btw - its quite different than a mac address change. When a processor is handling a request that calls for the mac address, it looks up the address in memory from when the device was initialized. Catch that? It looks it up in memory. Memory can be altered.
On the other hand, if you have a serial number in the proc, and the proc is handling code that contains the specific instruction that requests that #, then guess what? The processor has to be taught to lie to *itself*, which is a considerably more difficult proposal. That, or it has to never get the request at all, which would involve modifying the code of the program requesting it.
But a mac address? Easily changed. Not both apples, though.
yes, I think a system call could be made to request, via a specific instruction, the serial number from the processor...and that "spoofing" that number, while possible, would be beyond the realm of what the average person would do. Which would allow the MPAA to distribute movies with said mechanism, and not worry about it. Which would, in turn, allow people to be lazy and just download their movies.
ah, you are correct; I was under an incorrect assumption, and for that I apologize. I thought you were trying to say you should be allowed to spam me with your servers, since it is your property. I haven't been keeping up with all the bickering and politics in the world lately, esp not in the tech industry. So EFF wants you to have to do the work to filter spam, instead of working to stop spammers in the first place? Never work, spam will just increase (like it has) until the cost of filtering has become too much to bear.
Guess that's why I've reaquianted myself with phones, snail mail, and good old-fashioned face-to-face lately. Noise to static ratio has gotten higher than I care to deal with.
too bad we squashed the whole serial #'s on procs thing (see: Intel P3)...otherwise we could download movies, go to the MPAA site, and request a key that will only work on our PC yet will allow the downloaded (and encrypted) movie to be viewed. Too bad. That would have been cool. Oh well.
And yes, someone could have cracked the encryption, but they've cracked dvd anyway. Point is that this could be used by the common person who just wants to download a movie, and doesn't want to have to get out of his chair. Because heaven forbid we actually get out of our houses, or have to actually go *get* something. People pull back muscles doing that sort of stuff, right?
I agree that IBm is just as at fault (actually, probably more so) than MS. The difference is that IBM isn't then pretending to support reform here in the US. Were they, then they'd be subject to the same ire.
Precisely. Before you remove the splinter from your neighbor's eye, remove the plank from your own.
"But they're just trying to protect themselves" the MS apologists will say...
No, they're not. They could easily protect themselves by creating a "prior art" and putting it out there. MS has a bazillion patents out there...
Lets take, for instance, IsNOT. Instead of applying for a pantent for that, they could have just *used* it, then claimed prior art if they ever needed "protection."
so yeah...if MS thinks we need patent reform, they should start with themselves. They're a large part of the problem.
women aren't departing in greater numbers...
on
Women Leaving I.T.
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
IT has a high turnover rate. If you look at the statistics for any school, you'll find that the # of guys getting comp sci degrees is FAR higher than the number of girls getting them, so what is really happening is the replacement crop isn't as gender balanced as before.
Actually, no...that's not fair to say either. What's really happening is that there were never as many women in IT as this story suggests. There were roles in the IT field that were held by women more than men, but those roles weren't really *IT* roles...and those roles don't exist as much now.
Its simply a matter of how IT was defined then, and how the landscape has changed. The core support and development teams (what most of us would call IT) have always been overwhelmingly male....never were they 44% female. On what planet did that happen? I've never seen an IT dept with more than 10% females. That's really unfortunate, I think, but...that's just how it is (esp in the sysadmin ranks...the women population goes up some in the web dev ranks).
people get dragged to court over CIVIL things all the time...perhaps you meant that there is no danger of them going to jail? That's quite different, ya know...
I drove to work today, and didn't cower in fear, despite not having a handgun.
I went to the store last night, and didn't cower in fear, despite not having a handgun.
I didn't see any criminals ruling the streets, amazingly enough. In fact, in most areas where criminals do "rule the streets," there aren't handgun laws. Amazing, that.
I had a populated (rifle) gunrack in my pickup back when I lived in Texas. I don't see a problem with that. People can see I have it, I can see others have it, no problems. A criminal, on the other hand, doesn't want you to know they're armed. What's perfect for being armed, without looking it? A handgun. An inaccurate chunk of metal that does little else than provide a hammer to strick the firing mechanism with, and a couple inches of barrel to sortof guide the projectile fired. Rather crude, they are, and they have little to do with a militia that defends the country from invaders.
I indeed wonder if they're selling a "hardened linux." I also wonder why we can't just look, instead of just theorising.
From their web site (there were only 6 buttons on the main page, one said "security" Servers in an organization are the single most important components of the infrastructure. So they must be made immune to all kind of malicious attacks which can be expected in its environment. Linuxense has been providing this service, called Server Hardening, to various kinds of businesses so far.
handguns are made for killin, they ain't no good for nothin else and if you like to drink a whiskey, you might even shoot yourself so why don't we drop them people, to the bottom of the sea before some old fool come round here, want to shoot either you or me -- "saturday night special" - Lynard Skynard (words from memory, they're close)
Personally, I think they should require that ammo be bought only by those with a permit. Ammo doesn't tend to last as long as a gun will. Handguns aren't "arms" like the 2nd'ers will start screaming, and everything has reasonable limits (like the first ammendment, which doesn't permit you to scream "fire" in a crowded theatre, or to threaten the life of the President). The *simple* fact is that were handguns made illegal, *honest* people would be dying less. Let the honest guy defending his home use a shotgun - much better for that sort of thing, anyway. The value of a handgun is simply to have something that can easily kill someone without much hassle, yet is easy to hide and/or carry. Only police officers and the actual "militia" mentioned in the second ammendment need to carry weapons in public.
Start of the article: I survived the UNIX wars, unlike most of the companies involved in them. In their day, Pyramid, SCO, Apollo, DEC, Sun, Silicon Graphics, Gould and others fought ferocious scorched-earth wars trying to win customers' minds and money. The survivors, with the exception of Sun (a.k.a., The last man standing), have either disappeared into the mists of time, or are niche players that have been forced into new markets in order to survive. Other than their conflict, what did they have in common?
They were all selling some kind of UNIX operating system.
Back in the UNIX wars, the vendors had two primary axes on which they could compete: hardware speed, and features of their flavor of UNIX....
Ever heard of Acer? HP? Dell? IBM? Compaq? All these companies make desktops, and all have different features they use to sell their products...at least, when the companies were still relevent. Some died.
When this Marcus guy says Linux is a 14 year old kid, and MS is "Mike Tyson who could deliver a line-straight punch and knock a hole through the side of a steel I-beam," "courteous enough to pay lip-service to the threat that the 14-year-old was making," guess what - that's not an unbiased person saying new things. That is a MS supporter. Not that there's anything truely wrong with that, but...
This arguement is YEARS old, and its wrong. People have been making this same claim for a decade now...and they're wrong. Ignoring that Solaris isn't the only commercial UNIX out there that is common use (anyone ever hear of a little company named IBM that puts out an OS named AIX?) the simple fact is that there IS a consistent set of tools. There's the X api if you want to tie in there, the C libraries are C libraries, etc. If you want to install XYZ thing on Windows - guess what! You'll need to install.NET, or whatever else.
The only *difference* is that you become dependent upon MS for *everything*, as they provide all the framework for all apps. If Oracle wants to install on MS, they have to play well with MS. If Oracle wants to install on Linux, they can use a variety of tools, and pick the one best suited to them.
That Marcus wants to make a big deal about distro in this context is quite telling -
I installed Linux on one of my systems the other day, so I could use it as a teaching vehicle for my class on system log analysis. But first I had to Email a bunch of my friends and ask them, "what version of Linux should I use? Red Hat? Debian? Gentoo? Mandrake? Slackware?
It won't matter. Install ANY of them, and if you use the same syslog package (like standard syslogd) then GUESS WHAT - syslog.conf will be THE SAME, will have NO DIFFERENCES, and it WON'T matter. Install Gnome on them, and boom - same thing. They can be set up to look the same, they're still the same damn packages.
There are only 2 differences between distros - package management, and pointless bells and whistles. Gentoo uses emerge against make.conf to compile things a certain way. RedHat uses RPM to install (generally pre-built) packages. In both cases, once Firefox is installed it is still...brace yourselves...Firefox! Completely consistent, and everything! Firefox 1.01 on Gentoo looks just like Firefox 1.01 on Redhat! Crazy stuff!
This guy is an idiot, spreading FUD. So long as people adhere to the standards, which we're actually quite good at doing in the community (considering its a religious topic for some people) then all is well. An app on one distro is the same as that app on another distro.
I have an ATI card on my laptop, and only recently bothered to try to play a 3d game. It was absolutely terrible - "choppy" doesn't begin to describe it. I'd move the mouse, and the pointer on the screen would move 30 seconds later. This was with the remade xcom as reported recently here.
Do you know off-hand what I might have done wrong? I don't generally play games, so I had never noticed it.
my roommate gets them in XP quite often, yes. For the layman/woman, it is more stable than 95/98 - obviously. But its far from "incredibly stable," esp when the standard fix for windows is problems is *still* rebooting. Printer doesn't work? Reboot. Want to install the latest patches? Reboot 10 times. Not picking up an ip? Reboot. Blah, etc...then there's the recommended "maintenance reboot" that is still performed quite often in windows server farms.
I mean, I understand that you're trying to make a point and you just didn't make a good little formula there, but...can we test it with 1's and 2's before we put it out? You're not a MS developer, are you?;)
IQ measurements are meaningless when the person is no longer a child.
What you're saying is that the average/. person, who is likely approx 35, has the mental age of a 35 year old. The quotia is ((mental age)/(real age))*100.
The reason its meaningless when the person is not a child is because there's little difference between a 35 year old's "mental" age and a 50 year old's "mental" age, yet a 35 year old with a 143 IQ would be "mentally" 50. A 90 year old with a 140iq would have the "mental age" of a 126 year old - which, in my mind, would be a bad thing. Hell, I'd like an IQ of 30 when I'm 90, thank you (that would be 27).
You'll grant that the delta between the "mental age" of 6 and the "mental age" of 9 (a 6 year old with a 9 year old mind would be 150 iq) is considerably different than the delta between a 40 year old's "mental age" and the one of a 60 year old - correct? The 60 year old may have emotional/psyche maturation over the 40 year old, but he's not sharper minded than he was at 40. He's lost some of his edge. He can't learn things as quickly. He's starting down the long road of forgetfulness. So a 40 year old with a 150 IQ? A completely meaningless measurement. Once you start giving someone a "mental age" of about 30 or so (a 200 IQ on a 15 year old) the IQ system is worthless - move on to something more appropriate. GRE's, SAT's, whatver else - something not devised for 4 year olds.
This public service announcement was brought to you by: "try to know what something is before you use it as an insult. An IQ of 100 for a 35 year old person is just fine...it means they're 35."
Slashdot Mirror
why not do that *instead* of watching the video at all?
On the other hand, if you have a serial number in the proc, and the proc is handling code that contains the specific instruction that requests that #, then guess what? The processor has to be taught to lie to *itself*, which is a considerably more difficult proposal. That, or it has to never get the request at all, which would involve modifying the code of the program requesting it.
But a mac address? Easily changed. Not both apples, though.
yes, I think a system call could be made to request, via a specific instruction, the serial number from the processor...and that "spoofing" that number, while possible, would be beyond the realm of what the average person would do. Which would allow the MPAA to distribute movies with said mechanism, and not worry about it. Which would, in turn, allow people to be lazy and just download their movies.
Guess that's why I've reaquianted myself with phones, snail mail, and good old-fashioned face-to-face lately. Noise to static ratio has gotten higher than I care to deal with.
And yes, someone could have cracked the encryption, but they've cracked dvd anyway. Point is that this could be used by the common person who just wants to download a movie, and doesn't want to have to get out of his chair. Because heaven forbid we actually get out of our houses, or have to actually go *get* something. People pull back muscles doing that sort of stuff, right?
keep your money. It's tained anyway.
if it were, then the obvious solution would be to get a patent, then put the ownership to the public domain.
I agree that IBm is just as at fault (actually, probably more so) than MS. The difference is that IBM isn't then pretending to support reform here in the US. Were they, then they'd be subject to the same ire.
"But they're just trying to protect themselves" the MS apologists will say...
No, they're not. They could easily protect themselves by creating a "prior art" and putting it out there. MS has a bazillion patents out there...
Lets take, for instance, IsNOT. Instead of applying for a pantent for that, they could have just *used* it, then claimed prior art if they ever needed "protection."
so yeah...if MS thinks we need patent reform, they should start with themselves. They're a large part of the problem.
Actually, no...that's not fair to say either. What's really happening is that there were never as many women in IT as this story suggests. There were roles in the IT field that were held by women more than men, but those roles weren't really *IT* roles...and those roles don't exist as much now.
Its simply a matter of how IT was defined then, and how the landscape has changed. The core support and development teams (what most of us would call IT) have always been overwhelmingly male....never were they 44% female. On what planet did that happen? I've never seen an IT dept with more than 10% females. That's really unfortunate, I think, but...that's just how it is (esp in the sysadmin ranks...the women population goes up some in the web dev ranks).
people get dragged to court over CIVIL things all the time...perhaps you meant that there is no danger of them going to jail? That's quite different, ya know...
I went to the store last night, and didn't cower in fear, despite not having a handgun.
I didn't see any criminals ruling the streets, amazingly enough. In fact, in most areas where criminals do "rule the streets," there aren't handgun laws. Amazing, that.
I had a populated (rifle) gunrack in my pickup back when I lived in Texas. I don't see a problem with that. People can see I have it, I can see others have it, no problems. A criminal, on the other hand, doesn't want you to know they're armed. What's perfect for being armed, without looking it? A handgun. An inaccurate chunk of metal that does little else than provide a hammer to strick the firing mechanism with, and a couple inches of barrel to sortof guide the projectile fired. Rather crude, they are, and they have little to do with a militia that defends the country from invaders.
From their web site (there were only 6 buttons on the main page, one said "security" Servers in an organization are the single most important components of the infrastructure. So they must be made immune to all kind of malicious attacks which can be expected in its environment. Linuxense has been providing this service, called Server Hardening, to various kinds of businesses so far.
and if you like to drink a whiskey, you might even shoot yourself
so why don't we drop them people, to the bottom of the sea
before some old fool come round here, want to shoot either you or me -- "saturday night special" - Lynard Skynard (words from memory, they're close)
Personally, I think they should require that ammo be bought only by those with a permit. Ammo doesn't tend to last as long as a gun will. Handguns aren't "arms" like the 2nd'ers will start screaming, and everything has reasonable limits (like the first ammendment, which doesn't permit you to scream "fire" in a crowded theatre, or to threaten the life of the President). The *simple* fact is that were handguns made illegal, *honest* people would be dying less. Let the honest guy defending his home use a shotgun - much better for that sort of thing, anyway. The value of a handgun is simply to have something that can easily kill someone without much hassle, yet is easy to hide and/or carry. Only police officers and the actual "militia" mentioned in the second ammendment need to carry weapons in public.
The point is that 8 years after an attack was discovered, Microsofts commercial OS was STILL vulnerable to it.
hear here!
With all the yammering occuring on this topic, I thought no one else noticed that.
did you read mine? "Want to install the latest patches? Reboot 10 times"
They were all selling some kind of UNIX operating system.
Back in the UNIX wars, the vendors had two primary axes on which they could compete: hardware speed, and features of their flavor of UNIX....
Ever heard of Acer? HP? Dell? IBM? Compaq? All these companies make desktops, and all have different features they use to sell their products...at least, when the companies were still relevent. Some died.
When this Marcus guy says Linux is a 14 year old kid, and MS is "Mike Tyson who could deliver a line-straight punch and knock a hole through the side of a steel I-beam," "courteous enough to pay lip-service to the threat that the 14-year-old was making," guess what - that's not an unbiased person saying new things. That is a MS supporter. Not that there's anything truely wrong with that, but...
This arguement is YEARS old, and its wrong. People have been making this same claim for a decade now...and they're wrong. Ignoring that Solaris isn't the only commercial UNIX out there that is common use (anyone ever hear of a little company named IBM that puts out an OS named AIX?) the simple fact is that there IS a consistent set of tools. There's the X api if you want to tie in there, the C libraries are C libraries, etc. If you want to install XYZ thing on Windows - guess what! You'll need to install .NET, or whatever else.
The only *difference* is that you become dependent upon MS for *everything*, as they provide all the framework for all apps. If Oracle wants to install on MS, they have to play well with MS. If Oracle wants to install on Linux, they can use a variety of tools, and pick the one best suited to them.
That Marcus wants to make a big deal about distro in this context is quite telling -
I installed Linux on one of my systems the other day, so I could use it as a teaching vehicle for my class on system log analysis. But first I had to Email a bunch of my friends and ask them, "what version of Linux should I use? Red Hat? Debian? Gentoo? Mandrake? Slackware?
It won't matter. Install ANY of them, and if you use the same syslog package (like standard syslogd) then GUESS WHAT - syslog.conf will be THE SAME, will have NO DIFFERENCES, and it WON'T matter. Install Gnome on them, and boom - same thing. They can be set up to look the same, they're still the same damn packages.
There are only 2 differences between distros - package management, and pointless bells and whistles. Gentoo uses emerge against make.conf to compile things a certain way. RedHat uses RPM to install (generally pre-built) packages. In both cases, once Firefox is installed it is still...brace yourselves...Firefox! Completely consistent, and everything! Firefox 1.01 on Gentoo looks just like Firefox 1.01 on Redhat! Crazy stuff!
This guy is an idiot, spreading FUD. So long as people adhere to the standards, which we're actually quite good at doing in the community (considering its a religious topic for some people) then all is well. An app on one distro is the same as that app on another distro.
Thanks for trying though, Marcus.
TW2000 was one of my favorite games back in the day...is this just a gui version of it? I never played the original game this is a remake of.
Do you know off-hand what I might have done wrong? I don't generally play games, so I had never noticed it.
install winXP sp1, officexp, and patch everything. Tell me how many times ya reboot.
The issue is far from over.
Imagine if the head spun around 360 degrees every once in a while, at random? That would be even better...
where a=1, b=2
1+1=2
(1+1)(1+1) / 2 + 1*1 = 3
3 != 2
am I missing something here?
I mean, I understand that you're trying to make a point and you just didn't make a good little formula there, but...can we test it with 1's and 2's before we put it out? You're not a MS developer, are you? ;)
Redundant posts!
What you're saying is that the average /. person, who is likely approx 35, has the mental age of a 35 year old. The quotia is ((mental age)/(real age))*100.
The reason its meaningless when the person is not a child is because there's little difference between a 35 year old's "mental" age and a 50 year old's "mental" age, yet a 35 year old with a 143 IQ would be "mentally" 50. A 90 year old with a 140iq would have the "mental age" of a 126 year old - which, in my mind, would be a bad thing. Hell, I'd like an IQ of 30 when I'm 90, thank you (that would be 27).
You'll grant that the delta between the "mental age" of 6 and the "mental age" of 9 (a 6 year old with a 9 year old mind would be 150 iq) is considerably different than the delta between a 40 year old's "mental age" and the one of a 60 year old - correct? The 60 year old may have emotional/psyche maturation over the 40 year old, but he's not sharper minded than he was at 40. He's lost some of his edge. He can't learn things as quickly. He's starting down the long road of forgetfulness. So a 40 year old with a 150 IQ? A completely meaningless measurement. Once you start giving someone a "mental age" of about 30 or so (a 200 IQ on a 15 year old) the IQ system is worthless - move on to something more appropriate. GRE's, SAT's, whatver else - something not devised for 4 year olds.
This public service announcement was brought to you by: "try to know what something is before you use it as an insult. An IQ of 100 for a 35 year old person is just fine...it means they're 35."