for the exclusive use of the IP address of the UDP datagram.
- Daemon sends back UDP datagram to the port the guest box got from its firewall, informing it of the TCP port, and notifies parent application behind firewall that someone is calling.
- Guest then initiates a TCP connection, using the specific port number.
- Firewall allows this very specific connection to be established.
- When connection ends, box can update the
.rc for its daemon, or tell firewall it's done with the UDP port altogether.
I include the extra step of doing the UDP so that the firewall never opens a TCP port to the world, just to a single IP. If the p2p server can handle this negotiation, it can be skipped. From a security standpoint, I'd much prefer to just let the DMZ play middleman between the two machines, but if it's absolutely necessary to open a temporary hole, this would be the way to do it.Now someone can tell me the problem with this approach.
--------------------
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Since the TOS (Respondent's Exhibit "1") spells out that Half Price is the sole judge of violations, I'd explain to the judge that it's the plaintiff's burden of proof to show that my client had abused its discretion somehow. [The Florida Supremes wouldn't hear this one, because the TOS gives Kentucky jurisdiction.] But that would be after I made a motion to dismiss on the grounds that plaintiff could show no damage, given the fine print: emphasis mine
Then, if the judge somehow decided that damages could still exist, they'd be quite limited: Plaintiff's attorney already having advised him of this, there wouldn't be enough of a judgement to pay the attorney, so the case doesn't even get to a judge in the first place.--------------------
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
But a heavy-download site is still a violation of other TOS provisions. And if the admins catch you...
They can define an "instance" per file, or per download, and make "half-price" pretty damned expensive in a hurry. So, as the great philosopher Harry Callahan* said: *Yes, I know he's a fictitious character. There is ample evidence to suggest that Socrates is, too, but that doesn't stop people from quoting "him" to bolster their positions. And Net Kops probably have that"Go ahead... make my day" attitude.--------------------
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
- Admin turns on this paranoid checking to keep viri from executing.
- User says "I can't run FOOBAR.EXE, and I need it to get my job done."
- Admin runs virus scan, possibly turns program loose on a quarantine machine running an emulator, and satisfies himself that it's safe.
- Admin uses the certificate to sign FOOBAR.
Result?- User is happy because he gets to run FOOBAR.
- Admin is happy because he doesn't have to wipe every machine on his network whenever a new trojan sneaks in.
- Bean-counters are happy that the certificate is free as in beer.
- Slashdotters are happy that it is free as in speech.
Depending on how much it costs to get the certificates, some admins might even want to buy their own, and require everything to be certified by them, even locking out MS-authorized "upgrades".I am not making this up.
I'm not that clever.
Wait a minute. I don't reply to ACs. Forget I posted this.... <g>
According to a report I heard on the radio yesterday, Independent and Reform registered voters in the county number over 15,000, so it's not the least bit difficult to imagine that a quarter of them would vote for a Reform candidate. But since "we all know" all of the voters in Florida are elderly Jews who vote the straight (D) ticket in lockstep, there simply must be Something Going On Here.
It reminds me of a baseball game I saw on TV years ago. The late KC Royals shortstop Fred Patek was thrown out stealing second base. The umpire had his thumb out as soon as the ball hit the glove, long before Patek reached the bag... but the tag was not applied until after his foot touched second. The ump never even looked, having decided "There is no way this guy beats the tag". Ever since that day, I've been suspicious of people who decide something must be impossible, and never consider any other possibility.
Umpires (and election officials) should not be in the business of deciding how people should have voted. If they are allowed to do so, then they can throw out election results any time they want, which scares me far more than either Bush or Gore being elected via a recount of the actual ballots cast in accordance with the rules established before the election.
There are some medical conditions from which so few people suffer, that (after subtracting the lengthy FDA approval process from the statutory 17 year patent term) there is just no way to justify further research. While I think the ex post facto extension of copyright or patent terms we've seen in recent years is absurd, I do think it'd be a good idea for future patents on technology subject to regulatory approval have the expiry "clock" start with that approval, allowing the full 17 years to recoup the R&D.
DISCLAIMER: The Bride of Monster has Myasthenia Gravis, an "orphan disease". She has taken the same medication for decades, because nothing new has been developed. So I'm prejudiced? Maybe.
Virtualizing the hardware allows bullet-proof systems, that absolutely can not crash (IBM S/390 virtual machines, for example), can be painlessly debugged without requiring any debugging info to be compiled into the "object" code (but it helps to have a separate map file), intermediate compilation/assembly into p-code that is truly portable across architectures. You can use other languages to compile and link p-code, not just this VA thing. When you're dealing with multi-processing, especially of the mutant variety described for the PS2, it may be easier to deal with the associated issues at the p-code interpreter level than to try writing a universal kernel. Who cares if the virtual machine "forks", so long as the definition of the VM itself remains stable?
If you have closed-source p-code, you can still throw it on new hardware and expect it to work, without having to buy an upgrade (or worse, curse the fact that the vendor has gone t.u.). You can run the p-code in its own VM with tweaked versions of the libraries it calls to hook in functionality the original author never intended... In other words, it's a new level for geeks like us to play with!
But it's not a revolutionary idea... Didn't UCSD do this back in the '70s? Didn't Sun (Java) do this in the '90s?
A question should be puncuated with a question mark, not a period. And a proper name such as Bush or America[n] should be capitalized.
Almost every time ive seen him answer a questionj on TV he seems to go off on a tangent talking about the issues that the "american public" wants to know, for example, in the encryption question he(or his aids) went off talking about consumers right to privacy on e-commerce sites but the question was about encryption export controls.
The pronoun "I" should be capitalized, even in contractions such as "I've". Oh. A "contraction" is a compression of one or more words by eliminating some letters. Like "I have" or "do not". Wherever those letters are removed, we put an apostrophe in to represent the "hidden" letters. A person who assists is called an "aide" (so two or more would be "aides"); an inanimate object or abstract form of assistance is an "aid". Here's (Hey! That's a contraction! So's "that's"...) an example of a visual aid: [Preview]. I suggest that you let it aid you in composing any future posts critical of others' grammar. If you do that, you might also notice that the quoted sentence is a horrible run-on, which should be separated into two, by converting the comma after "know" into a period, and making the next letter a capital: "For..."
Another thiong that really bugs me is his constant use of bad grammer when he has a "masters degree" in business from HARVARD, dont you have to know basic grammer to even get into HARVARD. I just wish the elections were after Febuary so that I could vote...
Unless you learn a lot between now and February, you'll have proven that you don't have to know basic grammar (as opposed to knowing [Kelsey?] Grammer, which perhaps a state Governor might), or spelling for that matter, to vote.
Or were you just trolling?
Where in that quote did the writer use the word "only"?
Geez.
IMNSHO, there is absolutely no reason why LEOs should have a warrant to seize disks, CDs, etc. when on a fishing expe... uh, investigating a crime. They can copy whatever they need to another drive. Even books could be taken to the station to scan/microfiche any marginal notes that might seem relevant, and then returned promptly to the "suspect".
This is the difference between gathering information for an investigation, and asset forfeiture (spit).
OK: Sounds reasonable. What does it take to dump this "special portion of RAM" to the HD (possibly in a separate filesystem, especially if your emulator is running Win), which the emulator would associate with the i86 (or whatever) binary file? The emulator would probably need the date/time stamp of the binary to make sure it hadn't been modified since the last run... better do a checksum, too, just in case... Certain anti-viral properties suggest themselves here. Then, when the program is executed again, the i86 binary need not be loaded, and the translation doesn't need to be done at all.
Further on-the-fly optimizations for loops, etc. could be performed. This could also be handed off to a dedicated deep optimizer that runs the machine at full speed while plugged in to the wall, as the owner sleeps. Set up the benchmark software this way, and allow the optimizer to run, then see how it does.
A somewhat unrelated thought is that a machine running an emulator can do debugging without requiring any special support in the i86 "object code" itself. A compiler can build a separate map file for the emulator's use in setting breakpoints, and as an added bonus, use the same info to 'optimize the optimization'. Once again, the map file need not be visible to the OS running on the virtual machine, just so that the real chip can find it and make good use of it.
Uh. How about having /. servers cache the pages linked to, allowing folks to use them as sort of a proxy service? Or am I missing something here?
When a company buys a site license for x copies of an MS OS, do they expect the purchase of another x copies of an MS OS with the hardware?
I think the idea is good though. Redhat could just keep spooling ISOs at 56k so that even modem users could dip in to it and then maybe at 256k which most cable and dsl subscribers should be able to get and you could have a background process that plucks them off the wire and assembles the ISO on your disk.
That's a good start, but even better would be to use a protocol that assumes that packets will be lost, like the one that some tape drives use:|--A--|--B--|--C--| ...|--N--|--O--|--P--| ... |-A^N-|-B^O-|-C^P-|...
(where ^ means exclusive-or). Depending on the typical dropout rate, the number of packets checksummed (here it's 2) could be adjusted.For example, if we're transmitting 1024 packets with 4 packets per parity group, then 256 packets of xors
1st would be from packets 1, 257, 513, and 769;
2nd is 2, 258, 514, and 770...
256th is 256, 512, 768, and 1024.
For those with a perfect connection, there is no waiting at all. For those with tolerable dropouts, only a 25% increase in the total size of the transmission, which would of course repeat. You could pick up the channel at any point, (including during the parity portion), and pick up the whole show without waiting to sync (because once 4 of the 5 packets in a parity group are received, the 5th can be reconstructed).
Perhaps a second channel could use different redundancy (like 8 packets per parity group?)
Now that I think about it, when you burn a CD, some sort of redundancy like this is built in, although I don't know the details....
Then do it in their language:
.bYOKkJCIlWa.acWTnsyXjcyTicya.edyGkdbI.
Oh. Did I mention you'll need to run this through the (tweaked for generality) perl decoder (or equivalent) to make sense out of it?(in case you've forgotten)
#!
print map
{
if (length())
{
tr/a-zA-Z0-9+-/ -_/;
$_ = unpack 'u', chr(32+length()*3/4) . $_;
s/\0+$//;
$_ ^= ("C" x length)." ";
}
}
print "\n";