HMD (head mounted displays) are getting smaller, higher-res, etc... I hope that someday they will be mostly inconspicuous. This shouldn't (at least in my view) be about vanity. MicroOptical makes an HMD that basically are bulky glasses with a small patch of coloration on one end. Likely they'll become very much like normal glasses, the only difference being the small spot of coloration.
Wearable computing has many interesting applications... the stopgap has mostly been the displays. Monocular, small, inobtrusive displays do exist though, usually for 1-2k if you want high-res and color. But a low-res grayscale display is only 500. Everything else is getting smaller, too. IBM's recent 1gig harddrive is about the size of a match book, and is 500 bucks.
I believe that the root of this problem lies in the I/O models supported by Linux. Basically, we've got the following:
1) Blocking I/O (used with threads) 2) Nonblocking with select/poll/something else 3) Crappy POSIX aio_* functions (does Linux even support these?)
Windows NT has blocking and nonblocking of course, and has what they call asyncronous sockets that work based on a message queue, but it also has what is called I/O completion ports, which use overlapped I/O. I'm not an expert on these models (yet) but they are the de facto model on NT to support thousands of concurrent connections. It uses a mixture of threads and asyncronous operations (not message queue based this time) so, say, 64 clients are handled by one thread. As apposed to Apache fork()ing whenever a new connection comes in. Yuck.
I've searched for info on making a similar I/O model on linux and have come up with a few references to IOCP on the linux kernel mailing list, but it doesn't seem to have gone anywhere.
If someone could share more information... please do so.
For Linux they set the backlog at 3000. For W2k it's at 1000. Anyone see the difference? AFAIK, W2k can have a higher backlog, or even a dynamic backlog. I'd like to see a test where the backlogs are the same. Then there would actually be similar simultaneous connection counts! Right now, those numbers mean little if they are being compared.
Ubiquity, an ACM magazine/forum, had an article titled "As A Man Grows Older" by a Ubiquity reader. The story is somewhat chilling. Here's the opening sentence:
"In 1991 at 50 years old I was laid off. At the last section meeting (with my supervisor) the statement was made that 'There is going to be a layoff. The younger members of staff do not need to worry.'"
As a young person, I am worried about job security as a grow older. I am heavily leaning towards majoring in something other than computer science. Programming is almost always multi-disciplinary anyway. I plan on being an expert not only in the programming field but in another; able to get jobs in both fields.
Possibly, however the venerability was found after inspection triggered by comments relating to the "weenies" issue in the DVWSSR DLL file.
Those in the security scene know that there is no venerability related to the "weenies" string inside the DLL. However there may be a buffer overflow, see NtBugtraq.
Regardless, ESR's targeted audience for the past several articles seems to be the general public, not us. He's preaching to the choir and it's becoming annoying.
In fact, any attempt to access geocities seems to be routed to this site. Has geocities been hacked? Does my computer have a really sick URL reroute virus? I'd like to know!
Unfortunately open source games are not ideal from a gamer's point of view. The arguments of open source possibly improving quality and decreasing development time do not hold up against how easier it becomes to cheat -- and that's what gamers care more about, when it comes to multiplayer.
Seeing an opponent around the corner through cheating indeed could be eliminated, with a performance hit. This would have (probably) been done if the game had its sources available from the beginning, but...
Other cheats would not be detectable. The idea of detecting auto-aimers is truly ludicrous. With all the variable lag added in, the uncertainty grows to unacceptable levels. There is not a way to 100% be sure that a person is cheating via auto-aiming. I believe that it would be incorrect 75% of the time, with good players it would be incorrect all of the time. The idea shouldn't even be argued over -- simply not feasible.
If a method of attempting to detect autoaimers was developed then the auto-aiming cheaters would simply add in a few more milliseconds before they targeted the enemy. This wouldn't be detectable at all, certainly not with the variable lag added in, and cheaters could go even farther by adding variable times before targeting the enemy. Simply not possible to detect this.
Other undetectable cheats will be developed, dodging bullets by moving and/or jumping, automatically walking to pick up needed items, others that I can't think of. Possibly undetectable bots will be created if interest holds long enough.
The basic fact is that source available or not, cheating exists, distrust exists between players. With source available, that cheating and mistrust escalates, regardless if the protocol relentlessly follows a fake vision of security. Open source is not the solution to everything.
Also, shame on you ESR for describing the Quake 1 source release as a lump of coal. How much experience do you have playing Quake, or more importantly writing networked games? Or anything for that matter -- show me the code. Your recent writings are not helpful. Go hack on Quake 1 yourself and show us what you mean -- through action.
With all the worry/complaining surrounding government spying (think Echelon) I don't like the idea of my neighbors also spying on me, nor do I want to spy on them.
Under the Windows NT 4 licensing program, Microsoft required a CAL for every user accessing a Windows NT server for filing and printing services, but not for Web surfers inside the corporate network or those coming in from the outside. Beginning with Windows 2000 a CAL is necessary for each individual requiring authentication, such as would be necessary for a secure online transaction.
When I saw the subject I was going "yes yes yes" until I saw that it wasn't going to be made by id. I can remember playing Wolf3d on my 386. Maybe nostalgia has enhanced the experience, but it was a great game. Seems like as games get more realistic they also become harder to set up and configure properly . The simple game of Wolf3d was wonderful, I hope it can somehow be reproduced.
As has been mentioned above, OpenBSD's primary goal is security. The OpenBSD project is commited to being the most secure product out there. Another advantage of OpenBSD is integrated crypto. US crypto laws do not apply since their "headquarters" is in Canada.
From http://www.openbsd.org/security.html: Our security auditing team typically has between six and twelve members who continue to search for and fix new security holes. We have been auditing since the summer of 1996. The process we follow to increase security is simply a comprehensive file-by-file analysis of every critical software component. We are not so much looking for security holes, as we are looking for basic software bugs, and if years later someone discovers a the problem used to be a security issue, and we fixed it because it was just a bug, well, all the better. Flaws have been found in just about every area of the system. Entire new classes of security problems have been found during our audit, and often source code which had been audited earlier needs re-auditing with these new flaws in mind. Code often gets audited multiple times, and by multiple people with different auditing skills.
If one is running multiple architectures or arcane/strange ones, a cool thing about NetBSD is that it is supported on many platforms. Their motto is "Of course it runs NetBSD."
The specs allow it, it is not required, but really, people can do whatever they want. I could devise an IPv4 based system that required each packet to contain an address and valid credit card number (if I was crazy). This worry over IPv6 is mostly paranoia. Yes, IPv6 makes using a hardware address for IP address assignment more feasible, but if someone doesn't want that then find another internet feed that has different rules.
Unfortunatly many TCP/IP programs will have to be rewritten to work with IPv6. Yes, it is possible to create protocol-independant (as far as v4 or v6) programs, but there is still lots of maintanence to be done (which is why I believe that the switch from IPv4 to IPv6 will have more problems than those caused by Y2K).
The bulk of problems lie in the address conversion (from readable strings to data used by sockets) functions. Since IPv6 addresses need more space to store, the IPv4-centric program isn't going to have enough space for them, thus support for IPv6 in the libraries isn't going to solve everthing, a partial rewrite will be needed. Usually it will be simple to make it compliant, unless it uses a lot of IPv4 dependant stuff (like raw sockets for example).
If code uses gethostbyname and gethostbyaddr, it is probably IPv4-dependant. If code uses getaddrinfo and getnameinfo, it is probably protocol-independant. (Please note that I said "probably"). Just grep source and find out if it needs to be rewritten.
So, yes, you were slightly naive, there is yet work to be done:)
John Vranesevich is a twit who has done NOTHING to help the security community. He continually makes himself look like a fool when he thinks he has some rightous cause. I looked up the defininition of "lamer" and it cross-referenced me to John Vranesevich. I wonder if he's gotten his copy of Win2k Beta 3.
P.S. I hope the venture capital he got kills his "business".
Re:RMS Never tried to run a company
on
RMS Responds
·
· Score: 1
Often when I'm hanging around fellow computer-knowledgable friends I might say something about how I should hack such-and-such together over the weekend for a personal project or school. But I never call myself a hacker - definatly not in the presence of non-computer people. It's a stupid term that means many different things. Not just coding. I call myself a coder.
Hacking has gathered different meanings over time. It could refer to coding (even bad coding! "I just hacked this crap together last night at 3 am"), or building hardware, or pulling of an awesome prank, or - I daresay - breaking into a computer system. I know that I personally have called computer criminals hackers. Why shouldn't I? People know what I'm talking about, and there is no confusion. Even with my computer-knowledgable friends - it's taken in context.
My point is that it's not worth fighting for. Live with it.
P.S. some computer criminals hate being called crackers. Crackers, in their view, are people who crack software.
"I came to the conclusion yesterday that commercial software is for people who hate their job so much you have to pay them to do it. Free software is created by people who like to do it."
What a pleasant generalization! Do you think that Free Software writers are communists also? Free (as in freedom) and commercial software are not perfect opposites. Red Hat is selling Free Software! They must HATE thier jobs!
Free Software can be sold. Yes, that's right, it's a little confusing huh? Famous jwz quote about freeness of Linux comes to mind -- highly stupid quote, jwz either doesn't know what is meant by Linux being free or he wanted to look cool (but made him look stupid, at least to me).
And, for those who just hate selling any kind of software, they can write a book about it, or ask for cash in return for support of the product. OH, but does that mean that they hate writing or are anti-social?? Last time I checked, a Snickers bar costs me 59 cents. Maybe I can get that money by standing on the street corner with my hand out (but will that mean that I hate standing?).
I'm kicking up a lot of dirt here, but your hypothesis is, well, stupid.
"If people in college decide they want to study what they like, and not what will make them employable, which community will see a more severe impact?"
Well, those people will have to pick it up somewhere, eh? Otherwise we'll have a bunch of philosophers as garbage men.
What's the worst RedHat can manage, legally? That rules out killing all Linux programmers... They can't take over, they can't dictate the development of Linux, but what they have been doing is making a nice (I use Debian though) distribution even with items made AT RedHat, TCL scripts, RPM (remember the R stands for RedHat - but it can be used on any Unix-like system) and other goodies. They *pay* people to make a distribution that can be freely downloaded from the 'net. They also pay guys to hack GNOME right? What's wrong with that?
does gcc support differing calling conventions?
on
egcs to become gcc
·
· Score: 1
"GNU wouldn't exist without gcc."
Uh, GNU *MADE* GCC. GNU C Compiler.
"Think about what it would do to windows if everyone started getting windows freeware as source."
It would do nothing important if this happened. Go check out Cygwin. http://www.cygnus.com
Slashdot Mirror
GeForce + Voodoo =
VoodooForce!
With a lot of frames, one could interpolate between them to create a slightly blurry effect not unlike motion blur.
HMD (head mounted displays) are getting smaller, higher-res, etc... I hope that someday they will be mostly inconspicuous. This shouldn't (at least in my view) be about vanity. MicroOptical makes an HMD that basically are bulky glasses with a small patch of coloration on one end. Likely they'll become very much like normal glasses, the only difference being the small spot of coloration.
Wearable computing has many interesting applications... the stopgap has mostly been the displays. Monocular, small, inobtrusive displays do exist though, usually for 1-2k if you want high-res and color. But a low-res grayscale display is only 500. Everything else is getting smaller, too. IBM's recent 1gig harddrive is about the size of a match book, and is 500 bucks.
I believe that the root of this problem lies in the I/O models supported by Linux. Basically, we've got the following:
1) Blocking I/O (used with threads)
2) Nonblocking with select/poll/something else
3) Crappy POSIX aio_* functions (does Linux even support these?)
Windows NT has blocking and nonblocking of course, and has what they call asyncronous sockets that work based on a message queue, but it also has what is called I/O completion ports, which use overlapped I/O. I'm not an expert on these models (yet) but they are the de facto model on NT to support thousands of concurrent connections. It uses a mixture of threads and asyncronous operations (not message queue based this time) so, say, 64 clients are handled by one thread. As apposed to Apache fork()ing whenever a new connection comes in. Yuck.
I've searched for info on making a similar I/O model on linux and have come up with a few references to IOCP on the linux kernel mailing list, but it doesn't seem to have gone anywhere.
If someone could share more information... please do so.
khaladan
For Linux they set the backlog at 3000. For W2k it's at 1000. Anyone see the difference? AFAIK, W2k can have a higher backlog, or even a dynamic backlog. I'd like to see a test where the backlogs are the same. Then there would actually be similar simultaneous connection counts! Right now, those numbers mean little if they are being compared.
Ubiquity, an ACM magazine/forum, had an article titled "As A Man Grows Older" by a Ubiquity reader. The story is somewhat chilling. Here's the opening sentence:
)
"In 1991 at 50 years old I was laid off. At the last section meeting (with my supervisor) the statement was made that 'There is going to be a layoff. The younger members of staff do not need to worry.'"
(url: http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/u_reader_1.html
As a young person, I am worried about job security as a grow older. I am heavily leaning towards majoring in something other than computer science. Programming is almost always multi-disciplinary anyway. I plan on being an expert not only in the programming field but in another; able to get jobs in both fields.
khaladan
Possibly, however the venerability was found after inspection triggered by comments relating to the "weenies" issue in the DVWSSR DLL file.
Those in the security scene know that there is no venerability related to the "weenies" string inside the DLL. However there may be a buffer overflow, see NtBugtraq.
Regardless, ESR's targeted audience for the past several articles seems to be the general public, not us. He's preaching to the choir and it's becoming annoying.
ESR: find something interesting to tell us.
After seeing "Anna and the King" last night I wanted to know more about King Mongkut. I searched on "Mongkut" at Excite and tried the first reference:
g kut.html
http://www.geocities.net/Athens/Aegean/7545/Mon
IE took me to this disgusting site instead:
http://www.youcansave.com/healthbeauty.html
In fact, any attempt to access geocities seems to be routed to this site. Has geocities been hacked? Does my computer have a really sick URL reroute virus? I'd like to know!
Unfortunately open source games are not ideal from a gamer's point of view. The arguments of open source possibly improving quality and decreasing development time do not hold up against how easier it becomes to cheat -- and that's what gamers care more about, when it comes to multiplayer.
Seeing an opponent around the corner through cheating indeed could be eliminated, with a performance hit. This would have (probably) been done if the game had its sources available from the beginning, but...
Other cheats would not be detectable. The idea of detecting auto-aimers is truly ludicrous. With all the variable lag added in, the uncertainty grows to unacceptable levels. There is not a way to 100% be sure that a person is cheating via auto-aiming. I believe that it would be incorrect 75% of the time, with good players it would be incorrect all of the time. The idea shouldn't even be argued over -- simply not feasible.
If a method of attempting to detect autoaimers was developed then the auto-aiming cheaters would simply add in a few more milliseconds before they targeted the enemy. This wouldn't be detectable at all, certainly not with the variable lag added in, and cheaters could go even farther by adding variable times before targeting the enemy. Simply not possible to detect this.
Other undetectable cheats will be developed, dodging bullets by moving and/or jumping, automatically walking to pick up needed items, others that I can't think of. Possibly undetectable bots will be created if interest holds long enough.
The basic fact is that source available or not, cheating exists, distrust exists between players. With source available, that cheating and mistrust escalates, regardless if the protocol relentlessly follows a fake vision of security. Open source is not the solution to everything.
Also, shame on you ESR for describing the Quake 1 source release as a lump of coal. How much experience do you have playing Quake, or more importantly writing networked games? Or anything for that matter -- show me the code. Your recent writings are not helpful. Go hack on Quake 1 yourself and show us what you mean -- through action.
khaladan
With all the worry/complaining surrounding government spying (think Echelon) I don't like the idea of my neighbors also spying on me, nor do I want to spy on them.
Under the Windows NT 4 licensing program, Microsoft required a CAL for every user accessing a Windows NT server for filing and printing services, but not for Web surfers inside the corporate network or those coming in from the outside. Beginning with Windows 2000 a CAL is necessary for each individual requiring authentication, such as would be necessary for a secure online transaction.
Everyone switch to Samba!
When I saw the subject I was going "yes yes yes" until I saw that it wasn't going to be made by id. I can remember playing Wolf3d on my 386. Maybe nostalgia has enhanced the experience, but it was a great game. Seems like as games get more realistic they also become harder to set up and configure properly . The simple game of Wolf3d was wonderful, I hope it can somehow be reproduced.
As has been mentioned above, OpenBSD's primary goal is security. The OpenBSD project is commited to being the most secure product out there. Another advantage of OpenBSD is integrated crypto. US crypto laws do not apply since their "headquarters" is in Canada.
From http://www.openbsd.org/security.html:
Our security auditing team typically has between six and twelve members who continue to search for and fix new security holes. We have been auditing since the summer of 1996. The process we follow to increase security is simply a comprehensive file-by-file analysis of every critical software component. We are not so much looking for security holes, as we are looking for basic software bugs, and if years later someone discovers a the problem used to be a security issue, and we fixed it because it was just a bug, well, all the better. Flaws have been found in just about every area of the system. Entire new classes of security problems have been found during our audit, and often source code which had been audited earlier needs re-auditing with these new flaws in mind. Code often gets audited multiple times, and by multiple people with different auditing skills.
If one is running multiple architectures or arcane/strange ones, a cool thing about NetBSD is that it is supported on many platforms. Their motto is "Of course it runs NetBSD."
Ben Higgins
The specs allow it, it is not required, but really, people can do whatever they want. I could devise an IPv4 based system that required each packet to contain an address and valid credit card number (if I was crazy). This worry over IPv6 is mostly paranoia. Yes, IPv6 makes using a hardware address for IP address assignment more feasible, but if someone doesn't want that then find another internet feed that has different rules.
Ben Higgins
Unfortunatly many TCP/IP programs will have to be rewritten to work with IPv6. Yes, it is possible to create protocol-independant (as far as v4 or v6) programs, but there is still lots of maintanence to be done (which is why I believe that the switch from IPv4 to IPv6 will have more problems than those caused by Y2K).
:)
The bulk of problems lie in the address conversion (from readable strings to data used by sockets) functions. Since IPv6 addresses need more space to store, the IPv4-centric program isn't going to have enough space for them, thus support for IPv6 in the libraries isn't going to solve everthing, a partial rewrite will be needed. Usually it will be simple to make it compliant, unless it uses a lot of IPv4 dependant stuff (like raw sockets for example).
If code uses gethostbyname and gethostbyaddr, it is probably IPv4-dependant. If code uses getaddrinfo and getnameinfo, it is probably protocol-independant. (Please note that I said "probably"). Just grep source and find out if it needs to be rewritten.
So, yes, you were slightly naive, there is yet work to be done
Ben Higgins
John Vranesevich is a twit who has done NOTHING to help the security community. He continually makes himself look like a fool when he thinks he has some rightous cause. I looked up the defininition of "lamer" and it cross-referenced me to John Vranesevich. I wonder if he's gotten his copy of Win2k Beta 3.
P.S. I hope the venture capital he got kills his "business".
He does.
http://www.fsf.org/
"preaching to the choir situation."? Do you even know what "preaching to the choir" means?
This is old news. It's too generic of a term anyway.
Often when I'm hanging around fellow computer-knowledgable friends I might say something about how I should hack such-and-such together over the weekend for a personal project or school. But I never call myself a hacker - definatly not in the presence of non-computer people. It's a stupid term that means many different things. Not just coding. I call myself a coder.
Hacking has gathered different meanings over time. It could refer to coding (even bad coding! "I just hacked this crap together last night at 3 am"), or building hardware, or pulling of an awesome prank, or - I daresay - breaking into a computer system. I know that I personally have called computer criminals hackers. Why shouldn't I? People know what I'm talking about, and there is no confusion. Even with my computer-knowledgable friends - it's taken in context.
My point is that it's not worth fighting for. Live with it.
P.S. some computer criminals hate being called crackers. Crackers, in their view, are people who crack software.
P.S.S. I am not a computer criminal.
I want to see more of this on Slashdot!
:)
Hehe
"I came to the conclusion yesterday that commercial software is for people who hate their job so much you have to pay them to do it. Free
software is created by people who like to do
it."
What a pleasant generalization! Do you think that Free Software writers are communists also? Free (as in freedom) and commercial software are not perfect opposites. Red Hat is selling Free Software! They must HATE thier jobs!
Free Software can be sold. Yes, that's right, it's a little confusing huh? Famous jwz quote about freeness of Linux comes to mind -- highly stupid quote, jwz either doesn't know what is meant by Linux being free or he wanted to look cool (but made him look stupid, at least to me).
And, for those who just hate selling any kind of software, they can write a book about it, or ask for cash in return for support of the product. OH, but does that mean that they hate writing or are anti-social?? Last time I checked, a Snickers bar costs me 59 cents. Maybe I can get that money by standing on the street corner with my hand out (but will that mean that I hate standing?).
I'm kicking up a lot of dirt here, but your hypothesis is, well, stupid.
"If people in college decide they want to
study what they like, and not what will make
them employable, which community will see a more
severe impact?"
Well, those people will have to pick it up somewhere, eh? Otherwise we'll have a bunch of philosophers as garbage men.
Don't you know? ESR is the phantom menace. Run for your lives before he attacks us with essays!
What's the worst RedHat can manage, legally? That rules out killing all Linux programmers... They can't take over, they can't dictate the development of Linux, but what they have been doing is making a nice (I use Debian though) distribution even with items made AT RedHat, TCL scripts, RPM (remember the R stands for RedHat - but it can be used on any Unix-like system) and other goodies. They *pay* people to make a distribution that can be freely downloaded from the 'net. They also pay guys to hack GNOME right? What's wrong with that?
"GNU wouldn't exist without gcc."
Uh, GNU *MADE* GCC. GNU C Compiler.
"Think about what it would do to windows if everyone started getting windows freeware as source."
It would do nothing important if this happened. Go check out Cygwin. http://www.cygnus.com