On the atari jaguar, there was a certain series of instructions that when executed repeatedly would cause the chip to overheat. While it wouldn't explode per say, it could pop out of it's socket.
Global Exports of Commercial Encryption Source Code and Toolkits
Encryption source code which is available to the public and which is subject to an express agreement for the payment of a licensing fee or royalty for commercial production or sale of any product developed using the source code (such as "community source" code) may be exported under a license exception to any end-user without a technical review. At the time of export, the exporter must submit to the Bureau of Export Administration a copy of the source code, or a written notification of its Internet address. All other source code can be exported after a technical review to any non-government end-user. U.S. exporters may have to provide general information on foreign products developed for commercial sale using commercial source code, but foreign products developed using U.S.-origin source code or toolkits do not require a technical review.
so, open-source projects don't need licensing. But netscape is not open source. They probably did a one-time techincal review for that :
Global exports to individuals, commercial firms or other non-government end-users
Any encryption commodity or software, including components, of any key length can now be exported under a license exception after a technical review to any non-government end-user in any country except for the seven state supporters of terrorism. Exports previously allowed only for a company's internal use can now be used for any activity, including communication with other firms, supply chains and customers. Previous liberalizations for banks, financial institutions and other approved sectors are continued and subsumed under the license exception. Exports to government end-users may be approved under a license.
- Encryption now included! Now that the US more closely resembles a free country, all versions of Red Hat Linux include:
o Kerberos authentication for mutt, pine, fetchmail, cvs, and imap. In addition, the following kerberos-aware versions of the following clients have been added:
o Kerboros network clients included for rlogin, rsh, telnet, ftp in krb5-workstation package
o GNOME-based Kerberos configuration tools added
o GNU Privacy Guard (gpg) included
o Netscape with 128-bit encryption included
Ok, what did I miss? Was there legislation that was passed that totally opened up the encryption issue, or did Redhat get licensing from the commerse dept. for these products? I thought things like 128-bit Netscape were still illegal to export. If not, this is great news! Someone please fill me in.;)
When 9/10 of these companies go under, two things will happen.
9/10 already go under. In fact if 1 in 10 businesses that you invest in make it, you've got a pretty nice profit. Consider that dotcoms that score big, will give you 100/1 profits. And it's not like the businesses that fail leave the city in ruin. It happens every day, yet the unemployeement rate stays at an all time low. I don't see any kind of crash you are refering to anytime soon.
Recently having ported software between Linux, FreeBSD and NT, I have developed my own idea of what a ``UNIX'' is. It's simplicity most of all. Everything is a file, and most calls that work on file descriptors work on _all_ file descriptors. You can make a select() call on a file, a pipe, and a socket. This is impossible on NT, because files are HANDLEs, sockets are SOCKETs, HANDLEs from anonymous pipes cannot be used for select() like calls (only named pipes there). Why this diversity in the API ?
Being a long time Unix and Windows developer, I don't see any advantage to the developer to having one ioctl() that works with all devices. While it makes sense on the kernel (one api to export), it is total nonsense for the end developer.
type 'man ioctl' : There is absolute no useful information given. It's a generic function and the developer must explictly know what kind of device he is talking to and somehow find the right parameter values to pass in to make it do what he wants. ioctl documentation can never be complete.
I would argue that it's better to have more functions that are strongly typed and can be documented seperately. If the developer want's abstration, let him build it into his application - don't force it on them.
Programming may not prove the theorem true, but it can certainly prove it false by finding one counter example.
Also it's worth mentioning some non-obvious math theorems have been "proven" by symbolic math systems without human intervention. Of course it takes a human to recognize weither all the proofs that were calculated had any significance or not.
This would lead to extremely user-unfriendly domain names
agreed, but no more than session tracking done through URLS like this : "http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/03/05/23 45247&op=Reply&threshold=3&commentsort=3&m ode=thread&pid=50"
and surely it would really bugger up users trying to bookmark the site (stale sessions could stay in bookmarks for a LONG time).
No. If the session id expires then just assign them a new one on reconnect and if they try to access any previous session information let them know it has expired. Same as it works now. But it works if people have cookies turned off.
Personally I think it's a great idea. If it was obvious, how come no one used it before? This falls into the area I would think is patentable.
I'd like to get an incremental linker one of these days. I'd also like to see better assembly tools, better debugging tools, better C++ support, better code optimization, better compatibility across the various..
Hi Scott, I ran into you a while back at a conference. As a Linux game developer (crack.com - Abuse, Golgotha) I can whole heartily agree on the linking problem. The problem is not so much being incremental, but where the debug information is stored. Under Visual C++, the debug information is stored in a separate file and can updated incrementally. Under GCC all debug information is store in the executable and it's written out each link. A large game will produce a 30-50MB EXE with all the debug information compiled in. Even on a fast computer, this can take minutes to link, versus a few seconds on VC. This makes a big difference in development because you tend to forget what you were doing after a few seconds.:) I tried to talk some Cygnus people into adding incremental support, but I don't think anyone fully understands GCC anymore and such a major change would be a big undertaking - because GDB is involved. I suggest the problem could be solved if GDB would load debug information from.o files and just have GCC not link debug info.
Some partial solutions we found:
- Don't include header files unless you need to. Predeclare everything that you only use pointers to. GCC produces debugging information for all inline functions (even constructors you didn't declare), and classes that get included whether or not you use them. If you are porting someone else's game, this is hard to do.
- Use Dynamically linkable libraries for code you are experimenting for. This is troublesome because it's not always easy to make everything modular and create an interface between the game and the DLL.
- Buy a commercial compiler. There are 1 or two that I came across that support incremental linking. At the time they were pretty expensive so I didn't pursue this option.
- Avoid templates when they don't add much value. Templates don't allow you to predeclare anything and produce a lot more debugging information.
... Now as to better C++ support, I don't know what you are referring to. GCC is very standards strict and has excellent support for templates, exceptions, and RTTI. I don't use namespaces, to I can't comment on that but I believe it's in there.
. For example, the company plans to use Network Solutions' massive subscriber lists to help supply buyer and supplier credentials for B2B exchanges and to complement VeriSign's various service-oriented businesses.
I wonder why HA is such a high concern for all telcos? I mean, the customer is more than willing to put up with delays and disconnects for a cheaper price. Already millions of people use cell phones which are have availability problems left and right. HA comes with a high price tag, I would like to see a telco offer second-rate service for a lower price on phone calls. I suppose that since you have to work with everyone else and can't really pick and choice your customers that you can't do this?
I would say just send raw ethernet packets, that way the device doesn't have to configure an IP address. If each device has a MAC then you can have mutiple machines on a LAN without conflicts. Without a protocol some packets may be losted, but the work of resolving these can be done on the client without much work.
The only issue I see is security. If the machine will always take input from the lan AND one of the inputs is "CTRL-ALT-DEL" which is mapped to reboot, then you could have problems if someone broke into your subnet.:) I'm fine with letting the firewall take care of that issue and passing on the encryption.
I want an ethernet version! Who uses serial these days anyway? I suppose you could write your own microcode on one of these things to talk to an ethernet card??
Most HTML can be compressed pretty well by removing comments, unneeded meta tags, and spaces/new lines that have no contribution to the final page. This program will automatically compress html files for you. When I ran it on/. I can sometimes get a 50% compresssion ratio (not including graphics).
bissextile year \bye-SEKS-tuhl-YEAR\ (noun) : a leap year in the Julian or Gregorian calendar
The year 2000 is a bissextile year, but the year 1900 was not because leap years can only occur in century years that are divisible by 400.
When Julius Caesar reformed the calendar in 45 BC, he stipulated that an extra day be added to February every four years. But the Romans didn't add the extra day at the end of the month; they inserted it after the 24th day of the month. They also reckoned days near the end of a month by counting backwards from the first of the following month rather than forward from the beginning of the current one. The day we call February 24 is six days before March 1, so it was known as the sextus, or "sixth day." When Caesar's extra day was added, it became a "second sextus" or bissextus (appending the Latin "bis," meaning "doubled"). English speakers adopted "bissextile" to refer to that extra day, even though its placement in the modern calendar makes that term a misnomer.
I use Kinesis myself, and I have to say it has very positive effect on me. My wrist rarely go out before my mind does. I'm not 100% healed, I can still feel it in some stretching exercises, but it's definately better than standard/split keyboards like ms-ergo.
The downsides: if you have to use the mouse a lot, it's probably not that great... but I don't know what can be done about that. I would like to see kinesis try to integrate a thinkpad-like mouse onto one of these things. When possible you should use the keyboard to scroll, not the mouse.
It takes a few days to get really comfortable with a Kinesis. Once you learn, pick up a keyboard switch box for your other computers because these things are not super cheap and you won't be able to type on the other keyboards very well anymore. I bring my keyboard on trips with me when I know I'm going to be coding at the other end. Luckily it's a pretty compact keyboard.
I found the best solution for people who have to use Linux and NT is to run a NT-based X server (I like X-deep32) and export your linux display to it. This saves a lot of reaching for the switch box, and you can cut and paste between the two. (Assuming VMWare doesn't cut it).
Two issues, though: 1. Why just 56 bits? the new export regulations specifically exempt encryption used for copy protection from such limitations.
Think global. Not all countries have the same legislation as the US. Also 56 DES decoder chips are much cheaper to make then 128-bit counter parts. That's a pretty high-bandwidth stream to decrypt if you are looking at 640x448x32bit at 30fps.
2. How will this interact with compression?
A very good question. It would seem they would need to do the mpeg macro-block decoding in the monitor which is a very freaky idea. That means the monitor needs some video memory of it's own. There is no mention of this in the article. This would make the monitors quite a bit more expensive.
One other issue I thought of is image scaling and clipping. Suppose you want to run the DVD in a window, how can you scale the bits if they are encoded? Or if the window is obscured by another window you have to clip at pixel boundaries not macro-block boundaries. Monitor supported overlays could do this, but again more cost in the monitor - basically the monitor needs it's own video card with video memory. In which case, why have one in the PC as well?
I've got to agree with this point. While I think Intel has a good idea here (from the producers standpoint), I don't see the consumer willing to pay extra money for these screens that don't add any value from their perspective - unless a new DVD-like standard comes around that requires it.
Most people in america probably have el-cheapo 13-15" monitor that cost ~$100. A digital screen with the processing power needed to decrypt DES at a screen fill rate isn't going to compete with this anytime soon. In the end it's all about the dollars. Content with good copy protection is going to have a small market and make much less money than content with bad copy protection (DVD) that is available to more people. It's not aobut how many people pirate your stuff, it's about how many people buy (or rent) it.
Or some fool who comes into a restaurant and expects a spoon for their soup (imagine it, eating with a spoon in public! I mean, I do it sometimes at home when I'm alone, but I would never touch one in a restaurant).
excuse me for being clueless, but how do canadians eat soup if not with a spoon?
This shows how Sony's interest is not the consumer's interest
Listen to what you just said. No for-profit company's interest is the consumer.. If it were they would operate at 0 profit margins. This is no reason not to buy from them. People chose to buy drugs because it saves their lives, not because the drug companies are operating in a "fair and ethical manner"
Slashdot Mirror
On the atari jaguar, there was a certain series of instructions that when executed repeatedly would cause the chip to overheat. While it wouldn't explode per say, it could pop out of it's socket.
I guess I've been asleep for the last two months. Here is the relevant info for anyone interested:
.246.62/public.nsf/docs/60D6B47456BB389F8525686400 78B6C0
from http://204.193
Global Exports of Commercial Encryption Source Code and Toolkits
Encryption source code which is available to the public and which is subject to an express agreement for the payment of a licensing fee or royalty for commercial production or sale of any product developed using the source code (such as "community source" code) may be exported under a license exception to any end-user without a technical review. At the time of export, the exporter must submit to the Bureau of Export Administration a copy of the source code, or a written notification of its Internet address. All other source code can be exported after a technical review to any non-government end-user. U.S. exporters may have to provide general information on foreign products developed for commercial sale using commercial source code, but foreign products developed using U.S.-origin source code or toolkits do not require a technical review.
so, open-source projects don't need licensing. But netscape is not open source. They probably did a one-time techincal review for that :
Global exports to individuals, commercial firms or other non-government end-users
Any encryption commodity or software, including components, of any key length can now be exported under a license exception after a technical review to any non-government end-user in any country except for the seven state supporters of terrorism. Exports previously allowed only for a company's internal use can now be used for any activity, including communication with other firms, supply chains and customers. Previous liberalizations for banks, financial institutions and other approved sectors are continued and subsumed under the license exception. Exports to government end-users may be approved under a license.
and of course - INAL.
added
;)
- Encryption now included! Now that the US more closely resembles
a free country, all versions of Red Hat Linux include:
o Kerberos authentication for mutt, pine, fetchmail,
cvs, and imap. In addition, the following kerberos-aware
versions of the following clients have been added:
o Kerboros network clients included for rlogin, rsh, telnet, ftp
in krb5-workstation package
o GNOME-based Kerberos configuration tools added
o GNU Privacy Guard (gpg) included
o Netscape with 128-bit encryption included
Ok, what did I miss? Was there legislation that was passed that totally opened up the encryption issue, or did Redhat get licensing from the commerse dept. for these products? I thought things like 128-bit Netscape were still illegal to export. If not, this is great news! Someone please fill me in.
SSL is useless if you can log key strokes silly!
When 9/10 of these companies go under, two things will happen.
9/10 already go under. In fact if 1 in 10 businesses that you invest in make it, you've got a pretty nice profit. Consider that dotcoms that score big, will give you 100/1 profits. And it's not like the businesses that fail leave the city in ruin. It happens every day, yet the unemployeement rate stays at an all time low. I don't see any kind of crash you are refering to anytime soon.
Recently having ported software between Linux, FreeBSD and NT, I have developed my own idea of what a ``UNIX'' is. It's simplicity most of all. Everything is a file, and most calls that work on file descriptors work on _all_ file descriptors. You can make a select() call on a file, a pipe, and a socket. This is impossible on NT, because files are HANDLEs, sockets are SOCKETs, HANDLEs from anonymous pipes cannot be used for select() like calls (only named pipes there). Why this diversity in the API ?
Being a long time Unix and Windows developer, I don't see any advantage to the developer to having one ioctl() that works with all devices. While it makes sense on the kernel (one api to export), it is total nonsense for the end developer.
type 'man ioctl' : There is absolute no useful information given. It's a generic function and the developer must explictly know what kind of device he is talking to and somehow find the right parameter values to pass in to make it do what he wants. ioctl documentation can never be complete.
I would argue that it's better to have more functions that are strongly typed and can be documented seperately. If the developer want's abstration, let him build it into his application - don't force it on them.
I've been telneting into my 95/98/NT boxes since they first came out. The functionality isn't built-in, but it's a pretty easy thing to do.
DNA evidence has been used in criminal trial proceedings for years, perhaps most notoriously in the Simpson murder trial.
ok, who read this and was tring to remember which episode of the Simpsons used DNA evidence?
Programming may not prove the theorem true, but it can certainly prove it false by finding one counter example.
Also it's worth mentioning some non-obvious math theorems have been "proven" by symbolic math systems without human intervention. Of course it takes a human to recognize weither all the proofs that were calculated had any significance or not.
Yeah. What is this world comming to? Next thing you know students will be required to buy books and pay tution. Oh wait..
This would lead to extremely user-unfriendly domain names
3 45247&op=Reply&threshold=3&commentsort=3&m ode=thread&pid=50"
agreed, but no more than session tracking done through URLS like this :
"http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/03/05/2
and surely it would really bugger up users trying to bookmark the site (stale sessions could stay in bookmarks for a LONG time).
No. If the session id expires then just assign them a new one on reconnect and if they try to access any previous session information let them know it has expired. Same as it works now. But it works if people have cookies turned off.
Personally I think it's a great idea. If it was obvious, how come no one used it before? This falls into the area I would think is patentable.
I'd like to get an incremental linker one of these days. I'd also like to see better assembly tools, better debugging tools, better C++ support, better code optimization, better compatibility across the various..
:) I tried to talk some Cygnus people into adding incremental support, but I don't think anyone fully understands GCC anymore and such a major change would be a big undertaking - because GDB is involved. I suggest the problem could be solved if GDB would load debug information from .o files and just have GCC not link debug info.
Hi Scott, I ran into you a while back at a conference.
As a Linux game developer (crack.com - Abuse, Golgotha) I can whole heartily agree on the linking problem. The problem is not so much being incremental, but where the debug information is stored. Under Visual C++, the debug information is stored in a separate file and can updated incrementally. Under GCC all debug information is store in the executable and it's written out each link. A large game will produce a 30-50MB EXE with all the debug information compiled in. Even on a fast computer, this can take minutes to link, versus a few seconds on VC. This makes a big difference in development because you tend to forget what you were doing after a few seconds.
Some partial solutions we found:
- Don't include header files unless you need to. Predeclare everything that you only use pointers to. GCC produces debugging information for all inline functions (even constructors you didn't declare), and classes that get included whether or not you use them. If you are porting someone else's game, this is hard to do.
- Use Dynamically linkable libraries for code you are experimenting for. This is troublesome because it's not always easy to make everything modular and create an interface between the game and the DLL.
- Buy a commercial compiler. There are 1 or two that I came across that support incremental linking. At the time they were pretty expensive so I didn't pursue this option.
- Avoid templates when they don't add much value. Templates don't allow you to predeclare anything and produce a lot more debugging information.
... Now as to better C++ support, I don't know what you are referring to. GCC is very standards strict and has excellent support for templates, exceptions, and RTTI. I don't use namespaces, to I can't comment on that but I believe it's in there.
. For example, the company plans to use Network Solutions' massive subscriber lists to help supply buyer and supplier credentials for B2B exchanges and to complement VeriSign's various service-oriented businesses.
I wonder why HA is such a high concern for all telcos? I mean, the customer is more than willing to put up with delays and disconnects for a cheaper price. Already millions of people use cell phones which are have availability problems left and right. HA comes with a high price tag, I would like to see a telco offer second-rate service for a lower price on phone calls. I suppose that since you have to work with everyone else and can't really pick and choice your customers that you can't do this?
I would say just send raw ethernet packets, that way the device doesn't have to configure an IP address. If each device has a MAC then you can have mutiple machines on a LAN without conflicts.
:) I'm fine with letting the firewall take care of that issue and passing on the encryption.
Without a protocol some packets may be losted, but the work of resolving these can be done on the client without much work.
The only issue I see is security. If the machine will always take input from the lan AND one of the inputs is "CTRL-ALT-DEL" which is mapped to reboot, then you could have problems if someone broke into your subnet.
I want an ethernet version! Who uses serial these days anyway? I suppose you could write your own microcode on one of these things to talk to an ethernet card??
Most HTML can be compressed pretty well by removing comments, unneeded meta tags, and spaces/new lines that have no contribution to the final page. This program will automatically compress html files for you. When I ran it on /. I can sometimes get a 50% compresssion ratio (not including graphics).
bissextile year \bye-SEKS-tuhl-YEAR\ (noun)
: a leap year in the Julian or Gregorian calendar
The year 2000 is a bissextile year, but the year 1900 was
not because leap years can only occur in century years that are
divisible by 400.
When Julius Caesar reformed the calendar in 45 BC, he
stipulated that an extra day be added to February every four
years. But the Romans didn't add the extra day at the end of the
month; they inserted it after the 24th day of the month. They
also reckoned days near the end of a month by counting backwards
from the first of the following month rather than forward from
the beginning of the current one. The day we call February 24 is
six days before March 1, so it was known as the sextus, or "sixth
day." When Caesar's extra day was added, it became a "second
sextus" or bissextus (appending the Latin "bis," meaning
"doubled"). English speakers adopted "bissextile" to refer to
that extra day, even though its placement in the modern calendar
makes that term a misnomer.
and got it spinning my old "abuse" shareware game CD up to full speed (ahh the irony).
:)
Just when I thought no one played with my game anymore...
I use Kinesis myself, and I have to say it has very positive effect on me. My wrist rarely go out before my mind does. I'm not 100% healed, I can still feel it in some stretching exercises, but it's definately better than standard/split keyboards like ms-ergo.
The downsides: if you have to use the mouse a lot, it's probably not that great... but I don't know what can be done about that. I would like to see kinesis try to integrate a thinkpad-like mouse onto one of these things. When possible you should use the keyboard to scroll, not the mouse.
It takes a few days to get really comfortable with a Kinesis. Once you learn, pick up a keyboard switch box for your other computers because these things are not super cheap and you won't be able to type on the other keyboards very well anymore. I bring my keyboard on trips with me when I know I'm going to be coding at the other end. Luckily it's a pretty compact keyboard.
I found the best solution for people who have to use Linux and NT is to run a NT-based X server (I like X-deep32) and export your linux display to it. This saves a lot of reaching for the switch box, and you can cut and paste between the two. (Assuming VMWare doesn't cut it).
I was interesting the subject of fat recently and came across a few good intro articles. Here is one about very low fat diets.
---
Two issues, though:
1. Why just 56 bits? the new export regulations specifically exempt encryption used for copy protection from such limitations.
Think global. Not all countries have the same legislation as the US. Also 56 DES decoder chips are much cheaper to make then 128-bit counter parts. That's a pretty high-bandwidth stream to decrypt if you are looking at 640x448x32bit at 30fps.
2. How will this interact with compression?
A very good question. It would seem they would need to do the mpeg macro-block decoding in the monitor which is a very freaky idea. That means the monitor needs some video memory of it's own.
There is no mention of this in the article. This would make the monitors quite a bit more expensive.
One other issue I thought of is image scaling and clipping. Suppose you want to run the DVD in a window, how can you scale the bits if they are encoded? Or if the window is obscured by another window you have to clip at pixel boundaries not macro-block boundaries. Monitor supported overlays could do this, but again more cost in the monitor - basically the monitor needs it's own video card with video memory. In which case, why have one in the PC as well?
I've got to agree with this point. While I think Intel has a good idea here (from the producers standpoint), I don't see the consumer willing to pay extra money for these screens that don't add any value from their perspective - unless a new DVD-like standard comes around that requires it.
Most people in america probably have el-cheapo 13-15" monitor that cost ~$100. A digital screen with the processing power needed to decrypt DES at a screen fill rate isn't going to compete with this anytime soon. In the end it's all about the dollars. Content with good copy protection is going to have a small market and make much less money than content with bad copy protection (DVD) that is available to more people. It's not aobut how many people pirate your stuff, it's about how many people buy (or rent) it.
Or some fool who comes into a restaurant and expects a spoon for their soup (imagine it, eating with a spoon in public! I mean, I do it sometimes at home when I'm alone, but I would never touch one in a restaurant).
excuse me for being clueless, but how do canadians eat soup if not with a spoon?
This shows how Sony's interest is not the consumer's interest
Listen to what you just said. No for-profit company's interest is the consumer.. If it were they would operate at 0 profit margins. This is no reason not to buy from them. People chose to buy drugs because it saves their lives, not because the drug companies are operating in a "fair and ethical manner"