Why, in this day and age, is it necessary to 'restart' the whole friggin machine?
It's necessary when you're trying to change a file that's currently in memory. But the windows installer framework, for several years now, gives you the chance to shut down applications using locked files so you don't have to reboot. You can refuse and you'll have to reboot.
In this case I can't imagine it needs a reboot; it's probably hooking something into IE or explorer, or maybe installing a device driver or service - they're probably skimping on testing by only supporting service start-up on reboot, it's cleaner environment to work from. Even if they're hooking something deep into the IP stack they could easily restart all networking on the machine.
Is there a multi-user version of windows yet? Why do I have to log out as 'user' before I can log on as 'administrator'?
Yes, Windows XP lets you switch between users and separate desktops unless it's attached to a domain. But you can only be one user at once, and remote-desktopping in (XP Pro only) kicks off the console user.
I sure as hell wouldn't give that knowledge away for a Xbox...
So why claim the xbox? If you had a super secret hack, and an "IIS is teh suck" agenda, you could deface the site and *not* claim the prize, keeping your secret hack safe.
Of course you're telling the world there *is* a hack out there, which isn't smart if you want to keep using it, but you've shown IIS insecure, right?
Unless they log *every* packet in and out of the machine. But that'd be a huge burden.
If AMD had some brains they would hire a few engineers to submit optimization patches to gcc for AMD processors.
They did - they paid SuSE to do the original work and some performance work. I'm not sure if that's still ongoing, though.
AMD64 is definitely on the GCC radar - it's now in the list of primary release platforms and they're taking AMD64 performance seriously for future versions. But it's slow progress and ICC has a big lead.
What makes you think that Chiwetel Ejiofor's character is based on on Jubal Early (Richard Brooks)? Because they're both black?
He didn't say that at all. What they've got in common is they're both hunting River, and Early's also the only really comparible villain in the series to The Operative. We're saying Richard Brooks comes across more convincingly as a bad guy than Chiwetel Ejiofor's does in the trailer.
To the guy who thinks that Ejiofor "should be presenting kids TV:-/,"
I said *looks like*. I'm sure he's an excellent actor, he just doesn't *look* the part like Richard Brooks did.
As I recall, Jubal Early was a bounty hunter, not a soldier. And he was left to die in space at the end of the series.
Correct. Again, we're not saying that we want Jubal Early to be the villain here.
I'm wondering if the killing children bit wasnt editted to be deliberately misleading; you'll notice it wasnt one continual scene, but it jumped around a bit, so its quite possible that it was placed there deliberately out of context. Movie trailers (sadly) do that all the time.
Yeah, I did wonder about that. Happens a lot in "last time on..." episode recaps too, e.g. the West Wing. It is an excellent way to set the tone for he character though so I'd guessed it was written. But either way the trailer didn't work for it:-/
Umm...the acting from Mal and Wash was dead on with what they did in the show. Especially Wash's one-liner at the end.
Mal changed. Yeah, he started off like he was in the trailer but towards the end he was more human.
IMO the last half of the series was *much* better than the first half, and that's probably just better characterisation.
When has Wash freaked out over a piloting thing? He's always dry and sarcastic, especially when forcasting doom.
OK, but he didn't really go for the sarcastic in that line, he just sort of spoke it. If there's impending doom, he should be concentrating on flying the thing too and he should look like he's concentrating and it should show in his voice. If you look at Wash in the early group shots in the trailer he's clearly concentrating on flying the thing.
Anyway, it didn't work for me at least. And I don't think the acoustics worked either in that scene, it didn't feel real.
And did anyone else think that the black bad guy in the trailer seemed a lot less impressive than the bad guy (on whom I suppose the movie one was based) from Objects In Space?
I agree - the guy in Objects In Space looked like the soldier he was supposed to be. This guy looks more like he should be presenting kids TV:-/
I could understand if he was the leader of the hunter force, not a soldier, but there's a clip of him unsheathing a sword. Lawrence Fishburne's kung-fu bits in the second Matrix suffered because he, well, didn't look physically up to it - let's hope this guy pulls it off better.
I also thought some of his emotion was wrong, especially the "I kill children" bit which I didn't really buy. It should have been hard-stare-forceful with a smile in the eyes rather than with his mouth. But that's possibly the direction:-/
I remember one episode in the series (Where Jane was shooting at something through space) and it was completly silent. Maybe this is just my bad memory, but it seems like there was at least an attempt to do the no sound in space thing.
The TV show did no-sound-in-space throughout - which is why everyone's commenting on the sound in the trailer. It's mentioned on the DVD commentary that they made conscious choices to do no-sound-in-space and no-aliens to set Firefly apart from other space shows.
Firefly doesn't have sounds in space. It's part of the "look". The series uses music to add atmosphere instead. It works, so shouldn't be changed.
It worked where it was used - in short bursts in the middle of a sequence that weren't the whole piece of the action. That might have changed for the film.
There is no sound in space anymore than a knife goes "scwhingg!" when you raise it.
Audio cues are used all the time to emphasize the action, so why should space be any different?
If you move a big knife fast enough, you'll hear an air rush. Yes, it's almost always exaggerated.
The point is they deliberately didn't have sound-in-space in the series. It worked because the space scenes were short, because of the start contrast and because of an excellent orchestral score.
Sound may be back here just for the trailer, but it wouldn't surprise me if they've had to ditch no-sound-in-space for the film because 1) the space scenes are longer and 2) it's not what we've come to expect.
The show *was* good, but it started off mediocre which probably didn't help. I agree, the trailer didn't do that much for me on the first view and I'm a fan of the TV show. The best episodes on the DVD set are in the second half but you need to sit through the rest to know what's going on - and the first few are still pretty good, just a 'B+' not an 'A'. The pilot is overlong, though.
Oh, by the way, this is written by the legendary guy-you've-never-heard-of-in-your-life who is responsible for the incredibly awesome WB network television!!"
Absolutely. "Loved on the internet" is pointless too: in a big enough population you'll find someone willing to say anything, witness Jerry Springer.
Here are a bunch of actors you've never heard of.
A handful have been in high-profile stuff - e.g., discounting Buffy/Angel, Alan Tudyk was recently in Dodgeball and (sort of) I, Robot, and plenty of films before that; Gina Torres was a regular guest in Alias series 1, Adam Baldwin has had a film career since Full Metal Jacket.
I ask because I never caught it, and I'm not seeing the big whoop-de-fuck that everybody else is. As the trailer stands, it actually looks like mediochre sci-fi, to me.
I agree - and I'm a fan of the show. I wasn't impressed by the trailer. I watched it a few times, though, and I got more into it after the first view. If this was my first exposure to Serenity and I'd seen the trailer exactly once I don't think I'd need to go see it.
My biggest disappointment was some of the acting (or maybe direction) didn't convince. The shows were pretty flawless so maybe I was expecting too much. Mal, the captain, is supposed to be a hard-ass here but he played it too dead. Wash, the pilot, is usually very funny but his one line here ("oh god, oh god, we're all going to die") fell totally flat - wrong tone and too clear, as if it'd been recorded on a soundstage not a starship in distress. River's final kick? Please, *NO* power at all.
Now there were a lot of good lines and moments, too - good to see Jayne's still on form - and I will still go see the film. But I feel let down by the trailer.
Reading elsewhere the film still isn't finished (they're putting on ten special showings of a still unfinished cut next month) so hopefully they can still polish some of the edges.
Also, there is no longer a 'secure' Solaris version, which was typically used by the US government. Solaris 10 is (apparently) secure enough 'out of the box' to be natively deployed in the CIA, NSA, etc...
Though I'd hope to hell Visual Studio is way down the list. It's just an IDE! It has a GUI and a text editor. All the memory-chewing hard work is done in the compiler back end.
When editing, auto-complete will require a version of the compiler's language parser and a some processed version of the project code. This will usually include a lot of system headers, so it's large. For many languages, the parser in the language UI plugin is also used for on-the-fly syntax checking and syntax highlighting. There's also the source browser (navigate to definitions, declarations and uses) which I think has a separate dataset from the auto-complete.
When debugging, you have all of the above plus the program symbols in memory. This includes symbols for all referenced system DLLs, so that's large too.
And there's probably plenty I've forgotten. So I've no problem with VS using lots of RAM.
I assume 'clean room' was implied when he said he did things by the book.
As someone else has posted, there are other ways of doing it - Tridge describes the "French Cafe" approach he used for Samba, although I'm not 100% convinced it applies here.
And as I've just posted elsewhere, it's a matter of degrees - if team A wrote a few lines about the product, fair enough; if team A wrote a spec to the level of detail that team B could reimplement the product then you could say team A reverse-engineered it. I'm not aware of any hard-and-fast definition of reverse-engineering.
What is illegal about using software and telling people what it does?
It's all a matter of degrees. If team A write a few lines about the product, fair enough. If team A writes a detailed enough spec for team B to reimplement the original app then you could say that team A did the reverse-engineering, in violation of whatever licence. I'm not aware of any hard-and-fast definitions of these things.
If there was any way for Microsoft to attack Tridge or any other Samba team member on ethics then Microsoft surely would have done so by now.
If they cared. Samba isn't that big a deal, it's not MS's core business, and they get free interoperability with Unix without having to support it themselves.
A crypto one, where breaking a cipher is known as a "cryptographic attack". I was thinking in those terms. This isn't very much different, is it? If he has BK himself he's mounting a chosen-plaintext attack; if he has the cooperation of someone else with BK it's a known-plaintext attack. They apply.
Hmm, thanks. That's the only useful answer I've seen.
I'm not convinced sniffing the wire is legit or at least ethical, though - at the very least you're implicating whoever's using BK locally for you to sniff.
Yes. Did he say "clean room"? Not in the article he didn't:-p
it means that Team A uses the product you want to reverse-engineer and writes as complete of a spec of it as possible, team B then creates the app from the spec without using the original app at all.
Then Team A are naughty and probably open to litigation. I doubt Team B can legally without Team A's identity if compelled by a court.
He probably looked at the packets coming over the wire... just like the folks at the Samba/Wine project reverse engineer MS API's.
But that kind of attack is *so* much easier if you know what the packets represent, i.e. if you control at least one of the client or server, preferably both. I'd be surprised if he didn't.
And if he didn't then he might technically be intercepting traffic he isn't allowed to, along the lines of an illegal wiretap? But technically legit or not, that doesn't sound ethical to me.
Stored procedures are (IMHO) a bloody awful idea. Why put the business logic into the database ?
Normally, you don't - you use stored procedures to
1) fetch data from the database (e.g. several related selects at once if necessary, match up columns using data that you're not interested in returning, etc.) 2) carry out sets of transaction-updates for you
and invoke them from business logic in another tier. Stored procedures offer the convenience of keeping all the SQL code in one place and reduced overhead to call these operations - but, more importantly, the server knows that you're asking it to do the same thing over and over again: it can pre-compile the SQL into some form that's quicker to execute and it can store profile data from the procedures and efficiently tune execution plans per procedure.
14 - no casting: I'd say that's bad, strong typing is a good code-correctness tool. And they've added it in VB.NET, woohoo.
Does C/C++ come with RAD development (except Borland tools)
MFC, if you know what you're doing, with the Visual Studio dialog editor and classwizard. Almost everyone hates MFC and I don't understand why - it's great.
At the time of VB6 you with C/C++ couldn't modify code whilst in debuging, easly import any old com object etc..
Actually, yes you could - they introduced code modification in VC++ 6. And I think the COM proxy generation tools have been around longer than that.
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Why, in this day and age, is it necessary to 'restart' the whole friggin machine?
/user:administrator".
It's necessary when you're trying to change a file that's currently in memory. But the windows installer framework, for several years now, gives you the chance to shut down applications using locked files so you don't have to reboot. You can refuse and you'll have to reboot.
In this case I can't imagine it needs a reboot; it's probably hooking something into IE or explorer, or maybe installing a device driver or service - they're probably skimping on testing by only supporting service start-up on reboot, it's cleaner environment to work from. Even if they're hooking something deep into the IP stack they could easily restart all networking on the machine.
Is there a multi-user version of windows yet? Why do I have to log out as 'user' before I can log on as 'administrator'?
Yes, Windows XP lets you switch between users and separate desktops unless it's attached to a domain. But you can only be one user at once, and remote-desktopping in (XP Pro only) kicks off the console user.
You can always use "runas
I sure as hell wouldn't give that knowledge away for a Xbox...
So why claim the xbox? If you had a super secret hack, and an "IIS is teh suck" agenda, you could deface the site and *not* claim the prize, keeping your secret hack safe.
Of course you're telling the world there *is* a hack out there, which isn't smart if you want to keep using it, but you've shown IIS insecure, right?
Unless they log *every* packet in and out of the machine. But that'd be a huge burden.
If AMD had some brains they would hire a few engineers to submit optimization patches to gcc for AMD processors.
They did - they paid SuSE to do the original work and some performance work. I'm not sure if that's still ongoing, though.
AMD64 is definitely on the GCC radar - it's now in the list of primary release platforms and they're taking AMD64 performance seriously for future versions. But it's slow progress and ICC has a big lead.
What makes you think that Chiwetel Ejiofor's character is based on on Jubal Early (Richard Brooks)? Because they're both black?
:-/,"
He didn't say that at all. What they've got in common is they're both hunting River, and Early's also the only really comparible villain in the series to The Operative. We're saying Richard Brooks comes across more convincingly as a bad guy than Chiwetel Ejiofor's does in the trailer.
To the guy who thinks that Ejiofor "should be presenting kids TV
I said *looks like*. I'm sure he's an excellent actor, he just doesn't *look* the part like Richard Brooks did.
As I recall, Jubal Early was a bounty hunter, not a soldier. And he was left to die in space at the end of the series.
Correct. Again, we're not saying that we want Jubal Early to be the villain here.
I'm wondering if the killing children bit wasnt editted to be deliberately misleading; you'll notice it wasnt one continual scene, but it jumped around a bit, so its quite possible that it was placed there deliberately out of context. Movie trailers (sadly) do that all the time.
:-/
Yeah, I did wonder about that. Happens a lot in "last time on..." episode recaps too, e.g. the West Wing. It is an excellent way to set the tone for he character though so I'd guessed it was written. But either way the trailer didn't work for it
Umm...the acting from Mal and Wash was dead on with what they did in the show. Especially Wash's one-liner at the end.
Mal changed. Yeah, he started off like he was in the trailer but towards the end he was more human.
IMO the last half of the series was *much* better than the first half, and that's probably just better characterisation.
When has Wash freaked out over a piloting thing? He's always dry and sarcastic, especially when forcasting doom.
OK, but he didn't really go for the sarcastic in that line, he just sort of spoke it. If there's impending doom, he should be concentrating on flying the thing too and he should look like he's concentrating and it should show in his voice. If you look at Wash in the early group shots in the trailer he's clearly concentrating on flying the thing.
Anyway, it didn't work for me at least. And I don't think the acoustics worked either in that scene, it didn't feel real.
And did anyone else think that the black bad guy in the trailer seemed a lot less impressive than the bad guy (on whom I suppose the movie one was based) from Objects In Space?
:-/
:-/
I agree - the guy in Objects In Space looked like the soldier he was supposed to be. This guy looks more like he should be presenting kids TV
I could understand if he was the leader of the hunter force, not a soldier, but there's a clip of him unsheathing a sword. Lawrence Fishburne's kung-fu bits in the second Matrix suffered because he, well, didn't look physically up to it - let's hope this guy pulls it off better.
I also thought some of his emotion was wrong, especially the "I kill children" bit which I didn't really buy. It should have been hard-stare-forceful with a smile in the eyes rather than with his mouth. But that's possibly the direction
I remember one episode in the series (Where Jane was shooting at something through space) and it was completly silent. Maybe this is just my bad memory, but it seems like there was at least an attempt to do the no sound in space thing.
Yes, that'd have been Our Mrs. Reynolds.
The TV show did no-sound-in-space throughout - which is why everyone's commenting on the sound in the trailer. It's mentioned on the DVD commentary that they made conscious choices to do no-sound-in-space and no-aliens to set Firefly apart from other space shows.
Firefly doesn't have sounds in space. It's part of the "look". The series uses music to add atmosphere instead. It works, so shouldn't be changed.
It worked where it was used - in short bursts in the middle of a sequence that weren't the whole piece of the action. That might have changed for the film.
There is no sound in space anymore than a knife goes "scwhingg!" when you raise it.
Audio cues are used all the time to emphasize the action, so why should space be any different?
If you move a big knife fast enough, you'll hear an air rush. Yes, it's almost always exaggerated.
The point is they deliberately didn't have sound-in-space in the series. It worked because the space scenes were short, because of the start contrast and because of an excellent orchestral score.
Sound may be back here just for the trailer, but it wouldn't surprise me if they've had to ditch no-sound-in-space for the film because 1) the space scenes are longer and 2) it's not what we've come to expect.
The show *was* good, but it started off mediocre which probably didn't help. I agree, the trailer didn't do that much for me on the first view and I'm a fan of the TV show. The best episodes on the DVD set are in the second half but you need to sit through the rest to know what's going on - and the first few are still pretty good, just a 'B+' not an 'A'. The pilot is overlong, though.
Oh, by the way, this is written by the legendary guy-you've-never-heard-of-in-your-life who is responsible for the incredibly awesome WB network television!!"
Absolutely. "Loved on the internet" is pointless too: in a big enough population you'll find someone willing to say anything, witness Jerry Springer.
Here are a bunch of actors you've never heard of.
A handful have been in high-profile stuff - e.g., discounting Buffy/Angel, Alan Tudyk was recently in Dodgeball and (sort of) I, Robot, and plenty of films before that; Gina Torres was a regular guest in Alias series 1, Adam Baldwin has had a film career since Full Metal Jacket.
I ask because I never caught it, and I'm not seeing the big whoop-de-fuck that everybody else is. As the trailer stands, it actually looks like mediochre sci-fi, to me.
I agree - and I'm a fan of the show. I wasn't impressed by the trailer. I watched it a few times, though, and I got more into it after the first view. If this was my first exposure to Serenity and I'd seen the trailer exactly once I don't think I'd need to go see it.
My biggest disappointment was some of the acting (or maybe direction) didn't convince. The shows were pretty flawless so maybe I was expecting too much. Mal, the captain, is supposed to be a hard-ass here but he played it too dead. Wash, the pilot, is usually very funny but his one line here ("oh god, oh god, we're all going to die") fell totally flat - wrong tone and too clear, as if it'd been recorded on a soundstage not a starship in distress. River's final kick? Please, *NO* power at all.
Now there were a lot of good lines and moments, too - good to see Jayne's still on form - and I will still go see the film. But I feel let down by the trailer.
Reading elsewhere the film still isn't finished (they're putting on ten special showings of a still unfinished cut next month) so hopefully they can still polish some of the edges.
Also, there is no longer a 'secure' Solaris version, which was typically used by the US government. Solaris 10 is (apparently) secure enough 'out of the box' to be natively deployed in the CIA, NSA, etc...
No, Trusted Solaris 10 is coming.
Though I'd hope to hell Visual Studio is way down the list. It's just an IDE! It has a GUI and a text editor. All the memory-chewing hard work is done in the compiler back end.
When editing, auto-complete will require a version of the compiler's language parser and a some processed version of the project code. This will usually include a lot of system headers, so it's large. For many languages, the parser in the language UI plugin is also used for on-the-fly syntax checking and syntax highlighting. There's also the source browser (navigate to definitions, declarations and uses) which I think has a separate dataset from the auto-complete.
When debugging, you have all of the above plus the program symbols in memory. This includes symbols for all referenced system DLLs, so that's large too.
And there's probably plenty I've forgotten. So I've no problem with VS using lots of RAM.
They can encrypt it, but it's your right to pull the data out of memory.
Uh, no, thanks to the DMCA.
I assume 'clean room' was implied when he said he did things by the book.
As someone else has posted, there are other ways of doing it - Tridge describes the "French Cafe" approach he used for Samba, although I'm not 100% convinced it applies here.
And as I've just posted elsewhere, it's a matter of degrees - if team A wrote a few lines about the product, fair enough; if team A wrote a spec to the level of detail that team B could reimplement the product then you could say team A reverse-engineered it. I'm not aware of any hard-and-fast definition of reverse-engineering.
What is illegal about using software and telling people what it does?
It's all a matter of degrees. If team A write a few lines about the product, fair enough. If team A writes a detailed enough spec for team B to reimplement the original app then you could say that team A did the reverse-engineering, in violation of whatever licence. I'm not aware of any hard-and-fast definitions of these things.
If there was any way for Microsoft to attack Tridge or any other Samba team member on ethics then Microsoft surely would have done so by now.
If they cared. Samba isn't that big a deal, it's not MS's core business, and they get free interoperability with Unix without having to support it themselves.
ATTACK? What fucking planet are you living on?
A crypto one, where breaking a cipher is known as a "cryptographic attack". I was thinking in those terms. This isn't very much different, is it? If he has BK himself he's mounting a chosen-plaintext attack; if he has the cooperation of someone else with BK it's a known-plaintext attack. They apply.
Hmm, thanks. That's the only useful answer I've seen.
I'm not convinced sniffing the wire is legit or at least ethical, though - at the very least you're implicating whoever's using BK locally for you to sniff.
Yes. Did he say "clean room"? Not in the article he didn't :-p
it means that Team A uses the product you want to reverse-engineer and writes as complete of a spec of it as possible, team B then creates the app from the spec without using the original app at all.
Then Team A are naughty and probably open to litigation. I doubt Team B can legally without Team A's identity if compelled by a court.
He probably looked at the packets coming over the wire... just like the folks at the Samba/Wine project reverse engineer MS API's.
But that kind of attack is *so* much easier if you know what the packets represent, i.e. if you control at least one of the client or server, preferably both. I'd be surprised if he didn't.
And if he didn't then he might technically be intercepting traffic he isn't allowed to, along the lines of an illegal wiretap? But technically legit or not, that doesn't sound ethical to me.
What he did was perfectly ethical.
Oh? What *exactly* did he do? How did he reverse-engineer it without using it?
That's a key point. If he can't answer it, why should we believe he didn't use BK?
Stored procedures are (IMHO) a bloody awful idea. Why put the business logic into the database ?
Normally, you don't - you use stored procedures to
1) fetch data from the database (e.g. several related selects at once if necessary, match up columns using data that you're not interested in returning, etc.)
2) carry out sets of transaction-updates for you
and invoke them from business logic in another tier. Stored procedures offer the convenience of keeping all the SQL code in one place and reduced overhead to call these operations - but, more importantly, the server knows that you're asking it to do the same thing over and over again: it can pre-compile the SQL into some form that's quicker to execute and it can store profile data from the procedures and efficiently tune execution plans per procedure.
Mostly agree:
14 - no casting: I'd say that's bad, strong typing is a good code-correctness tool. And they've added it in VB.NET, woohoo.
Does C/C++ come with RAD development (except Borland tools)
MFC, if you know what you're doing, with the Visual Studio dialog editor and classwizard. Almost everyone hates MFC and I don't understand why - it's great.
At the time of VB6 you with C/C++ couldn't modify code whilst in debuging, easly import any old com object etc..
Actually, yes you could - they introduced code modification in VC++ 6. And I think the COM proxy generation tools have been around longer than that.