Actually the voice in Parsec wasn't synthesized. It was a recording of a Texas Tech co-ed. (I remember reading a brief interview with her in "99er" magazine.) However, it did require the Speech Synthesizer module to play the voice.
Anybody else have the Milton-Bradley Expansion system - keypad, uber-joystick, and voice recognition system? Had a lot of fun playing Baseball and speaking aloud the positions to which I wanted the ball thrown...
EV8 will never tape out. And the die shrink is EV79. EV79 is well beyond tape out.
The reference to EV8 was a typo on my part. Meant to say EV78. (Of course, EV8 will live on in a forthcoming iteration of IA64. I'm sure that the folks at Intel were quite pleased to get there hands on Alpha technologies and engineers, given that their own staff can't seem to build a decent 64-bit processor to save their lives.)
Just did some digging on HPaq's website and found references to EV79. I supposed they changed nomenclature somewhere along the line and I missed it. (Are you sure that EV79 has taped out? Seems early.)
Anyway, my original point remains: Marvel runs on EV7, not EV78 as indicated in the original posting.
It's built on Alpha EV78 processors connected by a switched fabric and promises blazing performance.
EV78? Not likely. I seriously doubt that EV8 has even taped out yet. Marvel servers are powered by EV7 processors. EV78 will be a die-shrink version of the EV7 (don't recall the timeline for its appearance - probably about a year and a half).
CF is a languange and an environment in which it runs on your webserver. Somewhat similar to ASP. It allows you to add tags (essentially an extension to html) which allow you to do things like easily accessing a database. Very popular where I work for accessing SQL databases.
That's why most VMS users have symbolic and logical definitions in their login.com files to create shortcuts, such as
$ HOME == "device:[homedir]"
I type HOME and there I am.
For that matter, I could drop into the long discontinued posix shell, or install bash from the GNV package (Gnu for VMS), and just use *nix commands. I don't, though. I prefer to use commands that aren't quite so cryptic.
For the record, VAX != VMS. VAX and Alphas are hardware platforms, each of which run various operating systems, including VMS and various flavors of Unix (and Unix-like systems).
Re:Isn't everything in OS X late-binding?
on
Is Mac OS X Slow?
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· Score: 2
Thanks for the link. I had forgotten about the xnu stuff. Looks like we were both wrong. The kernel is a hybrid consisting of Mach with a little BSD code integrated into it.
Re:Isn't everything in OS X late-binding?
on
Is Mac OS X Slow?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Er, no. You've gotten that completely scrambled. OS X uses the Mach kernel. BSD runs as a "personality layer" on top of the the Mach kernal, right alongside the Cocoa and Carbon environments.
My wording of that last sentence was rather poor. It should instead read "Elements of BSD (minus kernel) run as a 'personality layer' on top of the Mach kernel, right alongside the Cocoa and Carbon environments."
Re:Isn't everything in OS X late-binding?
on
Is Mac OS X Slow?
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· Score: 2
Um.. not quite. OS X doesn't have a true micro kernal. To speed things up Apple placed the BSD kernal in mach's kernal space, thus mitigating most of the cost of making calls between the two layers.
Er, no. You've gotten that completely scrambled. OS X uses the Mach kernel. BSD runs as a "personality layer" on top of the the Mach kernal, right alongside the Cocoa and Carbon environments.
Read the article. The guy owns a company that provides broadband access via satellite. You can certainly connect a Mac to such services (the sat modem just looks like a router), but most companies that provide that service are just too lazy to provide config scripts for platforms other than windows.
I didn't say that buffer overflows can't happen (except with system calls), but that buffer overflow exploits don't happen. The example you showed will not permit unauthorized code access (unless you plan on using it as a poorly written telnet deamon or such and completely bypassing SYSUAF for authentication), nor does it allow arbitrary execution of overflowing code.
Reference please? I remember mention a few weeks ago of a flaw related to the pop3 executable being installed with too many privs, giving anyone who executes it from the command line the option to willy-nilly overwrite any file with its log file. Config issue. Not a buffer overflow exploit.
VMS is architected such that overflowing data cannot be executed (i.e. doesn't get passed along to the shell). As far as the kernel level code itself is concerned, overflows don't occur in the first place due to the universal use of descriptors to pass data to system-level calls.
The complete OpenVMS doc set is available on the web from a link at http://www.openvms.compaq.com. There are also several good books on OpenVMS internals, with links to info on them available at the same place.
Sure, app level buffer overflows can occur (if for example, the programmer uses null-terminated strings instead of descriptors, a necessary evil for implementing most Internet protocols), but the overflowing data does not get executed, nor does it get written to an area for which the application has no privs.
I don't know which OS would get that "award". But I'd have to believe that it'd be something obscure like a tiny, embedded, OS the NSA uses in their crypto equipment or some such.
An embedded OS, especially if it has no networking, sure. For general purpose operating system that actually communicate with the outside world, my vote would have to be OpenVMS. So secure it makes even OpenBSD look as leaky as cheesecloth... (Buffer overflow exploits? No such thing in VMS.)
OS X is referred to as a BSD variant not because of the kernel but because of the BSD "personality layer" which sits atop Mach alongside Carbon and Cocoa.
It is doubtful that a probe could even get substantially close to the event horizon intact. Gravitational tidal forces would rip it to shreds. No need to even mention the intense radiation...
While the Michaelson-Morley experiment was certainly ground-breaking, it did not serve as the basis for Special Relativity. Special Relativity explained its outcome, but Einstein developed his theory based upon the application of Lorentz transformations to Maxwell's equations. Essentially, Relativity popped up as being necessary for Maxwell's equations to hold in all reference frames.
Re:Physics has always been ethically compromised
on
Ununoctium Wrapup
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Having performed the oil drop experiment in an undergraduate lab (and getting REALLY bad data), I can understand why Millikan would have added a subjective quality weighting to his data. Squinting through a little eyepiece and measuring how long it takes for a microscopic drop of oil to drift between two points is tedious work, with a lot of room for error to creep in. He wasn't aiming for a certain pre-determined value. He was merely uncertain as to how accurately some of his measurements were made. ("I blinked. Is that the same drop I was watching a second ago? Damn, drifted out of the focal plane...")
Of course, the correct way to compensate for this is to collect more data points to get a better statistical sampling, and outright von Neuman rejection of data points which were clearly erroneous, not weighting the values. Nevertheless, there is no denying Millikan's cunning as an experimentalist (on a par with J.J. Thompson). The experiment is simple and elegant, and works quite well given enough care and patience.
Sorry. Not nearly as effective as an actual copyright registration, and inadmissible in court. Too easy to steam open an envelope, change contents, and re-seal it. (I'm not a lawyer, but this is what I've been told by someone who is.)
OpenVMS can not identify data which came Buffer overflows, and therefore, OpenVMS can also be exploited via buffer overflows - this can be prooved by writing just a few lines of C code.
I would love to see such code, as this does not jive with what I've observed in my own socket coding. When a buffer overflow occurs on a VMS socket_read() call (at least under Multinet), the overflowing data doesn't seem to even get written to memory, let alone passed to DCL (unlike the situation in Unix and Windows where overflowing data gets passed to the shell).
You are overlooking the fact that most OpenVMS installations use third party TCP/IP stacks, generally Multinet or TCPware from Process Software (the CMU stack being largely defunct now), which do not suffer from this defect. This is largely because the initial implementation of DEC's TCP/IP stack, UCX, was buggy as hell and lacked many features, although it is finally starting to catch up.
Not that it matters much anyway. This predictable ISN weakness only threatens systems configured to trust others based solely upon their IP address (a bad idea). The only ways to crack a properly configured OpenVMS system currently involve (1)physical access to the console, (2) "social hacking" (tricking someone into telling you their password), or (3) packet sniffing for protocols which pass unencrypted passwords such as POP3 and telnet (easily solved by disabling such nonsecure protocols); three vulnerabilities which pose a threat to any OS, no matter how well designed. Nice having an OS which cannot be compromised via buffer overflow exploits (OpenVMS discards data from buffer overflows and raises an exception, always. Overflowing data cannot be executed).
Personally, I've only known a handful of people running Linux on the desktop, and I do IT work at a major University. From what I've seen, Mac desktops outnumber Linux desktops by at least 1000 to 1.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually the voice in Parsec wasn't synthesized. It was a recording of a Texas Tech co-ed. (I remember reading a brief interview with her in "99er" magazine.) However, it did require the Speech Synthesizer module to play the voice.
Anybody else have the Milton-Bradley Expansion system - keypad, uber-joystick, and voice recognition system? Had a lot of fun playing Baseball and speaking aloud the positions to which I wanted the ball thrown...
Ah, thanks for the clarification...
The reference to EV8 was a typo on my part. Meant to say EV78. (Of course, EV8 will live on in a forthcoming iteration of IA64. I'm sure that the folks at Intel were quite pleased to get there hands on Alpha technologies and engineers, given that their own staff can't seem to build a decent 64-bit processor to save their lives.)
Just did some digging on HPaq's website and found references to EV79. I supposed they changed nomenclature somewhere along the line and I missed it. (Are you sure that EV79 has taped out? Seems early.)
Anyway, my original point remains: Marvel runs on EV7, not EV78 as indicated in the original posting.
EV78? Not likely. I seriously doubt that EV8 has even taped out yet. Marvel servers are powered by EV7 processors. EV78 will be a die-shrink version of the EV7 (don't recall the timeline for its appearance - probably about a year and a half).
CF is a languange and an environment in which it runs on your webserver. Somewhat similar to ASP. It allows you to add tags (essentially an extension to html) which allow you to do things like easily accessing a database. Very popular where I work for accessing SQL databases.
Typo and poor proofreading on my part. Make that symbolic def
$ HOME == "set def device:[homedir]"
You mean "set def sys$login"
That's why most VMS users have symbolic and logical definitions in their login.com files to create shortcuts, such as
$ HOME == "device:[homedir]"
I type HOME and there I am.
For that matter, I could drop into the long discontinued posix shell, or install bash from the GNV package (Gnu for VMS), and just use *nix commands. I don't, though. I prefer to use commands that aren't quite so cryptic.
For the record, VAX != VMS. VAX and Alphas are hardware platforms, each of which run various operating systems, including VMS and various flavors of Unix (and Unix-like systems).
Thanks for the link. I had forgotten about the xnu stuff. Looks like we were both wrong. The kernel is a hybrid consisting of Mach with a little BSD code integrated into it.
My wording of that last sentence was rather poor. It should instead read "Elements of BSD (minus kernel) run as a 'personality layer' on top of the Mach kernel, right alongside the Cocoa and Carbon environments."
Er, no. You've gotten that completely scrambled. OS X uses the Mach kernel. BSD runs as a "personality layer" on top of the the Mach kernal, right alongside the Cocoa and Carbon environments.
Read the article. The guy owns a company that provides broadband access via satellite. You can certainly connect a Mac to such services (the sat modem just looks like a router), but most companies that provide that service are just too lazy to provide config scripts for platforms other than windows.
I didn't say that buffer overflows can't happen (except with system calls), but that buffer overflow exploits don't happen. The example you showed will not permit unauthorized code access (unless you plan on using it as a poorly written telnet deamon or such and completely bypassing SYSUAF for authentication), nor does it allow arbitrary execution of overflowing code.
Obscurity? Funny, I have the OS listings around here somewhere....
Reference please? I remember mention a few weeks ago of a flaw related to the pop3 executable being installed with too many privs, giving anyone who executes it from the command line the option to willy-nilly overwrite any file with its log file. Config issue. Not a buffer overflow exploit.
VMS is architected such that overflowing data cannot be executed (i.e. doesn't get passed along to the shell). As far as the kernel level code itself is concerned, overflows don't occur in the first place due to the universal use of descriptors to pass data to system-level calls.
The complete OpenVMS doc set is available on the web from a link at http://www.openvms.compaq.com. There are also several good books on OpenVMS internals, with links to info on them available at the same place.
Sure, app level buffer overflows can occur (if for example, the programmer uses null-terminated strings instead of descriptors, a necessary evil for implementing most Internet protocols), but the overflowing data does not get executed, nor does it get written to an area for which the application has no privs.
An embedded OS, especially if it has no networking, sure. For general purpose operating system that actually communicate with the outside world, my vote would have to be OpenVMS. So secure it makes even OpenBSD look as leaky as cheesecloth... (Buffer overflow exploits? No such thing in VMS.)
OS X is referred to as a BSD variant not because of the kernel but because of the BSD "personality layer" which sits atop Mach alongside Carbon and Cocoa.
It is doubtful that a probe could even get substantially close to the event horizon intact. Gravitational tidal forces would rip it to shreds. No need to even mention the intense radiation...
While the Michaelson-Morley experiment was certainly ground-breaking, it did not serve as the basis for Special Relativity. Special Relativity explained its outcome, but Einstein developed his theory based upon the application of Lorentz transformations to Maxwell's equations. Essentially, Relativity popped up as being necessary for Maxwell's equations to hold in all reference frames.
Of course, the correct way to compensate for this is to collect more data points to get a better statistical sampling, and outright von Neuman rejection of data points which were clearly erroneous, not weighting the values. Nevertheless, there is no denying Millikan's cunning as an experimentalist (on a par with J.J. Thompson). The experiment is simple and elegant, and works quite well given enough care and patience.
Sorry. Not nearly as effective as an actual copyright registration, and inadmissible in court. Too easy to steam open an envelope, change contents, and re-seal it. (I'm not a lawyer, but this is what I've been told by someone who is.)
I would love to see such code, as this does not jive with what I've observed in my own socket coding. When a buffer overflow occurs on a VMS socket_read() call (at least under Multinet), the overflowing data doesn't seem to even get written to memory, let alone passed to DCL (unlike the situation in Unix and Windows where overflowing data gets passed to the shell).
You are overlooking the fact that most OpenVMS installations use third party TCP/IP stacks, generally Multinet or TCPware from Process Software (the CMU stack being largely defunct now), which do not suffer from this defect. This is largely because the initial implementation of DEC's TCP/IP stack, UCX, was buggy as hell and lacked many features, although it is finally starting to catch up.
Not that it matters much anyway. This predictable ISN weakness only threatens systems configured to trust others based solely upon their IP address (a bad idea). The only ways to crack a properly configured OpenVMS system currently involve (1)physical access to the console, (2) "social hacking" (tricking someone into telling you their password), or (3) packet sniffing for protocols which pass unencrypted passwords such as POP3 and telnet (easily solved by disabling such nonsecure protocols); three vulnerabilities which pose a threat to any OS, no matter how well designed. Nice having an OS which cannot be compromised via buffer overflow exploits (OpenVMS discards data from buffer overflows and raises an exception, always. Overflowing data cannot be executed).
Personally, I've only known a handful of people running Linux on the desktop, and I do IT work at a major University. From what I've seen, Mac desktops outnumber Linux desktops by at least 1000 to 1.