I've got a slightly different take on the whole thing. I agree that the 4Gig address space will start to become a bottleneck if we don't start migrating now, but I think it may have some positive effects over the long run.
Kind of like how a speed bump on the road can sometimes have a positive effect for traffic on the whole. Consider the current state of (desktop) software: its rarely written with efficiency as an important consideration. Often, there is not much incentive to do so: as long as it runs comfortably on decently new hardware, its fine. As a result, people who are forced to use bottom-of-the-line hardware are screwed. (Like me. I'm running my webserver on stone-age hardware, simply because I can't afford anything more). In fact, Microsoft even goes to the extent of deliberately makign its new releases require the latest hardware to force users into an upgrade cycle. This is a Bad Thing.
Now consider the effect that the 32-bit speedbreaker will have. Applications like gaming will be affected first. Since they have to add more features without getting more memory expensive, there will be incentive to do more efficient coding. In turn there will be pressure on underlying libraries to be more efficient. Other apps using these libs will start benefitting. There will also be more programmers catching those memory leaks which eat tons of memory rather than postponing them to a future release. More emphasis on software engg in general.
The bottom line: more headaches for programmers for a couple of years, but smaller, faster, better software for a long time.
And who are you to decide what's bullshit and what's not? The Trixie in your example would probably say "most of the weblogs I ever come acress are written by impossible linux geeks about things no one ever cares about".
If you've really read any blogs at all, you'd know blogs interlink extensively. This is a great mechanism to increase the signal/noise ratio. Same way that the web works, except much quicker in time. So you wouldn't come across lots of blogs like Trixie's unless you went looking for them.
If Trixie's got readers, who have the same interests that she does, that's fine; as a community they are able to discuss what they'd be discussing anyway, except much more easily. If not, nobody'd link to her and she'll stop posting the junk after a while. Get over it: the internet stands for freedom of speech; anyone can express themself; and you can't gag them just because you think they're stupid. Actually, its my opinion that blogging needs a certain amount of humility, rather than being a consequence of vanity.
Sorry, I've got to disagree. I'll give some concrete examples of how losing something on your mind may an Unfortunate Thing, even if you're Nobody In Particular.
Remember Trent Lott's remarks on Thurmond? Consider a similar scenario. Mr Public Figure makes Incendiary Remarks, but Big Media misses it entirely. Now, whether or not the scandal ever sees the light of the day might depend entirely on J Random Blogger, who was in attendance at Public Figure's speech, is able to reproduce his exact comments, which in turn might depend on JRB's being able to Blog On The Spot.
Your comment "weblogging is a form of vanity publishing" is very cynical, and also pretty representative of the/. view. Blogging is much more than that. For instance, one of the things blogging allows you to do is distributed cognition, in contrast to "group think" that happens here. For this to work, however, the activity must take place within the attention span of an individual. So the latencies typically involved in having to be near a computer in order to blog are unacceptable. Get the point?
Actually the site was/.ed before a single comment was posted. I think CmdrTaco was so excited by the article that he managed to/. the site singlehandedly by reloading it over and over again.
In related news, Intel, Microsoft and the RIAA have announced the formation of the trusted music playing alliance (TMPA). "We are very concerned with people playing copyrighted music on their digital guitars", a spokesman for the alliance said today. "It is a heinous crime which will drive down profits for the music industry".
The alliance is working on the trusted music platform which is expeced to be implemented on all digital guitars by 2006. Microsoft corporation (MSFT) will provide the software which will verify that the musician has renewed their subscription with the RIAA before allowing him or her to play the guitar. It will also constantly compare the notes being played on the guitar with a database provided by the RIAA. If a copyright violation is found, the guitar will immediately self-destruct and the musician's license will be revoked. A spokesman for Intel corporation (INTC) has assured slashdot.org that the guitar cannot be used without digitally signed software.
"This is a great step forward for digital music", RIAA CEO Hillary Rosen was quoted as saying. Now we will be able to protect misuse of intellectual property at the source instead of at the destination. The next step in the battle would be the development of the PTC - the platform for trusted cognition. Essentially, we will be able to monitor people's thought for intellectual property violations.
EFF director Cindy John was not immediately available for comment, but is widely rumoured to have commited suicide.
I agree. And another thing: an internet with more number of smaller players is more stable than one with fewer, larger players. Remember the speculations when worldcom went down? Ideally there shouldn't be any such thing as backbones. While we can't say that of today's internet, its certainly better now than in the past.
Anything that leads to a more distributed internet is a Good Thing, IMHO. Lack of centralization is the biggest reason why the net has been successful, but recent trends are disturbing (eg: ICANN). OTOH, the US-centeredness of the internet has decreased greatly since the early days, which is good. Another thing: with the growth of permanent connections worldwide as against dialup, more and more of the average Joes will host their webpages on their own machine (like me:)), as against uploading it to some free server, which would typically be in the US. So maybe things are going to get better.
The consequences of the simple fact that copies of information can be made at no cost or loss to the original are profound. Unfortunately, current mainstream thinking is totally misguided by applying conventional ideas of property to thoughts and ideas.
The recent trends in DRM etc are actually consequences of this. If you haven't yet, go read Stallman's A right to read. He anticipated DRM 9 years ago. The point is that there are certain things as unenforceable digital restrictions, such as sending a copy of a file on a machine you own to another machine you own through a channel you own. The media companies are seeking to prevent exactly this. To succeed, they will have to own all computing. From this point, I think we are on a path of no return. Either we will end up in a big-brother like situation, or there will be a major social revolution and rebellion, an overthrow of the existing order, and major reevaluation of the thinking on intellectual property issues.
From the article:
Central to Romer's theory is the idea of nonrivalry, a property he considers inherent to invention, designs, and other forms of intellectual creation. "A purely nonrival good," he wrote, "has the property that its use by one firm or person in no way limits its use by another." A formula, for example, can be used simultaneously and equally by 100 people, whereas a wrench cannot.
This guy "gets it". What needs to be done is to raise awareness on a large scale so that we can meet the threats head on.
If there was something around the house that needed to be fixed or wasn't right (at least in my mind), I couldn't think about anything else except solving that problem. My father would sometimes call this a "wild hair." I guess you could say that building and launching a weather balloon became a wild hair of mine...
So one day the weather wasn't right, and this guy decided to build and launch a weather balloon to fix it?
In case you haven't done it yet, see "about:mozilla".
If you're stuck on IE, here it is:
And the beast shall be made
legion. Its numbers shall
be increased a thousand thousand fold. The din of a
million keyboards like unto a great storm shall cover
the earth, and the followers of Mammon shall tremble.
The cost of the airbus programme is $10.7 bn. Of this, $5.1 bn is funded by European governments. Benefit of the airbus programme: possible lowering in airline costs over the next 10-20 years.
Compare this with the space elevator.
The estimated initial cost ($10 bn) is about the same as that of the airbus. Govt. spending on the space elevator: $570,000. Benefit of the space elevator: It would possibly have an enormous impact on the destiny of mankind.
If only governments wouldn't be so shortsighted...
Actually, one of the main motivations for work on building computers in the first half of this century was the promise of weather prediction. Those hopes were shattered by the discovery of chaos theory by Edward Lorenz in 1960. The central point of the theory is that natural systems evolve with time in such a way that even a minute error in measurement at some point in time will make the simulated system diverge rapidly from the real system. You may have heard the catchphrase
A butterfly's wings in Brazil Can trigger a Texan tornado
This is the fundamental obstacle to simulation of natural phenomena. However, while local parameters remain hard or impossible to predict, global parameters are easier to forecast, and computing power helps. This is where supercomputers come in: for example, they help us study the effect of global warming far out into the future.
I understand its called earth simulator because it is used for simulations, but does the name also have something to do with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? That would be a cool thing. (In H2G2, the earth, which is the most powerful computer in the universe, is supposed to be a simulation run by mice with humans as the guinea pigs.)
This isn't like on of the regular "a new vulnerability has been discovered. No exploitz are known yet. Patch can be found " kind of things we get on bugtraq all the time.
From the article
For the last couple of years or so there has been a rising tide of phantoms.
I get emails with increasing frequency from people all over the world whose
banks have debited them for ATM withdrawals that they deny making. Banks in
many countries simply claim that their systems are secure and so the
customers must be responsible. It now looks like some of these
vulnerabilities have also been discovered by the bad guys.
What the bank is doing is very irresponsible. I hope they get lots of bad publicity for this. Getting on/. is a good start.
Personally, the thing that strikes me as most ridiculous is how clueless courts are when it comes to estimating how much loss the hacker caused.
From http://www.savage.net/public_html/net/phrack.html:
The following March a Federal grand jury was told that the document that Knight Lightning had printed in Phrack was worth 80 thousand dollars and was extremely dangerous to the public. The grand jury brought a Federal indictment against Knight Lighting. He faced 31 years in prison for the interstate transportation of stolen property, wire-fraud and violations of the computer fraud and abuse act.
"In July of 90 we went to court...the witnesses took the stand to try and prove that I had not just committed the crimes they were saying i committed, but to prove that the actions I took were crimes in the first place. The defense never had to put on a single witness, by the end of the week, the governments case had completely fallen apart. The now famous 80 thousand dollar E-911 document was proven to be [publicly] available for no more than 13 dollars from Bellcore."
This guy was accused of stealing 80 grand when in reality it was worth 13 dollars!!!
He didn't say "GNU" nearly enough. Can't be with the FSF.
If you notice, he never once said the word "linux" either. Like the GPL, which forces you to distribute source only if you distribute binaries, the FSF requires you to say GNU only when you say Linux.
You were probably just trying to be funny, but just in case you thought its really a bad idea to discuss honeypots on/. :
You are essentially arguing for security through obscurity. Consider how a cracker would start to attack a system. They would most likely have some portscanning scripts that would pick up a vulnerability. Honeypots are perfect for this. You set up a virtual machine that detects a vulnerability.
Next, the cracker has r00ted your machine and wants to exploit it. They've read about honeypots on/. and wonder if it is one. So how do they find out? From the outside, a honeypot looks just like any other machine.
If you let the world know that you are running a honeypot on a certain IP, then you're doing something stupid. But knowledge about honeypots in itself does not decrease their effectiveness.
Slashdot Mirror
Kind of like how a speed bump on the road can sometimes have a positive effect for traffic on the whole. Consider the current state of (desktop) software: its rarely written with efficiency as an important consideration. Often, there is not much incentive to do so: as long as it runs comfortably on decently new hardware, its fine. As a result, people who are forced to use bottom-of-the-line hardware are screwed. (Like me. I'm running my webserver on stone-age hardware, simply because I can't afford anything more). In fact, Microsoft even goes to the extent of deliberately makign its new releases require the latest hardware to force users into an upgrade cycle. This is a Bad Thing.
Now consider the effect that the 32-bit speedbreaker will have. Applications like gaming will be affected first. Since they have to add more features without getting more memory expensive, there will be incentive to do more efficient coding. In turn there will be pressure on underlying libraries to be more efficient. Other apps using these libs will start benefitting. There will also be more programmers catching those memory leaks which eat tons of memory rather than postponing them to a future release. More emphasis on software engg in general.
The bottom line: more headaches for programmers for a couple of years, but smaller, faster, better software for a long time.
If you've really read any blogs at all, you'd know blogs interlink extensively. This is a great mechanism to increase the signal/noise ratio. Same way that the web works, except much quicker in time. So you wouldn't come across lots of blogs like Trixie's unless you went looking for them.
If Trixie's got readers, who have the same interests that she does, that's fine; as a community they are able to discuss what they'd be discussing anyway, except much more easily. If not, nobody'd link to her and she'll stop posting the junk after a while. Get over it: the internet stands for freedom of speech; anyone can express themself; and you can't gag them just because you think they're stupid. Actually, its my opinion that blogging needs a certain amount of humility, rather than being a consequence of vanity.
Does this guy really use the HURD, or is it just that he's an RMS mega-fan?
Now there's a true Atari fan.
The alliance is working on the trusted music platform which is expeced to be implemented on all digital guitars by 2006. Microsoft corporation (MSFT) will provide the software which will verify that the musician has renewed their subscription with the RIAA before allowing him or her to play the guitar. It will also constantly compare the notes being played on the guitar with a database provided by the RIAA. If a copyright violation is found, the guitar will immediately self-destruct and the musician's license will be revoked. A spokesman for Intel corporation (INTC) has assured slashdot.org that the guitar cannot be used without digitally signed software.
"This is a great step forward for digital music", RIAA CEO Hillary Rosen was quoted as saying. Now we will be able to protect misuse of intellectual property at the source instead of at the destination. The next step in the battle would be the development of the PTC - the platform for trusted cognition. Essentially, we will be able to monitor people's thought for intellectual property violations.
EFF director Cindy John was not immediately available for comment, but is widely rumoured to have commited suicide.
Yeah right. I'll put a Mac and a PC in one case for you the moment you make oil and water mix. Oh wait. They already did that. Nevermind.
I agree. And another thing: an internet with more number of smaller players is more stable than one with fewer, larger players. Remember the speculations when worldcom went down? Ideally there shouldn't be any such thing as backbones. While we can't say that of today's internet, its certainly better now than in the past.
Anything that leads to a more distributed internet is a Good Thing, IMHO. Lack of centralization is the biggest reason why the net has been successful, but recent trends are disturbing (eg: ICANN). OTOH, the US-centeredness of the internet has decreased greatly since the early days, which is good. Another thing: with the growth of permanent connections worldwide as against dialup, more and more of the average Joes will host their webpages on their own machine (like me :)), as against uploading it to some free server, which would typically be in the US. So maybe things are going to get better.
The recent trends in DRM etc are actually consequences of this. If you haven't yet, go read Stallman's A right to read. He anticipated DRM 9 years ago. The point is that there are certain things as unenforceable digital restrictions, such as sending a copy of a file on a machine you own to another machine you own through a channel you own. The media companies are seeking to prevent exactly this. To succeed, they will have to own all computing. From this point, I think we are on a path of no return. Either we will end up in a big-brother like situation, or there will be a major social revolution and rebellion, an overthrow of the existing order, and major reevaluation of the thinking on intellectual property issues.
From the article:
This guy "gets it". What needs to be done is to raise awareness on a large scale so that we can meet the threats head on.So one day the weather wasn't right, and this guy decided to build and launch a weather balloon to fix it?
If you're stuck on IE, here it is:
from The Book of Mozilla, 3:31
(Red Letter Edition)
Also see The mozilla museum and The hidden features of mozilla. Its about the old netscape, but still very enjoyable and sometimes hilarious.
Compare this with the space elevator. The estimated initial cost ($10 bn) is about the same as that of the airbus. Govt. spending on the space elevator: $570,000. Benefit of the space elevator: It would possibly have an enormous impact on the destiny of mankind.
If only governments wouldn't be so shortsighted...
This is the fundamental obstacle to simulation of natural phenomena. However, while local parameters remain hard or impossible to predict, global parameters are easier to forecast, and computing power helps. This is where supercomputers come in: for example, they help us study the effect of global warming far out into the future.
I understand its called earth simulator because it is used for simulations, but does the name also have something to do with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? That would be a cool thing. (In H2G2, the earth, which is the most powerful computer in the universe, is supposed to be a simulation run by mice with humans as the guinea pigs.)
From the article
What the bank is doing is very irresponsible. I hope they get lots of bad publicity for this. Getting on /. is a good start.
From http://www.savage.net/public_html/net/phrack.html:
This guy was accused of stealing 80 grand when in reality it was worth 13 dollars!!!Also see Kevin mitnick answers if you missed it.
But you _can't_ claim it as your own.
From http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=openbsd-misc&m=104 570206117686&w=4
You are STRONGLY urged to use ssh instead of telnet, rlogin, or rsh! ssh is included in all MicroBSD systems. The implementation is OpenSSH, which we are the developers of. (emphasis mine)
So you see, they didn't give credit where credit is due.
It won't be once we're done slashdotting it ;^)
Since you're sure all the hardware works with linux, you can buy the thing, wipe the disk and install RH/Debian/Gentoo whatever.
You said it yourself. People's time is valuable.
If you notice, he never once said the word "linux" either. Like the GPL, which forces you to distribute source only if you distribute binaries, the FSF requires you to say GNU only when you say Linux.
HTH.
You are essentially arguing for security through obscurity. Consider how a cracker would start to attack a system. They would most likely have some portscanning scripts that would pick up a vulnerability. Honeypots are perfect for this. You set up a virtual machine that detects a vulnerability.
Next, the cracker has r00ted your machine and wants to exploit it. They've read about honeypots on /. and wonder if it is one. So how do they find out? From the outside, a honeypot looks just like any other machine.
If you let the world know that you are running a honeypot on a certain IP, then you're doing something stupid. But knowledge about honeypots in itself does not decrease their effectiveness.