Well, the Samba team should be happy. The thing that they have *always* needed is access to the APis. That will happen before any appeal. As a side-effect, it should let us see the Kerberos 'extensions'.
But this ruling (if implemented) will reduce Microsoft to an irrelevance very quickly.
First, the OS group will lose their 'Unique selling point' - 'If you want to run Office, you have to run Windows'. That goes. As soon as the apps company releases Office for another platform (which will be soon). Then the OS has to compete on a level playing field, and without the apps, they can't. At the very least they would have to be cheap.
Secondly, the Apps company will want to move the 'Back Office' apps (IIS, SQL Server, Message Queue) to stable server platforms. And that means UNIX. This will happen *very* fast. This will kill Windows2000 server, and the Windows2000 Datacenter team can go home now.
Thirdly, The remaining good engineers will leave. A lot have already gone. OK, maybe they'll stay. But they will want *big* pay rises, because they won't believe in the share options any more. I know I'd be 'considering my options'.
The OS group will be left nursing a large number (Win95, Win98, WinNT, WinCE, Win2K, WinBleurgh etc) of operating systems to support. For the forseeable future. They will have no 'killer app', because they can't bundle Office. Oh, whoops. That means they might have to (gasp) compete - and that will be a new experience for Microsoft executives.
And they can kiss goodbye to NGWS (Next Generation Windows Services). This will actually be the first big casualty, because developing it will probably defy the non-'structural' remedies, which come into force before any appeal. So they've blown all that money already. If I were a minority shareholder I might consider whether the directors were acting properly when they decided to spend that money. And there are a huge number of minority shareholders.
Which brings me to my final point. This ruling opens the way to a *lot* of other lawsuits. Including some very nasty class actions. In fact, the pork barrel is so full the problem will be preventing coronary heart disease in the lawyers.
There are two problems here. The first is that there is a need for translation between 'human memorable' names and IP addresses. This means that something like DNS is needed. It doesn't have to be DNS.
The second problem is managing distribution of IP addresses. v4 IP addresses are meant to be in short supply. They're not. There are 2^32 (less a few) possible addresses. The number of Internet-connected hosts is 1-2 orders of magnitude less than that. The problem isn't a lack of available v4 IP addresses; it's piss-poor management of the available ones. One solution is hard - getting people (and, more importantly, routers) to manage v4 addresses intelligently. The other solution is easy. Move to IP v6. This will happen (probably very suddenly - all the infrastructure is in place).
However, mapping 'human-readable' names to IP addresses is the issue here. DNS is inherently a hierarchical structure. It doesn't need to be. I think that a truly distributed lookup system is more desirable. The obvious example (although I disapprove of both) is Gnutella versus Napster.
My suggestion is simple: The free software community should develop a distributed name -> address resolution protocol in conjunction with IETF. Conflict resolution should be handled with existing copyright law.
These are ideas. Please respond intelligently (I have enough hot grits already)
Select from a bunch of nerd-related 'news' stories on a simulated 'bulletin-board' style website!
Read the comments other gamers have made. Post your own reponses in a truly 'InterActive(tm)' fashion!
Then wait as the cruel 'Moderators' play the 'Troll or Funny game' Wait in trepidation for their verdict on your comment! Soon, You Too will do anything for Karma!
As you progress through the game, *you* may even become a 'Moderator' yourself!
*Cheer* as another 'grits' post is moderated down *Swoon* as your post is moderated 'Off-Topic' *Wonder* at the re-posting of ancient stories *Thrill* as you bribe a moderator with the cheap $3 crack. *Wince* at the replies to your comments.
Coming soon - version 2 - Now you can play Online!
Apologies to moderators - I know the cheap $3 crack isn't what it used to be.
Advances like this first get used on 'real' computers - serious SMP servers like IBM's SP series of RS6000s, Suns high-end servers (Starfire), Compaq's WildFire Alpha boxes (drool) and, soon, servers based on AMD Sledgehammer and Intel Merced (Itanium) / Willamette chips.
Machines like this are used for *serious* numbercrunching. They predict the weather, model the economy, help design planes and spacecraft and find oil. These are tasks for which there is still a serious demand for MIPS.
Because of the astounding cost of developing these technologies, it takes years for them to trickle through to the desktop.
I admit that when decent processors get to the desktop, they are wasted. I did some low-level monitoring of my mother's PIII 450 recently. She runs Win98 and MS Word. The processor spends 99.2% of it's time idle, and 60% of it's active time it's waiting for cache misses. The cache miss problem isn't going away any time soon, because memory is still not getting faster at a high enough rate. The only realistic cure is for compiler writers to continue developing *very* clever optimisers. This is happening, but optimisations like this are deep magic.
I/O in modern servers using proprietary technology is awesome. Check out the IBM SP servers for more info. (Can't find the link - I have it on CD). Unfortunately, PCs are hampered by 'legacy' technologies like PCI. There is at least one serious attempt to address this - the Next Generation I/O project
This is stretching the limits of physics. A 70 nm layer is only about 200-300 Si=O bonds thick. We're almost in the area where quantum effects become an overriding concern. I can't be bothered to work out the probability of an electron with a given voltage tunnelling through a layer this thin, but I suspect that we are in the area where voltage regulation and temperature control become *very* important. Put another way, these babies won't be candidates for aggressive overclocking.
What this really means is that we *may* have a little longer to go before we have to start using 'exotic' oxides. This is good news. One of the great things about SiO2 is that the manufacturing properties are well understood (although, at this size, lithography is going to be, er, interesting.
And they say there's a chance that they can take it even further. Gordon Moore will be pleased. His law looks good for the forseeable future.
One of the reasons that SCO operating systems have been so popular is that there are a lot of applications (Tetra, Informix etc) that the run on them. These are used very widely (particularly in manufacturing industry in my experience)
As you seem to be embracing open source, will you be encouraging the suppliers of this software to port their applications to open source operating systems? And how will you sell the idea of open source to the traditionally conservative manufacturing sector?
We only need to reduce the equatorial radius. So put the rockets at the poles and stretch the planet into a thin ellipsiod. This has the other effect of making almost everywhere tropical.
Or we could use one of those wormholes to move the planet to a universe with a higher speed of light.
Or we could breed humans with lower reaction times (or just chill existing ones) so 500ms seems really fast.
Bruce Perens' comment about viruses -"no doubt Linux is in for some viruses and security problems." - willprobably bring hoots of derision from the underinformed.
Linux has at least two major vulnerabilities to viruses. The first doesn't affect Linux directly, but is still embarrasing. If you run Linux as a file server for Win32 machines, and a (usually macro) virus gets a decent foothold in the network, you rely on the Win32 virus checkers to fix it. But they can't (easily) clean it from the file server. The Linux boxes can quite happily continue serving infected files to clean Win32 boxes. Whoops. I believe that we need a native Linux virus checker built as close to the file system as you dare.
The other problem is with binary-only kernel modules that allow connections from userland. Another post today about 'run anywhere' device drivers has exactly this architecture. Unless the supplier of the binary has done a *perfect* security job, there is a possibility that a virus-writer could exploit the binary module to do almost anything to the kernel.
The main protection that Linux has had so far from viruses is the culture of Unix. A Unix programmer good enough to write a virus would spend their time doing something useful. This will change. If even a tiny proportion of the trolls/mp3 warez lusers on this board learn some programming, we could all be in for a difficult time.
Share and Enjoy.
Freedom without responsibility?
on
CFP 2000 Wrapup
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· Score: 5
--BEGIN RANT MODE Sometimes I get angry. I have read the 'notes'. And I can find *no* reference to responsibility anywhere. This is worrying. I am concerned that a growing number of people have no idea what freedom means.
A lot of people rant on about 'freedom' and 'privacy'. Why do none of these people talk about responsibility?
Freedom is an abstract concept that only a minority of the human population currently enjoy. When you talk about freedom, what do you mean? Let's start with Roosevelt's four:
Freedom of speech and expression
Freedom to worship in your own way
Freedom from want
Freedom from fear
A *lot* of people don't have these. And many of them would be grateful for any one of them. Try living in Burma, Somalia, Serbia or China if you find it hard to believe.
I get tired of hearing skript kiddies on this forum saying things like 'Information wants to be free' as they deprive an artist of money by using closed-source Napster to rip of another mp3. What about the artist's right to 'freedom from want'?
I get tired of seeing the 'troll' posts about a certain young lady. Does the troll's 'freedom of expression' outweigh her freedom from fear?
I am increasingly irritated by the same hormonally-challenged kiddies burbling on about 'information wants to be free' insisting that they have a right to strong encryption for *their* information.
Here is my point: Freedom brings responsibility. If you can't handle the responsibility, don't abuse the freedom
-- END RANT MODE
Do to others as you would be done by. Trite, but true.
I agree with many of your points. But if you cared about this forum you could at least have logged in. Or are you worried about your 'Karma'?
The other response is to set up your own forum.
The *only* reason that I am posting this response is that you have posted your points against every story today. When does 'Interesting' become 'Redundant'? And when does 'Redundant' become 'Trolling'? (I hate the misuse of the word 'troll' - check here for the canonical definition)
Try emailing cmdrtaco@slashdot.org before you post this again.
The BBC has been covering this story for a few days. There's a good story here
The cosmonauts have almost no idea what they're going to find. The station has been unmanned for about six months. They have no idea whether it is still presurrised, whether the hull has been compromised or anything. Mir also needs to be *flown* by using it's gyros to keep the solar panels pointing at the sun. How well this is working now is anybody's idea. Rather them than me.
Given the GUI nature of Windows I'd assume that C++ is out of the question - after all under Linux you've only got gcc - which works well enough for simple Linux apps but would fail miserably under the burden of a full-sized Windows app
Ever heard of the Linux kernel? Or Gnome? or KDE? Or Gnumeric? These are all large projects which gcc compiles fine. g++ scales just as well. And they are both a *lot* closer to the standards than VC++.
...and you can't use the logical structure of MFC with it either.
Logical structure? MFC barely has *any* structure. It is a poorly designed, unstructured, non-standards complying disgrace. Often, you are forced to use the raw API because MFC can't cut it. As a framework, it's a disgrace.
Java is a lot slower than C++, and can be a lot more difficult to use for a large project, what with keeping track of finals, absracts and the like.
A decent, modern JIT (Symantec, Borland and even MS have *very* good ones) will run Java with a similar, or even better, performance than C++. And if you have trouble keeping track of finals, abstracts etc. then you have completely missed the point. These are tools which make large-scale development considerably easier in Java than in C/C++. Develop a couple of large (100,000+ lines) projects before dismissing useful language features.
Python is a marvellous language with some great features but it is fairly rigid, and its indentation rules leave a lot to be desired
Umm. These rules are a critical part of the language. They are intended to make it easier to maintain, for one thing. A bit B&D for some tastes, but they are there for a purpose.
And Perl? Well, for anything other than a simple CGI script, forget it. You won't be able to understand the code five minutes later, let alone after a couple of release cycles.
Any competent programmer will be aware of the facility perl gives you to shoot yourself in the foot, and don't make use of it. Well-written perl is no worse than any other powerful scripting language. If you have trouble understanding regexps, do some learning. Practice a bit, and use the/x modifier.
Any other scripting languages aren't even worth considering.
Why not? Do you have extensive experience of them? Or do you just find it hard to name another 5? What about REXX, for example? Just because it's not as popular as perl shouldn't be a reason to write it off. How about REBOL, Tcl/Tk, Scheme, Guile, Snobol, even;)
The Windows platform will continue to lose mindshare. One day you will have to port. A port from Visual Studio is not a thing I would wish to be involved with again. Been there, got the scars.
I am sure you already intend to ask the following, but here goes anyway:
Assuming you are really planning to implement this scary system, how will it work? When you get an anonymous (or even open) report of someone who is reported to be acting 'oddly', what happens next? Who is informed? Teachers? Parents? Police?
How are 'reports' corroborated? Or do you intend to act first, ask questions later?
Are you concerned that you could be handing a vicious, nasty little weapon to irresponsible people? How do you vet the 'reporters' to ensure they are not acting out of malice rather than concern?
What recourse do the accused have? I would hope that they are presented with any allegation, including *all* relevant facts This includes *all* records that you have about them. Will they have free access to an adult who will represent their viewpoint and are assumed innocent of *everything* until there is *real* evidence of wrongdoing. Real wrongdoing, not just 'Not fitting in', or 'Having a bad attitude'
Are you concerned that you are undermining the role of teachers and parents? That you are attempting to remove some responsibility from the people who *should* be caring for children with emotional problems?
Finally, are you aware that you could easily get your behinds sued off, bigtime? Are your shareholders aware of the legal risks you are taking with their money?
I haven't read the findings yet (no-one has), but this is only the beginning.
First, the remedies will be announced. Then, the appeals start. Realistically, these will take years.
However, I understand that the findings can be used by the *many* class action suits. This will hurt MS badly. The real damage will be to their share price. Historically, a significant part of the remuneration to MS staff has been in stock options. In the past, this was a great deal. But if the share price starts to fall, they will find it very hard to hire and retain the best people. Unless this is very carefully managed, it could easily lead to a vicious circle.
It will be very interesting to see what MS does over the next few months to shore the share price up. I hope they don't do anything illegal in the process. That would be tragic.
I can only assume that this machine was stolen to order. They are of limited usefulness for cryptographic purposes these days.
I think it's very sad. This is one of only three Enigma machines left. It was used by the Abwehr (SS), so it a particularly well-engineered machine. It's hard to imagine who would want one. The Bletchley museum was opened recently after a huge amount of work, largely by volunteers.
If any good can come from this, it may draw attention once again to the astonishing work done at Bletchley Park. As part of their efforts to break the Enigma cipher, they built some of the earliest electronic computers (some would say *the* first electronic computer)
You know life is getting weird when you get moderated up for a troll in binary.
I must say that the quality of trolling today was *far* better than usual. And I suspect a few of the regular trolls will be feeling their noses *well* out if joint.
This comment spontaneously generated by MentalPlex
Only the paranoid survive...
on
Intel Roadmap
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· Score: 5
Intel make great chips. There, I said it. They also have a history of making good decisions. So why are they acting like a rabbit caught in the headlights?
For a long time Intel had the highest clock speed chips on the market. Their FPU kicked any part of the anatomy you care to sit on. Their chipsets were awesome. They drove Cyrix into a *very* small corner.
Then, AMD finally gets it's act together with the Athlon. Athlon is faster/better/cheaper (pick two:) than the Pentium 3. And Intel seem to go to pieces. This is not cause and effect, but I honestly believe that losing bragging rights to AMD has caused Intel to mismanage a series of problems that would have been merely embarrasing.
The Camino chipset had/has problems. Merced is so late it may be entirely overtaken by Willamette. Etcetera (it's not a long list of problems, but they seem to be screwing them up so badly I thought I'd say 'etcetera')
Then AMD beat them to the punch with a 1GHz processor. That must have hurt. Even though the Athlon was running it's cache at 1/3 clock rate, AMD got there first. By all of two days.
The (pass me another bucket of 'allegedly's) rumour is that Intel are having difficulty supplying demand for their faster chips (850MHz+), while AMD are happy to ship by the truckful. (More 'allegedly's please...) Other rumours say that some of Intel's second-tier customers are abandoning their Intel loyalty points and buying Athlons just so thay can ship some boxes. Fast boxes. They would love to buy from Intel, but their customers want the boxes today.
And Intel are *still* making stupid decisions. Backing RDRAM is daft. Nobody makes it in serious volume, it's five times more expensive than 'conventional' RAM, and it's proprietry. You can't make it without a licence from Rambus (Who don't have any fabs themselves). And it is at best marginally faster, and at worst astonishingly slower, than SDRAM.
To end the rant: Intel is a great company with great products. But Andy Grove should go and read his own book.
Um. Good point. Will her grant cover the $3million a *week* to keep it going? Or will her friends help chip in a few million?:)
I can appreciate your concern for your sister. I have two myself. But she is going to some seriously 'wilderness' places. (Like UK - my home). Cut her some slack, and learn to worry. It's not an adventure if you can get the bus home.
My (useless) advice: Make sure she knows how to contact the relevant consulate/embassy in every country she goes to. Make sure she gets the right shots before she goes, and then let her go. Keep a spare airfare in your bank in case she needs help. She won't. But please let her go.
The urban legend is that some seriously rich person was on his yacht in the Carribean, and his wife/girlfriend/mistress suggested that his inability to place a phone call to her mother/boyfriend/pet rabbit reflected badly on his manliness. So he decided to make global mobile telecomms happen, irrespective of cost. This is not the way to start a successful enterprise.
Enough legends, now some techie stuff. At the time that Iridium was being designed and implemented, GSM was taking off. Who cares if their phone doen't work in the Rub Al Khali? It works in Boston/Manchester/Kyoto. Very few rich people live in serious wilderness. Those that do can make their own arrangements.
With satellites, you make a trade-off between the number, the altitude and the latency. For useable voice, you *must* have low altidude satellites."Do not exceed the speed of light. It's the law." That has two immediate consequences. You'll need a lot, and they won't last long. The upper atmosphere will eventually cause the final 'Iridium flash'.
Which moves us on to the vandalism of Iridium. The antennae on the sattelites are *incredibly* flat polished surfaces pointing at Earth. So they reflect sunlight *very* effectively. This upsets astronomers. The reflected sunlight flash from an Iridium satellite can do a lot of damage to an astronomical observation.
Then, the choice of frequency for transmissions. Slap bang in the middle of a *critically* important astronomical region. I may be wrong, but I think it's a CO band.
I'm sure this will be said again, but cutting the number of satellites must have irked the gods. It's called Iridium because the number of satellites that they were going to launch was the same as the atomic number of iridium. Then they scaled it down the the atomic number of dysoprasium. My Greek is bad, by dysopraxis is 'inability to speak'. Bad decision.
Cisco kit (routers, switches etc) runs an operating system called IOS (Internetworking Operating System) currently at version 12. Check it out here if you're interested.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the Samba team should be happy. The thing that they have *always* needed is access to the APis. That will happen before any appeal. As a side-effect, it should let us see the Kerberos 'extensions'.
But this ruling (if implemented) will reduce Microsoft to an irrelevance very quickly.
First, the OS group will lose their 'Unique selling point' - 'If you want to run Office, you have to run Windows'. That goes. As soon as the apps company releases Office for another platform (which will be soon). Then the OS has to compete on a level playing field, and without the apps, they can't. At the very least they would have to be cheap.
Secondly, the Apps company will want to move the 'Back Office' apps (IIS, SQL Server, Message Queue) to stable server platforms. And that means UNIX. This will happen *very* fast. This will kill Windows2000 server, and the Windows2000 Datacenter team can go home now.
Thirdly, The remaining good engineers will leave. A lot have already gone. OK, maybe they'll stay. But they will want *big* pay rises, because they won't believe in the share options any more. I know I'd be 'considering my options'.
The OS group will be left nursing a large number (Win95, Win98, WinNT, WinCE, Win2K, WinBleurgh etc) of operating systems to support. For the forseeable future. They will have no 'killer app', because they can't bundle Office. Oh, whoops. That means they might have to (gasp) compete - and that will be a new experience for Microsoft executives.
And they can kiss goodbye to NGWS (Next Generation Windows Services). This will actually be the first big casualty, because developing it will probably defy the non-'structural' remedies, which come into force before any appeal. So they've blown all that money already. If I were a minority shareholder I might consider whether the directors were acting properly when they decided to spend that money. And there are a huge number of minority shareholders.
Which brings me to my final point. This ruling opens the way to a *lot* of other lawsuits. Including some very nasty class actions. In fact, the pork barrel is so full the problem will be preventing coronary heart disease in the lawyers.
Thomas Penfield Jackson, We Salute You.
There are two problems here. The first is that there is a need for translation between 'human memorable' names and IP addresses. This means that something like DNS is needed. It doesn't have to be DNS.
The second problem is managing distribution of IP addresses. v4 IP addresses are meant to be in short supply. They're not. There are 2^32 (less a few) possible addresses. The number of Internet-connected hosts is 1-2 orders of magnitude less than that. The problem isn't a lack of available v4 IP addresses; it's piss-poor management of the available ones. One solution is hard - getting people (and, more importantly, routers) to manage v4 addresses intelligently. The other solution is easy. Move to IP v6. This will happen (probably very suddenly - all the infrastructure is in place).
However, mapping 'human-readable' names to IP addresses is the issue here. DNS is inherently a hierarchical structure. It doesn't need to be. I think that a truly distributed lookup system is more desirable. The obvious example (although I disapprove of both) is Gnutella versus Napster.
My suggestion is simple: The free software community should develop a distributed name -> address resolution protocol in conjunction with IETF. Conflict resolution should be handled with existing copyright law.
These are ideas. Please respond intelligently (I have enough hot grits already)
Select from a bunch of nerd-related 'news' stories on a simulated 'bulletin-board' style website!
Read the comments other gamers have made. Post your own reponses in a truly 'InterActive(tm)' fashion!
Then wait as the cruel 'Moderators' play the 'Troll or Funny game' Wait in trepidation for their verdict on your comment! Soon, You Too will do anything for Karma!
As you progress through the game, *you* may even become a 'Moderator' yourself!
*Cheer* as another 'grits' post is moderated down
*Swoon* as your post is moderated 'Off-Topic'
*Wonder* at the re-posting of ancient stories
*Thrill* as you bribe a moderator with the cheap $3 crack.
*Wince* at the replies to your comments.
Coming soon - version 2 - Now you can play Online!
Apologies to moderators - I know the cheap $3 crack isn't what it used to be.
Advances like this first get used on 'real' computers - serious SMP servers like IBM's SP series of RS6000s, Suns high-end servers (Starfire), Compaq's WildFire Alpha boxes (drool) and, soon, servers based on AMD Sledgehammer and Intel Merced (Itanium) / Willamette chips.
Machines like this are used for *serious* numbercrunching. They predict the weather, model the economy, help design planes and spacecraft and find oil. These are tasks for which there is still a serious demand for MIPS.
Because of the astounding cost of developing these technologies, it takes years for them to trickle through to the desktop.
I admit that when decent processors get to the desktop, they are wasted. I did some low-level monitoring of my mother's PIII 450 recently. She runs Win98 and MS Word. The processor spends 99.2% of it's time idle, and 60% of it's active time it's waiting for cache misses. The cache miss problem isn't going away any time soon, because memory is still not getting faster at a high enough rate. The only realistic cure is for compiler writers to continue developing *very* clever optimisers. This is happening, but optimisations like this are deep magic.
I/O in modern servers using proprietary technology is awesome. Check out the IBM SP servers for more info. (Can't find the link - I have it on CD). Unfortunately, PCs are hampered by 'legacy' technologies like PCI. There is at least one serious attempt to address this - the Next Generation I/O project
This is stretching the limits of physics. A 70 nm layer is only about 200-300 Si=O bonds thick. We're almost in the area where quantum effects become an overriding concern. I can't be bothered to work out the probability of an electron with a given voltage tunnelling through a layer this thin, but I suspect that we are in the area where voltage regulation and temperature control become *very* important. Put another way, these babies won't be candidates for aggressive overclocking.
What this really means is that we *may* have a little longer to go before we have to start using 'exotic' oxides. This is good news. One of the great things about SiO2 is that the manufacturing properties are well understood (although, at this size, lithography is going to be, er, interesting.
And they say there's a chance that they can take it even further. Gordon Moore will be pleased. His law looks good for the forseeable future.
One of the reasons that SCO operating systems have been so popular is that there are a lot of applications (Tetra, Informix etc) that the run on them. These are used very widely (particularly in manufacturing industry in my experience)
As you seem to be embracing open source, will you be encouraging the suppliers of this software to port their applications to open source operating systems?
And how will you sell the idea of open source to the traditionally conservative manufacturing sector?
We only need to reduce the equatorial radius. So put the rockets at the poles and stretch the planet into a thin ellipsiod. This has the other effect of making almost everywhere tropical.
Or we could use one of those wormholes to move the planet to a universe with a higher speed of light.
Or we could breed humans with lower reaction times (or just chill existing ones) so 500ms seems really fast.
while(1) {fork();}
Bruce Perens' comment about viruses -"no doubt Linux is in for some viruses and security problems." - willprobably bring hoots of derision from the underinformed.
Linux has at least two major vulnerabilities to viruses. The first doesn't affect Linux directly, but is still embarrasing. If you run Linux as a file server for Win32 machines, and a (usually macro) virus gets a decent foothold in the network, you rely on the Win32 virus checkers to fix it. But they can't (easily) clean it from the file server. The Linux boxes can quite happily continue serving infected files to clean Win32 boxes. Whoops. I believe that we need a native Linux virus checker built as close to the file system as you dare.
The other problem is with binary-only kernel modules that allow connections from userland. Another post today about 'run anywhere' device drivers has exactly this architecture. Unless the supplier of the binary has done a *perfect* security job, there is a possibility that a virus-writer could exploit the binary module to do almost anything to the kernel.
The main protection that Linux has had so far from viruses is the culture of Unix. A Unix programmer good enough to write a virus would spend their time doing something useful. This will change. If even a tiny proportion of the trolls/mp3 warez lusers on this board learn some programming, we could all be in for a difficult time.
Share and Enjoy.
Sometimes I get angry. I have read the 'notes'. And I can find *no* reference to responsibility anywhere. This is worrying. I am concerned that a growing number of people have no idea what freedom means.
A lot of people rant on about 'freedom' and 'privacy'. Why do none of these people talk about responsibility?
Freedom is an abstract concept that only a minority of the human population currently enjoy. When you talk about freedom, what do you mean? Let's start with Roosevelt's four:
Freedom of speech and expression
Freedom to worship in your own way
Freedom from want
Freedom from fear
A *lot* of people don't have these. And many of them would be grateful for any one of them. Try living in Burma, Somalia, Serbia or China if you find it hard to believe.
I get tired of hearing skript kiddies on this forum saying things like 'Information wants to be free' as they deprive an artist of money by using closed-source Napster to rip of another mp3. What about the artist's right to 'freedom from want'?
I get tired of seeing the 'troll' posts about a certain young lady. Does the troll's 'freedom of expression' outweigh her freedom from fear?
I am increasingly irritated by the same hormonally-challenged kiddies burbling on about 'information wants to be free' insisting that they have a right to strong encryption for *their* information.
Here is my point: Freedom brings responsibility. If you can't handle the responsibility, don't abuse the freedom
-- END RANT MODE
Do to others as you would be done by. Trite, but true.
I agree with many of your points. But if you cared about this forum you could at least have logged in. Or are you worried about your 'Karma'?
The other response is to set up your own forum.
The *only* reason that I am posting this response is that you have posted your points against every story today. When does 'Interesting' become 'Redundant'? And when does 'Redundant' become 'Trolling'? (I hate the misuse of the word 'troll' - check here for the canonical definition)
Try emailing cmdrtaco@slashdot.org before you post this again.
Share and enjoy.
Chaz
The BBC has been covering this story for a few days. There's a good story here
The cosmonauts have almost no idea what they're going to find. The station has been unmanned for about six months. They have no idea whether it is still presurrised, whether the hull has been compromised or anything. Mir also needs to be *flown* by using it's gyros to keep the solar panels pointing at the sun. How well this is working now is anybody's idea. Rather them than me.
Given the GUI nature of Windows I'd assume that C++ is out of the question - after all under Linux you've only got gcc - which works well enough for simple Linux apps but would fail miserably under the burden of a full-sized Windows app
...and you can't use the logical structure of MFC with it either.
/x modifier.
;)
Ever heard of the Linux kernel? Or Gnome? or KDE? Or Gnumeric? These are all large projects which gcc compiles fine. g++ scales just as well. And they are both a *lot* closer to the standards than VC++.
Logical structure? MFC barely has *any* structure. It is a poorly designed, unstructured, non-standards complying disgrace. Often, you are forced to use the raw API because MFC can't cut it. As a framework, it's a disgrace.
Java is a lot slower than C++, and can be a lot more difficult to use for a large project, what with keeping track of finals, absracts and the like.
A decent, modern JIT (Symantec, Borland and even MS have *very* good ones) will run Java with a similar, or even better, performance than C++. And if you have trouble keeping track of finals, abstracts etc. then you have completely missed the point. These are tools which make large-scale development considerably easier in Java than in C/C++. Develop a couple of large (100,000+ lines) projects before dismissing useful language features.
Python is a marvellous language with some great features but it is fairly rigid, and its indentation rules leave a lot to be desired
Umm. These rules are a critical part of the language. They are intended to make it easier to maintain, for one thing. A bit B&D for some tastes, but they are there for a purpose.
And Perl? Well, for anything other than a simple CGI script, forget it. You won't be able to understand the code five minutes later, let alone after a couple of release cycles.
Any competent programmer will be aware of the facility perl gives you to shoot yourself in the foot, and don't make use of it. Well-written perl is no worse than any other powerful scripting language. If you have trouble understanding regexps, do some learning. Practice a bit, and use the
Any other scripting languages aren't even worth considering.
Why not? Do you have extensive experience of them? Or do you just find it hard to name another 5? What about REXX, for example? Just because it's not as popular as perl shouldn't be a reason to write it off. How about REBOL, Tcl/Tk, Scheme, Guile, Snobol, even
The Windows platform will continue to lose mindshare. One day you will have to port. A port from Visual Studio is not a thing I would wish to be involved with again. Been there, got the scars.
I apologise.
Share and Enjoy.
I am sure you already intend to ask the following, but here goes anyway:
Assuming you are really planning to implement this scary system, how will it work? When you get an anonymous (or even open) report of someone who is reported to be acting 'oddly', what happens next? Who is informed? Teachers? Parents? Police?
How are 'reports' corroborated? Or do you intend to act first, ask questions later?
Are you concerned that you could be handing a vicious, nasty little weapon to irresponsible people? How do you vet the 'reporters' to ensure they are not acting out of malice rather than concern?
What recourse do the accused have? I would hope that they are presented with any allegation, including *all* relevant facts This includes *all* records that you have about them. Will they have free access to an adult who will represent their viewpoint and are assumed innocent of *everything* until there is *real* evidence of wrongdoing. Real wrongdoing, not just 'Not fitting in', or 'Having a bad attitude'
Are you concerned that you are undermining the role of teachers and parents? That you are attempting to remove some responsibility from the people who *should* be caring for children with emotional problems?
Finally, are you aware that you could easily get your behinds sued off, bigtime? Are your shareholders aware of the legal risks you are taking with their money?
I haven't read the findings yet (no-one has), but this is only the beginning.
First, the remedies will be announced. Then, the appeals start. Realistically, these will take years.
However, I understand that the findings can be used by the *many* class action suits. This will hurt MS badly. The real damage will be to their share price. Historically, a significant part of the remuneration to MS staff has been in stock options. In the past, this was a great deal. But if the share price starts to fall, they will find it very hard to hire and retain the best people. Unless this is very carefully managed, it could easily lead to a vicious circle.
It will be very interesting to see what MS does over the next few months to shore the share price up. I hope they don't do anything illegal in the process. That would be tragic.
I can only assume that this machine was stolen to order. They are of limited usefulness for cryptographic purposes these days.
I think it's very sad. This is one of only three Enigma machines left. It was used by the Abwehr (SS), so it a particularly well-engineered machine. It's hard to imagine who would want one. The Bletchley museum was opened recently after a huge amount of work, largely by volunteers.
If any good can come from this, it may draw attention once again to the astonishing work done at Bletchley Park. As part of their efforts to break the Enigma cipher, they built some of the earliest electronic computers (some would say *the* first electronic computer)
Check here for more information.
You know life is getting weird when you get moderated up for a troll in binary.
I must say that the quality of trolling today was *far* better than usual. And I suspect a few of the regular trolls will be feeling their noses *well* out if joint.
This comment spontaneously generated by MentalPlex
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For all you C programmers (and others who think in hex...)
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Apologies.
Intel make great chips. There, I said it. They also have a history of making good decisions. So why are they acting like a rabbit caught in the headlights?
For a long time Intel had the highest clock speed chips on the market. Their FPU kicked any part of the anatomy you care to sit on. Their chipsets were awesome. They drove Cyrix into a *very* small corner.
Then, AMD finally gets it's act together with the Athlon. Athlon is faster/better/cheaper (pick two:) than the Pentium 3. And Intel seem to go to pieces. This is not cause and effect, but I honestly believe that losing bragging rights to AMD has caused Intel to mismanage a series of problems that would have been merely embarrasing.
The Camino chipset had/has problems. Merced is so late it may be entirely overtaken by Willamette. Etcetera (it's not a long list of problems, but they seem to be screwing them up so badly I thought I'd say 'etcetera')
Then AMD beat them to the punch with a 1GHz processor. That must have hurt. Even though the Athlon was running it's cache at 1/3 clock rate, AMD got there first. By all of two days.
The (pass me another bucket of 'allegedly's) rumour is that Intel are having difficulty supplying demand for their faster chips (850MHz+), while AMD are happy to ship by the truckful. (More 'allegedly's please...) Other rumours say that some of Intel's second-tier customers are abandoning their Intel loyalty points and buying Athlons just so thay can ship some boxes. Fast boxes. They would love to buy from Intel, but their customers want the boxes today.
And Intel are *still* making stupid decisions. Backing RDRAM is daft. Nobody makes it in serious volume, it's five times more expensive than 'conventional' RAM, and it's proprietry. You can't make it without a licence from Rambus (Who don't have any fabs themselves). And it is at best marginally faster, and at worst astonishingly slower, than SDRAM.
To end the rant: Intel is a great company with great products. But Andy Grove should go and read his own book.
Um. Good point. Will her grant cover the $3million a *week* to keep it going? Or will her friends help chip in a few million? :)
I can appreciate your concern for your sister. I have two myself. But she is going to some seriously 'wilderness' places. (Like UK - my home). Cut her some slack, and learn to worry. It's not an adventure if you can get the bus home.
My (useless) advice: Make sure she knows how to contact the relevant consulate/embassy in every country she goes to. Make sure she gets the right shots before she goes, and then let her go. Keep a spare airfare in your bank in case she needs help. She won't. But please let her go.
The urban legend is that some seriously rich person was on his yacht in the Carribean, and his wife/girlfriend/mistress suggested that his inability to place a phone call to her mother/boyfriend/pet rabbit reflected badly on his manliness. So he decided to make global mobile telecomms happen, irrespective of cost. This is not the way to start a successful enterprise.
Enough legends, now some techie stuff.
At the time that Iridium was being designed and implemented, GSM was taking off. Who cares if their phone doen't work in the Rub Al Khali? It works in Boston/Manchester/Kyoto. Very few rich people live in serious wilderness. Those that do can make their own arrangements.
With satellites, you make a trade-off between the number, the altitude and the latency. For useable voice, you *must* have low altidude satellites."Do not exceed the speed of light. It's the law." That has two immediate consequences. You'll need a lot, and they won't last long. The upper atmosphere will eventually cause the final 'Iridium flash'.
Which moves us on to the vandalism of Iridium. The antennae on the sattelites are *incredibly* flat polished surfaces pointing at Earth. So they reflect sunlight *very* effectively. This upsets astronomers. The reflected sunlight flash from an Iridium satellite can do a lot of damage to an astronomical observation.
Then, the choice of frequency for transmissions. Slap bang in the middle of a *critically* important astronomical region. I may be wrong, but I think it's a CO band.
I'm sure this will be said again, but cutting the number of satellites must have irked the gods. It's called Iridium because the number of satellites that they were going to launch was the same as the atomic number of iridium. Then they scaled it down the the atomic number of dysoprasium. My Greek is bad, by dysopraxis is 'inability to speak'. Bad decision.
I apologise for the rant.
A Microsoft OS
A Unix
Consider:
FreeBSD
NetBSD
OpenBSD
Linux
BeOS (Which certainly has a lot of userland stuff fron Unix)
Solaris for Intel
And now Darwin.
As a sad old Unix hacker, this makes me happy. But is there no other architecture out there? How about MVS for Intel? VMS? OS/400?
Or is it just that Unix is so far technically superior that it is the only realistic option?
Here are a few places to check.
/. - puzzling}
The article describing how it was done. It's here as well.
The source and binaries are at http://arcade.kvinesdal.com/cyberpatrol.html.
These are all personal sites, so be gentle.
Share and enjoy.
{PS - the last link was reverting to
Cisco kit (routers, switches etc) runs an operating system called IOS (Internetworking Operating System) currently at version 12. Check it out here if you're interested.