We just use Nagios. We had a drive failure recently, and we got paged immediately letting us know the drive had failed. It worked exactly as we expected.
Erasing the data of a user, even someone reverse-engineering your program, is a good way to go to jail. Reverse-engineering isn't illegal. Trashing someone's files is.
And I'd rather fight to build a world in which you didn't need a job, rather than trying to tear down others. Considering my field of expertise (automation systems), that's not a joke either.
Last time I checked, the ASCAP (Association of Song Composers and Publishers) was in charge of broadcast royalties and rights, not the RIAA. In fact, the RIAA has been campaigning for a long time to get a slice of this very lucrative pie.
The RIAA has a lot of posturing in this, but no real control.
I can't imagine what disabling softice would do. If I were trying to crack a game based on this scheme (which, now that I'm both retired from software cracking and a die-hard Linux user, seems a touch unlikely, excluding pure intellectual curiosity), the first thing I would do is locate the "driver" involved. With high probability, the offending module is quite small and easily disassembled. It wouldn't be that hard to then write a replacement module that provided the same interface to the copy-protection in the game, while being quite inert. Depending on how much faith they put in the driver, that might be enough cracking in and of itself. If not, it opens up the kernel debugger attack again.
Thinking like this makes me nostalgic... these days, the only "copy protection" I deal with is the GPL.
Speaking as a former software cracker (I retired from such persuits circa the late 90's, but most of this still applies), most of the people doing the actual cracking were very close to the academic cracking category. Very few software crackers would actually participate in piracy, at least directly. I never actually distributed any code not written by me.
The trick is simply that most cracks are binary diffs with some sort of binary patch program. We'd often trade these programs around. The abilities of our binary patchers, the particular algorithms used in certain copy protection schemes and the best ways of defeating them were all hot topics. Some of us were affiliated with warez networks, some weren't. Most of us just "didn't ask, didn't tell".
This used to be all perfectly legal, since we didn't actually violate any copyrights. The only code we distributed was our own work. This isn't really the case anymore in the USA, thanks to the DMCA. Binary patchers and the associated patch files are, without question, "circumvention devices" under that law. I'm thankful I'm in Canada, and can still talk about it.
Someone offered me a torrent for Doom 3, but I figured since it would cost me so much in hardware upgrades to run it anyway, it would be rather petty to pirate the game. Especially considering it's the first game in years that I've felt like playing.
I don't see why everyone is so concerned about the usage statistics of linux on the desktop. Linux is NOT A DESKTOP OS.
Why not compare apples with apples and tell me what share windows has of the workstation market. I'd never run windows on a workstation. Don't get me wrong, with the exception of certain political misfeatures (product activation, drm, etc), the modern windows core is pretty solid, and it makes a decent desktop OS. But it's not for workstations. Linux might not be making a lot of inroads on Microsoft, but it's making the traditional workstation OS vendors very, very scared (just look at SCO, for a prime example).
I run a variety of OS's. Linux is currently the one I spend most of my time in, since it's readily available, has a large base of development tools, and is updated frequently without cost. Total cost of ownership, from the perspective of a technical professional, is extremely low. I know no other OS that can make a similar claim. I cross-develop for several operating systems, including windows and a few custom RTOS's.
So at the end of the day, I don't much care if Linux never makes it past 1% desktop share. I'm not going to lose any sleep if those who can't be bothered to really learn how to use a computer choose to use an operating system that makes their computer act like an over-glorified toaster. Not everyone is a technical professional, and nor should they be expected to be. I'm much more interested in letting vendors of technical products know that Linux is the OS preferred by professionals, ensuring the continued availability of applications like printed circuit board layout software, compilers for embedded architectures, vlsi design applications, and the like. It's a comfortable, important niche.
Speaking as an autistic person, and reading pretty much everything that even contains the word out there, those "studies" are almost entirely fabrications. The same couple groups have been trying to link vaccination to all sorts of other conditions (lupus, arthritis, and the like) for years. Each time the actual research fails to validate the expected result, they move on to a new condition. Autism is just the latest in this long campaign of disinformation.
And on an off-topic point, what's all this fear of autism about anyway? I have several "low-functioning" friends, who are only considered low-functioning because of the expectations of the neurotypical world.
You just gave me a brilliant idea by making that comparison.
Outsource Music!
I'm sure we could get music cheaper if we outsourced the creation to a country like India. I mean, sure there's a bit of a language and culture gap to cross, but the lower cost of creation is surely worth some retraining.
I'll feel more sympathetic when someone tells me how I can make a living by creating what I want to create, instead of having to work for someone else. I don't really see that happening though.
While that's true for just a bit of light, a laser is quite a bit brighter. It's entirely possible that one of the large laser pointers (the kind that have to have warning labels on them) could overwhelm the entire sensor.
The thing is, the "color" received by each element on the sensor is actually a bell curve. A pure red light will be picked up by all 3 sensors, but the red will be the brightest. If you shine a laser into it, you could saturate all the channels.
I think you have the wrong system. Having just rebuilt a failed power supply on a VAX TK50 tape drive (in order to keep a piece of computing history functional), I'll be the first to point out that an average VAX tape drive is substantially smaller than a closet. In fact, the TK50 is smaller than a breadbox.
It sounds like you're either talking about signal reflections or metastability. I would bet on the second. I posted a lengthy comment on metastability over here.
Basically, if the clock cycle is not long enough to allow propogation of the signals, then the latch fails to lock on to the correct value and instead goes metastable. From metastable, it can come down in either position, essentially randomizing that bit.
If that's really why they aren't releasing it then they are having problems fine-tuning the production process, and either smaller featuresizes or improved chemistry will eventually prevail.
You also have to remember that Intel is competing not just against AMD, but against themselves. It's entirely plausible that they are making chips that run substantially faster than the ratings and soft-locking them down just so they have time to catch up with their own marketing without having to re-invent their CPU core every 6 months.
Think about it. If they invent a 5GHz CPU now, and release it now, and it takes them 2 years to develop the 10GHz CPU, then they will spend 18 months (thanks to the roughly 6-month CPU lifecycle) with no "cutting-edge" product. If they release that CPU as a 3.5GHz CPU now, a 4.0GHz CPU in 6 months, a 4.5GHz CPU 6 months after that, and a 5GHz CPU 6 months after that, suddenly they've filled in their entire product line for that time. And since the CPU market is an oligopoly, they only have to make it look like they're fighting the good fight against AMD. The next "competitors" (via, transmeta, and the like) don't have the resources to compete on pure performance.
I'm not saying that I honestly think they're doing exactly this. I do suspect something on a much smaller scale, though. Remember, this is the company that gave you the 487SX.
It used to matter a lot more back when you could really overclock a processor. My old dual-celeron used to run decently at 550MHz, when it was originally specced at 366. I think ion migration finally started to set in, though, it doesn't take the higher speed properly anymore. Otherwise, it's still running (at 366) to this day.
I'm one of the original overclockers. I had a 486DX36, back when overclocking required replacing the clock module on the motherboard. I'm also an occasional chip designer.
The trick to overclocking is to know what your limit is. Until recently, thermal load was not the limiting factor. The real limiting factor was a condition called "metastability", where a digital transition fails to finish before being latched in the next register (usually due to violations of the setup and hold time restrictions of those registers). The smallest case of metastability can flip a bit.
A larger case can cascade through multiple stages, flipping lots of bits or even pushing the state tables into illegal states. This is where the first real danger lies: a processor that uses one-hot encoding to improve the speed of the controlling state machine can be pushed into illegal states that may cause several circuits to drive the internal busses at once. This leads to large current dissipation, and in some cases it can burn holes in the thin metal layers of the IC.
A less common hazard appears in cases when the CPU is massively overclocked. The CPU in such a case will never exit the metastable state. This causes each clocked circuit on large areas of the chip to dissipate maximum current during those metastable states. This can also lead to high current dissipation, although it is less dangerous than the abovementioned one. It's also worth mentioning that a chip in this state will not function normally.
Generally speaking, you have a wide margin between the onset of metastability and the onset of serious damage. Unfortunately, there is now *another* danger of overclocking processors. High thermal load can cause ion migration. In fact, most processors are now designed to only last 5 years (!) before ion migration renders them useless. (This is also why I personally don't overclock anymore).
It's frightening to notice that mainstream CPU's are less and less overclockable and have higher and higher thermal loads with smaller and smaller featuresizes, though. The manufacturers are simply not leaving as much margin as they once did.
Armadillo is doing test flights. In fact, at the moment their vehicles aren't even designed for lifting people. They are, however, inventing a lot of new-ish and very cool technology.
As you'd expect given the nature of the guy running it, Armadillo has an impressive physics simulator designed to test their new designs before they are even built (and which is apparently pretty accurate). They also have made a cone-shaped rocket land straight down on its tail without large stabilizer fins. What they lack in financing or general rocketry, they certainly make up for in software.
Either way, it's pretty obvious that Scaled is going to win the X Prize. Their design is conventional and well-executed.
I actually find it really refreshing that Gentoo does not do this. I'm too used to Redhat obliterating some custom config file or init script when updated (having apache.conf eaten isn't fun).
Then again, I use Gentoo specifically because I wanted a good package management system without too much distro attached to it. My configuration is atypical, to say the least, and I like it that way.
Re:I may screw this up...
on
P2P Bits
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· Score: 1
Check out the trailer for the next Star Wreck movie: Star Wreck
So yes, big special effects can be done on shoestring budgets.
The real problem now, though, is mostly an issue of people simply not having money. Wealth has become so concentrated in our society that breaking out of poverty in any way other than abject slavery is becoming extraordinarily difficult. Big business gets no sympathy from the working poor.
Re:Whoa there with the brainwashing
on
P2P Bits
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· Score: 1
It's not downloading, but uploading, that's illegal. The theft model doesn't really apply well here. I suppose you could equate it to the shopkeeper slipping you the CD without the manager knowing, but that sounds like a bit of a stretch.
Re:I may screw this up...
on
P2P Bits
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Actually, no, they're not a lot more effective.
See, I don't have a television. The only place I have seen one of these ads was in a cinema.
The result of me having to listen to propaganda like that without the benefit of "mute" or "fast forward" buttons, while trying to "do the right thing" and actually *spending* $20 or so on admission to a movie on a non-discounted night, left a distinctly unpleasant taste in my mouth.
If it weren't such a cool movie (LoTR 3), I would have been decidedly dempted to leave, get my money back, and hit bittorrent.
The MPAA, though, is in very little danger from downloads. It will take a bite out of DVD sales, but the box office can never be replaced. I don't know many people with 8-point surround sound and 15-foot high screens, and those few who do aren't usually worried about the cost of a DVD.
"Some of the other differences include the compilation policy used, heap defaults, and inlining policy."
Am I the only one who noticed the "inlining policy" thing? Considering "method call" was one of the most compelling arguments for his case (by orders of magnitude!), the fact that the methods being "called" are being called *INLINE* should mean something.
If you're allowed to turn on the java inliner, surely you can spare the time to turn on the C++ one as well (he used -O2, not -O3, for compiling the C++ apps).
Your analogy suffers from a fundamental fallacy. Copying and stealing are quite different.
If one day I decided, for instance, that I wanted a nice, fancy car, and then went into my workshop and built myself a shiny new car that just happened to be exactly, in all ways, identical to a BMW, using my own tools, equipment, and materials, then I would have a BMW, at much lower cost than if I had bought it. The car that I would have in my garage then would not be a stolen car, merely an identical copy of a similar car.
Certainly, doing this would cause a loss of profits for the manufacturer who made the original design. There is, however, no material loss involved, no actual theft of scarce property. It's entirely possible (and likely) that I was unable to afford their car in the first place, in which case there is no net loss to them at all.
The case where this becomes a big issue is if I start mass-producing their design at a lower cost than the MSRP. Doing so is unfair competition, since I did not have to pay the original design engineers.
Copyright infringement is not theft. It's copyright infringement. And copying information without a profit motive is both ethically and legally a gray area. In Canada, where I live, making a copy of a CD for personal, non-commercial use (using my own equipment, and my own blank media) is 100% legal.
In writing, it's called "third person limited" (as opposed to "third person omniscient").
Re:Heatsinks
on
Metal Velcro
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· Score: 3, Informative
Assuming the added turbulence of all the protrusions doesn't end up blocking the flow of the coolant entirely (by creating vaccum pockets between them via Bernouli's Principle, or similar effects), then yes, it would make a heat-sink much more efficient.
The gains would be much more noticable in a system where the bulk of the coolant action comes from a high specific heat with low fluid motion, as in a liquid cooled system. It would increase the efficiency of still air, but could end up decreasing the efficiency of forced air.
Slashdot Mirror
We just use Nagios. We had a drive failure recently, and we got paged immediately letting us know the drive had failed. It worked exactly as we expected.
Erasing the data of a user, even someone reverse-engineering your program, is a good way to go to jail. Reverse-engineering isn't illegal. Trashing someone's files is.
And I'd rather fight to build a world in which you didn't need a job, rather than trying to tear down others. Considering my field of expertise (automation systems), that's not a joke either.
The RIAA has a lot of posturing in this, but no real control.
Thinking like this makes me nostalgic... these days, the only "copy protection" I deal with is the GPL.
The trick is simply that most cracks are binary diffs with some sort of binary patch program. We'd often trade these programs around. The abilities of our binary patchers, the particular algorithms used in certain copy protection schemes and the best ways of defeating them were all hot topics. Some of us were affiliated with warez networks, some weren't. Most of us just "didn't ask, didn't tell".
This used to be all perfectly legal, since we didn't actually violate any copyrights. The only code we distributed was our own work. This isn't really the case anymore in the USA, thanks to the DMCA. Binary patchers and the associated patch files are, without question, "circumvention devices" under that law. I'm thankful I'm in Canada, and can still talk about it.
Someone offered me a torrent for Doom 3, but I figured since it would cost me so much in hardware upgrades to run it anyway, it would be rather petty to pirate the game. Especially considering it's the first game in years that I've felt like playing.
Why not compare apples with apples and tell me what share windows has of the workstation market. I'd never run windows on a workstation. Don't get me wrong, with the exception of certain political misfeatures (product activation, drm, etc), the modern windows core is pretty solid, and it makes a decent desktop OS. But it's not for workstations. Linux might not be making a lot of inroads on Microsoft, but it's making the traditional workstation OS vendors very, very scared (just look at SCO, for a prime example).
I run a variety of OS's. Linux is currently the one I spend most of my time in, since it's readily available, has a large base of development tools, and is updated frequently without cost. Total cost of ownership, from the perspective of a technical professional, is extremely low. I know no other OS that can make a similar claim. I cross-develop for several operating systems, including windows and a few custom RTOS's.
So at the end of the day, I don't much care if Linux never makes it past 1% desktop share. I'm not going to lose any sleep if those who can't be bothered to really learn how to use a computer choose to use an operating system that makes their computer act like an over-glorified toaster. Not everyone is a technical professional, and nor should they be expected to be. I'm much more interested in letting vendors of technical products know that Linux is the OS preferred by professionals, ensuring the continued availability of applications like printed circuit board layout software, compilers for embedded architectures, vlsi design applications, and the like. It's a comfortable, important niche.
And on an off-topic point, what's all this fear of autism about anyway? I have several "low-functioning" friends, who are only considered low-functioning because of the expectations of the neurotypical world.
Outsource Music!
I'm sure we could get music cheaper if we outsourced the creation to a country like India. I mean, sure there's a bit of a language and culture gap to cross, but the lower cost of creation is surely worth some retraining.
I'll feel more sympathetic when someone tells me how I can make a living by creating what I want to create, instead of having to work for someone else. I don't really see that happening though.
The thing is, the "color" received by each element on the sensor is actually a bell curve. A pure red light will be picked up by all 3 sensors, but the red will be the brightest. If you shine a laser into it, you could saturate all the channels.
Of course, it wasn't in the US... it was on the other side of the globe. But that's another story.
I think you have the wrong system. Having just rebuilt a failed power supply on a VAX TK50 tape drive (in order to keep a piece of computing history functional), I'll be the first to point out that an average VAX tape drive is substantially smaller than a closet. In fact, the TK50 is smaller than a breadbox.
Basically, if the clock cycle is not long enough to allow propogation of the signals, then the latch fails to lock on to the correct value and instead goes metastable. From metastable, it can come down in either position, essentially randomizing that bit.
If that's really why they aren't releasing it then they are having problems fine-tuning the production process, and either smaller featuresizes or improved chemistry will eventually prevail.
Think about it. If they invent a 5GHz CPU now, and release it now, and it takes them 2 years to develop the 10GHz CPU, then they will spend 18 months (thanks to the roughly 6-month CPU lifecycle) with no "cutting-edge" product. If they release that CPU as a 3.5GHz CPU now, a 4.0GHz CPU in 6 months, a 4.5GHz CPU 6 months after that, and a 5GHz CPU 6 months after that, suddenly they've filled in their entire product line for that time. And since the CPU market is an oligopoly, they only have to make it look like they're fighting the good fight against AMD. The next "competitors" (via, transmeta, and the like) don't have the resources to compete on pure performance.
I'm not saying that I honestly think they're doing exactly this. I do suspect something on a much smaller scale, though. Remember, this is the company that gave you the 487SX.
I'm one of the original overclockers. I had a 486DX36, back when overclocking required replacing the clock module on the motherboard. I'm also an occasional chip designer.
The trick to overclocking is to know what your limit is. Until recently, thermal load was not the limiting factor. The real limiting factor was a condition called "metastability", where a digital transition fails to finish before being latched in the next register (usually due to violations of the setup and hold time restrictions of those registers). The smallest case of metastability can flip a bit.
A larger case can cascade through multiple stages, flipping lots of bits or even pushing the state tables into illegal states. This is where the first real danger lies: a processor that uses one-hot encoding to improve the speed of the controlling state machine can be pushed into illegal states that may cause several circuits to drive the internal busses at once. This leads to large current dissipation, and in some cases it can burn holes in the thin metal layers of the IC.
A less common hazard appears in cases when the CPU is massively overclocked. The CPU in such a case will never exit the metastable state. This causes each clocked circuit on large areas of the chip to dissipate maximum current during those metastable states. This can also lead to high current dissipation, although it is less dangerous than the abovementioned one. It's also worth mentioning that a chip in this state will not function normally.
Generally speaking, you have a wide margin between the onset of metastability and the onset of serious damage. Unfortunately, there is now *another* danger of overclocking processors. High thermal load can cause ion migration. In fact, most processors are now designed to only last 5 years (!) before ion migration renders them useless. (This is also why I personally don't overclock anymore).
It's frightening to notice that mainstream CPU's are less and less overclockable and have higher and higher thermal loads with smaller and smaller featuresizes, though. The manufacturers are simply not leaving as much margin as they once did.
As you'd expect given the nature of the guy running it, Armadillo has an impressive physics simulator designed to test their new designs before they are even built (and which is apparently pretty accurate). They also have made a cone-shaped rocket land straight down on its tail without large stabilizer fins. What they lack in financing or general rocketry, they certainly make up for in software.
Either way, it's pretty obvious that Scaled is going to win the X Prize. Their design is conventional and well-executed.
Then again, I use Gentoo specifically because I wanted a good package management system without too much distro attached to it. My configuration is atypical, to say the least, and I like it that way.
So yes, big special effects can be done on shoestring budgets.
The real problem now, though, is mostly an issue of people simply not having money. Wealth has become so concentrated in our society that breaking out of poverty in any way other than abject slavery is becoming extraordinarily difficult. Big business gets no sympathy from the working poor.
It's not downloading, but uploading, that's illegal. The theft model doesn't really apply well here. I suppose you could equate it to the shopkeeper slipping you the CD without the manager knowing, but that sounds like a bit of a stretch.
See, I don't have a television. The only place I have seen one of these ads was in a cinema.
The result of me having to listen to propaganda like that without the benefit of "mute" or "fast forward" buttons, while trying to "do the right thing" and actually *spending* $20 or so on admission to a movie on a non-discounted night, left a distinctly unpleasant taste in my mouth.
If it weren't such a cool movie (LoTR 3), I would have been decidedly dempted to leave, get my money back, and hit bittorrent.
The MPAA, though, is in very little danger from downloads. It will take a bite out of DVD sales, but the box office can never be replaced. I don't know many people with 8-point surround sound and 15-foot high screens, and those few who do aren't usually worried about the cost of a DVD.
Am I the only one who noticed the "inlining policy" thing? Considering "method call" was one of the most compelling arguments for his case (by orders of magnitude!), the fact that the methods being "called" are being called *INLINE* should mean something.
If you're allowed to turn on the java inliner, surely you can spare the time to turn on the C++ one as well (he used -O2, not -O3, for compiling the C++ apps).
If one day I decided, for instance, that I wanted a nice, fancy car, and then went into my workshop and built myself a shiny new car that just happened to be exactly, in all ways, identical to a BMW, using my own tools, equipment, and materials, then I would have a BMW, at much lower cost than if I had bought it. The car that I would have in my garage then would not be a stolen car, merely an identical copy of a similar car.
Certainly, doing this would cause a loss of profits for the manufacturer who made the original design. There is, however, no material loss involved, no actual theft of scarce property. It's entirely possible (and likely) that I was unable to afford their car in the first place, in which case there is no net loss to them at all.
The case where this becomes a big issue is if I start mass-producing their design at a lower cost than the MSRP. Doing so is unfair competition, since I did not have to pay the original design engineers.
Copyright infringement is not theft. It's copyright infringement. And copying information without a profit motive is both ethically and legally a gray area. In Canada, where I live, making a copy of a CD for personal, non-commercial use (using my own equipment, and my own blank media) is 100% legal.
In writing, it's called "third person limited" (as opposed to "third person omniscient").
The gains would be much more noticable in a system where the bulk of the coolant action comes from a high specific heat with low fluid motion, as in a liquid cooled system. It would increase the efficiency of still air, but could end up decreasing the efficiency of forced air.