The little problem is that step 1 will go through just fine. On step 2 you'll find that:
1. MS holds most of the market, with the rest being filled with Linux and Apple 2. MS charges OEMs per computer sold, even if it doesn't carry Windows, so from an OEMs point, any alternative OS besides a free one is more expensive. 3. You'll need to write drivers for every device on the market, as vendors make them for Windows because they have to in order to sell their stuff, not because they're feeling nice. 4. In the event you manage to make something decent, it'll have vast interoperability problems, and will need years to get to where Linux is right now.
If those aren't barriers to entry (problems that stop you from even trying to enter the market), I don't know what they are. For an example of how well that will go, see BeOS.
The password being in the log is a TINY problem compared with what Windows has.
You can currently install Linux on a computer with a direct internet connection without problems. You can't do that with Windows. Patching it fully takes hours after installation and the average time before you get infected with something is about 30 minutes -- do the math.
I actually tried that with a friend. Gave up after 3 tries, and ended up bringing it to my home so that I could install it behind my Linux firewall.
The explanation is that it's too risky. They're great eagles, not exactly pigeons. And they're not just common eagles either. You can bet that Sauron would see them coming hours before they arrived, and the Nazgul would be all over them before they could cross the border to Mordor.
They could sneak in after the ring was melted because Sauron vanished in a puff of smoke, and everything remaining was in chaos and nobody gave a damn about the eagles anymore.
In theory, it's possible to recover data on a magnetic disk that was overwritten because if you look at it with more precision than the disk's hardware does, you can tell what was there before.
For example:
0 -> 1 (actual value 0.95) 1 -> 0 (actual value 0.05) 0 -> 1 -> 1 (actual value 0.97)
etc. The 7 times is the amount that is in theory needed to confuse things enough to make this method unworkable. Mind, it may be very well completely arbitrary as far as I know, and I have the feeling that looking at a modern 500GB disk this way would be very, very expensive.
This is only needed if you're worried about somebody spending a lot of cash on examining your disk's platters with very expensive hardware. One overwrite will do just fine against the people simply reading sectors on the disk.
Quality varies, but the Luskwood avatars are really good. I'd say that overall the graphics quality probably has a lot to do with it being so dynamic. You can't optimize it like Quake by manually tweaking until it's perfect and precalculating things.
Yes, there are malicious items, but in my experience, Linden Labs deals very swiftly with abusers. The client logs people who for instance push you, and allows to easily report abuse if it happens.
Why stupid? I spent more than that writing the code for mine. I must be somewhere about 1K lines right now. It's my first attempt though, so it's taking some time.
The $1 thing seems to be done by Amazon as well, at least they did it with me. I was quite surprised at first, but came to the conclusion that it must be some kind of test, as it was refunded.
I don't know why the furries scare you though. Luskwood seems to be full of geeks, it's great.
They work now. Nothing guarantees they'll continue working in Windows 2007 or whatever. MS can easily break say, something in ADO, and all the programs using it will be screwed.
Another pretty major thing is that there's no upgrade path. VB3 code worked with VB4, and so on until VB6. But not anymore. This is a deadend. Compare with C, invented in 1970 and compilers are still being developed. It works, so people happily continue using it.
This also means all 3rd party providers are switching to the new infrastructure, and since VB programming largely consists of stringing together 3rd party components, it means it's quite likely the programmer will run into a wall sooner or later.
No such thing as a migration from VB6 to.NET. VB.NET is simply.NET with a VB-like syntax. Anything at all larger than a few lines is best rewritten from the beginning.
IMO, it's pointless to try to convert a VB6 program to.NET, it'll end up being a lot more effort than just writing it from scratch.
This is the risk you take when coding using closed tools. There's no more support for VB6, and no real migration path.
Buy your music at allofmp3.com, then you will pay per album what you pay per song now, and you can get it directly in any format you want, no crap attached. With some luck, you can get them to encode it directly from the CD rip, otherwise it comes from a 320 kbps MP3 or something like that.
Assuming terrorists build a working nuclear device, why would they want to smuggle it into the country? Surely, detonating it near the coast would work just fine.
Well, that can be easily fixed. Just find some bored geeks, and get them to work.
Attach tiny computers to the pigeons and write a TCP stack for it, as well as some code to implement HTTP to submit the data to livejournal. Then implement IP over avian carriers (with QoS) to transport the data. And voila, blogging pigeons!
Re:For those of us who are unaware...
on
ReactOS Code Audit
·
· Score: 1
I don't understand, what's the problem?
So, they found code that looks suspiciously like it was decompiled and used that way? Don't they use source control? It's trivial to trace it back to the developers that added it and ban them from further participation.
I would say it sounds like an organization problem though. Why exactly is code that makes no sense getting added? This is easily solved by say, using a post-commit hook in SVN that mails diffs. Post that to the mailing list so that everybody can see and check whether it makes sense or not.
The things we're talking about are hardly heavily restricted. More to the point, the alternative isn't necessarily an unrestricted site; it could well be no site at all. This is the point a lot of people forget in their haste to tell us how information wants to be free, you can't stop distribution, etc: by default, only the author of the work has it. If society wants the author to share, it has to make it worth his while, or he'll simply keep it to himself and no-one will benefit under any circumstances.
This is a faulty argument. It assumes that the more control to the author, the more incentive to publish. But it isn't so. Copyleft effectively works around copyright and wouldn't be needed if copyright didn't exist, and some people wouldn't create content if it could be tracked back to them.
Would you still post anything on the Internet if anybody, your family, friends, employers, government, etc, could instantly find everything you did online? Imagine somebody being able to enter your name, and finding every post in every forum, a list of the sites you accessed, and all of it going back 10 years?
Or consider an alternative situation, where every bit of information has DRM attached, and I could at will make my posts vanish from the Internet when I found it convenient, restrict who can see them and when? Should I be able to now go and cancel my previous post, making you look like you're completely out of your mind arguing with nobody at all?
That's a discussion for another time, perhaps, but just consider how many crimes, from the somewhat irritating to the seriously damaging, are possible only because of the effective anonymity the Internet provides. Again, that's not to say that some don't benefit, but IMHO most of the benefits are illusory, while the damage from spam, viruses, phishing and on-line fraud, and countless other things is very real.
This is very debatable, but I don't think it's worth discussing. Mainly because for a long time I ran a Freenet node, so obviously I already considered all that, and didn't think it was a huge deal.
However: The current infrastructure makes spam perfectly possible to track, yet it didn't stop it, viruses don't work on my systems, and the existence of phishing has absolutely nothing to do with the anonymity of the *client*.
Huh? And using a heavily restricted site contributes to society how?
Take slashdot for instance. Is my contribution any greater because I have to jump through hoops to make this post (slashdot bans my ISP's anonymous proxy)? I sent quite a lot of mail about it already, but it all seems to go to the bit bucket.
In the end, I can still post, but as I can't remain logged in, I have to load each page twice, once for the page itself, the second time to change to nested mode.
But back ontopic. Why are they detrimental activities? Screen scraping allows me to gather the stuff I want. I can contribute then to society by letting other people use the same code, which then can benefit from it. I call that a good thing.
Finding old information removed from the site is often invaluable. Don't you hate it when the site that seems to be just about the subject you need is down, or removed right the page you wanted? Thanks to google, often I still can have it.
I don't see anything wrong about anonymous access either, my ISP's transparent proxy already provides a degree of anonymity anyway. Even though my IP address is clearly sent by the proxy in the headers, lots of sites (like slashdot) still react to my proxy's address instead of mine.
Huh, and "fixing" those "problems" is good for me how?
The google cache is very nice precisely because of the things you don't like. I want to screen scrape, see old stuff removed for no good reason, and visit sites anonymously. But that last part could be done without google cache anyway.
As an user, I don't give a damn about your interest in keeping control, sorry.
No, I think the question is: Why can't a disk controller have any speed it wants? The reason you get a card that supports UDMA133 isn't because the motherboard's controller doesn't support it, not because the bandwidth between the IDE chip and the board is limited to UDMA100 speed.
I mean, SATA is an interface between the hard disk and the *disk controller*. Then the OS talks to the controller, not to the disk itself. I don't think there's any reason you couldn't have an UDMA133 ISA card, for instance. So why does a SATA controller have to limit itself to SATA speed?
After all, you can have a RAID card that uses multiple disks and provides better throughput than possible on the SCSI/IDE/SATA interface a single drive uses.
If you look at what has been considered as death, you'll notice that it keeps getting pushed father and farther away. Initially, a stopped heart was hopeless. Now we can fix that, but have trouble with brain damage. After some time, even if you restart the heart, there'd be mental damage or no meaningful activity at all. Now we're learning to preserve the body in such a way that we can delay death even longer.
What happens is that death is not really an event that happens in any particular moment, but is just the point where we say "Ok, it's hopeless. We can't do anything else here". But since we keep pushing that back further and further, it's becoming quite obvious that eventually we'll be able to stop the damage by preserving the body, and we'll get better at repairing the damage that already exists.
The idea of cryonics is that even though we can't do anything now, we can at least try to preserve things as they are, betting on the quite reasonable assumption that some day we'll be able to fix things we can't fix now.
BTW, my knowledge is a bit fuzzy here, but my understanding is that "brain death" isn't limited to just plain inactivity, which apparently happens without ill effect during deep anesthesia.
I live in Madrid, and used the same line where the train blew up to go to class every day. One of my friends was even there when it blew up, but fortunately wasn't hurt.
However, I happen to be sane enough to realize that this nonsense leads nowhere. You can't have perfect security unless you decide to move into a bunker and never come out, but that's not a very nice way to live. I like living in a country without armed guards standing everywhere and draconian security.
The Madrid mess wouldn't have happened if our ex-president (Aznar) wasn't such a moron and decided to kiss Bush's arse against the wishes of 90% of the population! Fortunately he was promptly kicked out after that incident. Now if only America could do the same, the world would be a much nicer place.
Well, it's been ages since I read it (and not planning to do so again), but:
IIRC, the "rolling cleartext" idea was that the text was initially scrambled, so that if the right key was found, it wouldn't be possible to identify it was the right one.
However, that's nonsense. Encryption is already a series of transformations applied to the cleartext. This "rolling cleartext" stuff would be equivalent to it being part of the encryption algorhitm.
Say, suppose the encryption is DES, and the "rolling cleartext" is made by XOR 123. Then you can consider the whole thing as DES with XOR 123 at the end, and still brute force the whole thing by waiting a bit longer. You don't do the DES, then look at the result, and go "huh?", you do DES+XOR and eventually get the cleartext.
Very simple, jamming is quite different from turning it off.
If the US turns GPS off for whatever reason, Europe can't complain. After all, it's an US owned system, the signal just happens to be available in Europe. It's in the US domain, so they can do whatever they want with it. Relying on that the US will continue to make it available out of pure good will is obviously a bad idea.
Now, jamming is different. Galileo as an Europe owned system is now in the European domain, and as such, US jamming of it would probably be qualified as an attack, and something like that couldn't be done lightly without all sorts of messy political consequences.
Say, why have your own home instead of sharing it with your parents or a friend? One good reason is that as something you own, it is under your control. When you rely on the good will of others, you have to have in mind that one day they might decide to kick you out, and you wouldn't be able to complain. However, somebody trying to kick you out of your own home would be grounds for legal action.
The first thing I did when I earned some money was to buy my own hardware and pay for my Internet connection to remove my parents' ability to claim "we gave it, and we can take it away". Same thing here.
I would think the reason is completely obvious: It's a really bad idea to have your critical infrastructure depend on something external you can't control.
In a data center, do you trust your ISP has full redundancy and will never, ever fail, decide to disconnect you or go bankrupt? Or you you use several ISPs, have an UPS and a standby generator just in case some day something does go wrong?
For example, I have a Subversion post-commit script that takes the changelog, formats it, and posts it on a blog on tikiwiki. This serves as a nice permanent record, and anybody who just wants to keep track of my progress can subscribe to the RSS feed.
Another nice use is security updates. Maybe I don't want to open the page for every distribution I use every day. It's a lot easier to see that something new appeared in the security folder.
But yeah, if your daily usage consists in going to slashdot every day, RSS makes little sense. It's most useful when you do not want to do that.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, you can make an OS. Great business plan:
1. Make new OS
2. ???
3. Profit!
The little problem is that step 1 will go through just fine. On step 2 you'll find that:
1. MS holds most of the market, with the rest being filled with Linux and Apple
2. MS charges OEMs per computer sold, even if it doesn't carry Windows, so from an OEMs point, any alternative OS besides a free one is more expensive.
3. You'll need to write drivers for every device on the market, as vendors make them for Windows because they have to in order to sell their stuff, not because they're feeling nice.
4. In the event you manage to make something decent, it'll have vast interoperability problems, and will need years to get to where Linux is right now.
If those aren't barriers to entry (problems that stop you from even trying to enter the market), I don't know what they are. For an example of how well that will go, see BeOS.
The password being in the log is a TINY problem compared with what Windows has.
You can currently install Linux on a computer with a direct internet connection without problems. You can't do that with Windows. Patching it fully takes hours after installation and the average time before you get infected with something is about 30 minutes -- do the math.
I actually tried that with a friend. Gave up after 3 tries, and ended up bringing it to my home so that I could install it behind my Linux firewall.
I've seen this discussed a couple times.
The explanation is that it's too risky. They're great eagles, not exactly pigeons. And they're not just common eagles either. You can bet that Sauron would see them coming hours before they arrived, and the Nazgul would be all over them before they could cross the border to Mordor.
They could sneak in after the ring was melted because Sauron vanished in a puff of smoke, and everything remaining was in chaos and nobody gave a damn about the eagles anymore.
Hovering vehicles not going to happen!?
What is this, then? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hovercraft
In theory, it's possible to recover data on a magnetic disk that was overwritten because if you look at it with more precision than the disk's hardware does, you can tell what was there before.
For example:
0 -> 1 (actual value 0.95)
1 -> 0 (actual value 0.05)
0 -> 1 -> 1 (actual value 0.97)
etc. The 7 times is the amount that is in theory needed to confuse things enough to make this method unworkable. Mind, it may be very well completely arbitrary as far as I know, and I have the feeling that looking at a modern 500GB disk this way would be very, very expensive.
This is only needed if you're worried about somebody spending a lot of cash on examining your disk's platters with very expensive hardware. One overwrite will do just fine against the people simply reading sectors on the disk.
Quality varies, but the Luskwood avatars are really good. I'd say that overall the graphics quality probably has a lot to do with it being so dynamic. You can't optimize it like Quake by manually tweaking until it's perfect and precalculating things.
Yes, there are malicious items, but in my experience, Linden Labs deals very swiftly with abusers. The client logs people who for instance push you, and allows to easily report abuse if it happens.
Why stupid? I spent more than that writing the code for mine. I must be somewhere about 1K lines right now. It's my first attempt though, so it's taking some time.
The $1 thing seems to be done by Amazon as well, at least they did it with me. I was quite surprised at first, but came to the conclusion that it must be some kind of test, as it was refunded.
I don't know why the furries scare you though. Luskwood seems to be full of geeks, it's great.
They work now. Nothing guarantees they'll continue working in Windows 2007 or whatever. MS can easily break say, something in ADO, and all the programs using it will be screwed.
Another pretty major thing is that there's no upgrade path. VB3 code worked with VB4, and so on until VB6. But not anymore. This is a deadend. Compare with C, invented in 1970 and compilers are still being developed. It works, so people happily continue using it.
This also means all 3rd party providers are switching to the new infrastructure, and since VB programming largely consists of stringing together 3rd party components, it means it's quite likely the programmer will run into a wall sooner or later.
No such thing as a migration from VB6 to .NET. VB.NET is simply .NET with a VB-like syntax. Anything at all larger than a few lines is best rewritten from the beginning.
.NET, it'll end up being a lot more effort than just writing it from scratch.
IMO, it's pointless to try to convert a VB6 program to
This is the risk you take when coding using closed tools. There's no more support for VB6, and no real migration path.
Why, I completely agree with him.
Buy your music at allofmp3.com, then you will pay per album what you pay per song now, and you can get it directly in any format you want, no crap attached. With some luck, you can get them to encode it directly from the CD rip, otherwise it comes from a 320 kbps MP3 or something like that.
There's one thing I'm wondering, though.
Assuming terrorists build a working nuclear device, why would they want to smuggle it into the country? Surely, detonating it near the coast would work just fine.
Well, that can be easily fixed. Just find some bored geeks, and get them to work.
Attach tiny computers to the pigeons and write a TCP stack for it, as well as some code to implement HTTP to submit the data to livejournal. Then implement IP over avian carriers (with QoS) to transport the data. And voila, blogging pigeons!
I don't understand, what's the problem?
So, they found code that looks suspiciously like it was decompiled and used that way? Don't they use source control? It's trivial to trace it back to the developers that added it and ban them from further participation.
I would say it sounds like an organization problem though. Why exactly is code that makes no sense getting added? This is easily solved by say, using a post-commit hook in SVN that mails diffs. Post that to the mailing list so that everybody can see and check whether it makes sense or not.
The things we're talking about are hardly heavily restricted. More to the point, the alternative isn't necessarily an unrestricted site; it could well be no site at all. This is the point a lot of people forget in their haste to tell us how information wants to be free, you can't stop distribution, etc: by default, only the author of the work has it. If society wants the author to share, it has to make it worth his while, or he'll simply keep it to himself and no-one will benefit under any circumstances.
This is a faulty argument. It assumes that the more control to the author, the more incentive to publish. But it isn't so. Copyleft effectively works around copyright and wouldn't be needed if copyright didn't exist, and some people wouldn't create content if it could be tracked back to them.
Would you still post anything on the Internet if anybody, your family, friends, employers, government, etc, could instantly find everything you did online? Imagine somebody being able to enter your name, and finding every post in every forum, a list of the sites you accessed, and all of it going back 10 years?
Or consider an alternative situation, where every bit of information has DRM attached, and I could at will make my posts vanish from the Internet when I found it convenient, restrict who can see them and when? Should I be able to now go and cancel my previous post, making you look like you're completely out of your mind arguing with nobody at all?
That's a discussion for another time, perhaps, but just consider how many crimes, from the somewhat irritating to the seriously damaging, are possible only because of the effective anonymity the Internet provides. Again, that's not to say that some don't benefit, but IMHO most of the benefits are illusory, while the damage from spam, viruses, phishing and on-line fraud, and countless other things is very real.
This is very debatable, but I don't think it's worth discussing. Mainly because for a long time I ran a Freenet node, so obviously I already considered all that, and didn't think it was a huge deal.
However: The current infrastructure makes spam perfectly possible to track, yet it didn't stop it, viruses don't work on my systems, and the existence of phishing has absolutely nothing to do with the anonymity of the *client*.
Huh? And using a heavily restricted site contributes to society how?
Take slashdot for instance. Is my contribution any greater because I have to jump through hoops to make this post (slashdot bans my ISP's anonymous proxy)? I sent quite a lot of mail about it already, but it all seems to go to the bit bucket.
In the end, I can still post, but as I can't remain logged in, I have to load each page twice, once for the page itself, the second time to change to nested mode.
But back ontopic. Why are they detrimental activities? Screen scraping allows me to gather the stuff I want. I can contribute then to society by letting other people use the same code, which then can benefit from it. I call that a good thing.
Finding old information removed from the site is often invaluable. Don't you hate it when the site that seems to be just about the subject you need is down, or removed right the page you wanted? Thanks to google, often I still can have it.
I don't see anything wrong about anonymous access either, my ISP's transparent proxy already provides a degree of anonymity anyway. Even though my IP address is clearly sent by the proxy in the headers, lots of sites (like slashdot) still react to my proxy's address instead of mine.
Huh, and "fixing" those "problems" is good for me how?
The google cache is very nice precisely because of the things you don't like. I want to screen scrape, see old stuff removed for no good reason, and visit sites anonymously. But that last part could be done without google cache anyway.
As an user, I don't give a damn about your interest in keeping control, sorry.
No, I think the question is: Why can't a disk controller have any speed it wants? The reason you get a card that supports UDMA133 isn't because the motherboard's controller doesn't support it, not because the bandwidth between the IDE chip and the board is limited to UDMA100 speed.
I mean, SATA is an interface between the hard disk and the *disk controller*. Then the OS talks to the controller, not to the disk itself. I don't think there's any reason you couldn't have an UDMA133 ISA card, for instance. So why does a SATA controller have to limit itself to SATA speed?
After all, you can have a RAID card that uses multiple disks and provides better throughput than possible on the SCSI/IDE/SATA interface a single drive uses.
There's no such thing as "death". Really.
If you look at what has been considered as death, you'll notice that it keeps getting pushed father and farther away. Initially, a stopped heart was hopeless. Now we can fix that, but have trouble with brain damage. After some time, even if you restart the heart, there'd be mental damage or no meaningful activity at all. Now we're learning to preserve the body in such a way that we can delay death even longer.
What happens is that death is not really an event that happens in any particular moment, but is just the point where we say "Ok, it's hopeless. We can't do anything else here". But since we keep pushing that back further and further, it's becoming quite obvious that eventually we'll be able to stop the damage by preserving the body, and we'll get better at repairing the damage that already exists.
The idea of cryonics is that even though we can't do anything now, we can at least try to preserve things as they are, betting on the quite reasonable assumption that some day we'll be able to fix things we can't fix now.
BTW, my knowledge is a bit fuzzy here, but my understanding is that "brain death" isn't limited to just plain inactivity, which apparently happens without ill effect during deep anesthesia.
Crawl back into the hole you came from, moron.
I live in Madrid, and used the same line where the train blew up to go to class every day. One of my friends was even there when it blew up, but fortunately wasn't hurt.
However, I happen to be sane enough to realize that this nonsense leads nowhere. You can't have perfect security unless you decide to move into a bunker and never come out, but that's not a very nice way to live. I like living in a country without armed guards standing everywhere and draconian security.
The Madrid mess wouldn't have happened if our ex-president (Aznar) wasn't such a moron and decided to kiss Bush's arse against the wishes of 90% of the population! Fortunately he was promptly kicked out after that incident. Now if only America could do the same, the world would be a much nicer place.
Well, it's been ages since I read it (and not planning to do so again), but:
IIRC, the "rolling cleartext" idea was that the text was initially scrambled, so that if the right key was found, it wouldn't be possible to identify it was the right one.
However, that's nonsense. Encryption is already a series of transformations applied to the cleartext. This "rolling cleartext" stuff would be equivalent to it being part of the encryption algorhitm.
Say, suppose the encryption is DES, and the "rolling cleartext" is made by XOR 123. Then you can consider the whole thing as DES with XOR 123 at the end, and still brute force the whole thing by waiting a bit longer. You don't do the DES, then look at the result, and go "huh?", you do DES+XOR and eventually get the cleartext.
Very simple, jamming is quite different from turning it off.
If the US turns GPS off for whatever reason, Europe can't complain. After all, it's an US owned system, the signal just happens to be available in Europe. It's in the US domain, so they can do whatever they want with it. Relying on that the US will continue to make it available out of pure good will is obviously a bad idea.
Now, jamming is different. Galileo as an Europe owned system is now in the European domain, and as such, US jamming of it would probably be qualified as an attack, and something like that couldn't be done lightly without all sorts of messy political consequences.
Say, why have your own home instead of sharing it with your parents or a friend? One good reason is that as something you own, it is under your control. When you rely on the good will of others, you have to have in mind that one day they might decide to kick you out, and you wouldn't be able to complain. However, somebody trying to kick you out of your own home would be grounds for legal action.
The first thing I did when I earned some money was to buy my own hardware and pay for my Internet connection to remove my parents' ability to claim "we gave it, and we can take it away". Same thing here.
I would think the reason is completely obvious: It's a really bad idea to have your critical infrastructure depend on something external you can't control.
In a data center, do you trust your ISP has full redundancy and will never, ever fail, decide to disconnect you or go bankrupt? Or you you use several ISPs, have an UPS and a standby generator just in case some day something does go wrong?
It's another device name. "CON" stands for "console".
For instance, open cmd.exe, and type:
copy con test.txt
type some text, press
^Z (Ctrl+Z)
This is the DOS/Windows equivalent to cat > test.txt. Reading from CON reads from the standard input, writing writes to the standard output.
It has many uses. Just not everybody needs it.
For example, I have a Subversion post-commit script that takes the changelog, formats it, and posts it on a blog on tikiwiki. This serves as a nice permanent record, and anybody who just wants to keep track of my progress can subscribe to the RSS feed.
Another nice use is security updates. Maybe I don't want to open the page for every distribution I use every day. It's a lot easier to see that something new appeared in the security folder.
But yeah, if your daily usage consists in going to slashdot every day, RSS makes little sense. It's most useful when you do not want to do that.