4 is BBNPlanet, theres thousands of dsl/cable customers there... Same goes for 12, thousands of AT&T cable users there... DEC used to use 16, but i dont think they make much use of it anymore... atleast clepsydra.dec.com, their ntp server.. which used to have a 16.x address is now in 204.x, HP actually make some use of their ipblock tho.. so do apple: nserver.apple.com has address 17.254.0.50 DEC and MIT atleast were instrumental in creating the internet however.. it`s not surprising they have an A-class each... but i really wonder why ford has one... Are they going to provide an internet connection in every car or something?
This might be worth a read, general electric and ford motor company have A-class blocks for a start... so do Apple, DEC and HP... Now while i can understand MIT, DEC, HP etc.. since they were part of the internet from the start and instrumental in it`s creation... I really wonder why ford needs an A-class that doesnt even have any active hosts. Theres also a large number of reserved blocks... what are these for? they seem just wasted while theyre marked as reserved...
But do all controllers/bioses/drivers/oses/drives/whatever support this feature? And if the host os can`t access it, how does it get installed? There must be some way to write to it or else the software wouldnt be installed atall, and in that case there must be a way to overwrite it again. Also, how about SCSI devices? or what about ATA devices behind an ATA to SCSI adapter?
Well corporate computers should be little more than dumb terminals with strict access controls, any data of importance should be stored on a central server with regular on and offsite backups and which is stored in a high security area. The servers themselves should also be too large to easily steal, and theres likely to be a large number of disks which would need to be reassembled in the exact same raid configuration if you hoped to steal data. Backup tapes should be locked in a fireproof safe too. That`s assuming you actually care about the data.
I used to work in a university, where one of our labs got raided overnight.... When we turned up in the morning, all the cases were opened and neatly stacked, all the internal components were gone, but the cases and keyboards complete with security markings, remained.
As for trade secrets, just take the drive.. dont boot it, simply connect it to another machine and read the data from it..
If this system waits for you to connect to a network, then surely it must rely on the OS to send the ping packets... What if you run an OS which the bios doesnt support? How about if someone spoofs or hacks the server at phoenix? it could be mass abused to take systems offline, or even to inject hostile code onto them... think denial of service networks or spam sending machines! Also, wouldnt it be possible to reflash this bios with a version that lacks the protection? and if not, then what about when a major security flaw is found and an update is NECESSARY.
But the BSD license explicitely allows the reuse of code, in some cases so long as copyright messages are preserved.. In most common OS`s you`l be able to find BSD copyright messages somewhere...
Also the machines are more restricted than they used to be.... and would you really want to ssh from a public access terminal? I sure as hell wouldnt trust it.
Which is why i said "atleast under the same brandname they use in the states..." Whats more, Opel/Vauxhall, Daewoo and Saab are the most common in europe, Daewoo started out as a korean operation, Saab was swedish and Opel/Vauxhall is european i believe, but i`m not sure. With this in mind, many of the cars being sold by general motors in europe will be influenced by, if not based on, non american designs, many of these brands take advantage of the fact theyre backed by a large company that has more clout with subcontractors/suppliers, and has the financial resources to bail them out of a crisis.
But the parent was drawing attention to a comparison based on AGE of a system, rather than design.. Which is why i brought up the older unix systems. Ofcourse theyre designed for different purposes, but my point is valid considering what it was in reply to.
As his personal box, and not a production server at his workplace, nodoubt he uses it for testing of new things.. its possible he updates his kernel regularly for instance, like i do on my personal boxes.. testing a new kernel on a production server is inexcuseable, but if your personal box goes down its no biggie. I have a few boxes here, some for fucking around with.. and 2 which are dedicated servers, the servers never have anything updated on them unless its necessary for security purposes, and neither have gone down. My test boxes get a new kernel each time theres a new development release out, sure there not stable, development releases arent supposed to be.. But most of the downtime is due to intentional reboots to test a new kernel, and not to crashes.
People are so used to unstable computers nowadays, a crash is considered normal.. people EXPECT computers to crash, and couldnt imagine one that doesnt. This means that unstable software sells just as well as stable software, but is much cheaper to produce since you dont need to test it so thoroughly. Now any commercial vendor will realise they can save a lot of money while only very slightly damaging their sales, the money they save on testing more than makes up for the lost sales so they just continue writing buggy software. If the average computer user would boycott products for being unstable, and stand up and say "this really isn't good enough", and it seriously hurt software sales, then something would swiftly be done about it.
Well, my SunOS 4.1.2 machine from i believe 1993 or even earlier, has been running reliably ever since, not a single crash.. not a single os reinstall, downtime caused by moving house and power failures. Windows 95 is surely newer than SunOS 4.1.2, but nowhere near as stable. Come to think of it, i have a machine running IRIX 5.3 thats still going strong, i forget exactly how old IRIX 5.3 is, but its not exactly modern.
Not to mention the minor/negligible security benefits gained from compiling your own apps.. For instance, with gentoo you dont enable features you dont want... if you dont want to run an ssl website, you dont built apache with ssl support.. And, since every binary is compiled slightly different, the script kiddies exploits may be foiled if the buffers theyre trying to jump into are located in a different area of memory than they would expect.
Re:3 days to a week to compile?
on
Gentoo Reviewed
·
· Score: 1
You`d be surprised... some cheaper monitors expect windows to plug+play detect their capabilities and not over drive them... I fried my friends monitor recently... i took an SGI machine and a 13W3 adapter over, and hooked it up... Ofcourse the sgi starts up in 1280*1024 by default right from initial poweron, and the monitor did NOT like that.. It was some cheap unbranded monitor made somewhere in asia i assume, so thankfully it didnt hurt my bank balance too much when i had to replace it!
Re:3 days to a week to compile?
on
Gentoo Reviewed
·
· Score: 1
It only took me a couple of days on a K6-2/400 clocked to 420 (4x 105 bus) with 768mb ram and some fast scsi disks, to compile a complete desktop system with X, mozilla, kde, galeon (and its gnome dependencies) Admittedly the ram helped a lot... on an athlon system i have access to, which has 128mb ram and ide disks... the compile speed is throttled by disk io. But the end result, was a machine that ran kde 3 with all the eyecandy turned on at a more than useable speed, and this for a machine thats a few years old now! And speaking of old, my Alphastation from 1997 runs gentoo aswell, and i can do everything on it that i can do on the athlon system.. mozilla, galeon, kde etc are all speedy as hell.. I`m typing this right now on the alpha running galeon. It can even play divx and xvid files without breaking a sweat, and this is a 6 year old machine with an old 8mb pci displaycard.
Re:My experiences with Gentoo
on
Gentoo Reviewed
·
· Score: 1
Theyre negligible in a single app, IE if you take your debian system and compile a program with aggressive optimization flags you`l get *some* benefit in the program, but you`l still be linked against the unoptimized libs, and most programs spend a lot of their time executing library routines. This is why most binary distributions provide multiple versions of glibc compiled for different processors. However, when you consider just how much code an average system will be executing at any given time, if you save a few cycles in each routine they soon add up.
Re:My experiences with Gentoo
on
Gentoo Reviewed
·
· Score: 1
The performance difference for one or two programs may be negligible, especially compiling something optimized on a distribution where most of your libs are not particularly optimized provides very little effect... But consider how much code the average machine will be running through every second, a few cycles saved here and then will soon add up. Sure, i didnt like the default cursor theme they used for XFree, and it didnt work very well with my displaycard.. so i submitted it as a bug and it got reset to the old defaults, but defaults are just that... there to be changed, and you get default settings with any precompiled distribution too. The difference, is that while precompiled distro`s compile things with all options enabled, to satisfy as many potential customers as possible... gentoo lets you choose wether you want some features or not. Compare that with the crazy list of dependencies redhat will make you install, most of which are optional at compiletime... think of lynx or wget with SSL support.
But nowadays the media producer takes steps to prevent fair use copying... And if they want to do that, they should definately provide a replacement media service.
Strange, ford has a good reputation for reliability here in europe... On the other hand, theyre about the only american manufacturer that has a huge presence in europe, atleast under the same brandname they use in the states...
So now when i want a copy to keep, "yours to keep forever" as the disney advert says... i`m FORCED to use DeCSS to copy the dvd.. But how about the expiring media we already have? movie companies expect you to buy new copies if the media gets damaged (happens eventually even if your carefull.. not to mention accidents and kids) or stolen (this is why i only have burnt cds in my car) Media companies should provide replacement media free or at cost if you can show proof of purchase of the original.
The computer should not STOP them from doing bad things, but it should raise the bar to prevent someone with little or no knowlege from doing so. And it should also warn about potentially dangerous actions. The idea is, if you know enough about it to save a file out from your mail client, and then navigate to the directory where it was saved, mark it as executeable and then execute it, you *SHOULD* know better than to execute untrusted files in the first place, or atleast to execute them inside of a sandbox. This is how all the unix mail clients i`ve seen behave, and a few years ago the average employee/student had no trouble running pine, they had never known some fancy graphical crap so they didnt complain about pine... Nowadays theyre used to graphical clients with cutesy icons, irritating noises and ease of doing dangerous things, and they consider text based mail clients to be old and obsolete. Yes, i still use pine, No, i`ve never been infected with an email distributed virus, altho i recieve a lot of them on a regular basis.
In short, a computer should not prevent the user from doing anything, afterall a computer is a tool under the control of the user. Rather the computer should raise the bar so that running untrusted code requires a reasonable understanding of the system, in the hope that anyone who understands the system well enough to run executeables recieved via email, also know enough to verify the source/integrity, and not run untrusted files.
Such viruses were VERY common in the Amiga world, where the system was primarily booted from floppy and you could write code which remained resident in ram after a warm reboot. Also these bootsector viruses wouldn't display an error of any kind, they would boot just like a normal AmigaOS bootblock, become resident, and then allow your game/app to boot normally... When you reset the machine with the CTRL-AMIGA-AMIGA combination, the functional equivalent of CTRL-ALT-DEL only it cant be disabled in software, the virus would still be resident and would infect the next disk you booted from. This used to destroy custom bootloaders, common among commercial games, which had their own nonstandard bootblocks...
But ponder for a minute, seeing how common it is to distribute ISO images nowadays, and the fact that casual cd copying/swapping is almost as prevalent as disk copying was in the Amiga days, how long before viruses are written to take advantage of the autorun feature of windows?
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4 is BBNPlanet, theres thousands of dsl/cable customers there...
Same goes for 12, thousands of AT&T cable users there...
DEC used to use 16, but i dont think they make much use of it anymore... atleast clepsydra.dec.com, their ntp server.. which used to have a 16.x address is now in 204.x, HP actually make some use of their ipblock tho.. so do apple:
nserver.apple.com has address 17.254.0.50
DEC and MIT atleast were instrumental in creating the internet however.. it`s not surprising they have an A-class each... but i really wonder why ford has one... Are they going to provide an internet connection in every car or something?
http://www.whois.sc/internet-statistics/world-ip.h tml
This might be worth a read, general electric and ford motor company have A-class blocks for a start... so do Apple, DEC and HP...
Now while i can understand MIT, DEC, HP etc.. since they were part of the internet from the start and instrumental in it`s creation... I really wonder why ford needs an A-class that doesnt even have any active hosts.
Theres also a large number of reserved blocks... what are these for? they seem just wasted while theyre marked as reserved...
But do all controllers/bioses/drivers/oses/drives/whatever support this feature? And if the host os can`t access it, how does it get installed? There must be some way to write to it or else the software wouldnt be installed atall, and in that case there must be a way to overwrite it again.
Also, how about SCSI devices? or what about ATA devices behind an ATA to SCSI adapter?
Well corporate computers should be little more than dumb terminals with strict access controls, any data of importance should be stored on a central server with regular on and offsite backups and which is stored in a high security area. The servers themselves should also be too large to easily steal, and theres likely to be a large number of disks which would need to be reassembled in the exact same raid configuration if you hoped to steal data.
Backup tapes should be locked in a fireproof safe too.
That`s assuming you actually care about the data.
I used to work in a university, where one of our labs got raided overnight....
When we turned up in the morning, all the cases were opened and neatly stacked, all the internal components were gone, but the cases and keyboards complete with security markings, remained.
As for trade secrets, just take the drive.. dont boot it, simply connect it to another machine and read the data from it..
If this system waits for you to connect to a network, then surely it must rely on the OS to send the ping packets... What if you run an OS which the bios doesnt support?
How about if someone spoofs or hacks the server at phoenix? it could be mass abused to take systems offline, or even to inject hostile code onto them... think denial of service networks or spam sending machines!
Also, wouldnt it be possible to reflash this bios with a version that lacks the protection? and if not, then what about when a major security flaw is found and an update is NECESSARY.
I would imagine NetBSD would build just fine under OSX natively anyway!
But the BSD license explicitely allows the reuse of code, in some cases so long as copyright messages are preserved..
In most common OS`s you`l be able to find BSD copyright messages somewhere...
It`s also disabled by default since win2k, the system will instantly reboot instead of displaying the blue screen.
Also the machines are more restricted than they used to be.... and would you really want to ssh from a public access terminal? I sure as hell wouldnt trust it.
Which is why i said "atleast under the same brandname they use in the states..."
Whats more, Opel/Vauxhall, Daewoo and Saab are the most common in europe, Daewoo started out as a korean operation, Saab was swedish and Opel/Vauxhall is european i believe, but i`m not sure.
With this in mind, many of the cars being sold by general motors in europe will be influenced by, if not based on, non american designs, many of these brands take advantage of the fact theyre backed by a large company that has more clout with subcontractors/suppliers, and has the financial resources to bail them out of a crisis.
But the parent was drawing attention to a comparison based on AGE of a system, rather than design.. Which is why i brought up the older unix systems.
Ofcourse theyre designed for different purposes, but my point is valid considering what it was in reply to.
As his personal box, and not a production server at his workplace, nodoubt he uses it for testing of new things.. its possible he updates his kernel regularly for instance, like i do on my personal boxes.. testing a new kernel on a production server is inexcuseable, but if your personal box goes down its no biggie.
I have a few boxes here, some for fucking around with.. and 2 which are dedicated servers, the servers never have anything updated on them unless its necessary for security purposes, and neither have gone down. My test boxes get a new kernel each time theres a new development release out, sure there not stable, development releases arent supposed to be.. But most of the downtime is due to intentional reboots to test a new kernel, and not to crashes.
People are so used to unstable computers nowadays, a crash is considered normal.. people EXPECT computers to crash, and couldnt imagine one that doesnt.
This means that unstable software sells just as well as stable software, but is much cheaper to produce since you dont need to test it so thoroughly. Now any commercial vendor will realise they can save a lot of money while only very slightly damaging their sales, the money they save on testing more than makes up for the lost sales so they just continue writing buggy software.
If the average computer user would boycott products for being unstable, and stand up and say "this really isn't good enough", and it seriously hurt software sales, then something would swiftly be done about it.
Well, my SunOS 4.1.2 machine from i believe 1993 or even earlier, has been running reliably ever since, not a single crash.. not a single os reinstall, downtime caused by moving house and power failures.
Windows 95 is surely newer than SunOS 4.1.2, but nowhere near as stable.
Come to think of it, i have a machine running IRIX 5.3 thats still going strong, i forget exactly how old IRIX 5.3 is, but its not exactly modern.
Not to mention the minor/negligible security benefits gained from compiling your own apps..
For instance, with gentoo you dont enable features you dont want... if you dont want to run an ssl website, you dont built apache with ssl support..
And, since every binary is compiled slightly different, the script kiddies exploits may be foiled if the buffers theyre trying to jump into are located in a different area of memory than they would expect.
You`d be surprised... some cheaper monitors expect windows to plug+play detect their capabilities and not over drive them... I fried my friends monitor recently... i took an SGI machine and a 13W3 adapter over, and hooked it up... Ofcourse the sgi starts up in 1280*1024 by default right from initial poweron, and the monitor did NOT like that..
It was some cheap unbranded monitor made somewhere in asia i assume, so thankfully it didnt hurt my bank balance too much when i had to replace it!
It only took me a couple of days on a K6-2/400 clocked to 420 (4x 105 bus) with 768mb ram and some fast scsi disks, to compile a complete desktop system with X, mozilla, kde, galeon (and its gnome dependencies)
Admittedly the ram helped a lot... on an athlon system i have access to, which has 128mb ram and ide disks... the compile speed is throttled by disk io.
But the end result, was a machine that ran kde 3 with all the eyecandy turned on at a more than useable speed, and this for a machine thats a few years old now!
And speaking of old, my Alphastation from 1997 runs gentoo aswell, and i can do everything on it that i can do on the athlon system.. mozilla, galeon, kde etc are all speedy as hell.. I`m typing this right now on the alpha running galeon.
It can even play divx and xvid files without breaking a sweat, and this is a 6 year old machine with an old 8mb pci displaycard.
Theyre negligible in a single app, IE if you take your debian system and compile a program with aggressive optimization flags you`l get *some* benefit in the program, but you`l still be linked against the unoptimized libs, and most programs spend a lot of their time executing library routines. This is why most binary distributions provide multiple versions of glibc compiled for different processors.
However, when you consider just how much code an average system will be executing at any given time, if you save a few cycles in each routine they soon add up.
The performance difference for one or two programs may be negligible, especially compiling something optimized on a distribution where most of your libs are not particularly optimized provides very little effect... But consider how much code the average machine will be running through every second, a few cycles saved here and then will soon add up.
Sure, i didnt like the default cursor theme they used for XFree, and it didnt work very well with my displaycard.. so i submitted it as a bug and it got reset to the old defaults, but defaults are just that... there to be changed, and you get default settings with any precompiled distribution too.
The difference, is that while precompiled distro`s compile things with all options enabled, to satisfy as many potential customers as possible... gentoo lets you choose wether you want some features or not. Compare that with the crazy list of dependencies redhat will make you install, most of which are optional at compiletime... think of lynx or wget with SSL support.
But nowadays the media producer takes steps to prevent fair use copying... And if they want to do that, they should definately provide a replacement media service.
Strange, ford has a good reputation for reliability here in europe... On the other hand, theyre about the only american manufacturer that has a huge presence in europe, atleast under the same brandname they use in the states...
So now when i want a copy to keep, "yours to keep forever" as the disney advert says... i`m FORCED to use DeCSS to copy the dvd..
But how about the expiring media we already have? movie companies expect you to buy new copies if the media gets damaged (happens eventually even if your carefull.. not to mention accidents and kids) or stolen (this is why i only have burnt cds in my car)
Media companies should provide replacement media free or at cost if you can show proof of purchase of the original.
The computer should not STOP them from doing bad things, but it should raise the bar to prevent someone with little or no knowlege from doing so. And it should also warn about potentially dangerous actions.
The idea is, if you know enough about it to save a file out from your mail client, and then navigate to the directory where it was saved, mark it as executeable and then execute it, you *SHOULD* know better than to execute untrusted files in the first place, or atleast to execute them inside of a sandbox.
This is how all the unix mail clients i`ve seen behave, and a few years ago the average employee/student had no trouble running pine, they had never known some fancy graphical crap so they didnt complain about pine... Nowadays theyre used to graphical clients with cutesy icons, irritating noises and ease of doing dangerous things, and they consider text based mail clients to be old and obsolete.
Yes, i still use pine, No, i`ve never been infected with an email distributed virus, altho i recieve a lot of them on a regular basis.
In short, a computer should not prevent the user from doing anything, afterall a computer is a tool under the control of the user. Rather the computer should raise the bar so that running untrusted code requires a reasonable understanding of the system, in the hope that anyone who understands the system well enough to run executeables recieved via email, also know enough to verify the source/integrity, and not run untrusted files.
Such viruses were VERY common in the Amiga world, where the system was primarily booted from floppy and you could write code which remained resident in ram after a warm reboot. Also these bootsector viruses wouldn't display an error of any kind, they would boot just like a normal AmigaOS bootblock, become resident, and then allow your game/app to boot normally...
When you reset the machine with the CTRL-AMIGA-AMIGA combination, the functional equivalent of CTRL-ALT-DEL only it cant be disabled in software, the virus would still be resident and would infect the next disk you booted from.
This used to destroy custom bootloaders, common among commercial games, which had their own nonstandard bootblocks...
But ponder for a minute, seeing how common it is to distribute ISO images nowadays, and the fact that casual cd copying/swapping is almost as prevalent as disk copying was in the Amiga days, how long before viruses are written to take advantage of the autorun feature of windows?