Well, they have a message area don't they? Then you have your web server log, your database server log.... they all need to go somewhere sometime.
I'm surprised they're running on just one hard drive, I'd thought a 3 drive RAID-5 would be the minimum you'd need for a server, especially since they're running a database on it.
Last time I saw there was this Epson one that does A3 format, using some ink that supposedly will not fade for a hundred years or so.... although by the sound of it the ink is special (another word for expensive). Probably not a bad way to do colour stuff, much healthier than playing with Cibachrome in a darkroom I suppose.
I agree that digital photography is still at the same level of quality/accessibility as plain old film. But I don't think you need to compare the quality of digital camera to tech pan - I load my Mamiya TLR with the cheapest 400 B/W film and the result is still way ahead of you standard digital camera, and will be for a good few years. Good luck getting that animal to stay still for tech pan:)
And the bonus is those old mechanical cameras can be used anywhere, without any battery. Whereas a digital camera is a battery hog.
However when it comes to printing - inkjet printer outputs are/will beat photographic prints in terms of durability simply because you're spraying micro dots of pigment instead of going through multiple washes of chemicals.
Digital photography will put the nail into the coffin for film when a standard memory card will hold a few hundred shots, saving the photo to it will take microseconds. The camera battery will last a few hundred shots at least and can be recharged with a built-in solar panel like a pocket calculator. And photo paper and inkjet carttridge are cheap enough that we can afford to print as many as we want. Perhaps someone will invent a method of using laser to create high resolution transparencies on some special plastic that will last hundreds of years. And something the equivalent of a Canon D30 cheap enough that I don't need to sell an organ or two. And we keep thousands of copies of technical document on how CDR and things work on paper..... just in case!
Right now film/scan/inkjet printout is probably the best "computer" way of doing things.
the problem with that is you will end up with a time scale problem..... realtime battles (say 3d shoot-em-up, flight sim) will have to occur in.....well, realtime. which means the people doing the upper level strategic decisions will be spending most of their time doing nothing. I suppose one way to solve this is to have perhaps "key" battles played out by people in real time and use the outcome to scale the computer simulated engagements.
Another potential problem I can see is the frustration when your lowly soldiers just fought the most amazingly hard engagement and yet the battle may have absolutely no effect on the large scale..... Okay that's what happens in real life but surely the whole point of computer games is to provide a respite from real life?
We want new Supra and maybe a MR2 beefed-up with a turbo/supercharger, and a 4WD Turbo Celica damnit!
If I'm contributing to the doom of humanity by burning up dead dinosaurs at least let me do it in a nice sports car instead of those overweight SUV's...
Leeching MP3s and warez off each other happen pretty frequently in the LAN parties I've been to. And everytime some nitwit decided to start their copying right in the middle of some intense Quake CTF.....
Isn't that the most common excuse when someone start losing badly - "My mouse isn't working properly!":)
We used to have a few quick rounds of Doom every time at the beginning while someone inevitably take a while to set up their computer. Until we started having them at work and play Unreal Tournament instead.
The major problem I find with optical mice is that because of the lack of a ball they tend to have virtually no traction. I suppose you'll get used to that lightness after while but it just feels odd.
One possible explanation for the declining sale
on
Why Can't LEGO Click?
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· Score: 1
Maybe the reason for the declining popularity of Lego is the fact it's such a good toy and made of nice, durable plastic. I doubt anyone with a sizable collection of Lego will ever even consider throwing them away. Once you have handed over your crate full of Lego pieces there isn't much of a need of buying new ones.
The thing is most OS come shipped with too many options for the average user: The reality is most people buy a full scale PC because they have this delusion that they can utilise the full capability and flexibility of it (when they clearly are unable to do so).
However making security transparent to the user is also pretty bad: in most Windows software they do this by just getting everything running at system privilege (I haven't really come across anything that does otherwise - usually you run the setup program, at the end you reboot and next time the software is up and running automatically as system). Of course you can have installers that create user/groups but then the issue is how can you be sure those newly created accounts won't be used, and when the use have no knowledge of how many accounts there are in the system the situation isn't all the pretty either.
I'm always of the opinion that OS X is going to end up one of the most cracked OS of all times, simply because the target users won't have the slightest clue what is happening to their computer. The same thing can be said for Windows XP. And if MS keep bundling HTTP/FTP/SMTP servers up and running by default just like Windows 2000 a lot of people will have plenty of fun.
Actually perhaps the thing to do is to encourage all the script kiddies to hack all the Windows machine they can find, not just defacing web pages, but doing some serious damage like copying the SQL database info and send it off to the victim's competitors, then alter the data just enough to do damage but not bad enough to be noticed immediately - and after that data has been used for another few months..... well..:)
And after enough businesses are ruined because of all the user-friendly features of Windows perhaps people will start thinking of a more secure OS.
Last rant: idea for a nice virus: after infecting an NT box, watch of access of.doc,.xls type files, then overwrite a few frequently accessed one with some trojans - could be quite useful hitting NT boxes also running as file servers, and infect all the 9x clients.
Re:"Impossible to drive" says the article
on
BYO Battlebot
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· Score: 1
I reckon whoever get around to putting a video camera onto their robot would have no problem out manouevring their opponents - having a first-person viewpoint means you can really start controlling your robot reflexively.
Outsourcing production to Taiwanese companies is definitely a nice way to bring the price of the PS2 boxes down.
Paranoid scenario #1:
Maybe the real reason the US government is doing this is to give Microsoft an advantage competing against Sony.... giving their own corporations a helping hand against foreign companies sure ain't a new thing.
Time to harass your local US embassy/consulate and demand that they subsidise you buying a PS2.
If you put air filters over the computer case fans (on the outside) it helps to reduce the fan noise. The main problem of noise is mostly to do with the gaps and holes on a computer case. Covering all the expansion slot backpane helps. Having a case with plastic cover instead of sheetmetal helps. Vibrations noises can usually be eliminated with blu-tack. Putting the case under the desk instead of on it definitely helps:)
Chances are the people who make the Flash content don't know the slightest bit of programming, or just get by copying and pasting code. It doesn't help that all those getMovie and getVariable requests are asynchronous and you end up with this empty movie loaded to the eyeball with code to check for the arrival of your data and movies.
It's asking a utter novice to jump straight to multi-threaded programming (albeit a much simpler version, but still). Made worse by the fact that most of the who make Flash aren't and never will be programmer material. And the entire user interface of the software is about as clunky as it can get - especially the ActionScript editor.
I certainly wouldn't mind a bit less reliance on playing Where's Waldo with the mouse hunting for the right floating window and be given an AutoCAD style text input box to enter commands. But somehow I don't see that happening.
CRT monitors are such commodity items that there isn't that much money to be made, and the quality difference between an expensive one and cheap one is a great deal less than it used to be. But the problem with LCD is last time I looked at one (a few days ago at a Sony showroom) they still suck compared to CRT, and I assume color calibration would be a big problem as well. So whether people who need accurate color matching will be happy with the move is a big question.
I think Apple monitors use Sony tubes (used to anyway...) which is one reason they're expensive (not that I think their prices are justified).
I think LCD is still at the toy stage - I'll stick with CRT for everyday use for a long time unless somehow they drastically improve the resolution and the refresh rate.
That is only if things are running properly.... I assume the big deal about the bug is that it breaks IIS before it has the chance to change to the IWAP_machinename, so the buffer overflow exploit gets executed as system. If I'm wrong let me know...
The whole problem would no nowhere as bad if IIS isn't running as system. This is definitely a fault of Microsoft because it wanted things to be nice and easy integrating the NT security with IIS. I can't remember any Linux/BSD distribution installing Apache as root. On NT/Win2000 every service and its dogs run as system, and any of them having a buffer overflow bug would leave the entire system open to sack and pillage.
It needs to be said that there are equivalent stuff on Linux: Most distributions have a BIND package that runs as root, WU-FTPD as well...
I would seriously doubt the firewall "solution" included would be of much use if they do not have the a system admin capable of properly securing a Windows NT/2000 box. (Plus there is already a flaw discovered with that ISA product http://www.securityfocus.com/vdb/bottom.html?vid=2 600, heck knows how many will be discovered in the future)
An SMTP server is pretty much a default on any Linux system (Sendmail/Qmail), an IMAP server would be definitely useful though.
MS SQL is definitely not low-maintenance software. I can imagine what kind of disaster some badly written ASP code in Frontpage by an using sa privileges on SQL can do...
You CANNOT get away from having a competant system admin - I had to recently deal with a company running some core business software on Interbase. One day the database crashed and when I asked for a backup the sysadmin (if you can call the monkey that) gave me an Windows 2000 backup file, which contained all the files but the database file (because Interbase must have had it in some exclusive access mode or something while running and when I mentioned that you need to either stop the DB or do a online backup using th DB admin software, the guy didn't have a clue what I was talking about...). So there has been no effective backup of the DB for months. I can imagine these small businesses using the MS software finding out the same thing if they think copying the database file for MS SQL will give them a backup:)
But just think... all those shinny new boxes with SQL running ready to be hijacked for other purposes...
Of the top of my head I can think of about a dozen or so software that will apply a checksum to a file (regardless whether a browser will render it badly or not)... Transfer protocols like ZModel should certainly qualify as prior art?
Even if a modern CPU can task switch faster, wouldn't the much higher difference between CPU and memory speed as we see today make task switch even worse?
The thing is you will not be a happy user you have a buggy device driver for video/disk/network no matter what kind of kernel you're using. So does it really matter if a device driver can bring down the kernel?
I'm pretty sure something like this must have been mentioned by someone before, but still:
How feasible is it to build a database engine with SQL support into an OS kernel? Are there any brave souls somewhere attempting this? A lot of the features of a multi-tasking OS can be used without having to redo the same thing again at the application level. Some things like the scheduler would need to be seriously augmented maybe?
With your average database servers running pretty much just the database itself hogging all the resources the OS is kind of just there to provide hardware abstraction isn't it.
I think online multiplayer turn based games will need to use the x turns per day way of playing like the old BBS games. But in a LAN game, there is no problem - just have a rule that everybody do the massive micromanagement stuff at the same time. e.g. in Master of Orion II we make sure everyone design ships in the same turn. Usually a game can be finished in about 4 to 5 hours because you don't need to completely annhiliate the enemy to win, any conclusive swing of balance would be sufficient, expecially with the more advanced techs. Also the spare time while waiting for someone to finish their turn can be filled up by some mp3 copying:)
The problem is in most real-time strategy games your units have the mental capacity of some soft noodle. For example in Starcraft it'd be nice if the siege tanks don't all fire on the first incoming unit, almost all at the same time. have a way to set the firing pattern would make them a lot more useful. And yeah, in real life entrenched infantry is almost impervious to an infantry rush, as demonstrated in the millions of life lost in WWI trench warfare.
Yeah well, everyone is cautious in from of a door, but I wonder how most DM would react to the "we'll grease the hinges of the door, gentally push it open just a tiny bit and point the tip of the wand of fire into the gap and shoot a fireball into the room":)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, they have a message area don't they? Then you have your web server log, your database server log.... they all need to go somewhere sometime.
I'm surprised they're running on just one hard drive, I'd thought a 3 drive RAID-5 would be the minimum you'd need for a server, especially since they're running a database on it.
Last time I saw there was this Epson one that does A3 format, using some ink that supposedly will not fade for a hundred years or so.... although by the sound of it the ink is special (another word for expensive). Probably not a bad way to do colour stuff, much healthier than playing with Cibachrome in a darkroom I suppose.
I agree that digital photography is still at the same level of quality/accessibility as plain old film. But I don't think you need to compare the quality of digital camera to tech pan - I load my Mamiya TLR with the cheapest 400 B/W film and the result is still way ahead of you standard digital camera, and will be for a good few years. Good luck getting that animal to stay still for tech pan :)
And the bonus is those old mechanical cameras can be used anywhere, without any battery. Whereas a digital camera is a battery hog.
However when it comes to printing - inkjet printer outputs are/will beat photographic prints in terms of durability simply because you're spraying micro dots of pigment instead of going through multiple washes of chemicals.
Digital photography will put the nail into the coffin for film when a standard memory card will hold a few hundred shots, saving the photo to it will take microseconds. The camera battery will last a few hundred shots at least and can be recharged with a built-in solar panel like a pocket calculator. And photo paper and inkjet carttridge are cheap enough that we can afford to print as many as we want. Perhaps someone will invent a method of using laser to create high resolution transparencies on some special plastic that will last hundreds of years. And something the equivalent of a Canon D30 cheap enough that I don't need to sell an organ or two. And we keep thousands of copies of technical document on how CDR and things work on paper..... just in case!
Right now film/scan/inkjet printout is probably the best "computer" way of doing things.
the problem with that is you will end up with a time scale problem..... realtime battles (say 3d shoot-em-up, flight sim) will have to occur in.....well, realtime. which means the people doing the upper level strategic decisions will be spending most of their time doing nothing. I suppose one way to solve this is to have perhaps "key" battles played out by people in real time and use the outcome to scale the computer simulated engagements.
Another potential problem I can see is the frustration when your lowly soldiers just fought the most amazingly hard engagement and yet the battle may have absolutely no effect on the large scale..... Okay that's what happens in real life but surely the whole point of computer games is to provide a respite from real life?
But then, I like playing The Sims.....
We want new Supra and maybe a MR2 beefed-up with a turbo/supercharger, and a 4WD Turbo Celica damnit!
If I'm contributing to the doom of humanity by burning up dead dinosaurs at least let me do it in a nice sports car instead of those overweight SUV's...
Leeching MP3s and warez off each other happen pretty frequently in the LAN parties I've been to. And everytime some nitwit decided to start their copying right in the middle of some intense Quake CTF.....
Isn't that the most common excuse when someone start losing badly - "My mouse isn't working properly!" :)
We used to have a few quick rounds of Doom every time at the beginning while someone inevitably take a while to set up their computer. Until we started having them at work and play Unreal Tournament instead.
The major problem I find with optical mice is that because of the lack of a ball they tend to have virtually no traction. I suppose you'll get used to that lightness after while but it just feels odd.
Maybe the reason for the declining popularity of Lego is the fact it's such a good toy and made of nice, durable plastic. I doubt anyone with a sizable collection of Lego will ever even consider throwing them away. Once you have handed over your crate full of Lego pieces there isn't much of a need of buying new ones.
The thing is most OS come shipped with too many options for the average user: The reality is most people buy a full scale PC because they have this delusion that they can utilise the full capability and flexibility of it (when they clearly are unable to do so).
:)
.doc, .xls type files, then overwrite a few frequently accessed one with some trojans - could be quite useful hitting NT boxes also running as file servers, and infect all the 9x clients.
However making security transparent to the user is also pretty bad: in most Windows software they do this by just getting everything running at system privilege (I haven't really come across anything that does otherwise - usually you run the setup program, at the end you reboot and next time the software is up and running automatically as system). Of course you can have installers that create user/groups but then the issue is how can you be sure those newly created accounts won't be used, and when the use have no knowledge of how many accounts there are in the system the situation isn't all the pretty either.
I'm always of the opinion that OS X is going to end up one of the most cracked OS of all times, simply because the target users won't have the slightest clue what is happening to their computer. The same thing can be said for Windows XP. And if MS keep bundling HTTP/FTP/SMTP servers up and running by default just like Windows 2000 a lot of people will have plenty of fun.
Actually perhaps the thing to do is to encourage all the script kiddies to hack all the Windows machine they can find, not just defacing web pages, but doing some serious damage like copying the SQL database info and send it off to the victim's competitors, then alter the data just enough to do damage but not bad enough to be noticed immediately - and after that data has been used for another few months..... well..
And after enough businesses are ruined because of all the user-friendly features of Windows perhaps people will start thinking of a more secure OS.
Last rant: idea for a nice virus: after infecting an NT box, watch of access of
I reckon whoever get around to putting a video camera onto their robot would have no problem out manouevring their opponents - having a first-person viewpoint means you can really start controlling your robot reflexively.
Outsourcing production to Taiwanese companies is definitely a nice way to bring the price of the PS2 boxes down.
Paranoid scenario #1:
Maybe the real reason the US government is doing this is to give Microsoft an advantage competing against Sony.... giving their own corporations a helping hand against foreign companies sure ain't a new thing.
Time to harass your local US embassy/consulate and demand that they subsidise you buying a PS2.
What we really need, would be porn stars raised in Zero G environment. Just imagine: breasts untainted by the evil influence of gravity...
;)
Sorry, I know it's a bad bad bad sexist thing to say.... but it just has to be said
If you put air filters over the computer case fans (on the outside) it helps to reduce the fan noise. The main problem of noise is mostly to do with the gaps and holes on a computer case. Covering all the expansion slot backpane helps. Having a case with plastic cover instead of sheetmetal helps. Vibrations noises can usually be eliminated with blu-tack. Putting the case under the desk instead of on it definitely helps :)
Chances are the people who make the Flash content don't know the slightest bit of programming, or just get by copying and pasting code. It doesn't help that all those getMovie and getVariable requests are asynchronous and you end up with this empty movie loaded to the eyeball with code to check for the arrival of your data and movies.
It's asking a utter novice to jump straight to multi-threaded programming (albeit a much simpler version, but still). Made worse by the fact that most of the who make Flash aren't and never will be programmer material. And the entire user interface of the software is about as clunky as it can get - especially the ActionScript editor.
I certainly wouldn't mind a bit less reliance on playing Where's Waldo with the mouse hunting for the right floating window and be given an AutoCAD style text input box to enter commands. But somehow I don't see that happening.
CRT monitors are such commodity items that there isn't that much money to be made, and the quality difference between an expensive one and cheap one is a great deal less than it used to be. But the problem with LCD is last time I looked at one (a few days ago at a Sony showroom) they still suck compared to CRT, and I assume color calibration would be a big problem as well. So whether people who need accurate color matching will be happy with the move is a big question.
I think Apple monitors use Sony tubes (used to anyway...) which is one reason they're expensive (not that I think their prices are justified).
I think LCD is still at the toy stage - I'll stick with CRT for everyday use for a long time unless somehow they drastically improve the resolution and the refresh rate.
That is only if things are running properly.... I assume the big deal about the bug is that it breaks IIS before it has the chance to change to the IWAP_machinename, so the buffer overflow exploit gets executed as system. If I'm wrong let me know...
The whole problem would no nowhere as bad if IIS isn't running as system. This is definitely a fault of Microsoft because it wanted things to be nice and easy integrating the NT security with IIS. I can't remember any Linux/BSD distribution installing Apache as root. On NT/Win2000 every service and its dogs run as system, and any of them having a buffer overflow bug would leave the entire system open to sack and pillage.
It needs to be said that there are equivalent stuff on Linux: Most distributions have a BIND package that runs as root, WU-FTPD as well...
I would seriously doubt the firewall "solution" included would be of much use if they do not have the a system admin capable of properly securing a Windows NT/2000 box. (Plus there is already a flaw discovered with that ISA product http://www.securityfocus.com/vdb/bottom.html?vid=2 600, heck knows how many will be discovered in the future)
:)
An SMTP server is pretty much a default on any Linux system (Sendmail/Qmail), an IMAP server would be definitely useful though.
MS SQL is definitely not low-maintenance software. I can imagine what kind of disaster some badly written ASP code in Frontpage by an using sa privileges on SQL can do...
You CANNOT get away from having a competant system admin - I had to recently deal with a company running some core business software on Interbase. One day the database crashed and when I asked for a backup the sysadmin (if you can call the monkey that) gave me an Windows 2000 backup file, which contained all the files but the database file (because Interbase must have had it in some exclusive access mode or something while running and when I mentioned that you need to either stop the DB or do a online backup using th DB admin software, the guy didn't have a clue what I was talking about...). So there has been no effective backup of the DB for months. I can imagine these small businesses using the MS software finding out the same thing if they think copying the database file for MS SQL will give them a backup
But just think... all those shinny new boxes with SQL running ready to be hijacked for other purposes...
Of the top of my head I can think of about a dozen or so software that will apply a checksum to a file (regardless whether a browser will render it badly or not)... Transfer protocols like ZModel should certainly qualify as prior art?
Even if a modern CPU can task switch faster, wouldn't the much higher difference between CPU and memory speed as we see today make task switch even worse?
The thing is you will not be a happy user you have a buggy device driver for video/disk/network no matter what kind of kernel you're using. So does it really matter if a device driver can bring down the kernel?
I'm pretty sure something like this must have been mentioned by someone before, but still:
How feasible is it to build a database engine with SQL support into an OS kernel? Are there any brave souls somewhere attempting this? A lot of the features of a multi-tasking OS can be used without having to redo the same thing again at the application level. Some things like the scheduler would need to be seriously augmented maybe?
With your average database servers running pretty much just the database itself hogging all the resources the OS is kind of just there to provide hardware abstraction isn't it.
I think online multiplayer turn based games will need to use the x turns per day way of playing like the old BBS games. But in a LAN game, there is no problem - just have a rule that everybody do the massive micromanagement stuff at the same time. e.g. in Master of Orion II we make sure everyone design ships in the same turn. Usually a game can be finished in about 4 to 5 hours because you don't need to completely annhiliate the enemy to win, any conclusive swing of balance would be sufficient, expecially with the more advanced techs. Also the spare time while waiting for someone to finish their turn can be filled up by some mp3 copying :)
The problem is in most real-time strategy games your units have the mental capacity of some soft noodle. For example in Starcraft it'd be nice if the siege tanks don't all fire on the first incoming unit, almost all at the same time. have a way to set the firing pattern would make them a lot more useful. And yeah, in real life entrenched infantry is almost impervious to an infantry rush, as demonstrated in the millions of life lost in WWI trench warfare.
Yeah well, everyone is cautious in from of a door, but I wonder how most DM would react to the "we'll grease the hinges of the door, gentally push it open just a tiny bit and point the tip of the wand of fire into the gap and shoot a fireball into the room" :)