I'd be far from surprised to hear Cisco were notified of this 3 months ago, hence Lynn's frustration and his decision to publicly talk about the flaw.
Exactly. IIRC from another article this morning, the flaw was disclosed a while ago, I think in April. He publicly announced it on Wednesday July 27th. That's indeed around 3 months.
Using any buffer overflow or similar flaw, he showed how you could take control of the IOS (the OS on the router?). The IOS is supposed to be abstracted from the hardware and immune to this type of flaw.. this wasn't supposed to be possible before. So this flaw isn't tied to a specific low-level buffer-exploit vulnerabilty, so it's not enough to patch that vulnerabilty, because as soon as another is discovered, the IOS will be vulnerable too.
From other posts, it seems Cisco is usually quite reactive to flaw disclosure. Maybe this flaw was bigger and tougher to fix than the usual, but according to a Wired article. CISCO wanted to keep the flaw secret until next year, when a patched IOS beta would be released.
Lynn found this outrageous.
Outrageous enough to quit his job on the spot, burn himself from the industry's eye, and expose himself to a lawsuit from Cisco. Doesn't that make you think?
I'm all for this awesome idea. However I probably won't be buying the first model.
There has been an interview with the head of the design frim.
- 1.0 syndrom - they want to use OLEDs. OLEDs are nice because they're luminous and small. I don't want my keyboard to be a christmas tree! More important, though, is the short life-span of OLEDs. Know what the 'O' means? Organic. And Organic deteriorates. Lifetimes right now is 2 years, IIRC - They are thinking of USB2 or Firewire but no bluetooth. Plus power cord, potentially. I want less clutter on my desk now, not more. - The large footprint. See above. - This is going to be a luxury keyboard, thus focusing on aesthetics. I prefer practical rather than the aesthetical.
I'll meet the offspring of this keyboard in 2-3 years, when they shake the quirks out of it, and focus more on usability:)
AFAIK, slicker's lead developer (leineir) has turned his focus to the Plasma project.
Is(was) he really Slicker's lead developper? On the Berlios project page, he's noted as "doc writer", though I see he wrote the usability paper for Slicker. The project admin is danalien.
Plasma somehow reminds me of Slicker. It was a great idea for replacing Kicker, and IMHO was a nicely innovative one too. I mean, look at thesenicemockups.
Unfortunately, these are just mockups, and it seems the project has stalled for more than a year. Slicker could use a little attention, don't you think? So if you have some spare time and a love for moving the Linux desktop in cool directions, how about giving it a try?:)
PS: I'm totally unrelated to the project, just disappointed that this cool idea is rusting
We were part of a pilot program at our school on the Itanium. I think the Itanium tanked because Intel didn't plan the release correctly.
Remember the Itanium is a brand new architecture. It's NOT x86. It's like jumping from x86 to PPC if you will... That means you have to recompile everything. Of course, I'm not talking about compatibility mode.
Of course, introducing a new architecture is a *huge* endeavor. Intel wanted to fast-hand it and their marketing department went nuts over it. Problem is, the Itanium *wasn't ready*. You can't introduce a new architecture and expect the market to gulp it in. They were trying to push x86 out with the new chip. That couldn't happen. How long has x86 been around? How many *billions* of cash rest on that chip?
Anyhow, the first Itanium was only a technical preview, in a way. It was the first public diffusion of the chip, to try to get developpers used to it, slowly.
However, there came another problem: Itanium is an EPIC (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing) architecture. Not RISC or CISC. Do *not* listen to their marketing BS about EPIC. Technically, it kicks ass. In practice, you need a good compiler to take advantage of that instruction set.
That was the core of their problem. The compiler. Compiler gurus will tell you it's devilishly difficult to optimize parallel processing correctly. The cool thing about PPC chips is that it manages some parallelization on its pipelines internally. The compiler just doesn't have to care. It's much more difficult on EPIC, because of the E: the compiler has to manage the parallelization itself.
The chip arrived, but the compiler wasn't there. Intel relied on universities to develop powerful compilers. Universities are great for research. This is fine, if you have the time. Intel did not have the time.
At one point, I think, they tried to push the GCC guys to work a bit on optimisation for the Itanium. The answer was no. They had spent too much effort on optimisations for the x86 platform. x86 has been out for so long, and they're *still* optimizing. If someone wanted to do some Itanium optimisations in GCC, go ahead, but not them.
One important problem with the compilers, as another poster has pointed out his experience, was memory access. The Itanium is supposed to have a *killer* memory subsystem. It just wasn't used correctly.
So in the end, it boils down to this: the Itanium arrived before its time. Its time will be when good optimizing compilers will exist. I believe the NCSA is working on one that could fit: OpenMP, though its applications are primarly supercomputing.
Intel tried to push the processor too hard too quickly. It tanked in trying to replace the x86 market. It is now releguated to niche applications, like supercomputing. Maybe its descendants will come back to the front of the scene when the compilers will be good enough: when GCC will have optimisations for it.
Just my.03$, from hanging around the Itanium team at school.
Well no, that's not evolution. Remember evolution is a very, very, very slow process.
The problem is that man has bested evolution. Our smarts are much faster than it can ever be. We're an 'out-of-context' problem. The consequences of our actions come by much quicker than evolution can compensate.
So in less than a blink, on evolution's time scale, *poof*, wooly mamouths hunted to extinction, *poof*, no more Amazon rainforest, etc...
Wait, I thought physicists don't know what dark matter *is*! We went from MACHOs and WIMPs to "It's all just neutrinos. Lots.".
Did I miss something here?
How can they simulate something when they don't know what this thing is, let alone behaves? Shouldn't the density of dark matter strongly influence the simulation?
Or maybe they just simplified the equations to eliminate thos vital parameters?
Through a penny-arcade post, I discovered Bontago. I'm a complete gamer, and I haven't been this hooked on a new game in a long while.
The game is physics-based: you drop blocks on the field, and the higher your pile, the larger its control area. You can only drop blocks in your control area. Your goal is to have a majority of flags in your control area. Thus you have to balance making a high, but fragile, tower, or make lots of small stacks.
To make it a little more complicated, you can find special blocks on the field with some special effects, like the rocket that whizzes around and knocks down stacks, or the dreaded earthquake.
The rules are simple, and that's what makes it so addictive. It's a great balance of strategy and a touch of luck.
You can play alone against computer players, and of course network multiplayer (though I haven't tried it out yet)
And for you eye-candyers out there (but then, who truly isn't), it has nice 3d graphics! Check out the screenshots on their website, and you'll see what I mean.
The game is free (as in beer). It was developped by students at Digipen, a gamedev school near seattle. It's a breath of fresh, clean, mountain air (with that whiff of summer flowers) to see that people can still produce an original and goddamn fun game, and instead of an impressive but yet another FPS
Eisner came in with a grand plan to cut costs. It worked in the beginning, the profit margin went up. But they were hoping that the quality would stay up. Tough, but good quality needs a lot of cash and love thrown at it. The management went the way of the bean-counters rather than that of the creative types. Thus, creativity went slowly, but surely, down the drain. Maybe Disney can be saved... but it'll have to die first. I mean it'll need a big disaster for it to find its creative roots again, and shake off all the other entertainment industries it sucked its tentacles into. BTW, they're not alone in following this venue. Shrek-makers Dreamworks SKG are following the same lead. 2 movies a year... pump, pump it out! (BTW, CEO Jeff Katzenberg is a manager from Disney) He's counting on cooped-up creators to pump out the juice. How long until they run out of breath? They already planned two more shrek derivatives...
Cool, maybe this will allow the open source community to come up with an equivalent before they even push it out the door, for once;) Ok, sorry about the troll. However I have to admit that I really adore the concept of an 'object' console as opposed to the standard text shell we've been using and loving for, what, 30 years now? It could be awesome if your programs output standard 'objects' instead of your traditional string. The console would become much more powerful! I know the power of a text console is its simplicity: all programs can output text with an easy printf() or whatever. Outputting an object is a wholly different paradigm altogether. STDOUT and its brothers will have to change... There already exists a Perl SHell (psh!), but I can't say I've ever been carried away by Perl's OO system. I have been carried away by python's OO style however. Does anyone know of a python system shell?
So, between an augmented Street Samurai and an initiate Mage, who would win the fight?
Seriously, as much as I love Shadowrun, its idea, atmosphere, etc... it features serious balancing issues. As the rules stand, a single mage could take out a whole corpo squadron with a twitch of the finger. On an MMORPG, this would kill it. It would need to be tweaked to an extent far beyond what any game company would be ready to invest in. Otherwise, the rules would have to be changed deeply enough to lose a large part of what makes Shadowrun, well, Shadowrun.
Back in the old days, on April Fools day, most people forgot. And pranks were low-profile. You had to be careful to spot it. In school we had a sysadmin who'd send a prank e-mail to everyone. Same style as the usual informative mail he'd send from time to time. Everytime it was a subtle thing, often a follow-up of another affair or story going on, which made the mail seem more natural. And that prank was alone and enough. Back in the old days, Slashdot did one or two prank stories in the day. The rest was clean and pure.
Now it seems EVERY SINGLE story is a poor joke! It's clogging up the news stream. Don't post stories which just recount pranks from other news sites! Have one original slashdot prank (Slashcode to be CSS2/XHTML compliant!), and let stay at that!
When there's DRM around something, I can not consider it mine. Thus I'll consider a DRM'd product to be only a rent, and expect it to be priced accordingly.
That's the catch people don't get. So you 'bought' something from iTunes? No mate, you *rented* it for an unlimited duration.
That's why it's cheaper than buying the CD.
There exists is a hole in the marketplace for acquiring songs which you can then do whatever you want with. That hole has long since been filled by P2P applications. They can never be replaced by commercial apps, because they're plain cheaper.
There are some interesting thoughts on the subject at DRMblog
Well, I now know three companies I won't be buying PCs from. And, more importantly, telling my family and friends not to buy from. Anyhow, didn't IBM sell it's PC-producing unit to a chinese company?
Do you really think this ruling will stick? Come on, the movie industry is just as rapacious in France than in the USA (well actually no... but rapacious enough). If this ruling has even a fraction of the impact we think it has, you can expect an appeal quicker than you can say "Va te faire foutre FNDF" (Federation Nationale des Distributeurs de Films, take it as our local MPAA)
'scuze the redundancy, but there's one negative point people haven't made clear here: The point of putting stuff on the hard drive is the access time. An open xbox is a great example: play Halo from the CD. Observe the loading times. Now copy it to the hard drive. Observe the new loading times. It's TEN TIMES faster to load from the hard drive. (heh, remember loading times on the PS1?) Also, observe the sound difference...
Of course, the difference is subject to the speed of the cd drive, but the CD (DVD) will remain much slower than the HD.
However, a good result of this initiative will be to normalize/freeze the libraries the game needs. How often did you install a game lately without it asking you to install the latest version of directX or whatnot? The advantage of consoles is that they're ALL THE SAME (within a type of course, I'm not saying PS2 = Gamecube), or at least sufficiently so that the game doesn't need to adapt anything. If this would allow an API freeze of game support libraries, great! However, knowing Microsoft, I'm expecting a "you cannot launch this game in Tray and Play mode with this version. Please upgrade"
Finally, I have to point out that computer games are different from console games in (at least) their memory usage. How much data does UT2k4 load into memory for a typical level again? 200+ Mb? 400? Wanna load all that from your CD drive? Every Time? Maybe this will push developpers to minimize reload times (reinit only some variables, like player positions, mobile level objects etc.. instead of reloading everything)
We've seen a few april fools claiming to be able to run code backwards. This is impossible, at the lowest level. For example, take the logical OR: C = A + B (excuse the layout, the top line is the value of B, the first column the value of A)
A\B | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
We know the result, C. How do we know if A, B, or both was 1? We lost information (2 bits of info became 1), and cannot get it back. So at first I dismissed any ridiculous claims of reverse execution. But we aren't the 1st of April...
Hindsight seems to work based on a checkpoint mode when running backwards, it goes back to a checkpoint then runs forwards to the expected point. However how does it work with hardware? Anybody tried this out for real?
WTF is a LAND attack? From the source: "LAND attack:
Sending TCP packet with SYN flag set, source and destination IP address and source and destination port as of destination machine, results in 15-30 seconds DoS condition." If I understand correctly, this means the vulnerable machine will attempt to synchronise a connection with itself?
I find this quote enlightening: "Ethic:
Microsoft was informed 7 days ago (25.02.2005, GMT +1, local time), NO answer received, so I decided to share this info with security community. "
So the vulnerability was made public. So exploits are going to be made. However, if Microsoft, who claim to have shifted more focus to security issues, had even acknowledged this report, the vulnerability wouldn't have become public so soon without a patch. Kinda worries you about the way computer security is handled, doesn't it?
I concur, Munchkin is a very fun game. It's basically a card game, which can be played with 3 or more players. On the vanilla version, "Munchkin" (haven't tried all the other versions / extensions), games last 30 minutes to an hour, or more depending on the number of players. You're a wimpy level-1 dungeon crawler, and your goal is to attain godlike level 10. You gain levels by killing monsters. You kill monsters if the sum of your level+bonuses plus those of a potential ally overcome the level of the monster. The catch is, other players can intervene to boost the monster or to help you. If they help you, they'll usually negotiate one or more treasures, which you obtain from slain monsters. If you lose against the monster, Bad Things Happen. Treasure cards are most often bonuses, like a Very Big Rock (+3), or the Sword Of Blatant Machism (+2) (useable only by men). It's a hilarious game of backstabbing and one-time alliances. By the way, it is written in the rules that Disagreements Must Lead To Long And Fruitless Debates. Oh, and The Owner Of The Game Is Always Right;)
For libraries aiming to ease and solidify interface developpement, I'm amazed by the poor 'accessability' of their site. I had to randomly click through 5 links to find an introduction to what Adam & Eve are, and that was in corporatese. Ick. It's funny how an internally-developed corporate project can tie itself up in complicated vocabulary.
What's the status on software patents in two other 'emerging' markets: India and China? If they don't have patents, they'll beat Europe to dust in being any sort of Mecca...
Download warehouse? is that like an apt-get repository? DAMMIT! It was so OBVIOUS! To get Linux on the market, it had to become paying, then add free offers!
This guy has made a quick and dirty stack and webserver, which not only works, but SURVIVED the Slashdot effect! It's funny to look through all the comments giving shots of the page, predicting the obviously imminent demise of the server. However it's been a few hours, and it's still there and snapping!
Now to survive the Monday Morning/. effect variant...:)
Slashdot Mirror
I'd be far from surprised to hear Cisco were notified of this 3 months ago, hence Lynn's frustration and his decision to publicly talk about the flaw.
Exactly. IIRC from another article this morning, the flaw was disclosed a while ago, I think in April. He publicly announced it on Wednesday July 27th. That's indeed around 3 months.
Using any buffer overflow or similar flaw, he showed how you could take control of the IOS (the OS on the router?). The IOS is supposed to be abstracted from the hardware and immune to this type of flaw.. this wasn't supposed to be possible before. So this flaw isn't tied to a specific low-level buffer-exploit vulnerabilty, so it's not enough to patch that vulnerabilty, because as soon as another is discovered, the IOS will be vulnerable too.
From other posts, it seems Cisco is usually quite reactive to flaw disclosure. Maybe this flaw was bigger and tougher to fix than the usual, but according to a Wired article. CISCO wanted to keep the flaw secret until next year, when a patched IOS beta would be released.
Lynn found this outrageous.
Outrageous enough to quit his job on the spot, burn himself from the industry's eye, and expose himself to a lawsuit from Cisco. Doesn't that make you think?
I'm all for this awesome idea. However I probably won't be buying the first model.
:)
There has been an interview with the head of the design frim.
- 1.0 syndrom
- they want to use OLEDs. OLEDs are nice because they're luminous and small. I don't want my keyboard to be a christmas tree! More important, though, is the short life-span of OLEDs. Know what the 'O' means? Organic. And Organic deteriorates. Lifetimes right now is 2 years, IIRC
- They are thinking of USB2 or Firewire but no bluetooth. Plus power cord, potentially. I want less clutter on my desk now, not more.
- The large footprint. See above.
- This is going to be a luxury keyboard, thus focusing on aesthetics. I prefer practical rather than the aesthetical.
I'll meet the offspring of this keyboard in 2-3 years, when they shake the quirks out of it, and focus more on usability
AFAIK, slicker's lead developer (leineir) has turned his focus to the Plasma project.
Is(was) he really Slicker's lead developper? On the Berlios project page, he's noted as "doc writer", though I see he wrote the usability paper for Slicker. The project admin is danalien.
Plasma somehow reminds me of Slicker. It was a great idea for replacing Kicker, and IMHO was a nicely innovative one too. I mean, look at these nice mockups.
:)
Unfortunately, these are just mockups, and it seems the project has stalled for more than a year. Slicker could use a little attention, don't you think? So if you have some spare time and a love for moving the Linux desktop in cool directions, how about giving it a try?
PS: I'm totally unrelated to the project, just disappointed that this cool idea is rusting
We were part of a pilot program at our school on the Itanium. I think the Itanium tanked because Intel didn't plan the release correctly.
.03$, from hanging around the Itanium team at school.
Remember the Itanium is a brand new architecture. It's NOT x86. It's like jumping from x86 to PPC if you will... That means you have to recompile everything. Of course, I'm not talking about compatibility mode.
Of course, introducing a new architecture is a *huge* endeavor. Intel wanted to fast-hand it and their marketing department went nuts over it. Problem is, the Itanium *wasn't ready*. You can't introduce a new architecture and expect the market to gulp it in. They were trying to push x86 out with the new chip. That couldn't happen. How long has x86 been around? How many *billions* of cash rest on that chip?
Anyhow, the first Itanium was only a technical preview, in a way. It was the first public diffusion of the chip, to try to get developpers used to it, slowly.
However, there came another problem: Itanium is an EPIC (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing) architecture. Not RISC or CISC. Do *not* listen to their marketing BS about EPIC. Technically, it kicks ass. In practice, you need a good compiler to take advantage of that instruction set.
That was the core of their problem. The compiler. Compiler gurus will tell you it's devilishly difficult to optimize parallel processing correctly. The cool thing about PPC chips is that it manages some parallelization on its pipelines internally. The compiler just doesn't have to care. It's much more difficult on EPIC, because of the E: the compiler has to manage the parallelization itself.
The chip arrived, but the compiler wasn't there. Intel relied on universities to develop powerful compilers. Universities are great for research. This is fine, if you have the time. Intel did not have the time.
At one point, I think, they tried to push the GCC guys to work a bit on optimisation for the Itanium. The answer was no. They had spent too much effort on optimisations for the x86 platform. x86 has been out for so long, and they're *still* optimizing. If someone wanted to do some Itanium optimisations in GCC, go ahead, but not them.
One important problem with the compilers, as another poster has pointed out his experience, was memory access. The Itanium is supposed to have a *killer* memory subsystem. It just wasn't used correctly.
So in the end, it boils down to this: the Itanium arrived before its time. Its time will be when good optimizing compilers will exist. I believe the NCSA is working on one that could fit: OpenMP, though its applications are primarly supercomputing.
Intel tried to push the processor too hard too quickly. It tanked in trying to replace the x86 market. It is now releguated to niche applications, like supercomputing. Maybe its descendants will come back to the front of the scene when the compilers will be good enough: when GCC will have optimisations for it.
Just my
Well no, that's not evolution. Remember evolution is a very, very, very slow process.
The problem is that man has bested evolution. Our smarts are much faster than it can ever be. We're an 'out-of-context' problem. The consequences of our actions come by much quicker than evolution can compensate.
So in less than a blink, on evolution's time scale, *poof*, wooly mamouths hunted to extinction, *poof*, no more Amazon rainforest, etc...
Wait, I thought physicists don't know what dark matter *is*! We went from MACHOs and WIMPs to "It's all just neutrinos. Lots.".
Did I miss something here?
How can they simulate something when they don't know what this thing is, let alone behaves? Shouldn't the density of dark matter strongly influence the simulation?
Or maybe they just simplified the equations to eliminate thos vital parameters?
Through a penny-arcade post, I discovered Bontago. I'm a complete gamer, and I haven't been this hooked on a new game in a long while.
The game is physics-based: you drop blocks on the field, and the higher your pile, the larger its control area. You can only drop blocks in your control area. Your goal is to have a majority of flags in your control area. Thus you have to balance making a high, but fragile, tower, or make lots of small stacks.
To make it a little more complicated, you can find special blocks on the field with some special effects, like the rocket that whizzes around and knocks down stacks, or the dreaded earthquake.
The rules are simple, and that's what makes it so addictive. It's a great balance of strategy and a touch of luck.
You can play alone against computer players, and of course network multiplayer (though I haven't tried it out yet)
And for you eye-candyers out there (but then, who truly isn't), it has nice 3d graphics! Check out the screenshots on their website, and you'll see what I mean.
The game is free (as in beer). It was developped by students at Digipen, a gamedev school near seattle. It's a breath of fresh, clean, mountain air (with that whiff of summer flowers) to see that people can still produce an original and goddamn fun game, and instead of an impressive but yet another FPS
Bontago!
PS: the download was hell slow. Maybe someone could put up a mirror? Otherwise, take the light version, the full just has unnecessary extra fluff.
Eisner came in with a grand plan to cut costs. It worked in the beginning, the profit margin went up. But they were hoping that the quality would stay up. Tough, but good quality needs a lot of cash and love thrown at it. The management went the way of the bean-counters rather than that of the creative types. Thus, creativity went slowly, but surely, down the drain.
Maybe Disney can be saved... but it'll have to die first. I mean it'll need a big disaster for it to find its creative roots again, and shake off all the other entertainment industries it sucked its tentacles into.
BTW, they're not alone in following this venue. Shrek-makers Dreamworks SKG are following the same lead. 2 movies a year... pump, pump it out! (BTW, CEO Jeff Katzenberg is a manager from Disney) He's counting on cooped-up creators to pump out the juice. How long until they run out of breath? They already planned two more shrek derivatives...
Cool, maybe this will allow the open source community to come up with an equivalent before they even push it out the door, for once ;) .
Ok, sorry about the troll.
However I have to admit that I really adore the concept of an 'object' console as opposed to the standard text shell we've been using and loving for, what, 30 years now?
It could be awesome if your programs output standard 'objects' instead of your traditional string. The console would become much more powerful!
I know the power of a text console is its simplicity: all programs can output text with an easy printf() or whatever. Outputting an object is a wholly different paradigm altogether. STDOUT and its brothers will have to change...
There already exists a Perl SHell (psh!), but I can't say I've ever been carried away by Perl's OO system. I have been carried away by python's OO style however
Does anyone know of a python system shell?
So, between an augmented Street Samurai and an initiate Mage, who would win the fight?
Seriously, as much as I love Shadowrun, its idea, atmosphere, etc... it features serious balancing issues. As the rules stand, a single mage could take out a whole corpo squadron with a twitch of the finger. On an MMORPG, this would kill it. It would need to be tweaked to an extent far beyond what any game company would be ready to invest in.
Otherwise, the rules would have to be changed deeply enough to lose a large part of what makes Shadowrun, well, Shadowrun.
Back in the old days, on April Fools day, most people forgot. And pranks were low-profile. You had to be careful to spot it.
In school we had a sysadmin who'd send a prank e-mail to everyone. Same style as the usual informative mail he'd send from time to time. Everytime it was a subtle thing, often a follow-up of another affair or story going on, which made the mail seem more natural. And that prank was alone and enough.
Back in the old days, Slashdot did one or two prank stories in the day. The rest was clean and pure.
Now it seems EVERY SINGLE story is a poor joke! It's clogging up the news stream. Don't post stories which just recount pranks from other news sites! Have one original slashdot prank (Slashcode to be CSS2/XHTML compliant!), and let stay at that!
When there's DRM around something, I can not consider it mine. Thus I'll consider a DRM'd product to be only a rent, and expect it to be priced accordingly.
That's the catch people don't get. So you 'bought' something from iTunes? No mate, you *rented* it for an unlimited duration.
That's why it's cheaper than buying the CD.
There exists is a hole in the marketplace for acquiring songs which you can then do whatever you want with. That hole has long since been filled by P2P applications. They can never be replaced by commercial apps, because they're plain cheaper.
There are some interesting thoughts on the subject at DRMblog
Well, I now know three companies I won't be buying PCs from. And, more importantly, telling my family and friends not to buy from.
Anyhow, didn't IBM sell it's PC-producing unit to a chinese company?
Do you really think this ruling will stick? Come on, the movie industry is just as rapacious in France than in the USA (well actually no... but rapacious enough). If this ruling has even a fraction of the impact we think it has, you can expect an appeal quicker than you can say "Va te faire foutre FNDF" (Federation Nationale des Distributeurs de Films, take it as our local MPAA)
'scuze the redundancy, but there's one negative point people haven't made clear here:
The point of putting stuff on the hard drive is the access time. An open xbox is a great example: play Halo from the CD. Observe the loading times. Now copy it to the hard drive. Observe the new loading times.
It's TEN TIMES faster to load from the hard drive. (heh, remember loading times on the PS1?)
Also, observe the sound difference...
Of course, the difference is subject to the speed of the cd drive, but the CD (DVD) will remain much slower than the HD.
However, a good result of this initiative will be to normalize/freeze the libraries the game needs. How often did you install a game lately without it asking you to install the latest version of directX or whatnot?
The advantage of consoles is that they're ALL THE SAME (within a type of course, I'm not saying PS2 = Gamecube), or at least sufficiently so that the game doesn't need to adapt anything.
If this would allow an API freeze of game support libraries, great!
However, knowing Microsoft, I'm expecting a "you cannot launch this game in Tray and Play mode with this version. Please upgrade"
Finally, I have to point out that computer games are different from console games in (at least) their memory usage. How much data does UT2k4 load into memory for a typical level again? 200+ Mb? 400? Wanna load all that from your CD drive? Every Time? Maybe this will push developpers to minimize reload times (reinit only some variables, like player positions, mobile level objects etc.. instead of reloading everything)
Hindsight seems to work based on a checkpoint mode when running backwards, it goes back to a checkpoint then runs forwards to the expected point. However how does it work with hardware?
Anybody tried this out for real?
WTF is a LAND attack? From the source:
"LAND attack:
Sending TCP packet with SYN flag set, source and destination IP address and source and destination port as of destination machine, results in 15-30 seconds DoS condition."
If I understand correctly, this means the vulnerable machine will attempt to synchronise a connection with itself?
I find this quote enlightening:
"Ethic:
Microsoft was informed 7 days ago (25.02.2005, GMT +1, local time), NO answer received, so I decided to share this info with security community. "
So the vulnerability was made public. So exploits are going to be made. However, if Microsoft, who claim to have shifted more focus to security issues, had even acknowledged this report, the vulnerability wouldn't have become public so soon without a patch.
Kinda worries you about the way computer security is handled, doesn't it?
I concur, Munchkin is a very fun game. It's basically a card game, which can be played with 3 or more players. On the vanilla version, "Munchkin" (haven't tried all the other versions / extensions), games last 30 minutes to an hour, or more depending on the number of players. ;)
You're a wimpy level-1 dungeon crawler, and your goal is to attain godlike level 10. You gain levels by killing monsters. You kill monsters if the sum of your level+bonuses plus those of a potential ally overcome the level of the monster.
The catch is, other players can intervene to boost the monster or to help you. If they help you, they'll usually negotiate one or more treasures, which you obtain from slain monsters. If you lose against the monster, Bad Things Happen. Treasure cards are most often bonuses, like a Very Big Rock (+3), or the Sword Of Blatant Machism (+2) (useable only by men). It's a hilarious game of backstabbing and one-time alliances.
By the way, it is written in the rules that Disagreements Must Lead To Long And Fruitless Debates. Oh, and The Owner Of The Game Is Always Right
For libraries aiming to ease and solidify interface developpement, I'm amazed by the poor 'accessability' of their site. I had to randomly click through 5 links to find an introduction to what Adam & Eve are, and that was in corporatese.
Ick.
It's funny how an internally-developed corporate project can tie itself up in complicated vocabulary.
What's the status on software patents in two other 'emerging' markets: India and China?
If they don't have patents, they'll beat Europe to dust in being any sort of Mecca...
Ardour multi-track sound editor (not MIDI, I think)
Rosegarden Audio and MIDI sequencer
The smaller Audacity A wave/AIFF/MP3/Ogg/etc editor
Oh no! I'd better turn off my company's internet infrastructure to protect it against malicious usage!
Download warehouse? is that like an apt-get repository? DAMMIT! It was so OBVIOUS! To get Linux on the market, it had to become paying, then add free offers!
I have to say:
/. effect variant... :)
Bravo!
This guy has made a quick and dirty stack and webserver, which not only works, but SURVIVED the Slashdot effect! It's funny to look through all the comments giving shots of the page, predicting the obviously imminent demise of the server. However it's been a few hours, and it's still there and snapping!
Now to survive the Monday Morning