I couldn't bring myself to read more than half of this, as the author seems grossly misinformed on Copyright, but the bit about paying money to private registries sounds a bit worrying. Does anyone know more about this?
The builders of the world's biggest particle collider are being sued in federal court over fears that the experiment might create globe-gobbling black holes or never-before-seen strains of matter that would destroy the planet.
"What happened was that Intel were on the the board of OLPC (a non-profit organisation) whilst at the same time trying to undermine done deals made by OLPC"
I've been complaining about the name for a while now.
The purpose of the project is to change the learning model of disadvantaged children via novel purpose-built and Free software and revolutionary hardware (mesh computing, heaps of work done on the power side of things).
So then they call it "one laptop per child" and the tech media starts comparing it to PC laptops that people use for entirely different purposes. The casual observer / tech writer goes "laptops... like word processing and games and stuff? 3rd world children don't need that, they need food and infrastructure!".
Also it's been tagged "the $100 laptop", which once again causes people to compare it to consumer laptops and start whining when the price estimate changes.
So yeah - almost all of the writing I read about this wonderful technology Completely Misses The Point, stemming from a terrible choice of name.
If you take away copyright as an automatic right, then don't you get something like the patent system, where big companies can afford to legally restrict usage of things, but everyone else can't?
"Now the real project can get the credit it deserves. I hate it when people steal credit. It was so annoying to read interviews where it was claimed that behind openMosix are years of research, when all this research was actually behind MOSIX."
It's frightening how many people replying on this thread seem to have zero idea of what advances the OLPC people have been making with their hardware and software.
Maybe it's a consequence o the name of the project... are people just reading that and going "oh... laptops" instead of spending 30 seconds finding out that these machines are revolutionary?
"From a quick look at the strings in the lib, they use opengl, but import only very, very basic functions... just a hello world d3d10 implementation which doesn't do much more than return D3D_OK on CreateDeviceAndSwapchain"
Totally. If they go "foobar.c violates one of our patents", how do you know what abstract concepts from what patents are allegedly protected? Gah. They could pull an SCO and point to some random collection of files and go "there you go - those are in violation of our intehlectual propertiiies".
It's easier for the end user to have something that gives them most or all of what they need out of the box, rather than forcing them to scour around for the packages they need to get their job done.
The Windows way seems to be to start with Microsoft's approved libraries and build a big application from scratch.
Me, I would have thought 'wget', 'gzip' and 'mail' scheduled to run periodically would do the job. And without any "run arbitrary applications" stuff either
"It is impossible to develop a framework such as GStreamer in isolation as there are always usecases and trouble areas that get lost or design decisions who seem clever from the framework point of view but which is a complete fuck up from the application developers point of view. This is a big part of the reason why GStreamer have taken so long to get to where it is today."
And it has it's share of jerks, but it really illustrates what a Debian-like release cycle this has been.
You mean they're ensuring strict adherence to policies on Free Software whilst continuously fixing bugs on 11 different architectures and adding new software with complex interdependencies and retaining backwards compatibility and easy upgradability? Great!
I don't think it's ever going to be "released" as such... just keep up to date with current CVS. The guys are constantly experimenting with things and there's no target that I can see.
Why bother just tinkering with kernel modules when you can just replace the whole kit-n-kaboodle?
Because it's damn hard! Nobody here seems to realise that the point of this paper is (I'm guessing) that there's yet another neat way to code up an exploit "without depending on the sys_call_table[]" - it's in the damn title.
If you know anything about the topic, which I guess most people who've commented don't, then it's near trivial for an attacker to write code to do unauthorised stuff if they have the address of the symbol sys_call_table, but that's been removed to make life harded for shellcoders.
And "having root" doesn't mean an attacker sits down at an xterm with a root account, it might mean that he can remotely trick some system service into running 24 bytes of instructions as root or something. So stop being so dismissive of this sort of research.
For programmers its simple to put into words - if you have programmed a function to resample colour images and now you need a function to resample black and white images, just use the colour image function.
Simple to put into words. And obviously incorrect, if you know anything about perceptual colour theory:)
Slashdot Mirror
http://mag.awn.com/index.php?ltype=pageone&article_no=3605
I couldn't bring myself to read more than half of this, as the author seems grossly misinformed on Copyright, but the bit about paying money to private registries sounds a bit worrying. Does anyone know more about this?
The builders of the world's biggest particle collider are being sued in federal court over fears that the experiment might create globe-gobbling black holes or never-before-seen strains of matter that would destroy the planet.
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/03/27/823924.aspx
"What happened was that Intel were on the the board of OLPC (a
non-profit organisation) whilst at the same time trying to undermine
done deals made by OLPC"
http://openskills.blogspot.com/2008/01/intel-does-dirty-to-olpc.html
I've been complaining about the name for a while now.
The purpose of the project is to change the learning model of disadvantaged children via novel purpose-built and Free software and revolutionary hardware (mesh computing, heaps of work done on the power side of things).
So then they call it "one laptop per child" and the tech media starts comparing it to PC laptops that people use for entirely different purposes. The casual observer / tech writer goes "laptops... like word processing and games and stuff? 3rd world children don't need that, they need food and infrastructure!".
Also it's been tagged "the $100 laptop", which once again causes people to compare it to consumer laptops and start whining when the price estimate changes.
So yeah - almost all of the writing I read about this wonderful technology Completely Misses The Point, stemming from a terrible choice of name.
I scanned that as "and fought abstract non-national enemies like CORBA" and even though my mind registered the mistake, i thought "Oh yeah!"
If you take away copyright as an automatic right, then don't you get something like the patent system, where big companies can afford to legally restrict usage of things, but everyone else can't?
And who is aiding and comforting him?
o w-three-generations-of-america-to-the-rescue/
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/08/23/daily-sh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_nutricula
"Turritopsis nutricula is a hydrozoan (jellyfish) with a life cycle in which it reverts back to the polyp stage after becoming sexually mature."
As usual, people are posting replies without any clue about the actual situation (or at least the claims of important people involved)
See http://mulix.livejournal.com/199931.html
"Now the real project can get the credit it deserves. I hate it when people steal credit. It was so annoying to read interviews where it was claimed that behind openMosix are years of research, when all this research was actually behind MOSIX."
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000818.h tml
Slashdot... where you can get +4 informative for reading the linked article :)
eg.
t ml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patent
http://www.ipaustralia.gov.au/designs/benefits.sh
Not sure how this applies to ads. IANAL.
Nick
It's frightening how many people replying on this thread seem to have zero idea of what advances the OLPC people have been making with their hardware and software.
Maybe it's a consequence o the name of the project... are people just reading that and going "oh... laptops" instead of spending 30 seconds finding out that these machines are revolutionary?
Do you mean "It's got the touch"? (http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZymYbG9YUZw)
http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2007-Ap ril/056237.html
... just a hello world d3d10 implementation which doesn't do much more than return D3D_OK on CreateDeviceAndSwapchain"
"From a quick look at the strings in the lib, they use opengl, but import only very, very basic
functions
Totally. If they go "foobar.c violates one of our patents", how do you know what abstract concepts from what patents are allegedly protected? Gah. They could pull an SCO and point to some random collection of files and go "there you go - those are in violation of our intehlectual propertiiies".
Isn't this what metapackages are for?
http://packages.debian.org/testing/gnome/gnome-de
The Windows way seems to be to start with Microsoft's approved libraries and build a big application from scratch.
Me, I would have thought 'wget', 'gzip' and 'mail' scheduled to run periodically would do the job. And without any "run arbitrary applications" stuff either
"It is impossible to develop a framework such as GStreamer in isolation as there are always usecases and trouble areas that get lost or design decisions who seem clever from the framework point of view but which is a complete fuck up from the application developers point of view. This is a big part of the reason why GStreamer have taken so long to get to where it is today."
http://blogs.gnome.org/view/uraeus/2006/12/08/0
I don't think you have much insight into the process of making standards nowadays. Do you think the companies involved are charities?
You mean they're ensuring strict adherence to policies on Free Software whilst continuously fixing bugs on 11 different architectures and adding new software with complex interdependencies and retaining backwards compatibility and easy upgradability? Great!
I don't think it's ever going to be "released" as such... just keep up to date with current CVS. The guys are constantly experimenting with things and there's no target that I can see.
Great! Where are your bug reports?
Because it's damn hard! Nobody here seems to realise that the point of this paper is (I'm guessing) that there's yet another neat way to code up an exploit "without depending on the sys_call_table[]" - it's in the damn title.
If you know anything about the topic, which I guess most people who've commented don't, then it's near trivial for an attacker to write code to do unauthorised stuff if they have the address of the symbol sys_call_table, but that's been removed to make life harded for shellcoders.
And "having root" doesn't mean an attacker sits down at an xterm with a root account, it might mean that he can remotely trick some system service into running 24 bytes of instructions as root or something. So stop being so dismissive of this sort of research.
Simple to put into words. And obviously incorrect, if you know anything about perceptual colour theory