Since all the "What is CERT for?" and "Bugtraq rocks my scary little world" posts seem to have been made, I thought I would point my slashbot tendencies at the Treaty of Rome.
<SLASHBOT>
The EU will soon be *easily* the largest economy on the planet (except China. OK, Maybe India. You know what I mean). 500 million eager consumers with shedloads of cash. Enough cash to support some *very* fat lawyers. In the EU, we send our fattest, most offensive lawyers to Strasbourg, where they can do most harm.
Then we have this little thing called the Treaty of Rome, which has much the same purpose as the US Constitution, except you can't fit it on a sheet of A4, no matter how 'leet your PostScript skillz are.
One of the things it explicitly forbids is arrangements to establish contractual conditions that bear no direct connection to the subject of the contract, like tie-in clauses.
Now, If global giants like Sun, Cisco, Microsoft etc. use a forum like the one they have just set up to restrain trade, you wouldn't need a lawyer to win an antitrust case against them My blind old dog (if I had one) could win it.
</SLASHBOT>
So, there you go. If they do *anything* that pisses off the EU commission, they'll get nailed to the proverbial tree.
For those too stupid to work out how to get rich here, all you need to do is to start up a tech company that relies on one of their products in a way that directly competes with them or one of their "valued partners", wait for a security flaw to be announced, prove that they did not disclose it to *all* their customers at the same time and *BLAMMO!* a lot of fat lawyers get even fatter over a period of several years.
The main reason that Java runs fast on AS/400s is because you can compile the 32-bit Java bytecode to native 64-bit programs (CRTJVAPGM is the command IIRC - haven't played with an AS/400 recently).
That, and the fact that for raw I/O performance AS/400s rock.
My source for this is the Wall Street Journal (although not perfect, probably more reliable than the Sunday Times).
As a Brit, I tried to work myself into a state of righteous indignation over that statement. Then I realised that you're right. There was an era, in the dim, distant past, when The Times was the 'newspaper of record', and The Sunday Times was the paper that did serious, well researched investigative journalism. Then, Rupert Murdoch happened.
It is a sad fact that more.uk people buy the (Murdoch owned) paper called "The Sun" than buy a newspaper. The Sun isn't a newspaper. It is a daily rag based on the (very profitable) concept that a lot of people with 35p (==$0.5) are happy to spend that on a paper that has headlines like "Phwooarrr! Look at the tits on that!!!". Page 3 of The Sun (Every day) has a topless photograph of a young woman (aged 17-20).
It is very hard to gain the moral high ground about *anything* when you live in a country where the highest-selliing daily paper is largely filled with young women's breasts, and salacious, inaccurate and often inflammatory stories about sexual misdemanours of priests.
To summarise for US citizens: Our biggest-selling daily paper is a supermarket tabloid, with tits in. It's published by an Australian gangster. Ye Gods. We *deserved* to lose our Empire.
A reader realised that the link was to his work, and he hadn't been credited. The site that was publishing his work is a commercial site. He hadn't been offered payment, credit or anything.
I'd be bloody angry at that.
Then, people accused the original author of plagiarism. They used some questionable tactics to do so.
I'd have become physically violent at that point.
Then, some *very* bright people did some research (if looking at cached pages is called "being very bright" - it's certainly more than most people would think of doing).
End result - Author happy(ish), reviewboard has some apologising to do before it's reputation is back intact (if it ever had one). No lasting harm done
Game over. Insert stolen coin for replay.
<disclaimer>I have worked with E10Ks. They're quite cool.</disclaimer>
My gut tells me that money would be better spent helping NetBSD and others with code audits. Of course IANASecurity Expert, so what do I know...
Damn straight you're not a security expert. (And I think you meant OpenBSD). Nobody is a security "expert". Some of us are older, wiser, and bear a lot more scars than others, but *none* of us are experts.
Until you have had a system properly fucked over, you know *nothing* about security.
There are a surprising number of companies saying "We are InfoSec Experts" out there who leave there own internal systems open to flagrant abuse. Like leaving certain ports (137, 139 etc) open to the Internet, and then give the receptionist a domain account. How hard is *that* to crack? ("Hello, I'm from the auditors. What name do you type in to the computer in the morning? Good, that sound right. Now, just let me check. What do you type in the other box? Thankyou. That's the right answer!)
Back on topic: Honeypots are tremendously valuable if, and only if, they are well run.
In the ongoing battle between the infosec "good guys" (mostly sysadmins) and the infosec "bad guys" (mostly l33t k1dd13s, but with a peppering of serious, professional criminals) the good guys are at a crippling disadvantage. We have to get every single thing right all the time. The bad guys only need to find one single, trivial mistake, and then it's w00t! r00tkit!
These nasty little untalented, bored, socially malformed little twerps have all the cards; That wouldn't be so bad, but they freely give these cards to anyone. Nothing wrong with that. Except that some of the recipients (OK, a small number, but it only takes one) are working for serious, professional blow-your-brains-out-and-cover-you-in-concrete professionals.
Honeypots are one of the few tools that let us monitor, study and comprehend what's going on. (That, and assiduous reading of alt.2600 etc.)
We, the responsible victims of attacks, choose to monitor the attackers in any way we can. We do this because we want the Internet to be a useful place. And we are happy to forward information gained to law-enforcement types.
If script kiddies dont like this then, hey! Build your own sodding network. When you get 100 million people connected, I'll come and look.
If you want SMP on OpenBSD, download the source, buy a selection of SMP boxes (twin-processor Intel is not enough to be useful, really), and spend a year or so hacking out the code. If you find it interesting, that is.
OpenBSD is a free operating system. It's actually very good. If you want to add stuff, all you have to do is write it and compile it in.
If you lack the skills to add a feature you want, you can hire someone to do it.
Go for it. If it matters that much to you, an investment of maybe as little as $250,000 will be worth it. But either put your time or your money where your mouth is.
The majority of server systems these days are either I/O or connectivity bound these days.
Numerically 'the majority', maybe. If you count every pathetic little Intel box connected to a DSL line a 'server'.
I am happily able to nail 64 processors on a Starfire to the ground without filling up 8*1Gb/s outbound pipes. All you need is a big database and 30,000 users.
Real computers, properly configured, running real tasks run CPU-bound. If yours isn't, hire a real engineer.
Mind you, a box like that would never, ever, face the Internet directly.
True. But, I'm drunk, and I'm lazy. That's why I didn't say for certain whether it uses IP address or cookies. It's easier for me to ssh to another box on another network and fire up lynx than it is to point and drool round Netscape menus.
In addition, further poking of their 'search engine' seems to indicate that it's cock-up, not conspiracy to blame. And I am talking about the sort of fuckup that, if one of my staff did it, they would receive the highly-coveted 'moron of the day' bog-brush award.
OK. No porn. So, I search for 'sappho' It returns a bunch of non-porn gay/lesbian links. Good so far.
Then I search for 'x-33' (a cool aerospace failure). No returns.
Then I search for 'porn'. One link. A lesbian resource site that turned up in the first search.
Then (getting suspicious) I search for 'molniya' (both usual spellings) - a type of satellite orbit(OK, it's a bit obscure). No hits.
Next, it gets interesting. I try 'sappho' again. ( I got more than ten hits last time). I get no hits. Now I'm suspicious. So, I try a few other things. (telnet into another box, try it from there, etc). This thing *clearly* maintains state information. I *think* it does it by IP. It *may* do it by cookies.
I am suspicious. Show us the source. How does it work?
*Anything* that adds state information to HTTP and claims to be *new* needs some investigation.
To the people who run TheIndex: If you want help from people here, show us the source. Some of us will help if you do that. Until then, I will advise people to be aware that you are gathering information from visitors without telling them you are doing it.
Stop Post- You're not evil. You're incompetent. I just did a search for 'Lesbian' and it returned '9 sites found for sappho'. You are maintaning state information. But only because your back-end software sucks harder than raw vacuum. All I have to say is 'open the fucking code. You need the help badly'.
Share and enjoy.
PS - if you don't want to open the code, and you have a *lot* of money, I may be able to help. But check that it's a shedload of the folding stuff before you call - I may be easy, but I'm not cheap;-))
A few of us (me, thoric, kraken) on irc.openprojects.net/#slashdot decided (in a moment of drunken stupidity) it would be fun to give SameGnome two-player network functionality. So, we nearly did it. (It works, but has some ugly bits. And making sockets stuff cross-platform is a nightmare.).
I learnt three things:
I *still* really hate C as a GUI application language
Miguel de Icaza is a *really* nice bloke (he answered an email - I was *so* happy)
If you unfamiliar with a platform/language/API, read the code of the masters. SameGnome was written by people who *think* gtk+. Best practice examples were there for the stealing.
Summary:
Read code by Linus, Alan, Miguel, David Faure[I used to work with David - he coded an XML parser in PL/SQL - 'nuff respect], Ted T'so. And weep until you can at least aspire to that level of purity.
Hack on the code for fun. Get friends to join in. That's why you were given the source.
Never code in C. [I feel strongly about this;-)]
We achieved a lot. We added several dialogs, a neatly encapsulated network layer, completely re-engineered the 'player' logic (we moved an inherently one-player game to two players - adding more would now be trivial). We had some fun. Do it.
This won't work (unless there is something *very* strange happening - and there is nothing in the story to suggest that).
Basically, they suggest that by rapidly applying and removing a magnetic field on a superconductor, they may be able to violate the law of conservation of momentum. My guess is that this isn't going to happen (for values of 'guess' approaching 'absolutely certain')
I am British and European, so this rant is flavoured.
In the old days, the organisation that ran the mail (usually government-owned) also distributed telegrams. (After G. Marconi pulled his engineering/marketing magic, this went international). Then these scary 'telephone' devices became available.
There is an apocryphal tale (references, anybody?) of a mayor of an American town saying 'The telephone is a wonderful invention. One day, every town in America will have one.'
However, the postal companies were the ones who delivered the telephony. To this day, the 'big' telecoms provider in any region is referred to as 'The PTT' (Post, Telegraph and Telephony). British Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom are the obvious examples.
Unfortunately, these dinosaurs have failed to wake up. Small, agile little companies are desperately trying to eat their lunch.
Even more unfortunately, the PTTs are desperately clinging to their last monopoly - the local loop. The PTTs own the copper from the local exchange to the customer's wall socket, and they will do *anything* to cling to that.
Cable providers are working hard to get more delivery to the customer premises, and deliver bandwidth to the home that is scary ( I have seen cable modems achieving 10Mb), but that is irrelevant.
Here is my point: The PTTs are used to charging by the second, at 64Kb. That business model is dying. The smaller service providers know this. They are hanging in there until the dinosaurs die. Trust me, the dinosaurs *will* die.
Modern customers are happy to pay for bandwidth. Burst bandwidth, commited bandwidth, quality of service. These are the things a customer will pay for. Charge by the minute, charge by the megabyte and you are dead.
Message to the PTTs: Wake Up and Sell the Bandwidth. There are plenty of hungry people out here who are waiting to eat your lunch.
Or, put simply (and on-topic again) charging extra for VoIP is the death-rattle of a PTT. We shall feast on it's rotting flesh.
I agree totally with your "Bandwidth Management for Dummies" explanations. The first point I was making was that, to achieve what the author was on about, you would need intermediate servers (with a very trusted, and trusting nature). Your second point: Yes, yes yes. But where does this "massive bandwidth because it's relayed" requirement come from? Relaying/proxying should only ever require an O(1) signalling overhead. And O() is a kind function in this situation.
It's a waste of talented programmers to spend their time doing something that has been done (at least twice(Lotus and Microsoft)) very well. Particularly when there is more than one open-source team trying to do the same thing.
Why don't these people get together and build something new?
I have a *fuckload* of ideas for genuinely new tools. Unfortunately, I have to eat, so I have a job, so I have bugger-all free time to spend implementing my ideas.
Relay all the traffic between us, rather than just brokering the connection. (I am puzzled. What does that mean?)
(This next bit is Quality bollocks)
Broker the connection in some way that magically splices together two client-initiated TCP sessions.
What the flying fuck was that sentence about?
And now:
I was sure Napster didn't do relaying, that would require massive bandwidth Please! Help me! I am *paid* to know about networking. What is this "relaying" thing that 'requires massive bandwidth'? Am I going to lose my job?
Sorry, I am too scared to read further tosh like this. Either the author is a global telecoms guru, or he is a know-nothing fuckwit. If my diagnosis is wrong, then I have just lost my job.
apologies I just read a bit further into the story. Where some people who know (at least) the basics politely tell him how it works. Later still in the article, he proves he hasn't learnt a fucking thing.
I like journalists. But I'd need mustard before I could eat a whole one.
I use MS Outlook and Exchange server at work. It rocks.
There are some *huge* problems with it. For instance, if you send a meeting request to a person who has marked themselves as 'Out of Office', and they have made 'Everybody' a delegate, then everybody gets the meeting request.
And that's the worst problem I can think of. [Having worked with Exchange/Outlook for five years I think that's quite impressive]
Question: How can a bunch of students hope to create a better system than one that 2,000 professional software engineers spent ten years building?
Now, let's assume they do it. "Here is a better mail/news/groupware/calendar application then Exchange/Lotus Notes/". How many tens of million dollars have you got to promote it with? [If it's less than $100 million, go home now).
I am sorry. Free software is now, and always will be, utter shite when it comes to developing "business desktop" software. Simple reason - a person costs $75,000 to hire, so $2,000 a year per employee is chump change.
The place for free software is in the *server* arena. It's already winning there. No, I lie, It's already won. Most Sun Starfires have gcc, *very* few have Sun's CC.
I burble, I am drunk again.
Trying to reproduce excellent software like M$ Exchange and M$ Outlook is futile. Roll with the punches, and get accepted as an IETF engineer. IETF engineers (yes, I know there is no such thing...) build things that matter.
But, for the sake of Eris DO SOMETHING ORIGINAL.
Quit following, and start leading. Or grow up. It's your fucking choice.
So did I. (Netscape 4 on Linux, Flash plugin present).
So I read the HTML source. It's mostly Javascript that appears to be written by a non-idiot. Unfortunately, they overlooked some minor details, so the site won't work unless you run Windows or Mac on a 68k. The URL to try is fucking here.
I wonder who owns FuckNSI.com? That was rhetorical - I know who does now. - that's a cute weasel.
Or, less rhetorically, but rambling:
[chaz@phoebe chaz]$ whois fucknsi.com
[whois.internic.net]
Whois Server Version 1.3
Domain names in the.com,.net, and.org domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
for detailed information.
Domain Name: FUCKNSI.COM
Registrar: TUCOWS.COM, INC.
Whois Server: whois.opensrs.net
Referral URL: www.opensrs.org
Name Server: FRANK.BAZ.ORG
Name Server: SOM-NS-1.FSCK.COM
Updated Date: 20-sep-2000
>>> Last update of whois database: Thu, 23 Nov 2000 07:31:56 EST
The Registry database contains ONLY.COM,.NET,.ORG,.EDU domains and
Registrars.
It's going to be fast. Very fast. At the moment, it isn't significantly faster than the P3 or the Athlon, but remember this is the first release of an entirely new core.
This is the first *really* new core from Intel since the P2. The P2 first shipped at 120Mhz. This puppy is going to clock and clock. Expect to see 2Ghz by Q2 2001, 3Ghz before Q2 2002.
I agree that this release is strictly for the lunatic fringe, but this is the core that Intel are relying on to regain them bragging rights. Don't underestimate it.
Meanwhile, I'm still hoping for my 1024-way UltraSparc 3 box...
Slashdot Mirror
(see my out-of-print book Undocumented Windows File Formats)
Amazon have it listed here. They reckon they can ship in 2-3 days.
Amazon's UK outfit can get it in 4-6 weeks
Funnily enough, Amazon in Germany can get it in 3-5 weeks.
Read what you want into that. I blame Frankfurt airport.
IANAKD (Kernel Developer) (but I do read the mailing list).
/usr/src/linux/main.c
IIRC, there is a potential problem with very fast (>2GHz) processors confusing the delay loop calibration.
Check out calibrate_delay in
It uses an unsigned long to count ticks. So, on a 64-bit fast processor, there's probably no problem.
On the other hand, I may be completely wrong.
e^(pi*i)+1=0
Euler's relationship.
Since all the "What is CERT for?" and "Bugtraq rocks my scary little world" posts seem to have been made, I thought I would point my slashbot tendencies at the Treaty of Rome.
<SLASHBOT>
The EU will soon be *easily* the largest economy on the planet (except China. OK, Maybe India. You know what I mean). 500 million eager consumers with shedloads of cash. Enough cash to support some *very* fat lawyers. In the EU, we send our fattest, most offensive lawyers to Strasbourg, where they can do most harm.
Then we have this little thing called the Treaty of Rome, which has much the same purpose as the US Constitution, except you can't fit it on a sheet of A4, no matter how 'leet your PostScript skillz are.
Article 85 of the Treaty of Rome says some interesting things.
One of the things it explicitly forbids is arrangements to establish contractual conditions that bear no direct connection to the subject of the contract, like tie-in clauses.
Now, If global giants like Sun, Cisco, Microsoft etc. use a forum like the one they have just set up to restrain trade, you wouldn't need a lawyer to win an antitrust case against them My blind old dog (if I had one) could win it.
</SLASHBOT>
So, there you go. If they do *anything* that pisses off the EU commission, they'll get nailed to the proverbial tree.
For those too stupid to work out how to get rich here, all you need to do is to start up a tech company that relies on one of their products in a way that directly competes with them or one of their "valued partners", wait for a security flaw to be announced, prove that they did not disclose it to *all* their customers at the same time and *BLAMMO!* a lot of fat lawyers get even fatter over a period of several years.
If I had ~50 million Euros to burn, I'd do it.
Share and enjoy.
The main reason that Java runs fast on AS/400s is because you can compile the 32-bit Java bytecode to native 64-bit programs (CRTJVAPGM is the command IIRC - haven't played with an AS/400 recently).
That, and the fact that for raw I/O performance AS/400s rock.
My source for this is the Wall Street Journal (although not perfect, probably more reliable than the Sunday Times).
.uk people buy the (Murdoch owned) paper called "The Sun" than buy a newspaper. The Sun isn't a newspaper. It is a daily rag based on the (very profitable) concept that a lot of people with 35p (==$0.5) are happy to spend that on a paper that has headlines like "Phwooarrr! Look at the tits on that!!!". Page 3 of The Sun (Every day) has a topless photograph of a young woman (aged 17-20).
As a Brit, I tried to work myself into a state of righteous indignation over that statement. Then I realised that you're right.
There was an era, in the dim, distant past, when The Times was the 'newspaper of record', and The Sunday Times was the paper that did serious, well researched investigative journalism. Then, Rupert Murdoch happened.
It is a sad fact that more
It is very hard to gain the moral high ground about *anything* when you live in a country where the highest-selliing daily paper is largely filled with young women's breasts, and salacious, inaccurate and often inflammatory stories about sexual misdemanours of priests.
To summarise for US citizens: Our biggest-selling daily paper is a supermarket tabloid, with tits in. It's published by an Australian gangster.
Ye Gods. We *deserved* to lose our Empire.
Next time you link to a new /code site, at least show some commonsense by grabbing the "Hemos" username.
I now 0wn Hemos@geekt.org. I am so l33t I scare myself. Yadda Yadda. (Oh, mom, do I *have to go to bed now?)
Chaz the l33t 3kr1p7 k1dd13.
It happened fast.
/.
A story was posted on
A reader realised that the link was to his work, and he hadn't been credited. The site that was publishing his work is a commercial site. He hadn't been offered payment, credit or anything.
I'd be bloody angry at that.
Then, people accused the original author of plagiarism. They used some questionable tactics to do so.
I'd have become physically violent at that point.
Then, some *very* bright people did some research (if looking at cached pages is called "being very bright" - it's certainly more than most people would think of doing).
End result - Author happy(ish), reviewboard has some apologising to do before it's reputation is back intact (if it ever had one). No lasting harm done
Game over. Insert stolen coin for replay.
<disclaimer>I have worked with E10Ks. They're quite cool.</disclaimer>
My gut tells me that money would be better spent helping NetBSD and others with code audits. Of course IANASecurity Expert, so what do I know...
Damn straight you're not a security expert. (And I think you meant OpenBSD). Nobody is a security "expert". Some of us are older, wiser, and bear a lot more scars than others, but *none* of us are experts.
Until you have had a system properly fucked over, you know *nothing* about security.
There are a surprising number of companies saying "We are InfoSec Experts" out there who leave there own internal systems open to flagrant abuse. Like leaving certain ports (137, 139 etc) open to the Internet, and then give the receptionist a domain account. How hard is *that* to crack? ("Hello, I'm from the auditors. What name do you type in to the computer in the morning? Good, that sound right. Now, just let me check. What do you type in the other box? Thankyou. That's the right answer!)
Back on topic: Honeypots are tremendously valuable if, and only if, they are well run.
In the ongoing battle between the infosec "good guys" (mostly sysadmins) and the infosec "bad guys" (mostly l33t k1dd13s, but with a peppering of serious, professional criminals) the good guys are at a crippling disadvantage. We have to get every single thing right all the time. The bad guys only need to find one single, trivial mistake, and then it's w00t! r00tkit!
These nasty little untalented, bored, socially malformed little twerps have all the cards; That wouldn't be so bad, but they freely give these cards to anyone. Nothing wrong with that. Except that some of the recipients (OK, a small number, but it only takes one) are working for serious, professional blow-your-brains-out-and-cover-you-in-concrete professionals.
Honeypots are one of the few tools that let us monitor, study and comprehend what's going on. (That, and assiduous reading of alt.2600 etc.)
We, the responsible victims of attacks, choose to monitor the attackers in any way we can. We do this because we want the Internet to be a useful place. And we are happy to forward information gained to law-enforcement types.
If script kiddies dont like this then, hey! Build your own sodding network. When you get 100 million people connected, I'll come and look.
Some studies have shown that the best programmers are 100 times more effective than the worst.
To lazy to look up references.
Your point being?
If you want SMP on OpenBSD, download the source, buy a selection of SMP boxes (twin-processor Intel is not enough to be useful, really), and spend a year or so hacking out the code. If you find it interesting, that is.
OpenBSD is a free operating system. It's actually very good. If you want to add stuff, all you have to do is write it and compile it in.
If you lack the skills to add a feature you want, you can hire someone to do it.
Go for it. If it matters that much to you, an investment of maybe as little as $250,000 will be worth it. But either put your time or your money where your mouth is.
Share and Enjoy.
The majority of server systems these days are either I/O or connectivity bound these days.
Numerically 'the majority', maybe. If you count every pathetic little Intel box connected to a DSL line a 'server'.
I am happily able to nail 64 processors on a Starfire to the ground without filling up 8*1Gb/s outbound pipes. All you need is a big database and 30,000 users.
Real computers, properly configured, running real tasks run CPU-bound. If yours isn't, hire a real engineer.
Mind you, a box like that would never, ever, face the Internet directly.
Is IBM large enough for you?
True. But, I'm drunk, and I'm lazy. That's why I didn't say for certain whether it uses IP address or cookies. It's easier for me to ssh to another box on another network and fire up lynx than it is to point and drool round Netscape menus.
In addition, further poking of their 'search engine' seems to indicate that it's cock-up, not conspiracy to blame. And I am talking about the sort of fuckup that, if one of my staff did it, they would receive the highly-coveted 'moron of the day' bog-brush award.
OK. No porn. So, I search for 'sappho' It returns a bunch of non-porn gay/lesbian links. Good so far.
Then I search for 'x-33' (a cool aerospace failure). No returns.
Then I search for 'porn'. One link. A lesbian resource site that turned up in the first search.
Then (getting suspicious) I search for 'molniya' (both usual spellings) - a type of satellite orbit(OK, it's a bit obscure). No hits.
Next, it gets interesting. I try 'sappho' again. ( I got more than ten hits last time). I get no hits. Now I'm suspicious. So, I try a few other things. (telnet into another box, try it from there, etc). This thing *clearly* maintains state information. I *think* it does it by IP. It *may* do it by cookies.
I am suspicious. Show us the source. How does it work?
*Anything* that adds state information to HTTP and claims to be *new* needs some investigation.
To the people who run TheIndex: If you want help from people here, show us the source. Some of us will help if you do that. Until then, I will advise people to be aware that you are gathering information from visitors without telling them you are doing it.
Stop Post- You're not evil. You're incompetent. I just did a search for 'Lesbian' and it returned '9 sites found for sappho'. You are maintaning state information. But only because your back-end software sucks harder than raw vacuum. All I have to say is 'open the fucking code. You need the help badly'.
Share and enjoy.
PS - if you don't want to open the code, and you have a *lot* of money, I may be able to help. But check that it's a shedload of the folding stuff before you call - I may be easy, but I'm not cheap;-))
I learnt three things:
I *still* really hate C as a GUI application language
Miguel de Icaza is a *really* nice bloke (he answered an email - I was *so* happy)
If you unfamiliar with a platform/language/API, read the code of the masters. SameGnome was written by people who *think* gtk+. Best practice examples were there for the stealing.
Summary:
Read code by Linus, Alan, Miguel, David Faure[I used to work with David - he coded an XML parser in PL/SQL - 'nuff respect], Ted T'so. And weep until you can at least aspire to that level of purity.
Hack on the code for fun. Get friends to join in. That's why you were given the source.
Never code in C. [I feel strongly about this ;-)]
We achieved a lot. We added several dialogs, a neatly encapsulated network layer, completely re-engineered the 'player' logic (we moved an inherently one-player game to two players - adding more would now be trivial). We had some fun. Do it.
Share and enjoy.
This won't work (unless there is something *very* strange happening - and there is nothing in the story to suggest that).
Basically, they suggest that by rapidly applying and removing a magnetic field on a superconductor, they may be able to violate the law of conservation of momentum. My guess is that this isn't going to happen (for values of 'guess' approaching 'absolutely certain')
I have a weapon more powerful than you can possibly imagine. Hand the money over and no-one needs to gets hurt
</piss-poor translation>
Unfortunately, I can't make my browser display the canonical response in Greek (and my Greek is pathetic anyway), so here it is in English:
<repeated chanting>Come and have a go if you think you're hard enough </repeated chanting>
In the old days, the organisation that ran the mail (usually government-owned) also distributed telegrams. (After G. Marconi pulled his engineering/marketing magic, this went international). Then these scary 'telephone' devices became available.
There is an apocryphal tale (references, anybody?) of a mayor of an American town saying 'The telephone is a wonderful invention. One day, every town in America will have one.'
However, the postal companies were the ones who delivered the telephony. To this day, the 'big' telecoms provider in any region is referred to as 'The PTT' (Post, Telegraph and Telephony). British Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom are the obvious examples.
Unfortunately, these dinosaurs have failed to wake up. Small, agile little companies are desperately trying to eat their lunch.
Even more unfortunately, the PTTs are desperately clinging to their last monopoly - the local loop. The PTTs own the copper from the local exchange to the customer's wall socket, and they will do *anything* to cling to that.
Cable providers are working hard to get more delivery to the customer premises, and deliver bandwidth to the home that is scary ( I have seen cable modems achieving 10Mb), but that is irrelevant.
Here is my point: The PTTs are used to charging by the second, at 64Kb. That business model is dying. The smaller service providers know this. They are hanging in there until the dinosaurs die. Trust me, the dinosaurs *will* die.
Modern customers are happy to pay for bandwidth. Burst bandwidth, commited bandwidth, quality of service. These are the things a customer will pay for. Charge by the minute, charge by the megabyte and you are dead.
Message to the PTTs: Wake Up and Sell the Bandwidth. There are plenty of hungry people out here who are waiting to eat your lunch.
Or, put simply (and on-topic again) charging extra for VoIP is the death-rattle of a PTT. We shall feast on it's rotting flesh.
I agree totally with your "Bandwidth Management for Dummies" explanations.
The first point I was making was that, to achieve what the author was on about, you would need intermediate servers (with a very trusted, and trusting nature).
Your second point: Yes, yes yes. But where does this "massive bandwidth because it's relayed" requirement come from? Relaying/proxying should only ever require an O(1) signalling overhead. And O() is a kind function in this situation.
Particularly when there is more than one open-source team trying to do the same thing.
Why don't these people get together and build something new?
I have a *fuckload* of ideas for genuinely new tools. Unfortunately, I have to eat, so I have a job, so I have bugger-all free time to spend implementing my ideas.
C'est la vie.
Relay all the traffic between us, rather than just brokering the connection. (I am puzzled. What does that mean?)
(This next bit is Quality bollocks)
Broker the connection in some way that magically splices together two client-initiated TCP sessions.
What the flying fuck was that sentence about?
And now:
I was sure Napster didn't do relaying, that would require massive bandwidth
Please! Help me! I am *paid* to know about networking. What is this "relaying" thing that 'requires massive bandwidth'? Am I going to lose my job?
Sorry, I am too scared to read further tosh like this. Either the author is a global telecoms guru, or he is a know-nothing fuckwit. If my diagnosis is wrong, then I have just lost my job.
apologies
I just read a bit further into the story. Where some people who know (at least) the basics politely tell him how it works. Later still in the article, he proves he hasn't learnt a fucking thing.
I like journalists. But I'd need mustard before I could eat a whole one.
There are some *huge* problems with it. For instance, if you send a meeting request to a person who has marked themselves as 'Out of Office', and they have made 'Everybody' a delegate, then everybody gets the meeting request.
And that's the worst problem I can think of. [Having worked with Exchange/Outlook for five years I think that's quite impressive]
Question: How can a bunch of students hope to create a better system than one that 2,000 professional software engineers spent ten years building?
Now, let's assume they do it. "Here is a better mail/news/groupware/calendar application then Exchange/Lotus Notes/". How many tens of million dollars have you got to promote it with? [If it's less than $100 million, go home now).
I am sorry. Free software is now, and always will be, utter shite when it comes to developing "business desktop" software. Simple reason - a person costs $75,000 to hire, so $2,000 a year per employee is chump change.
The place for free software is in the *server* arena. It's already winning there. No, I lie, It's already won. Most Sun Starfires have gcc, *very* few have Sun's CC.
I burble, I am drunk again.
Trying to reproduce excellent software like M$ Exchange and M$ Outlook is futile. Roll with the punches, and get accepted as an IETF engineer. IETF engineers (yes, I know there is no such thing...) build things that matter.
But, for the sake of Eris DO SOMETHING ORIGINAL.
Quit following, and start leading. Or grow up. It's your fucking choice.
So I read the HTML source. It's mostly Javascript that appears to be written by a non-idiot. Unfortunately, they overlooked some minor details, so the site won't work unless you run Windows or Mac on a 68k. The URL to try is fucking here.
Fuckwits with Flash can try this fucking url
I wonder who owns FuckNSI.com? That was rhetorical - I know who does now. - that's a cute weasel.
Or, less rhetorically, but rambling:
[chaz@phoebe chaz]$ whois fucknsi.com
[whois.internic.net]
Whois Server Version 1.3
Domain names in the
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
for detailed information.
Domain Name: FUCKNSI.COM
Registrar: TUCOWS.COM, INC.
Whois Server: whois.opensrs.net
Referral URL: www.opensrs.org
Name Server: FRANK.BAZ.ORG
Name Server: SOM-NS-1.FSCK.COM
Updated Date: 20-sep-2000
>>> Last update of whois database: Thu, 23 Nov 2000 07:31:56 EST
The Registry database contains ONLY
Registrars.
So, now you know.
This is the first *really* new core from Intel since the P2. The P2 first shipped at 120Mhz. This puppy is going to clock and clock. Expect to see 2Ghz by Q2 2001, 3Ghz before Q2 2002.
I agree that this release is strictly for the lunatic fringe, but this is the core that Intel are relying on to regain them bragging rights. Don't underestimate it.
Meanwhile, I'm still hoping for my 1024-way UltraSparc 3 box...