Yeah, you're a troll, but in this case the answer comes from beyond the grave:
"Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer."
2GB is an arbitrary limit built into the.avi format.
There are plenty of filesystems, even Linux ones, that don't like files bigger than 2GB. It'll be a while before we have to worry about 8,500,000,000GB files.
Not to mention the simple fact that addressing those kinds of big files, and working on them, is vastly easier and more efficient at 64 bits.
why would joe user go buy one? to check their mail?
How about digital video? People already are running into a 2GB file size barrier. Yes, you can work around this up to 4GB on a 32-bit system, but if you want to avoid PAE or crap like that you need 64 bits. More people will be working on their home movies and such, and 2GB is about 20 minutes using DV codecs.
Less-lossy codecs will become popular as storage and CPU horsepower improves. DV is 720x480. What if you want full HDTV 1080p? Lot less than 20 minutes in 2GB then...
you'd stop wasting time on friends and wives after the 5th or 6th set of them died
Why would they have to die, too? Why would a hypothetical imortality treatment only apply to one person? Oh, sure, if it's based on some magic fountain deep in the Florida swamps there might not be enough water to go around, but something based on science is, by definition, reproducible...
Re:Works by maintaining/increasing telomere length
on
The Oldest Mouse Contest
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Telomeres are not the 'secret' of immortality. There are a lot of things that gradually wear down or accumulate in the human body (e.g. heavy metals) that cannot be dealth with by normal metabolic function, even in youthful bodies.
Real immortatlity is going to require active, artificial repair and maintenance systems.
Tell you what. After I've stood on an airless planetoid in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, and watched the Milky Way rise over its horizon, then you can ask me if I've seen everything worth seeing.
The root behind all this would be that since you've lived for centuries/millenia, your understanding of human behaviour would be sufficiently mature to dull the curiousity related to the fruits of human creativity.
So, a citizen of the Roman Empire circa 0 A.D. wouldn't be a bit surprised at the world of 2003? In any sphere; not just science, but art, politics, culture, etc.?
Just because you can't imagine that genuinely new things will come up...
what if your ssh-starter-daemon contains a security hole?
By reading a known, fixed amount of data, it can't get a buffer overflow. Aside from the rate of incoming connections, that data's the only thing an attacker can control, and the only thing that data is used for is to compare with an internally-generated hash. Even if I write in C, I can use strncmp() for the compare.:-)
I believe that sshd, even after those two recent holes, is much more secure than any new code you might write now.
But the proposed program is attempting a much less complex job.
Don't panic - upgrade sshd every time a hole is found, it's not that often compared to most other software.
I don't want to be rooted when that does happen, though. I don't want to have to frantically rush to install a new update when such a problem is found, too. If I'm on vacation, I'm content to let it wait until I get back. If sshd isn't running, I can do that.
The problem with time based salting is that for it to work practiacally the time window has to be too large, allowing the same token to be used again quite easily.
Ooops, I knew I forgot something. I thought of that, you also add the number of successful connections that day before the hash, or other salting. Basically, you make sure the same token can't be used during that window. Throttle the number of incoming connections and the likelihood of guessing the correct key for the window can be made arbitrarily small.
why not talk using symmetric cryptography straight away, use some proven to be solid cipher, add some salt/nonce, and quickly handshake new keys if needed and it's bomb secure.
That'd certainly work, but I'm also trying for something that'll work with reasonable speed on a 16MHz 68K processor (Palm IIIxe).
Naturally your implementation may fail, but that's why you might concider using cipe or openvpn to do it for you.
I don't want ssh running open to the world all the time, because of things like this; but I also want to be able to log in remotely from varying places with reasonable security. So I've been thinking. Imagine an app like this:
Listens on a given port, waiting for a connection. If it receives one, it reads an MD5 hash (and only that amount of data).
It computes an MD5 hash of a secret password, and the current time to the minute. It then compares that to what it received in step 1.
If they match, it fires off a ssh process listening on a nonstandard port. If they don't match, it locks out the source IP after a given number of failures.
Obviously, the person contacting the machine has to know the secret password, and also what port the sshd is going to be started on. This seems so simple and stupid that it'd be darn near impossible to have a buffer overflow, and while it could be subject to denial-of-service attacks, few things aren't.
Extensions like a 'kill' password that'd turn off this 'sshd-kicker', and a timer that'd kill the sshd if no one connected within a set period, and a limit to how fast the incoming tries would be allowed, would be easy to add.
This way, you could turn on sshd remotely when you needed to, and leave it off on other times. It's simple enough that I could write it without needing anything more than an MD5 library, and I could run it on my Palm Pilot.
That said, there are a few posts in this thread that say that NCO is a collection agency, in which case just pay up.
On the other hand, considering the number of identity-theft discussions on this forum, why just assume that the debt in question (if there is one) is actually their responsibility?
Mind you, an Orion launched from orbit, outside the Van Allen belts, would pose essentially no risk to the inhabitants of Earth, and is fairly cheap and well-studied. The best description of it is in Project Orion by George Dyson, Freeman Dyson's son. A fascinating read.
My girlfriend actually bought Max Payne, but because of the copy protection, it REFUSED to work on either her DVD Drive or burner.
I've had similar problems. I actually buy games (not necessarily the instant they come out, but I pay money for them). I have a DVD drive and a CDRW. I have had games that were a massive pain to install, or that just refused to run if the drive was not a plain vanilla CD-ROM drive.
More than that, I've actually damaged game CDs by accident. But the game manufacturers won't let me back them up. A few offer to exchange broken media for fresh ones, but those are limited-time offers usually, and even then it costs more in postage than in blank media.
So now I get a game, and immediately hit www.gamecopyworld.com and hack the games, so that they (a) work, (b) load faster, and (c) let me keep the fragile CD safely in storage.
I'm damn close to springing for a DVD writer and doing the same to my DVDs. I've already lost a couple to my three-year-old, and I've never heard of anyone willing to exchange damaged media for fresh ones. If I can't do that with audio media, I'll resort to the hacks there too.
Well, I don't know about patenting, but there's been hardware and software to do tilt sensing on a Palm for a while. Sure, it's not exactly common, but it's out there. There's even a game or two that use it.
Now people usually separate sci-fi into "hard" and "soft" to make this distinction, because they don't want to lump sci-fi and fantasy together. This seems to me to be a pointless form of elitism.
Nah, it's pretty easy to make consistent definitions. "Hard" SF works from known scientific principles, and doesn't contradict any currently-known physics. Any speculations are firmly within the realm of the possible. Most of Robert Forward's work is like this. Sure, it's odd to think of life in the thin layer of dense matter on the surface of a neutron star, but it's not a priori impossible.
"Soft" sci-fi is willing to bend the known rules of physics, but at least tries to be consistent. You pick the way the faster-than-light drive works, and then try to make the society, battle techniques, and economics consistent with that.
Fantasy doesn't bother explaining the magic, or even try to be consistent about it.
Yes, there are borderline cases; there are in all systems of categorization. But these definitions serve me pretty well.
You still need a scientificaly plausible explenation for it if you want to use in the movie.
Not necessarily. You need the treatment to be consistent, unless you insist that blueprints for how to build the spaceships in a movie be handed out afterward. For example, you could make a decent movie around "Flubber"; the original short story it was based on had rubber that violated the 2nd law of thermodynamics, changing heat into kinetic energy.
Now, we know of no conceivable way this could happen. It's something that I'd say is nearly certain to be impossible on any macroscopic level. But it'd be interesting if it were possible, and you could tell a good, entertaining story about it. Allow one impossible thing, but let other things be consistent.
Of course, my three-year-old enjoyed Flubber, but the substance in that movie has no consistent properties; it's just magic stuff that does whatever the screenwriters feel like having it do in that scene.
Don't let an alien computer be compatible with Earth-created software to the level of gladly running viruses. At least, not without giving a plausible explanation for this.
Well, they "kinda sorta" explained this. The head scientist said at one point they knew "tons" about the aliens' technology. They might have been able to figure out how to access the script interpreter.
But it would have been nice to see that laptop plugged into an obviously jury-rigged, half-human half-alien "interface unit". Bonus points for them showing that interface unit plugged into the machines in the hangar where the spaceship is stored when the ship is first shown, implying they've been working on it for a while.
But these days it's very rare that any movie even tries to help you suspend that disbelief. Like "Signs". I doubt I'm spoiling anyone's fun at this point by revealing that the aliens are deathly vulnerable to water.
And they are invading a planet that's mostly covered in water.
Without wearing any protective gear.
Now, maybe if we were utterly desperate, we'd consider invading a planet mostly covered in hydrochloric acid. But if we were that desperate, we wouldn't just give up and go away as soon as the natives figured out that we didn't like the stuff. For us to consider such a planet, our survival would have to be at stake, and we'd probably fight to the last.
I know the whole movie is a setup for the payoff moment at the end, where Gibson's character rediscovers his faith. But I can think of ten different substances besides water that could be poisonous to the aliens and give the same payoff. E.g. chocolate, caffiene, alcohol, aspartame, non-dairy creamer, etc. etc. etc.
At the end of the movie, Arnie and the generic love interest end up out on the Martian surface without suits, gasping, their eyes bulging like tennis balls, and the "airmaker" gets going, venting out precious oxygen. A wave of wind washes over them, and suddenly they're back to normal, no worse for the wear. The "wind wave" slams into the colony and windows explode inward.
Okay, first off, if your skin and eyes are stretched like that, you would have serious damage to contend with. Just to make some sort of nod toward this, they might have shown them with bruises and bloodshot eyes, but no...
Second, as presented, there's no way that air machine could have created a breatheable atmosphere in the time shown. At the rough rate of production shown, it'd be hours before a noticeable air pressure had built up.
But you could even save this scene. Imagine the scene exactly as presented, except suddenly, around the mountain, some shimmering globe of energy forms, trapping the air. As more air comes in, it expands, maintaining a constant pressure. This would save our heroes (well, except for the eyes-the-size-of-tennis-balls thing) and you
could have a neat effect of the globe expanding, sweeping past windows that blow in sequentially as the 'force-field' passed by.
Sure, we don't know how such a 'force-field' could possibly work, but aliens can get away with a certain amount of magic. For a science fiction movie done right, see The Abyss. All the human tech is plausible or at least not inconceivable. Sure, the aliens do magic things, but hey, they're supposed to be more advanced than us.
YOU DO NOT CODE THE CF BY HAND. YOU DO NOT EVEN TOUCH THE CF! The Sendmail gurus have been saying this for years and there is NO excuse for not heeding their warnings. You use the M4 macros to build your CF.
If your config language is Turing-complete, and needs a parsing tool to be useful even to "gurus", something is very, very wrong.
This doesn't just affect games. This kind of limitation means you can't write generic apps that let a Palm reliably serve any kind of information. (Imagine a PDA that could be queried for location on a building's WiFi net, or accept emails, or whatever.)
WindowsCE and such can do this stuff, but it's not terribly efficient, and the Windows API is, IMHO, aesthetically displeasing. Linux is (or can be) small, robust, royalty-free, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
There are plenty of filesystems, even Linux ones, that don't like files bigger than 2GB. It'll be a while before we have to worry about 8,500,000,000GB files.
Not to mention the simple fact that addressing those kinds of big files, and working on them, is vastly easier and more efficient at 64 bits.
How about digital video? People already are running into a 2GB file size barrier. Yes, you can work around this up to 4GB on a 32-bit system, but if you want to avoid PAE or crap like that you need 64 bits. More people will be working on their home movies and such, and 2GB is about 20 minutes using DV codecs.
Less-lossy codecs will become popular as storage and CPU horsepower improves. DV is 720x480. What if you want full HDTV 1080p? Lot less than 20 minutes in 2GB then...
Why would they have to die, too? Why would a hypothetical imortality treatment only apply to one person? Oh, sure, if it's based on some magic fountain deep in the Florida swamps there might not be enough water to go around, but something based on science is, by definition, reproducible...
Real immortatlity is going to require active, artificial repair and maintenance systems.
Tell you what. After I've stood on an airless planetoid in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, and watched the Milky Way rise over its horizon, then you can ask me if I've seen everything worth seeing.
The root behind all this would be that since you've lived for centuries/millenia, your understanding of human behaviour would be sufficiently mature to dull the curiousity related to the fruits of human creativity.
So, a citizen of the Roman Empire circa 0 A.D. wouldn't be a bit surprised at the world of 2003? In any sphere; not just science, but art, politics, culture, etc.?
Just because you can't imagine that genuinely new things will come up...
I note that article appears to date from before September 2001. It'd be interesting to see if that works now...
By reading a known, fixed amount of data, it can't get a buffer overflow. Aside from the rate of incoming connections, that data's the only thing an attacker can control, and the only thing that data is used for is to compare with an internally-generated hash. Even if I write in C, I can use strncmp() for the compare. :-)
I believe that sshd, even after those two recent holes, is much more secure than any new code you might write now.
But the proposed program is attempting a much less complex job.
Don't panic - upgrade sshd every time a hole is found, it's not that often compared to most other software.
I don't want to be rooted when that does happen, though. I don't want to have to frantically rush to install a new update when such a problem is found, too. If I'm on vacation, I'm content to let it wait until I get back. If sshd isn't running, I can do that.
Ooops, I knew I forgot something. I thought of that, you also add the number of successful connections that day before the hash, or other salting. Basically, you make sure the same token can't be used during that window. Throttle the number of incoming connections and the likelihood of guessing the correct key for the window can be made arbitrarily small.
why not talk using symmetric cryptography straight away, use some proven to be solid cipher, add some salt/nonce, and quickly handshake new keys if needed and it's bomb secure.
That'd certainly work, but I'm also trying for something that'll work with reasonable speed on a 16MHz 68K processor (Palm IIIxe).
Naturally your implementation may fail, but that's why you might concider using cipe or openvpn to do it for you.
Another reason for simple & stupid. :->
Obviously, the person contacting the machine has to know the secret password, and also what port the sshd is going to be started on. This seems so simple and stupid that it'd be darn near impossible to have a buffer overflow, and while it could be subject to denial-of-service attacks, few things aren't.
Extensions like a 'kill' password that'd turn off this 'sshd-kicker', and a timer that'd kill the sshd if no one connected within a set period, and a limit to how fast the incoming tries would be allowed, would be easy to add.
This way, you could turn on sshd remotely when you needed to, and leave it off on other times. It's simple enough that I could write it without needing anything more than an MD5 library, and I could run it on my Palm Pilot.
On the other hand, considering the number of identity-theft discussions on this forum, why just assume that the debt in question (if there is one) is actually their responsibility?
Well, there's at least one other possibility.
Mind you, an Orion launched from orbit, outside the Van Allen belts, would pose essentially no risk to the inhabitants of Earth, and is fairly cheap and well-studied. The best description of it is in Project Orion by George Dyson, Freeman Dyson's son. A fascinating read.
I've had similar problems. I actually buy games (not necessarily the instant they come out, but I pay money for them). I have a DVD drive and a CDRW. I have had games that were a massive pain to install, or that just refused to run if the drive was not a plain vanilla CD-ROM drive.
More than that, I've actually damaged game CDs by accident. But the game manufacturers won't let me back them up. A few offer to exchange broken media for fresh ones, but those are limited-time offers usually, and even then it costs more in postage than in blank media.
So now I get a game, and immediately hit www.gamecopyworld.com and hack the games, so that they (a) work, (b) load faster, and (c) let me keep the fragile CD safely in storage.
I'm damn close to springing for a DVD writer and doing the same to my DVDs. I've already lost a couple to my three-year-old, and I've never heard of anyone willing to exchange damaged media for fresh ones. If I can't do that with audio media, I'll resort to the hacks there too.
"Fox News: Utterly Without Merit"
...that was mentioned on Slashdot.
Well, I don't know about patenting, but there's been hardware and software to do tilt sensing on a Palm for a while. Sure, it's not exactly common, but it's out there. There's even a game or two that use it.
For example:
- a typedef name was a complete surprise to me at this point in your program
- Can't cast a void type to type void (because the ANSI spec. says so, that's why)
- can't go mucking with a 'void *'
Plenty more goodies! Somebody had some fun writing those error messages...No kidding. It's already established that the aliens have radio, from the baby-monitor scene. Why not plant small, inconspicuous radio beacons?
(BTW, if 'aliens' are so magically powerful, how come you never see forest circles? Or rock circles? Or building circles?)
Nah, it's pretty easy to make consistent definitions. "Hard" SF works from known scientific principles, and doesn't contradict any currently-known physics. Any speculations are firmly within the realm of the possible. Most of Robert Forward's work is like this. Sure, it's odd to think of life in the thin layer of dense matter on the surface of a neutron star, but it's not a priori impossible.
"Soft" sci-fi is willing to bend the known rules of physics, but at least tries to be consistent. You pick the way the faster-than-light drive works, and then try to make the society, battle techniques, and economics consistent with that.
Fantasy doesn't bother explaining the magic, or even try to be consistent about it.
Yes, there are borderline cases; there are in all systems of categorization. But these definitions serve me pretty well.
Not necessarily. You need the treatment to be consistent, unless you insist that blueprints for how to build the spaceships in a movie be handed out afterward. For example, you could make a decent movie around "Flubber"; the original short story it was based on had rubber that violated the 2nd law of thermodynamics, changing heat into kinetic energy.
Now, we know of no conceivable way this could happen. It's something that I'd say is nearly certain to be impossible on any macroscopic level. But it'd be interesting if it were possible, and you could tell a good, entertaining story about it. Allow one impossible thing, but let other things be consistent.
Of course, my three-year-old enjoyed Flubber, but the substance in that movie has no consistent properties; it's just magic stuff that does whatever the screenwriters feel like having it do in that scene.
Well, they "kinda sorta" explained this. The head scientist said at one point they knew "tons" about the aliens' technology. They might have been able to figure out how to access the script interpreter.
But it would have been nice to see that laptop plugged into an obviously jury-rigged, half-human half-alien "interface unit". Bonus points for them showing that interface unit plugged into the machines in the hangar where the spaceship is stored when the ship is first shown, implying they've been working on it for a while.
And they are invading a planet that's mostly covered in water.
Without wearing any protective gear.
Now, maybe if we were utterly desperate, we'd consider invading a planet mostly covered in hydrochloric acid. But if we were that desperate, we wouldn't just give up and go away as soon as the natives figured out that we didn't like the stuff. For us to consider such a planet, our survival would have to be at stake, and we'd probably fight to the last.
I know the whole movie is a setup for the payoff moment at the end, where Gibson's character rediscovers his faith. But I can think of ten different substances besides water that could be poisonous to the aliens and give the same payoff. E.g. chocolate, caffiene, alcohol, aspartame, non-dairy creamer, etc. etc. etc.
At the end of the movie, Arnie and the generic love interest end up out on the Martian surface without suits, gasping, their eyes bulging like tennis balls, and the "airmaker" gets going, venting out precious oxygen. A wave of wind washes over them, and suddenly they're back to normal, no worse for the wear. The "wind wave" slams into the colony and windows explode inward.
Okay, first off, if your skin and eyes are stretched like that, you would have serious damage to contend with. Just to make some sort of nod toward this, they might have shown them with bruises and bloodshot eyes, but no...
Second, as presented, there's no way that air machine could have created a breatheable atmosphere in the time shown. At the rough rate of production shown, it'd be hours before a noticeable air pressure had built up.
But you could even save this scene. Imagine the scene exactly as presented, except suddenly, around the mountain, some shimmering globe of energy forms, trapping the air. As more air comes in, it expands, maintaining a constant pressure. This would save our heroes (well, except for the eyes-the-size-of-tennis-balls thing) and you could have a neat effect of the globe expanding, sweeping past windows that blow in sequentially as the 'force-field' passed by.
Sure, we don't know how such a 'force-field' could possibly work, but aliens can get away with a certain amount of magic. For a science fiction movie done right, see The Abyss. All the human tech is plausible or at least not inconceivable. Sure, the aliens do magic things, but hey, they're supposed to be more advanced than us.
If your config language is Turing-complete, and needs a parsing tool to be useful even to "gurus", something is very, very wrong.
I was looking into making a networked game for Palms. The OS just isn't designed for servers, or background tasks, or anything like that. A few simple tweaks would go a long way to providing that, but even then "it just isn't possible to write a robust server app using PalmOS".
This doesn't just affect games. This kind of limitation means you can't write generic apps that let a Palm reliably serve any kind of information. (Imagine a PDA that could be queried for location on a building's WiFi net, or accept emails, or whatever.)
WindowsCE and such can do this stuff, but it's not terribly efficient, and the Windows API is, IMHO, aesthetically displeasing. Linux is (or can be) small, robust, royalty-free, etc.