With the exception of Donald Knuth, all of the names you list are of people who had mostly engineering contributions, as opposed to bringing scientific advancements in the field (although the two are somewhat related). Did you mean to exclude the people who created and formalized computer science? If not, then you most definitely want to include Alan Turing, Edsger Dijsktra, C. Antony R. Hoare, Niklaus Wirth, and Marvin Minsky.
Without Windows, you wouldn't have had Quake or Doom or Civ or any of the other games because they wouldn't have been written[...]
Funny that all three games that you mention actually worked under DOS; Quake and Doom used Watcom's DOS4GW protected-mode extender, which in itself was a patch for the hugely pathetic x86/DOS "platform." And no, DOS wasn't written by Microsoft, sorry. So I'm still waiting for you to point one, ONE original idea by Microsoft.
Update: the mini-PC wasn't released by Microsoft. Try reading the article next time.
Yeah, it was released by a company owned by one of Microsoft's founders, and was shown running Microsoft's sorry excuse for software. That really does make a big difference.
What I wrote was wrong. ICMP is a necessary part of the IP protocol, so you can't really block all ICMP message. My firewall only drops ICMP Echo and Echo Reply packets, which are used by ping.
lets hope this isn't globally exploitable, as I can't imagine every manufacturer of every card is going to fix this....
One wonders whether it would be possible to build a fix into the operating system, or would that be too great an abstraction?
Well, all you need to do is set your firewall to drop all ICMP packets. Theoretically, someone could exploit this over TCP, but because TCP allows piggybacking, and because it generally has more overhead than simple ICMP packets, it's unlikely that you can easily trick a remote system to respond with a TCP packet that's less than 48 bytes.
And by the way, if you use Mandrake Linux and the firewall software that ships with it, Shorewall (basically a collection of iptables rules), ICMP packets are already being dropped when they reach your system.
#1 The client's TCP stack (not IE, the stack) would have no idea that this connection was still open and would send a new SYN as soon as the user selected another link. This new request would have a different sequence number (probably source port as well) and would have to do the THREE-WAY handshake (SYN - SYN/ACK - ACK). Negating any benefit
True, but suppose they hacked their TCP stack to recognize a magic SYN number, and bypass the three-way handshake if the client sends this magic number. Improbable? IE is part of the Windows kernel, so what's to say it doesn't poke directly in the TCP/IP stack. Wild speculation, I know.
Military courts have upheld that "enemy combatants", on the other hand, have noonstitutional rights. Personally, I believe that it's the height of hypocrisy to deny those rights to anyone, American or not, but there you go.
I'll probably agree with you, but my point was that Sklyarov was legally residing in the US on a tourist visa (or whatever kind of visa you need for attending conferences), and was therefore under the same legal protection as any American citizen. I don't think enemy combatants should classify as legal residents; the question as to whether they're treated in accordance with international treaties and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a different story altogether.
I'm surprised no one noticed this - he doesn't HAVE 5th amendment rights. He's not an American citizen.
Actually, all legal residents and citizens of the United States are entitled to equal protection of the law, thanks to to the equal protection clause in the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Equal protection for foreign nationals residing in the U.S. was affirmed by the Supreme Court in the decision on Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 356 (1886). I think the most relevant part of this decision is [...]The guarantees of protection contained in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution extend to all persons within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States, without regard to differences of race, of color, or of nationality. Those subjects of the Emperor of China who have the right to temporarily or permanently reside within the United States, are entitled to enjoy the protection guaranteed by the Constitution and afforded by the laws.
OpenBSD and NetBSD
on
Antique Distros?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Assuming you have more than 4 or 8MB of RAM, I would suggest try putting FreeBSD [freebsd.org] on it.
I'd also suggest trying out OpenBSD; I've been running it on an old ThinkPad wtih 486/25MHz processor and 12 MB of RAM. I can run Emacs 20.x and the OpenSSH server on that machine, and still have about 6 - 8 MB of free RAM. I use it mostly as a type-writer, but GCC 2.95 is perfectly usable on it.
IBM just used it ala mouse-input. Microsoft is allowing people to use digital ink as a first class citizen in the computing world. It's a whole new way of looking at computing.
I don't speak marketing weaselese, so I don't know what "digital ink" is, but IBM had a little application that let you write with the stylus in say, a text entry box, and it would convert it to text on the fly. I'm also pretty sure Apple Newton did the same thing, and before that a research group in Stanford was developing similar principles. A whole new way of looking at computing? I think not.
5) Windows XP hangs with a DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL blue screen (after 2 days; every 5 minutes)
6) Time spent reinstalling all your software and settings (8 hours)
6.5) Windows trolls post on Slashdot how Win XP works for them, because they've configured it properly, and if it doesn't work for you, surely you don't know what you're doing.
[...] Early designs have been released and the first generation of models are expected to hit the market in late 2002.
Uh, no. The
IBM ThinkPad 710 was out in 1993, and it featured an electromagnetic stylus. Once again, no innovation whatsoever on part of Microsoft.
Swimming, hiking, biking, weight-lifting
on
Exercise for Geeks?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Well, you can lift weights for strength training (because all that sitting in front of a computer really affects your upper body posture); swim for flexibility training; on weekends you can go hiking and/or biking with your buddies -- that helps improve general endurance, and is a lot of fun, especially if there are beautiful mountains near where you are.
None of these are particularly expensive, but they do require you to get out of your home -- I think exercising is a lot more effective when you do it with a friend, because you tend to slack off more when you are on your own ("Oh, I feel tired today, I'll just go tomorrow" versus your buddy dragging you to the gym).
I especially enjoy group outings, because then you get to have fun while getting a good exercise. So do try to be more social in your exercise activities, and you'll benefit greatly.
3. The American Dream. The promises all of us are made, tacitly or otherwise, throughout our lives as Americans. The dream we inherit as each successive generation enters grade school - that we will be freer than our grandparents, more successful than our parents, and build a better world for our own children. The promises made by our textbooks, our presidents, and our culture, throughout the course of our childhoods: Fair pay for a day's work, and the right to strike. The right to leave a job that doesn't satisfy, or is abusive. Freedom from indentured servitude. The premise that every citizen is allowed a vote, and no one will ever be called "slave" again. The promise that libraries and basic education in this country are free, and will stay so. These are not ideas I came up with on the spur of the moment; this is what we're taught, by the culture we grow up in. And of everything we are taught, one issue is always paramount - in America, it is the people who rule. It is the people who determine our government. We elect our legislators, so they will pass laws designed for us. We elect and pay the thousands of judges, policemen, civil servants who implement the laws we elect our officials to pass.
It is the promise that our government supports the will of the people, and not the will of big business, that makes this issue so damning - and at the same time, so hope-inspiring.
When Disney are permitted to threaten suit against two clowns who dare to make mice out of three balloons and call them "Mickey", the people are not a part of it. When Senator Hollings accepts hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from entertainment conglomerates, then pretends money has nothing to do with his stance on downloading as he calls his own constituents "thieves", the people are not involved. When Representatives Berman and Coble introduce a bill allowing film studios and record companies to "disable, block or otherwise impair" your computer if they merely suspect you of file-trading, by inserting viruses and worms into your hard drive, it is the people who are imperiled. And when the CEO of RIAA commends this bill as an "innovative approach to combating the serious problem of Internet piracy," rather than admitting that it signifies a giant corporate step into a wasteland even our government security agencies dare not enter unscathed, the people are not represented. (Hilary Rosen, in a statement quoted by Farhad Manjoo, Salon.com June 2002)
USA today is not the best paper for eposing new trends, in the world. The WSJ or FT, for business, WP or NYT, for Politics, and there are several good international papers for foreign news, and analysis.
The Financial Times, while having interesting business and political analyses, is sometimes very biased towards big corporations, particularly Microsoft. In fact, I canceled my subscription when they published an article in support of Microsoft's proposition to donate computer equipment and software to public schools -- blatantly deceptive propaganda, which sounded eerily similar to a Microsoft press release.
Both the New York Times and the Washington Post possess a heavy political bias, and tend to have the annoying pseudo-liberal tendencies that are so common among Western journalists these days. I really wouldn't allow either of those newspapers to affect my political and/or social viewpoints. A matter of preference, I suppose.
"Buying" and open-sourcing some software that can do circuit schematics and PCB layout would actually be nice. Yes, I know about gEDA project, and they actually have a nice schematic editor and a pretty decent Gerber file viewer, but the board layout program hasn't even been started yet, or so it seems. And I don't feel like reinventing the wheel and writing all these auto-routing routines, etc. from scratch.
Oh, I see. Indeed, in that case the proper way to go with CVS is to create a branch and modify the files in it to your customer's preferences. For example, you could have a branch called "bobs-patches", that contains the changes Bob needs.
Whenever you make bug fixes in the main source tree, you would then use the `cvs update -j' command to update "bobs-patches" to contain the bug fixes also. But of course, I'm assuming that you branch once and you maintain branches for each customer. If you do very small changes frequently, then CVS would probably be getting in the way all the time. But in that case, I'd argue that most revision control systems would probably be getting in the way.
now I change b and c and commit them. now I change a and c and commit them. now I go to another server that also had the original files and do an update on a and now it sould figure out that a was commited with c and try to update those and then notice that c is out of date and figure out that the last time c was commited it was commited together with b and therefore it must also update b and so on until there are no more dependencies.
OK. So when you do cvs update in a directory that has been checked out, CVS is going to update all files that were modified and committed in the repository after the checkout you made in the current directory. Did that make sense?
Here's an example:
[server2]$ cvs co dir1 # check out source code on server2 [server1]$ cvs ci b c # commit b and c on server1 ... [server1]$ cvs ci a c # commit a and c on server 1 [server2]$ cd dir1; cvs update cvs server: Updating. U a U b U c
All three files that we just committed were updated on server2. If we don't want to update _all_ modified files in a directory, we can specify a module comprised of only the subset of files we're interested in, and work with this subset instead.
Perhaps I don't have very complex needs, but it seems to me that CVS is already incredibly flexible and has all the advantages of Free Software. I'd like to point out the following reasons for continuing to use CVS (in no particular order):
Fits well with the Unix philosophy -- CVS, of course, builds upon RCS, and uses other Unix tools, most notably diff to accomplish its tasks. It also allows for custom shell scripts or programs to serve as handlers for various CVS operations. What other source control tool fit so well in Unix, and maintains the tradition of older Unix tools?
Customizable behavior -- CVS allows the user to provide three kinds of commit support files (like commitinfo, verifymsg, etc.) which are programs executed whenever files are committed.
CVS modules allow for multiple different definitions of collections of source code, so one is not restrained to just a directory and all the files contained in it as the smallest organizational unit.
Tags and keyword substitution -- CVS has a very powerful system for tagging files in various manners, and referring to those tags for purposes of commit/checkout/diff/revision history. I don't know how much better than that you can get. Substituting keywords, a favorite feature of mine, lets you include your version history in the sourcefiles -- this is important when you're working with other programmers and you want to spare them the inconvenience of having to do `cvs log' each time they want to see what changes you've made.
Repository format is plain text -- well, I am a staunch believer in open file formats, and plain text/diff is about as open as you can get.
Slashdot Mirror
With the exception of Donald Knuth, all of the names you list are of people who had mostly engineering contributions, as opposed to bringing scientific advancements in the field (although the two are somewhat related). Did you mean to exclude the people who created and formalized computer science? If not, then you most definitely want to include Alan Turing, Edsger Dijsktra, C. Antony R. Hoare, Niklaus Wirth, and Marvin Minsky.
Without Windows, you wouldn't have had Quake or Doom or Civ or any of the other games because they wouldn't have been written[...]
Funny that all three games that you mention actually worked under DOS; Quake and Doom used Watcom's DOS4GW protected-mode extender, which in itself was a patch for the hugely pathetic x86/DOS "platform." And no, DOS wasn't written by Microsoft, sorry. So I'm still waiting for you to point one, ONE original idea by Microsoft.
Update: the mini-PC wasn't released by Microsoft. Try reading the article next time.
Yeah, it was released by a company owned by one of Microsoft's founders, and was shown running Microsoft's sorry excuse for software. That really does make a big difference.
What I wrote was wrong. ICMP is a necessary part of the IP protocol, so you can't really block all ICMP message. My firewall only drops ICMP Echo and Echo Reply packets, which are used by ping.
lets hope this isn't globally exploitable, as I can't imagine every manufacturer of every card is going to fix this....
One wonders whether it would be possible to build a fix into the operating system, or would that be too great an abstraction?
Well, all you need to do is set your firewall to drop all ICMP packets. Theoretically, someone could exploit this over TCP, but because TCP allows piggybacking, and because it generally has more overhead than simple ICMP packets, it's unlikely that you can easily trick a remote system to respond with a TCP packet that's less than 48 bytes.
And by the way, if you use Mandrake Linux and the firewall software that ships with it, Shorewall (basically a collection of iptables rules), ICMP packets are already being dropped when they reach your system.
#1 The client's TCP stack (not IE, the stack) would have no idea that this connection was still open and would send a new SYN as soon as the user selected another link. This new request would have a different sequence number (probably source port as well) and would have to do the THREE-WAY handshake (SYN - SYN/ACK - ACK). Negating any benefit
True, but suppose they hacked their TCP stack to recognize a magic SYN number, and bypass the three-way handshake if the client sends this magic number. Improbable? IE is part of the Windows kernel, so what's to say it doesn't poke directly in the TCP/IP stack. Wild speculation, I know.
Military courts have upheld that "enemy combatants", on the other hand, have noonstitutional rights. Personally, I believe that it's the height of hypocrisy to deny those rights to anyone, American or not, but there you go.
I'll probably agree with you, but my point was that Sklyarov was legally residing in the US on a tourist visa (or whatever kind of visa you need for attending conferences), and was therefore under the same legal protection as any American citizen. I don't think enemy combatants should classify as legal residents; the question as to whether they're treated in accordance with international treaties and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a different story altogether.
I'm surprised no one noticed this - he doesn't HAVE 5th amendment rights. He's not an American citizen.
Actually, all legal residents and citizens of the United States are entitled to equal protection of the law, thanks to to the equal protection clause in the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Equal protection for foreign nationals residing in the U.S. was affirmed by the Supreme Court in the decision on Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 356 (1886). I think the most relevant part of this decision is [...]The guarantees of protection contained in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution extend to all persons within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States, without regard to differences of race, of color, or of nationality. Those subjects of the Emperor of China who have the right to temporarily or permanently reside within the United States, are entitled to enjoy the protection guaranteed by the Constitution and afforded by the laws.
That after yesterday's article, Microsoft freebies turn India gov. against open-source. Oh, the sweet, sweet irony!
Assuming you have more than 4 or 8MB of RAM, I would suggest try putting FreeBSD [freebsd.org] on it.
I'd also suggest trying out OpenBSD; I've been running it on an old ThinkPad wtih 486/25MHz processor and 12 MB of RAM. I can run Emacs 20.x and the OpenSSH server on that machine, and still have about 6 - 8 MB of free RAM. I use it mostly as a type-writer, but GCC 2.95 is perfectly usable on it.
Who gets to decide what is considered "Hate Speech"?
Why, the Ministry of Truth, of course. Only an enemy of the state would ask such a question...
Did anyone else think of the Uruk-Hai, Tolkien's great soldier-Orcs? Hmm...
Here's a nice, big photograph of the TP 710T for moderators who modded this as a troll. I have a 710T at home.
IBM just used it ala mouse-input. Microsoft is allowing people to use digital ink as a first class citizen in the computing world. It's a whole new way of looking at computing.
I don't speak marketing weaselese, so I don't know what "digital ink" is, but IBM had a little application that let you write with the stylus in say, a text entry box, and it would convert it to text on the fly. I'm also pretty sure Apple Newton did the same thing, and before that a research group in Stanford was developing similar principles. A whole new way of looking at computing? I think not.
5) Windows XP hangs with a DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL blue screen (after 2 days; every 5 minutes)
6) Time spent reinstalling all your software and settings (8 hours)
6.5) Windows trolls post on Slashdot how Win XP works for them, because they've configured it properly, and if it doesn't work for you, surely you don't know what you're doing.
It'll be amusing seeing somebody copying M$, rather than the other way around.
In this case, it's a little too late -- IBM ThinkPad 710T precedes this Microsoft product by about nine years.
[...] Early designs have been released and the first generation of models are expected to hit the market in late 2002.
Uh, no. The IBM ThinkPad 710 was out in 1993, and it featured an electromagnetic stylus. Once again, no innovation whatsoever on part of Microsoft.
Well, you can lift weights for strength training (because all that sitting in front of a computer really affects your upper body posture); swim for flexibility training; on weekends you can go hiking and/or biking with your buddies -- that helps improve general endurance, and is a lot of fun, especially if there are beautiful mountains near where you are.
None of these are particularly expensive, but they do require you to get out of your home -- I think exercising is a lot more effective when you do it with a friend, because you tend to slack off more when you are on your own ("Oh, I feel tired today, I'll just go tomorrow" versus your buddy dragging you to the gym).
I especially enjoy group outings, because then you get to have fun while getting a good exercise. So do try to be more social in your exercise activities, and you'll benefit greatly.
...Glad someone has the guts to say it.
3. The American Dream. The promises all of us are made, tacitly or otherwise, throughout our lives as Americans. The dream we inherit as each successive generation enters grade school - that we will be freer than our grandparents, more successful than our parents, and build a better world for our own children. The promises made by our textbooks, our presidents, and our culture, throughout the course of our childhoods: Fair pay for a day's work, and the right to strike. The right to leave a job that doesn't satisfy, or is abusive. Freedom from indentured servitude. The premise that every citizen is allowed a vote, and no one will ever be called "slave" again. The promise that libraries and basic education in this country are free, and will stay so. These are not ideas I came up with on the spur of the moment; this is what we're taught, by the culture we grow up in. And of everything we are taught, one issue is always paramount - in America, it is the people who rule. It is the people who determine our government. We elect our legislators, so they will pass laws designed for us. We elect and pay the thousands of judges, policemen, civil servants who implement the laws we elect our officials to pass. It is the promise that our government supports the will of the people, and not the will of big business, that makes this issue so damning - and at the same time, so hope-inspiring. When Disney are permitted to threaten suit against two clowns who dare to make mice out of three balloons and call them "Mickey", the people are not a part of it. When Senator Hollings accepts hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from entertainment conglomerates, then pretends money has nothing to do with his stance on downloading as he calls his own constituents "thieves", the people are not involved. When Representatives Berman and Coble introduce a bill allowing film studios and record companies to "disable, block or otherwise impair" your computer if they merely suspect you of file-trading, by inserting viruses and worms into your hard drive, it is the people who are imperiled. And when the CEO of RIAA commends this bill as an "innovative approach to combating the serious problem of Internet piracy," rather than admitting that it signifies a giant corporate step into a wasteland even our government security agencies dare not enter unscathed, the people are not represented. (Hilary Rosen, in a statement quoted by Farhad Manjoo, Salon.com June 2002)
USA today is not the best paper for eposing new trends, in the world. The WSJ or FT, for business, WP or NYT, for Politics, and there are several good international papers for foreign news, and analysis.
The Financial Times, while having interesting business and political analyses, is sometimes very biased towards big corporations, particularly Microsoft. In fact, I canceled my subscription when they published an article in support of Microsoft's proposition to donate computer equipment and software to public schools -- blatantly deceptive propaganda, which sounded eerily similar to a Microsoft press release.
Both the New York Times and the Washington Post possess a heavy political bias, and tend to have the annoying pseudo-liberal tendencies that are so common among Western journalists these days. I really wouldn't allow either of those newspapers to affect my political and/or social viewpoints. A matter of preference, I suppose.
"Buying" and open-sourcing some software that can do circuit schematics and PCB layout would actually be nice. Yes, I know about gEDA project, and they actually have a nice schematic editor and a pretty decent Gerber file viewer, but the board layout program hasn't even been started yet, or so it seems. And I don't feel like reinventing the wheel and writing all these auto-routing routines, etc. from scratch.
Oh, I see. Indeed, in that case the proper way to go with CVS is to create a branch and modify the files in it to your customer's preferences. For example, you could have a branch called "bobs-patches", that contains the changes Bob needs.
Whenever you make bug fixes in the main source tree, you would then use the `cvs update -j' command to update "bobs-patches" to contain the bug fixes also. But of course, I'm assuming that you branch once and you maintain branches for each customer. If you do very small changes frequently, then CVS would probably be getting in the way all the time. But in that case, I'd argue that most revision control systems would probably be getting in the way.
Forgot one thing: integration with Emacs. Duh. What could be more important than the smooth integration CVS has with the One and Only True Editor?
now I change b and c and commit them. now I change a and c and commit them. now I go to another server that also had the original files and do an update on a and now it sould figure out that a was commited with c and try to update those and then notice that c is out of date and figure out that the last time c was commited it was commited together with b and therefore it must also update b and so on until there are no more dependencies.
... .
OK. So when you do cvs update in a directory that has been checked out, CVS is going to update all files that were modified and committed in the repository after the checkout you made in the current directory. Did that make sense?
Here's an example:
[server2]$ cvs co dir1 # check out source code on server2
[server1]$ cvs ci b c # commit b and c on server1
[server1]$ cvs ci a c # commit a and c on server 1
[server2]$ cd dir1; cvs update
cvs server: Updating
U a
U b
U c
All three files that we just committed were updated on server2. If we don't want to update _all_ modified files in a directory, we can specify a module comprised of only the subset of files we're interested in, and work with this subset instead.