Quake is about the only program I'll excuse for requiring a fast CPU and a ton of RAM. In every game there have been two to three times the number of polygons on-screen at once. How do you expect to do that much more without requiring a faster CPU?
Currently video cards only draw the scene you describe, until recently they couldn't even transform the light (T&L) the scene so the CPU had to do it all. (Transform means taking the level, clipping out bit syou can't see, bits that are occluded, and then transforming what's left to fit the screen in the proper perspective. Lighting then takes that and a list of all the lights and calculates which walls are being lit.)
If you want to do a few hundred thousand floating point calculations to draw the scene you're going to need a very fast CPU to do it many times in a second.
Quake is a graphical game, it's doing exactly what it says on the box. Now, MS Office, that's bloat.
And US soldiers dropping bombs to kill Osama, who accept a few civilian casualties along the way... that's freedom fighting right? Because they kill civilians who aren't you.
Painting didn't disappear when photography came around but portrait painters were less in demand.
Painting and photography overlap a little, digital photography and film photography completely overlap. When digital cameras are as good as film cameras, film cameras will stop selling.
Now, it may be quite a while before you can buy a digital camera to rival a $5k film camera, but eventually it'll happen and they'll be museum pieces.
Or, even better. If cars were free to make costing only development work, you'd see a lot more people developing cars.
Read the thread on here about McMaster Motors (the Rotary Engine thread) there are a lot of people with the interest and knowledge to open up Autocad and start designing an engine, if they could make one without a custom metal-shop costing a few hundred thousand dollars.
In a way, it's the same with music. It used to be you needed to mortgage the house to attempt to promote your first album (or sign all rights over to a publisher) but now that publishing is dirt cheap, you can do it for a few hundred dollars per song.
Many people on here claim you need a ton of "professional" studio time at $300/hour, etc, etc. They're on crack, or own stock in a studio. Equipment that was studio quality ten years ago is available at the low-end professional level. If all the big-name musicians (anyone who released a CD) and all the publishers vanished overnight, it wouldn't take a month for amateurs to be releasing medium to high quality content.
The biggest hurdles in place for a musician are getting known. You can't get a song played on the radio if you don't pay for it, and they won't even take your money if you're not one of the agents they deal with. (See ClearChannel and Payola...) Then, if you are semi-popular you need to pay for physical media, etc.
The music world would change drastically if the existing power structure was gone, but people would still demand music and artists would be there willing to produce it.
Those locks you're leaving out of your non-BeOS code might make it easier to code, but they mean it'll crash at random years later when some odd combination of load variables causes your program to be yanked out of a critical area before completion and lets the next thread enter too soon. But you'll have run it for months, seen no problems, and shipped it.
You *need* to lock everything that might ever be an issue, even if it's the tiniest operation. That's why there's a "Test & Set" operation in ASM. It might be the tiniest thing, but you need to guarantee it's atomic.
I wish more OSes were hard in the way you describe - if race conditions were more easily shaken out they wouldn't plague "release caliber" software.
And as to BeOS being hard to program for... What?!? It might have enforced better style which could be a pain at first, but it was (is still, I guess) a wonderful OS for programmers.
Anywhere that BeOS highlighted your race condition by causing unwanted behaviour is somewhere that you'd get "random" crash bugs from in another OS if you didn't fix the code.
Other OSes don't guarantee much about how long your timeslice is, or how often you'll get time, it's sort of haphazard. That randomness means that while those race conditions don't manifest as much, they're still there to bite you.
Think of it like memory leaks and dangling pointers. Ninety-nine times you can use an element of a linked list after delinking it, one time it will have already been written over. But you don't want to somehow make the bug come up one in a thousand times... you want it to come up EVERY time so that you fix the problem before release.
It might be a bit of a pain to put locks around everything, but after a while it becomes quick and natural and you still have the power of a fast kernel with a very small timeslice for when you need it.
I burn at 24... I've got the Plextor 24/10/40A and I use cheap "IBM" disks (Is this really IBM, or some asian company with a similar logo?) that claim to be rated for 12x... I've only had one disk (out of twenty or so) die during burning.
Its burn-proof is good enough that I can't kill the burn by playing Q3. It's a bit slow to play, but I can easily check out new levels and stuff...
I think the way to build a good IDE system is one device per channel, if you want performance from them. Ideally, you've got four channels. If you want to mix an old MP3 HD and a CD-ROM, that's okay, they aren't going to require high performance, but make sure the 7200RPM drives and the burners are on their own controllers.
And I never really want to burn from disk to disk... Well, I did dupe a disk ten times at a LAN, but there it was worth making an image and burning from that. Most of my burning (non-warez even) comes from images... Redhat CD, backups, etc.
Final Fantasy fans are *not* allowed on a thread about Deus Ex. Final Fantasy is the perfect example of static, non-interactive gameplay that PC games are striving to distance themselves from.
FF and Zelda are held up as the pinacle to which games should aspire to, but PC gamers tired of that when Ultima 4 brought out a free-form world for the exploring. Games like Deus Ex strive to include a very NPC-interactive plot, but also to let the gamer influence it.
It's not really the fault of console designers, you can't make anything very interactive in a system with very little RAM and only the ability to save between 16B and 1K per game. But it sure is a piss-off when you go back to a level and find it exactly as it was the first time, unchanged by everything you did there before.
I hope Deus Ex include something like Red Faction's "Geo Mod", where you can blow holes in walls. It'd be cool to come back to a level hours later, step over the bodies of the dead, and use your new-found explosives to blow through a wall and get to a previously inaccesible area.
You can hand the client a copy of all the information you're making public...
For instance, clients can be hacked to display health numbers of monsters, but if you display it as a health bar anyways, it's not an issue.
Using this information the client can run the simulation while lagged, so the client doesn't notice it as much.
What you can't do is TRUST the client. When you un-lag, take the input from the user and process it on the server. If it's different, update the client. If it's an acceptable error (like the client over-extrapolating) then simply correct the client, if the client did something that it couldn't have (ie, dealt more damage than possible) then you can flag them as cheating...
This is done in Quake for instance, because if you had to talk to the server every time you pressed jump, you'd never go anywhere because it'd be too lagged. Instead the client is allowed to move you, but the server maintains the right to put you back where you belong in case of an error or hacked client.
Re:replies to self for clairification :)
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Mozilla 0.9.5
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· Score: 2
Certainly is fairly crash free. I've been using it for 304 hours now, as close I can tell. I opened it as soon as I rebooted and that's the ammount of time in the idle task in 2k. It's not months of uptime or anything, but it's pretty good.
And that's with 2-15 pages open, not all light use.
When I use IE or NS they rarely make it more than two or three days before dying.
Actually, the caller ID is the phone company selling you out...
They sell Caller ID, but then sell a service which completely blocks it (like *67, but permanent).
They then often sell a service to get around the blocking, and some are contemplating selling a service to get around that.
It'll end up with everyone buying five levels of block/display and ending up with the same situation as now, except that the phone companies will make more money.
"The hackers have access to the same tools that you had while making the game. They have the compilers, dissemblers, debuggers, and utilities that you have, and a few that you don't. And they are smart people - they are probably more familiar with the Assembly output of an optimized C++ file than you are."
I've seen warez rips where the whole package format for the game has been changed, a CD or two of content removed, and bugs fixed. All with only the binaries. I doubt many people here could do that... trace through the object code well enough to make large-scale changes in the program.
I've also seen very clever protection removed from games, where subtle checks take place in the middle of the game and patch the game to crash at a later time, if the check failed.
It is easier to break than to protect, but that's usually because you have unlimited tries when breaking and only one chance to get it right when protecting.
"Women would never be free from obscene phone calls, because tracing back the callers would be impossible in a truly anonymous system. [...]"
If there was a problem with a system accepting connections from unknown hosts, people could choose to accept anonymous calls or make callers authenticate with a code.
"without a means to backtrack, after proof a crime, someone without a criminal record, or a prior criminal not currently being monitored will never be caught. So you will have to monitor 24-7 all prior criminals, and most likely everyone you suspect could ever become a criminal. Talk about a police state!"
That's exactly what keeping a log of phone calls does. It assumes that law enforcement will need to monitor everyone and keeps a record now, for them to refer to later. That's not really much different than recording all the calls and only listening to them if you suspect the person. It's still assuming guilt.
"Just because the majority of the/. community doesn?t think guaranteed anonymity facilitates criminal activity doesn?t make it so, and there have been no reasonable explanations of how to keep this from occurring."
Guaranteed anonymity might make things easier for criminals, but it'd also give non-criminals something they couldn't have achieved before without criminal acts (false ID, etc). Criminals can work around the identifiers in the system, non-criminals by definition, can't. Just because something CAN be used in a crime doesn't mean that it should be banned. This is where you get stuck.
" The argument that crime is not rampant seems a bit specious. Do we wait for it to become rampant as criminals become more technically savvy, then implement what I?m suggesting?"
Do we ban or neuter any technology that might be of use to a criminal someday?
"If someone sends me a message, why should they be able to completely disguise who sends it or from where? Why is this protected as Free Speech?"
It's protected because unless you have the ability to say something without fear of attacks. Thanks to this, Afghanis have been able (for years) to tell the free world about the atrocities of the Taliban. Imagine if their 'anonymous' communications could be logged by the government. Whistleblowers also tell of government corruption and coverups.
Also, if the government can tell who said something, so can a determined criminal. Think of the informant who wants to give evidence against a mafia member. The only way to guarantee anonimity is to not log the identity in the first place, because protecting it in the future is impossible to guarantee.
"I am not for the government reading your postings and transactions, only being able to identity the source of anonymous posting when there is proof of abuse."
This assumes the government isn't who you're trying to hide your identity from. There have been a lot of cases of corruption where the last people you'd want to be able to find you aree the law enforcement.
And any system that has a backdoor built in (either logging, or weaker encryption, or key escrow) is vulnerable to attack at that point.
Look at cell phones, for example. People didn't want evesdroppers, so it was made illegal to buy a scanner that would listen on those frequencies even though the law is essentially unenforceable. This to prevent people from using encryption, because the government didn't want untappable calls.
So what happens? Criminals, who for the most part are the only ones who stand to gain, still listen in on calls.
Now digital cell phones are encrypted, but with a weak encryption, that evidence shows the governments weakened, so that they wouldn't be untappable.
And we're again back to where criminals (by definition, with anti-scanner and DMCA type laws) are the only ones who can break the law, but they can do it with relative impunity. It's a passive attack, so all it's good for is a harsher charge if you catch them doing something else, it can't be used to actually prevent the evesdropping.
"It could be that you are confusing my position, as been the case in half the posting to this thread."
I could be, but you could also be missing some implications. By taking something (anything) away from non-criminals, you're just widening the gap between haves and have-nots. Sometimes this is worth it (I wouldn't want to see everyone with tac-nukes) and sometimes is isn't. I think the fact that anonymous posting is essential for free speech (whistle-blowing, unpopular speech) means that we can't jeapordize it just because it may, at some unspecified point in the future, help law enforcement. Especially when there are other ways to catch people.
This can be done, in a usable way, with a steganographic filesystem (one that doesn't just encrypt the files, but encrypts everything, so you can't tell if there are files (or a partition table, etc)).
The other (slightly less secure) way is to use a network filesystem for storage, of encrypted files, and decrypt the files in memory on the diskless desktop computer as you were using them. That way the decrypted files couldn't be written out in swap, or any of the other common problems. Once the power was turned off, it'd all be gone. But unlike most systems, the decryption would all be done locally, preventing clear-text from ever being transmitted.
Ideally your BIOS's POST routines would involve multiple writes to RAM, of patterns and psuedo-random data. So you'd just hit RESET and it'd perform a thorough wipe. (Theoretically data can be recovered from RAM once the computer is off.)
Re:He SHOULD care about the competition...
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Torvalds Tells All
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QNX will run nearly everything, but it isn't quite a user friendly because you end up installing from source more often, instead of using binary packages like on Linux or Windows.
Depends on what you're doing as to the important of this.
Any modern OS should be fairly good at analysing usage and keeping the important things in memory. You're almost always better of just tossing in more RAM and letting it run.
If you anticipate wanting to load something (Q3 maybe) you could have a login script that opened the file and read a few bytes every 8k or so, to make sure it got loaded into cache before you wanted to use it.
For all but the most extreme things, RAM disks cause problems in the extreme cases. Let's say you have a 64MB RAM disk and 192MB of RAM left over. When you've got RAM left, this is fine, when you run out, the OS has to do a couple of things.
1) Pretend it's only got 192MB - This means it'll thrash much sooner than it needs, negating any speed benefits.
2) Swap out the RAM disk - This is just silly, but can happen. Again, no speed benefits, but less thrashing.
2.5) Drop data from the RAM Disk when it duplicates HD data, restore it later. This is hard to do because the RAM disk is a special case for the MM to deal with, and negates pretty well all the speed advantage.
However, if you'd just let the OS cache the data, it would still be there, until all RAM was used, at which point you're thrashing anyways and not going to notice the speed from the RAM Disk.
If you can, you should find a way to ask the cache to keep certain files in memory, like the sticky bit. This suggestion lets it do what needs to be done, but gives it help in deciding which data goes, when something has to.
The less nice way, but the only way on some systems, is to run a cron job which performs small reads from the file, using it often will convince the cache to keep it in memory except as a last resort.
But yes, this boils down to "Let the OS do it" on decent OSes, and Linux is capable of this.
The only exception is when you know (better than the OS) the important function of the computer, and every millisecond of latency counts in getting it working. For instance, if you were using your desktop OS to run anti-missile defenses, you might want the critical files in a RAM disk... Unless of course, the whole OS would slow down as a result... Filesystem tuning can be a black art.
Re:He SHOULD care about the competition...
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Torvalds Tells All
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"Linus Torvalds: I don't actually follow other operating systems much. I don't compete - I just worry about making Linux better than itself, not others. And quite frankly, I don't see anythign very interesting on a technical level in either."
That sounds like he looks at the internals of other OSes, but that he doesn't care about Media-Player integration, or IE, etc.
He certainly has looked at other OSes for ideas on how to do complex things (thread scheduling, FS journalling, memory management) and is even willing to borrow whole filesystems if they are worthwhile.
Linux is already one of (if not the) best development systems for all non-win32 projects. If you develop a real-time system, you could use Win2k and cross-compile for QNX, or you could use Linux on the desktop and write for your own computer, then simply run it on a stripped-down distro. In my mind, if there was a competition, Linux won it in '99 or so.
The only way MS (and the RIAA, etc) can hurt us is buying laws that prevent us from using our computers with non-certified OSes. And it might happen... If hardware is required to include "rights-management" then OSes will have to use it, and reverse engineering it to write Linux drivers for it will be illegal (DMCA) and would require closed-source drivers if we licensed the info. That would kill Linux, and BSD, etc.
Re:He SHOULD care about the competition...
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Torvalds Tells All
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Except for pushing through laws that would require hardware to have "rights-management" built in, and make it illegal to reverse engineer that in order to build an OS around it. That would mean that only a few mainstream OSes could run on modern hardware and any attempts to make others run would be illegal.
Microsoft (and the RIAA, etc) can very easily destroy our hackerish way of life.
What they can't do is price-dump us out of the market.
I know about the legislation, but it seems that it should have been struck down, and I really don't think it would have any power after a declaration of war anyways.
Now, if the US went off and assasinated the Canadian Prime Minister because of a disagreement about soft-wood tariffs, I think that'd get a fairly bad world-wide response. But, ditto if the US had a bunch of Canadian citizens (or army personel) killed over the same thing. Really, to me, it looks like a matter of timing and circumstances. Just having someone killed is bad, but if you condone killing in some circumstances (war) you should condone any killing that will further the goal. (Further the goal is important, killing some people could make you more enemies that it is worth.)
Honestly, what's wrong with killing leaders, especially ones without a popular mandate (Sadam, the Taliban, G.W. Bush:) if you're at war with their countries? To do otherwise you basically legitimize their leadership by fighting them in the way they wish. (Going through rows of conscripts, etc.)
OT: My only problem with Anon. Cowards is that I often don't feel it's worth replying to them because they can't find their posting history and thus rarely read my response, let alone reply to that. That said I read at 0 and encourage everyone to do the same. It should be painfully obvious that registering for a/. account doesn't make you smarter, so ACs aren't necessarily less worthy of a POV.
Hmmm. I haven't heard anything that bad about iPass, but I admit I've never used it.
I would agree though, that if all they want is some text email, a two-minute call would be cheaper than paying for some third-party service. Much easier too.
Or, pay $20-$25 for a real ISP, and $0-$5 for extra email adresses.
As for global access, many dialup ISPs can use iPass, a company that provides local POPs (dial-in numbers) around the world. You can then use your ISP normally as if you were at home.
That may not be as effective as it otherwise might, because books don't offer a lot to someone starving.
But if we could put how-to videos on there, and things that would benefit starving peasants (a tetris game to play when waiting for food (see how-to #294), etc.
Ideally these things would be able to tutor, as well as simply present existing media. At this point they could help teach children (or adults) to read and thus use the more advanced materials.
Neil Stephenson (author of the Cryptonomicon) wrote a book called Diamond Age about something much like this. The 'primer' mentioned in the story is much more complex than this would need to be, it doesn't need to present a K->Univ education, complete with philosophy courses and all. What it needs to do is teach basic language and math skills to people who would otherwise be denied this.
Slashdot Mirror
Quake is about the only program I'll excuse for requiring a fast CPU and a ton of RAM. In every game there have been two to three times the number of polygons on-screen at once. How do you expect to do that much more without requiring a faster CPU?
Currently video cards only draw the scene you describe, until recently they couldn't even transform the light (T&L) the scene so the CPU had to do it all. (Transform means taking the level, clipping out bit syou can't see, bits that are occluded, and then transforming what's left to fit the screen in the proper perspective. Lighting then takes that and a list of all the lights and calculates which walls are being lit.)
If you want to do a few hundred thousand floating point calculations to draw the scene you're going to need a very fast CPU to do it many times in a second.
Quake is a graphical game, it's doing exactly what it says on the box. Now, MS Office, that's bloat.
And US soldiers dropping bombs to kill Osama, who accept a few civilian casualties along the way... that's freedom fighting right? Because they kill civilians who aren't you.
Painting didn't disappear when photography came around but portrait painters were less in demand.
Painting and photography overlap a little, digital photography and film photography completely overlap. When digital cameras are as good as film cameras, film cameras will stop selling.
Now, it may be quite a while before you can buy a digital camera to rival a $5k film camera, but eventually it'll happen and they'll be museum pieces.
Or, recreate the original porsche.
Or, even better. If cars were free to make costing only development work, you'd see a lot more people developing cars.
Read the thread on here about McMaster Motors (the Rotary Engine thread) there are a lot of people with the interest and knowledge to open up Autocad and start designing an engine, if they could make one without a custom metal-shop costing a few hundred thousand dollars.
In a way, it's the same with music. It used to be you needed to mortgage the house to attempt to promote your first album (or sign all rights over to a publisher) but now that publishing is dirt cheap, you can do it for a few hundred dollars per song.
Many people on here claim you need a ton of "professional" studio time at $300/hour, etc, etc. They're on crack, or own stock in a studio. Equipment that was studio quality ten years ago is available at the low-end professional level. If all the big-name musicians (anyone who released a CD) and all the publishers vanished overnight, it wouldn't take a month for amateurs to be releasing medium to high quality content.
The biggest hurdles in place for a musician are getting known. You can't get a song played on the radio if you don't pay for it, and they won't even take your money if you're not one of the agents they deal with. (See ClearChannel and Payola...) Then, if you are semi-popular you need to pay for physical media, etc.
The music world would change drastically if the existing power structure was gone, but people would still demand music and artists would be there willing to produce it.
Those locks you're leaving out of your non-BeOS code might make it easier to code, but they mean it'll crash at random years later when some odd combination of load variables causes your program to be yanked out of a critical area before completion and lets the next thread enter too soon. But you'll have run it for months, seen no problems, and shipped it.
You *need* to lock everything that might ever be an issue, even if it's the tiniest operation. That's why there's a "Test & Set" operation in ASM. It might be the tiniest thing, but you need to guarantee it's atomic.
I wish more OSes were hard in the way you describe - if race conditions were more easily shaken out they wouldn't plague "release caliber" software.
And as to BeOS being hard to program for... What?!? It might have enforced better style which could be a pain at first, but it was (is still, I guess) a wonderful OS for programmers.
Anywhere that BeOS highlighted your race condition by causing unwanted behaviour is somewhere that you'd get "random" crash bugs from in another OS if you didn't fix the code.
Other OSes don't guarantee much about how long your timeslice is, or how often you'll get time, it's sort of haphazard. That randomness means that while those race conditions don't manifest as much, they're still there to bite you.
Think of it like memory leaks and dangling pointers. Ninety-nine times you can use an element of a linked list after delinking it, one time it will have already been written over. But you don't want to somehow make the bug come up one in a thousand times... you want it to come up EVERY time so that you fix the problem before release.
It might be a bit of a pain to put locks around everything, but after a while it becomes quick and natural and you still have the power of a fast kernel with a very small timeslice for when you need it.
I burn at 24... I've got the Plextor 24/10/40A and I use cheap "IBM" disks (Is this really IBM, or some asian company with a similar logo?) that claim to be rated for 12x... I've only had one disk (out of twenty or so) die during burning.
Its burn-proof is good enough that I can't kill the burn by playing Q3. It's a bit slow to play, but I can easily check out new levels and stuff...
I think the way to build a good IDE system is one device per channel, if you want performance from them. Ideally, you've got four channels. If you want to mix an old MP3 HD and a CD-ROM, that's okay, they aren't going to require high performance, but make sure the 7200RPM drives and the burners are on their own controllers.
And I never really want to burn from disk to disk... Well, I did dupe a disk ten times at a LAN, but there it was worth making an image and burning from that. Most of my burning (non-warez even) comes from images... Redhat CD, backups, etc.
Ok, you, out of the pool.
Final Fantasy fans are *not* allowed on a thread about Deus Ex. Final Fantasy is the perfect example of static, non-interactive gameplay that PC games are striving to distance themselves from.
FF and Zelda are held up as the pinacle to which games should aspire to, but PC gamers tired of that when Ultima 4 brought out a free-form world for the exploring. Games like Deus Ex strive to include a very NPC-interactive plot, but also to let the gamer influence it.
It's not really the fault of console designers, you can't make anything very interactive in a system with very little RAM and only the ability to save between 16B and 1K per game. But it sure is a piss-off when you go back to a level and find it exactly as it was the first time, unchanged by everything you did there before.
I hope Deus Ex include something like Red Faction's "Geo Mod", where you can blow holes in walls. It'd be cool to come back to a level hours later, step over the bodies of the dead, and use your new-found explosives to blow through a wall and get to a previously inaccesible area.
Well, mostly...
You can hand the client a copy of all the information you're making public...
For instance, clients can be hacked to display health numbers of monsters, but if you display it as a health bar anyways, it's not an issue.
Using this information the client can run the simulation while lagged, so the client doesn't notice it as much.
What you can't do is TRUST the client. When you un-lag, take the input from the user and process it on the server. If it's different, update the client. If it's an acceptable error (like the client over-extrapolating) then simply correct the client, if the client did something that it couldn't have (ie, dealt more damage than possible) then you can flag them as cheating...
This is done in Quake for instance, because if you had to talk to the server every time you pressed jump, you'd never go anywhere because it'd be too lagged. Instead the client is allowed to move you, but the server maintains the right to put you back where you belong in case of an error or hacked client.
Certainly is fairly crash free. I've been using it for 304 hours now, as close I can tell. I opened it as soon as I rebooted and that's the ammount of time in the idle task in 2k. It's not months of uptime or anything, but it's pretty good.
And that's with 2-15 pages open, not all light use.
When I use IE or NS they rarely make it more than two or three days before dying.
Actually, the caller ID is the phone company selling you out...
They sell Caller ID, but then sell a service which completely blocks it (like *67, but permanent).
They then often sell a service to get around the blocking, and some are contemplating selling a service to get around that.
It'll end up with everyone buying five levels of block/display and ending up with the same situation as now, except that the phone companies will make more money.
Matt Pritchard on Cheating is a good article about cheating and it relates to copy protection, etc.
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Section #4
"The hackers have access to the same tools that you had while making the game. They have the compilers, dissemblers, debuggers, and utilities that you have, and a few that you don't. And they are smart people - they are probably more familiar with the Assembly output of an optimized C++ file than you are."
I've seen warez rips where the whole package format for the game has been changed, a CD or two of content removed, and bugs fixed. All with only the binaries. I doubt many people here could do that... trace through the object code well enough to make large-scale changes in the program.
I've also seen very clever protection removed from games, where subtle checks take place in the middle of the game and patch the game to crash at a later time, if the check failed.
It is easier to break than to protect, but that's usually because you have unlimited tries when breaking and only one chance to get it right when protecting.
Ahhh. I was wondering if 1) you were in Vancouver and 2) you didn't mind the work.
:)
Looking for 2-3 skilled tech support people, preferably with ISP experience.
Thought it was worth asking. Can't say I'd jump at the job myself though.
The only problem is that the US has a bad case of enforcing its laws worldwide...
Either through undue pressure like the DeCSS thing, or by trade embargoes, as they are discussing with countries who won't adopt a law like the DMCA.
Trek movies and Linux kernels are both flaky when the version number is odd...
"Women would never be free from obscene phone calls, because tracing back the callers would be impossible in a truly anonymous system. [...]"
/. community doesn?t think guaranteed anonymity facilitates criminal activity doesn?t make it so, and there have been no reasonable explanations of how to keep this from occurring."
If there was a problem with a system accepting connections from unknown hosts, people could choose to accept anonymous calls or make callers authenticate with a code.
"without a means to backtrack, after proof a crime, someone without a criminal record, or a prior criminal not currently being monitored will never be caught. So you will have to monitor 24-7 all prior criminals, and most likely everyone you suspect could ever become a criminal. Talk about a police state!"
That's exactly what keeping a log of phone calls does. It assumes that law enforcement will need to monitor everyone and keeps a record now, for them to refer to later. That's not really much different than recording all the calls and only listening to them if you suspect the person. It's still assuming guilt.
"Just because the majority of the
Guaranteed anonymity might make things easier for criminals, but it'd also give non-criminals something they couldn't have achieved before without criminal acts (false ID, etc). Criminals can work around the identifiers in the system, non-criminals by definition, can't. Just because something CAN be used in a crime doesn't mean that it should be banned. This is where you get stuck.
" The argument that crime is not rampant seems a bit specious. Do we wait for it to become rampant as criminals become more technically savvy, then implement what I?m suggesting?"
Do we ban or neuter any technology that might be of use to a criminal someday?
"If someone sends me a message, why should they be able to completely disguise who sends it or from where? Why is this protected as Free Speech?"
It's protected because unless you have the ability to say something without fear of attacks. Thanks to this, Afghanis have been able (for years) to tell the free world about the atrocities of the Taliban. Imagine if their 'anonymous' communications could be logged by the government. Whistleblowers also tell of government corruption and coverups.
Also, if the government can tell who said something, so can a determined criminal. Think of the informant who wants to give evidence against a mafia member. The only way to guarantee anonimity is to not log the identity in the first place, because protecting it in the future is impossible to guarantee.
"I am not for the government reading your postings and transactions, only being able to identity the source of anonymous posting when there is proof of abuse."
This assumes the government isn't who you're trying to hide your identity from. There have been a lot of cases of corruption where the last people you'd want to be able to find you aree the law enforcement.
And any system that has a backdoor built in (either logging, or weaker encryption, or key escrow) is vulnerable to attack at that point.
Look at cell phones, for example. People didn't want evesdroppers, so it was made illegal to buy a scanner that would listen on those frequencies even though the law is essentially unenforceable. This to prevent people from using encryption, because the government didn't want untappable calls.
So what happens? Criminals, who for the most part are the only ones who stand to gain, still listen in on calls.
Now digital cell phones are encrypted, but with a weak encryption, that evidence shows the governments weakened, so that they wouldn't be untappable.
And we're again back to where criminals (by definition, with anti-scanner and DMCA type laws) are the only ones who can break the law, but they can do it with relative impunity. It's a passive attack, so all it's good for is a harsher charge if you catch them doing something else, it can't be used to actually prevent the evesdropping.
"It could be that you are confusing my position, as been the case in half the posting to this thread."
I could be, but you could also be missing some implications. By taking something (anything) away from non-criminals, you're just widening the gap between haves and have-nots. Sometimes this is worth it (I wouldn't want to see everyone with tac-nukes) and sometimes is isn't. I think the fact that anonymous posting is essential for free speech (whistle-blowing, unpopular speech) means that we can't jeapordize it just because it may, at some unspecified point in the future, help law enforcement. Especially when there are other ways to catch people.
This can be done, in a usable way, with a steganographic filesystem (one that doesn't just encrypt the files, but encrypts everything, so you can't tell if there are files (or a partition table, etc)).
The other (slightly less secure) way is to use a network filesystem for storage, of encrypted files, and decrypt the files in memory on the diskless desktop computer as you were using them. That way the decrypted files couldn't be written out in swap, or any of the other common problems. Once the power was turned off, it'd all be gone. But unlike most systems, the decryption would all be done locally, preventing clear-text from ever being transmitted.
Ideally your BIOS's POST routines would involve multiple writes to RAM, of patterns and psuedo-random data. So you'd just hit RESET and it'd perform a thorough wipe. (Theoretically data can be recovered from RAM once the computer is off.)
QNX will run nearly everything, but it isn't quite a user friendly because you end up installing from source more often, instead of using binary packages like on Linux or Windows.
Depends on what you're doing as to the important of this.
Any modern OS should be fairly good at analysing usage and keeping the important things in memory. You're almost always better of just tossing in more RAM and letting it run.
If you anticipate wanting to load something (Q3 maybe) you could have a login script that opened the file and read a few bytes every 8k or so, to make sure it got loaded into cache before you wanted to use it.
For all but the most extreme things, RAM disks cause problems in the extreme cases. Let's say you have a 64MB RAM disk and 192MB of RAM left over. When you've got RAM left, this is fine, when you run out, the OS has to do a couple of things.
1) Pretend it's only got 192MB - This means it'll thrash much sooner than it needs, negating any speed benefits.
2) Swap out the RAM disk - This is just silly, but can happen. Again, no speed benefits, but less thrashing.
2.5) Drop data from the RAM Disk when it duplicates HD data, restore it later. This is hard to do because the RAM disk is a special case for the MM to deal with, and negates pretty well all the speed advantage.
However, if you'd just let the OS cache the data, it would still be there, until all RAM was used, at which point you're thrashing anyways and not going to notice the speed from the RAM Disk.
If you can, you should find a way to ask the cache to keep certain files in memory, like the sticky bit. This suggestion lets it do what needs to be done, but gives it help in deciding which data goes, when something has to.
The less nice way, but the only way on some systems, is to run a cron job which performs small reads from the file, using it often will convince the cache to keep it in memory except as a last resort.
But yes, this boils down to "Let the OS do it" on decent OSes, and Linux is capable of this.
The only exception is when you know (better than the OS) the important function of the computer, and every millisecond of latency counts in getting it working. For instance, if you were using your desktop OS to run anti-missile defenses, you might want the critical files in a RAM disk... Unless of course, the whole OS would slow down as a result... Filesystem tuning can be a black art.
"Linus Torvalds: I don't actually follow other operating systems much. I don't compete - I just worry about making Linux better than itself, not others. And quite frankly, I don't see anythign very interesting on a technical level in either."
That sounds like he looks at the internals of other OSes, but that he doesn't care about Media-Player integration, or IE, etc.
He certainly has looked at other OSes for ideas on how to do complex things (thread scheduling, FS journalling, memory management) and is even willing to borrow whole filesystems if they are worthwhile.
Linux is already one of (if not the) best development systems for all non-win32 projects. If you develop a real-time system, you could use Win2k and cross-compile for QNX, or you could use Linux on the desktop and write for your own computer, then simply run it on a stripped-down distro. In my mind, if there was a competition, Linux won it in '99 or so.
The only way MS (and the RIAA, etc) can hurt us is buying laws that prevent us from using our computers with non-certified OSes. And it might happen... If hardware is required to include "rights-management" then OSes will have to use it, and reverse engineering it to write Linux drivers for it will be illegal (DMCA) and would require closed-source drivers if we licensed the info. That would kill Linux, and BSD, etc.
Except for pushing through laws that would require hardware to have "rights-management" built in, and make it illegal to reverse engineer that in order to build an OS around it. That would mean that only a few mainstream OSes could run on modern hardware and any attempts to make others run would be illegal.
Microsoft (and the RIAA, etc) can very easily destroy our hackerish way of life.
What they can't do is price-dump us out of the market.
I know about the legislation, but it seems that it should have been struck down, and I really don't think it would have any power after a declaration of war anyways.
:) if you're at war with their countries? To do otherwise you basically legitimize their leadership by fighting them in the way they wish. (Going through rows of conscripts, etc.)
/. account doesn't make you smarter, so ACs aren't necessarily less worthy of a POV.
Now, if the US went off and assasinated the Canadian Prime Minister because of a disagreement about soft-wood tariffs, I think that'd get a fairly bad world-wide response. But, ditto if the US had a bunch of Canadian citizens (or army personel) killed over the same thing. Really, to me, it looks like a matter of timing and circumstances. Just having someone killed is bad, but if you condone killing in some circumstances (war) you should condone any killing that will further the goal. (Further the goal is important, killing some people could make you more enemies that it is worth.)
Honestly, what's wrong with killing leaders, especially ones without a popular mandate (Sadam, the Taliban, G.W. Bush
OT: My only problem with Anon. Cowards is that I often don't feel it's worth replying to them because they can't find their posting history and thus rarely read my response, let alone reply to that. That said I read at 0 and encourage everyone to do the same. It should be painfully obvious that registering for a
Hmmm. I haven't heard anything that bad about iPass, but I admit I've never used it.
I would agree though, that if all they want is some text email, a two-minute call would be cheaper than paying for some third-party service. Much easier too.
Where did you work for iStar from?
Or, pay $20-$25 for a real ISP, and $0-$5 for extra email adresses.
As for global access, many dialup ISPs can use iPass, a company that provides local POPs (dial-in numbers) around the world. You can then use your ISP normally as if you were at home.
That may not be as effective as it otherwise might, because books don't offer a lot to someone starving.
But if we could put how-to videos on there, and things that would benefit starving peasants (a tetris game to play when waiting for food (see how-to #294), etc.
Ideally these things would be able to tutor, as well as simply present existing media. At this point they could help teach children (or adults) to read and thus use the more advanced materials.
Neil Stephenson (author of the Cryptonomicon) wrote a book called Diamond Age about something much like this. The 'primer' mentioned in the story is much more complex than this would need to be, it doesn't need to present a K->Univ education, complete with philosophy courses and all. What it needs to do is teach basic language and math skills to people who would otherwise be denied this.