Proof that there exist some functions with unobfuscatable properties (for some definition of unobfuscability) need not imply that practical obfuscation is not possible.
Christian Collberg has done some very interesting work on obfuscating programs at a high-level by densely intertwining their control flow and data accesses with a parallel heap-pointer-intensive computation. Sort of like a separate thread, with the key point that lots of dynamically allocated memory must be used to defeat analysis. This both obfuscates the original program and also helps in tamper-proofing (the original program can be modified by the compiler to rely on the values computed by this alternate thread).
Separating the main program from the inserted "thread" is much harder than checking and skipping some branch instructions in a decompiler or SoftICE. Static pointer analysis is an NP- hard problem for compilers, which makes de-obfuscation of this kind probably not practical.
Here's an article with barcharts showing that Sony's electronics business lost money while the game business made money. So the PS2 profits could be larger than net Sony profits.
(a) Sony's PS business has revenues = 60% of Sony's profits. PS Revenue can be > 100% of Sony profit.
(b) Sony's PS business has profits = 60% of entire Sony's profits. PS Profit can be > 100% of entire Sony profit if some other Sony branch is losing money.
OK, according to http://www.adherents.com/adh_branches.html (who knows how correct this data is), Catholics number about 1 billion. What fraction of them hang on to every word of the Pope? God alone knows (and maybe he told the Pope too).
If at all the Pope has any authority, it is over Roman Catholics, not all Christians. I'm not sure what fraction of Christians are Catholics. And I'm not sure what fraction of those are devout followers of the Pope. Probably much much less than a billion?
news.cis.dfn.de works great for the non-binary newsgroups. Registration is mandatory and manual but free and quick. Great groups coverage and articles are retained for quite a while. I've been using it for a couple of months now, no complaints.
But "no alternative" is exactly the point
of these kinds of articles:
- You speak as if there are full-time
jobs available and these people deliberately
chose to screw themselves with temp jobs.
The workers in question do want long-term
employment but they do not have the
qualifications for getting a full-time job
with benefits and insurance and vacation.
All companies are increasing the fraction of
temps on their payroll, with a higher bar for
full-time positions. So these people
have no real choice when it comes to a job.
Temp work exists for a reason alright but
purely for lower costs to companies, not
for worker convenience. As of today,
blue-collar (and some white-collar) workers
have much fewer options to choose from.
- Current lifestyles and costs of living
in the developed world do rely somewhat
on such labor and cost-cutting tactics
adopted by companies, as well as trade
and foreign policies of governments. A
point to ponder about whether buying that
HP printer or designer jeans or filling that
SUV with oil from an American ally in the
Middle East.
Here're some public mirrors of the latest version
of what I had put together:
Blue's News,
PlanetMirror.
It basically
contains a Makefile which uses Wine to run the Win32 versions
of the tools. The README has more information on my
experiences with it (some of the web links are down now,
though). This was before the 1.17 point release for Linux
but it should still be able to run the latest Win32 tools.
BTW, I think versions of GtkRadiant have the Linux Q3A SDK 1.1
in the package. E.g., see this link:
(search for SDK at planetquake.com and linuxgames.com):
FilePlanet mirror.
One thing to note is that the 1.2x SDK release broke
mod compatibility, so running the old native Linux SDK tools
will produce code that runs only in pre-1.17 Q3A. It
may be better off to use Wine to run the latest Win32 tools
so that your mods can run on the latest Q3A. And bug
Timothee of GtkRadiant to release the updated SDK for Linux.
A long time ago, I had managed to get the Quake VM
tools running on Linux via Wine. I still have the files squirrelled away somewhere. In the meantime, you could try a mirror at
Blues's News. Also some more info on using Wine at the Linux Game Mod Center.
If these don't help you, drop me a line at terabaap@yumpee.org and I'll see if I can dig out the files...
Quake's default projection makes high fovs look ugly. And you can't set the fov more than 180.
See this page for a comparison of standard Quake fov and the fisheye mod:
The official site of the movie is at www.otnemem.com (nice touch). It has some details which are probably better learned after watching the movie rather than before.
The IMDb message boards for Memento have a
lot of discussion (SPOILER alert!!) about the possible plotlines. Reading the posts here after watching the movie the first time was quite enlightening...
Thin notwithstanding, the Edge is still a hand/palm-ful, just like other PDAs.
If you like the idea of a credit-card sized PDA
that gets you a lot of the basic functionality
of a Palm/Visor, try the REX 6000. You can
get it now for about $120-$150, a little pricy
but still reasonable.
Just dump the entire Encyclopaedia Brittanica, and then maybe the last 50 years of the archives of the primary newspapers and universities of each country. And don't forget the Backstreet Boys videos!!
Now what could we do with LEMON? LEMON Encodes MP3s Officially Now! LEMON Encodes MP3s Over Networks? LEMON Encodes MP3s for Orangutans and Newbies? LEMON Encodes MP3s Onto N....??? (couldn't think of anything not, ahem, lame)
I'm a little confused here... if Nvidia is releasing a binary-only kernel module with no source code, then how did Ralph Metzer discover that they were using his code?
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.sweetcode.org/ is a catalog of innovative free software. no longer updated but still browse-worthy.
A9 = algorithm = 9-letter word starting with a.
Something like i18n = Internationalization = 'I' followed by 18 letters followed by 'n'
Proof that there exist some functions with unobfuscatable properties (for some definition of unobfuscability) need not imply that practical obfuscation is not possible.
Christian Collberg has done some very interesting work on obfuscating programs at a high-level by densely intertwining their control flow and data accesses with a parallel heap-pointer-intensive computation. Sort of like a separate thread, with the key point that lots of dynamically allocated memory must be used to defeat analysis. This both obfuscates the original program and also helps in tamper-proofing (the original program can be modified by the compiler to rely on the values computed by this alternate thread).
Separating the main program from the inserted "thread" is much harder than checking and skipping some branch instructions in a decompiler or SoftICE. Static pointer analysis is an NP- hard problem for compilers, which makes de-obfuscation of this kind probably not practical.
Y.
Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California.
(attributed in a post to c.l.py
Here's an article with barcharts showing that Sony's electronics business lost money while the game business made money. So the PS2 profits could be larger than net Sony profits.
Three options:
(a) Sony's PS business has revenues = 60% of Sony's profits. PS Revenue can be > 100% of Sony profit.
(b) Sony's PS business has profits = 60% of entire Sony's profits. PS Profit can be > 100% of entire Sony profit if some other Sony branch is losing money.
(c) Economist needs to employ better reporters.
Y.
OK, according to http://www.adherents.com/adh_branches.html (who knows how correct this data is), Catholics number about 1 billion. What fraction of them hang on to every word of the Pope? God alone knows (and maybe he told the Pope too).
Y.
If at all the Pope has any authority, it is over Roman Catholics, not all Christians. I'm not sure what fraction of Christians are Catholics. And I'm not sure what fraction of those are devout followers of the Pope. Probably much much less than a billion?
Y.
news.cis.dfn.de works great for the non-binary newsgroups. Registration is mandatory and manual but free and quick. Great groups coverage and articles are retained for quite a while. I've been using it for a couple of months now, no complaints.
But "no alternative" is exactly the point
of these kinds of articles:
- You speak as if there are full-time
jobs available and these people deliberately
chose to screw themselves with temp jobs.
The workers in question do want long-term
employment but they do not have the
qualifications for getting a full-time job
with benefits and insurance and vacation.
All companies are increasing the fraction of
temps on their payroll, with a higher bar for
full-time positions. So these people
have no real choice when it comes to a job.
Temp work exists for a reason alright but
purely for lower costs to companies, not
for worker convenience. As of today,
blue-collar (and some white-collar) workers
have much fewer options to choose from.
- Current lifestyles and costs of living
in the developed world do rely somewhat
on such labor and cost-cutting tactics
adopted by companies, as well as trade
and foreign policies of governments. A
point to ponder about whether buying that
HP printer or designer jeans or filling that
SUV with oil from an American ally in the
Middle East.
Y.
Have you considered asking the GC mailing list? http://lists.tunes.org/mailman/listinfo/gclist
...
Coincidentally, there have been a couple of recent queries on gclist asking about patents on GC and memory management algorithms
Y.
It basically contains a Makefile which uses Wine to run the Win32 versions of the tools. The README has more information on my experiences with it (some of the web links are down now, though). This was before the 1.17 point release for Linux but it should still be able to run the latest Win32 tools.
BTW, I think versions of GtkRadiant have the Linux Q3A SDK 1.1 in the package. E.g., see this link: (search for SDK at planetquake.com and linuxgames.com): FilePlanet mirror.
One thing to note is that the 1.2x SDK release broke mod compatibility, so running the old native Linux SDK tools will produce code that runs only in pre-1.17 Q3A. It may be better off to use Wine to run the latest Win32 tools so that your mods can run on the latest Q3A. And bug Timothee of GtkRadiant to release the updated SDK for Linux.
Hope this helps,
Y.
If these don't help you, drop me a line at terabaap@yumpee.org and I'll see if I can dig out the files ...
Y.
The official HP presentation on the PA-8800 is0 01.pdf.
available as a PDF from http://www.cpus.hp.com/technical_references/mpf_2
Y.
Quake's default projection makes high fovs look ugly. And you can't set the fov more than 180.
o mpare.html
See this page for a comparison of standard Quake fov and the fisheye mod:
http://wouter.fov120.com/gfxengine/fisheyequake/c
Y.
... are belong to us!!
:)
http://www.amiallyourbaseornot.com/?pic=DBFF.
Sorry
http://www.ifilm.com/ifilm/skeletons/film_detail/
The official site of the movie is at www.otnemem.com (nice touch). It has some details which are probably better learned after watching the movie rather than before.
The IMDb message boards for Memento have a lot of discussion (SPOILER alert!!) about the possible plotlines. Reading the posts here after watching the movie the first time was quite enlightening ...
If you like the idea of a credit-card sized PDA that gets you a lot of the basic functionality of a Palm/Visor, try the REX 6000. You can get it now for about $120-$150, a little pricy but still reasonable.
Just dump the entire Encyclopaedia Brittanica,
and then maybe the last 50 years of the archives of the primary
newspapers and universities of each country.
And don't forget the Backstreet Boys videos!!
Y.
May be off-topic but if timothy is referring
to the guy from Asimov's Foundation series, then
it should be Hari Seldon, not Harry.
Y.
Now what could we do with LEMON?
LEMON Encodes MP3s Officially Now!
LEMON Encodes MP3s Over Networks?
LEMON Encodes MP3s for Orangutans and Newbies?
LEMON Encodes MP3s Onto N....??? (couldn't think of anything not, ahem, lame)
Y.
How about:
LIME = L{A,I}ME Is an MP3 Encoder?
Y.
I'm a little confused here ... if Nvidia is releasing a binary-only kernel module with no source code, then how did Ralph Metzer discover that they were using his code?
Y.
If Linux powers LARTs, does FreeBSD power FARTs?
Y.
Also, is there a good comparison of the 3-D engines available?
E.g., comparing Quake, Unreal, LithTech, Genesis/Jet3D, Crystal Space.
I did find one article comparing the features of Quake II, Unreal and Genesis 3D at http://www.gameznet. com/genesis/articles/enginecomparison.html.
Y.