Well, I boycotted "Episode I: The Phantom Menace" -- for an entire week.
Why? What's to boycott? Isn't "Star Wars" good old fashioned sci-fi? Harmless fun? Some people call it "eye candy" -- a chance to drop back into childhood and punt your adult cares away for two hours, dwelling in a lavish universe where good and evil are vividly drawn, without all the inconvenient counterpoint distinctions that clutter daily life.
Got a problem? Cleave it with a light saber! Wouldn't you love -- just once in your life -- to dive a fast little ship into your worst enemy's stronghold and set off a chain reaction, blowing up the whole megillah from within its rotten core while you streak away to safety at the speed of light? (It's such a nifty notion that it happens in three out of four "Star Wars" flicks.)
Anyway, I make a good living writing science-fiction novels and movies. So "Star Wars" ought to be a great busman's holiday, right?
One of the problems with so-called light entertainment today is that somehow, amid all the gaudy special effects, people tend to lose track of simple things, like story and meaning. They stop noticing the moral lessons the director is trying to push. Yet these things matter.
By now it's grown clear that George Lucas has an agenda, one that he takes very seriously. After four "Star Wars" films, alarm bells should have gone off, even among those who don't look for morals in movies. When the chief feature distinguishing "good" from "evil" is how pretty the characters are, it's a clue that maybe the whole saga deserves a second look.
Just what bill of goods are we being sold, between the frames?
Elites have an inherent right to arbitrary rule; common citizens needn't be consulted. They may only choose which elite to follow.
"Good" elites should act on their subjective whims, without evidence, argument or accountability.
Any amount of sin can be forgiven if you are important enough.
True leaders are born. It's genetic. The right to rule is inherited.
Justified human emotions can turn a good person evil.
That is just the beginning of a long list of "moral" lessons relentlessly pushed by "Star Wars." Lessons that starkly differentiate this saga from others that seem superficially similar, like "Star Trek." (We'll take a much closer look at some stark divergences between these two sci-fi universes below.)
Above all, I never cared for the whole Nietzschian Übermensch thing: the notion -- pervading a great many myths and legends -- that a good yarn has to be about demigods who are bigger, badder and better than normal folk by several orders of magnitude. It's an ancient storytelling tradition based on abiding contempt for the masses -- one that I find odious in the works of A.E. Van Vogt, E.E. Smith, L. Ron Hubbard and wherever you witness slanlike super-beings deciding the fate of billions without ever pausing to consider their wishes.
Wow, you say. If I feel that strongly about this, why just a week-long boycott? Why see the latest "Star Wars" film at all?
For all of the people who don't understand
how hard it is to write drivers for Linux
I suggest to read
Linux Device Drivers
by Alessandro Rubini and Jonathan Corbet:
This practical guide is for anyone who wants to support
computer peripherals under the Linux operating system. It
shows step-by-step how to write a driver for character devices,
block devices, and network interfaces, illustrating with
examples you can compile and run. The second edition covers
Kernel 2.4 and adds discussions of symmetric multiprocessing
(SMP), Universal Serial Bus (USB), and some new platforms.
[Full Description]
This book has 586 pages and it is still not
everything there is to know about
writing device drivers for Linux.
And this is only if you have the hardware specification, because if you don't,
then the reverse engineering makes
it a whole lot more difficult task.
Those "lazy open source driver authors
with selfish attitudes"
are actually working very hard to provide
their drivers to the community,
and they deserve a lot of respect for what
they do for us, as well as for their
great knowledge, skills and experience.
"even allowing a competing operating system like Linux to start up instead of Windows"
This is part of their *defense* against punishment for illegally using monopolistic
powers?
Truly amazing.
This is one of the strongest arguments of
people being against Microsoft
shameful business tactics...
People are trying to punish
Microsoft for not allowing the installation of
competing operating systems like Linux
by OEMs, and
how does Microsoft defend itself?
Saying that it
would allow a competing operating system
like Linux to start up instead of Windows!
Well, duh...
Earth to MS:
this is the whole damned point!
Wait a minute...
If a company has citizen rights in court...
Could its main
line of defense be insanity?
AC:
Again, the nine-bit security of UNIX falls down. It's so archaic.
M**20:
It's the security of your office. Don't blame unix.
You're right.
Of course the security of UNIX
doesn't fall down because I can bypass it
with direct access to the hardware.
The AC said that the
standard Unix file permission bits
are archaic.
They are in fact archaic in a sense of
ancient and old-fashioned,
but they are not archaic in a sense of
no longer current or applicable.
They are archaic like the
Kant's categorical imperative is.
However there are actually not 9 but 12 bits
(set-uid, set-gid and sticky bit,
owner read, write and execute,
group read, write and execute,
and others read, write and execute).
This system is very simple and
extremely practical, but this is not
the end of Unix security mechanisms.
You can mount filesystems
with different restrictions,
you can use additional file attributes
of your filesystem,
there are POSIX capabilities, etc.
With ACs there's a problem, that you never
know if the one who answers is the original AC,
or a different one, but I'll ask anyway:
What would you change with the Unix
(POSIX) security system?
I guess that you only said it to start
a flame war, but just in case you had anything
insightful in mind, I'd like you to
say some more details about Unix/Linux
security and other models which you
prefer, or any suggestions about features
you would change or add.
It could be very interesting.
I think, however, that when
you fully understand Unix,
you will appreciate and
enjoy this powerful and flexible
security model.
But, as Henry Spencer once said,
"Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."
It's really even easier than that, in fact, without a floppy, you can just tell the
bootloader (e.g. lilo) to boot with options like "linux init=/bin/sh" or something
similar, and after the kernel loads you'll just get a shell.
I haven't thought about it.
It's even better, because you can do it
on a machine without floppy and CD drive,
or without knowing/cracking BIOS password,
however you have to do everything manually.
But it's easy to e.g. copy/bin/sh to/bin/cracksh with suid root, or even make
a simple remote backdoor.
What's important is that people think they
have hard to guess root password and a secure
system, but with access to reset switch and
keyboard anyone can be root after 10 seconds.
Yes, you're right.
Sometimes you can even use a backdoor password.
I remember that password AMI worked for every
AmiBIOS some time ago
(extremely stupid idea,
once someone knows such a password,
every system can be compromised).
There's a lot of interesting articles on the Web
about cracking BIOS passwords:
A Google search for BIOS Passwords
gives quite a few hits.
Putting your floppy into the drive is
the fastest and easiest thing
you can do if you have physical access,
but it's not the only issue.
No one should ever be allowed to be near
the important servers, except people
responsible for the security.
Somehow off-topic, but speaking about
security, I have to recommend one of the best
texts about security
(mostly about secure programming)
I've ever read:
Secure Programming for Linux and Unix HOWTO by David A. Wheeler. Great read.
And speaking about passwords,
it's good to read great publications of
Alec Muffett,
the author of the famous crack(1) and CrackLib:
It's maybe not very on-topic
when speaking about physical security,
but it's very important
to understand the security as a whole.
[OT] Re:You gotta wonder about wipout.net...
on
Wipout Essay Results
·
· Score: 1
What I find kind of disturbing is asking me
what language version do I want to read
after my browser has already told
them that I want Polish or English...
Obviously, they haven't read my web design rules
and not reading my web design rules
is the root of all web-related evil,
now isn't it?
Other very common mistake is
leaving a floppy drive set up as the first
booting device, or not having password
protected BIOS settings.
With e.g.
Debian boot floppies or any other
mini Linux and
mini Unix distribution
you can just insert a floppy, hit reset
and wait a while until you got r00t
and do whatever you want
(like change the real root password in/etc/shadow on the main partition
to whatever you want).
I'm talking about it, because it's
much easier than trying to write
a remote exploit,
much easier than writing
a local exploit
and much easier
than actually stealing the whole hardware.
It's usually also much easier than
social engineering.
It wouldn't be even hard to make a floppy
which automatically do something to the
system (like adding new users
and adding them to every group,
changing passwords,
reading encrypted passwords for later
cracking, leaving backdoors, etc.).
When you have such a floppy, you only need
few seconds to insert it, hit reset,
come back after a minute when everything is done,
take your floppy and hit reset again.
You can even prepare this floppy
in a way, that when everything is done,
your files from the floppy are deleted
and "shutdown -r" is run.
That way even when someone enters the room
before you, he'll only find a
normally working system
with empty floppy in the drive.
The chances are that no one will even go
there to see what's wrong if the
server was down for a minute and now it's OK,
especially if it's a lunch brake
or something.
Very dangerous and very easy if you can only
go near a computer, and if it can boot
the system from the floppy.
And I've already
seen servers without BIOS passwords
and those set to boot in order of
floppy,cd,hdd.
It's very important and often forgotten issue,
it's somewhere between physical and
non-physical (logical?) security.
When I found Parish's analysis some time ago,
that's what I thought:
If this is all true,
than just letting people know about it
can kill Microsoft.
Because if some potential Microsoft stockholders
know about it, they will wait before they buy
the stock, if they don't buy the stock,
the value of other stock won't increase so
fast any more, the existing stockholders would
notice that and some of them will start selling
their stock,
if finally so many people starts selling
the stock that its value starts decreasing,
then even more of stockholders will start to sell,
but no one will want to buy it at that point
(those who will want to buy it,
would want to wait until it's even cheaper),
etc.
The only condition needed for such scenerio is
the critical mass of people reading
Parish's Microsoft Financial Pyramid.
I assume that Microsoft stockholders are smart
people, not the kind investing in
otherpyramids.
If I was Bill G. & Co.
I would hire Bill Parish
for $100M/year as a financial consultant
working at home and doing nothing, if he only
agrees to stop publishing his reports.
And if I was Bill Parish I would
accept this offer...
Bill Parish's Microsoft Financial Pyramid
is now on the first place in Google results
when searching for
Microsoft fraud.
Just imagine if we all started linking
to his article and it will
became the first place when
searching Google for
Microsoft,
just like the
Anti-DMCA
website is the first hit
searching for DMCA.
Something to think about.
If this is true
and if Microsoft is the
greatest financial pyramid scheme
and the greatest financial fraud of 20th
and 21st century, then
it would be really interesting to see
it finally collapsing.
Our granchildren will
read books and
watch movies about it.
"No other nonfinancial firm has more liquid money at its disposal, and only a
handful of banks do.
[...]
Who wouldn't love to have a bank account like that?"
Some food for thought.
We live in extraordinary economic times here in the U.S. and this success could ignite a whole new cycle
of economic prosperity. We must first, however, take a hard look at what is occurring at Microsoft.
Microsoft is a great company with terrific employees. Sadly, many of these brilliant people have been
blinded by the stock price and unable to see that Microsoft is also the key architect of the greatest
financial pyramid scheme this century. It is not uncommon for participants in pyramid schemes to lose
their emotional bearings. My close friends who work at Microsoft are particularly upset over my work
and it is possible that even Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer do not realize the implications of their financial
practices.
The fundamental problem is that Microsoft is incurring massive losses and only by accounting illusions
are they able to show a profit. Specifically, Microsoft is granting excessive amounts of stock options that
are allowing the company to understate its costs. You might ask yourself, what would happen to
Microsoft's stock price if the public suddenly realized that they lost $10 billion in 1999 rather than
earning the reported $7.8 billion? If 80 percent of its stock value or roughly $400 billion is the result of a
pyramid scheme, one might also ask what kind of effect this could have on the retirement system. It is
also important to note that this is a relatively new situation that did not occur before 1995. Microsoft
has always been a highly valued stock and that might have been justified prior to 1995.
This situation is not about stock valuation, product quality or whether or not Microsoft has
monopoly power in its markets. Nor is it part of a pro or anti-Microsoft movement. This
situation is instead a shining example of financial fraud and corruption enabled by bad
government policy. If not quickly and aggressively addressed, we will all be losers as credibility in
our financial markets is destroyed.
Sorry
if I took offense rather too quickly. It was more the thread I was replying to, not your
post in particular.
OK. No problem.
The games are Windows only for the moment (Hence the domain
name), but a tinyworkbenchgames site is in the works for Amiga fans. There are
currently no plans to develop on Linux, although if anyone wants to give it a shot, be
my guest;)
I don't have much of free time right now,
but I could take a look at the source of a
simple game and see if I could port it.
I don't know how your games are written but
if it's standard C or C++ and if you have
some internal frame buffer, than it shouldn't
be hard to output that buffer to SDL window.
Even if it had to be converted to different
format with every frame, the overhead shouln't
be high with small screen.
Actually, you may want to take a look at the
Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) library.
Using SDL, you could write portable games
working under Windows, Linux, MacOS, MacOS X,
Solaris, IRIX, FreeBSD, QNX, OSF/True64.
Here's a short summary from SDL website:
Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform
multimedia library designed to provide fast access to
the graphics framebuffer and audio device. It is used
by MPEG playback software, emulators, and many
popular games, including the award winning Linux
port of "Civilization: Call To Power." Simple
DirectMedia Layer supports Linux, Win32, BeOS,
MacOS, Solaris, IRIX, and FreeBSD.
SDL is written in C, but works with C++ natively,
and has bindings to several other languages,
including Ada, Eiffel, ML, Perl, PHP, Python, and
Ruby.
I really recomend SDL.
It's developed mostly by
Sam Lantinga,
who worked in Loki porting
Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns,
Tribes 2,
Heavy Gear II,
Heretic II,
Heroes of Might and Magic III,
Railroad Tycoon II,
Civilization: Call To Power and few other
titles,
and is now working in
Blizzard on the World of Warcraft
- in other words,
he knows how to code games,
and it shows with the SDL.
Check out the games, demos
and other applications which use SDL.
For the portable sound code
you can use SDL_mixer and for more
advanced effects I recommend the
OpenAL
which takes care for you about the 3-D sound
effects in a similar fashion as OpenGL with
graphics.
I'm not sure I follow. They say they want it to be easily stackable, and fault tolerant (they
specifically mention leaving blocks in place if they fail), but how do you combine that with
a water cooling system?
It can be done without water flowing from one
brick to another. If every brick is
built in a metal shield/radiator, then the water
only flows between the hot parts and that shield
within every brick, and the bricks are touching
with these metal shields.
But I haven't read the article, so I don't know
how they actually did it,
I just point that it is possible.
Writing code is very much like writing a novel. One day it's flowing out of you. Then
on another day, it just stops. And there's no way you can easily tap it back 'ON'.
It's not about 'formal methods'.
I agree with you and here's what I've observed:
When I do something for myself,
everything works great.
I can work 20 hours non stop, than sleep 6 hours,
than work another 20 hours,
sleep 6, work 20, sleep, work... and
I'm not even tired.
I'm working better with quiet and when
no one interrupts me, but I still can work with
random noise of kids playing outside, with
phones ringing and with people interrupting me.
I'm in hack mode and I'm just hacking.
But when I work for someone else,
while I should have a better motivation
being paid, I just can't focus, every little
sound is disturbing, I'm angry all of the time,
etc.
So my strongest problems with work are of the
emotional nature, while I have no intellectual
problems with that work at all.
When I do what I want,
I usually
(not always of course, but 95% of the time)
can easily find my zone.
When I do what I have to,
I usually (95% of the time)
cannot easily find my zone and have to work
under heavy stress.
I suppose that it is somehow similar to
writing a novel, i.e. when an author is
writing for himself, when all that matters is
a great novel, his own novel,
everything works.
But when he has to write a novel,
his employer's novel, because he needs
money, nothing works the same.
When I work for money it's no longer a hobby,
I do it because I have to,
not because I want to and this is
a great difference for me.
I can't have to do something,
I have to want to do it,
in order to do it well.
I hope you people understand what I'm trying
to say, it's kind of my self-psychoanalysis,
quite a difficult task.
When I have to do something, anything,
I don't feel that I do something important,
and I just don't see much sense in doing it.
The one and only sense is money,
but this is unfortunately quite a poor
imperative for me.
(Don't get me wrong,
I don't consider it a virtue,
because I have serious troubles
with money all the time.
I'm trying to convince myself that
this money is very important, which it is,
but I feel that I'm doing something
completely stupid and pointless,
and I just can't focus and relax at all.)
It's actually a very serious problem,
if anyone is or was experiencing
similar problems, please answer,
I'd like to know how do you solve them
or live with them.
I know that this thread is somehow old,
but I hope someone will
read it and answer.
Every comment to this article I read talks about
the furniture, equipment, noise,
music, drinks and
other elements of physical environment.
It could really help me if I could read
comments of people who deal with
similar problems
as mine.
Thanks.
Re:Letting users do things that are otherwise ille
on
GPL's Strength
·
· Score: 3
Because the GPL (and presumably, other free/open software licenses) lets the user do
MORE things that are otherwise illegal (copy and redistribute software)
Yes, it's like when you buy a book, or a CD,
or anything protected by the copyright law
without an explicite license,
you can do certain things
(like everything under the fair use term),
but you can't
e.g. copy and redistribute that work.
When you buy a protected work,
you have some rights provided by
the copyright law.
With most of software licenses (especially EULA's)
you have less rights than under
the standard copyright law,
while with the GPL you have more
rights than under
the standard copyright law.
I have always found it
strange that people in the computer industry tend to be some of the most backwards
when it comes to exploiting technology.
This
<font FACE="COURIER NEW" SIZE="-2"><b><i>Arcade Machine Emulators for download...</i></b></font>
is not new technology.
It's actually very outdated way to
control text appearance.
If you want to
exploit technology, use XHTML Strict
and Cascading Style Sheets.
But I wasn't
talking about the way how
the fonts are made smaller than the default size
(size="+1" is the font larger than the
user default
and size="-2" is font smaller
than the user default font,
i.e. this size which I find the most
readable -
see
my web design rules
if you're not sure what I mean).
I was only commenting the idea
of using fonts smaller than the size which
I have chosen as the best size for me.
Incidentally, you can zoom in to view the text better using menu options, or in IE you
can hold down the control key and use the mouse wheel.
Of course I can set my default font so large that when the size is decreased twice the result will be my favorite size.
But this way the correctly designed websites would have fonts too large and
it's completely backwards
and doesn't make much sense.
I'm sorry if you found my comment offensive.
I was mostly joking because I visited
a website with tiny games and I found
the fonts so tiny that I couldn't read anything,
which kind of made sense, because people
who play so tiny games
obviously has to have great sight,
unlike myself.
The first thing I thought was that you may
have set the fonts so small, so the people with
poor sight
(those who wouldn't be able to play those games
anyway), won't waste your bandwidth
downloading games to small for them to play,
because they won't find the download links.
I found that kind of funny.
As for the Javascript, as I said
(please read my comment),
I couldn't see the screenshots
even after I enabled Javascript,
so something is just broken.
(JavaScript Error:
http://www.tinywindowsgames.com/tiny/:
document.all has no properties.)
Most people have JavaScript enabled and that
helps us to create sites in a quick and useful way.
Yes, most of people, but not everyone.
Unless you use the <noscript> tag,
you have to understand that those who
don't have Javascript enabled, or those who
don't use Javascript browsers at all,
will complain that your website
simply don't work, which is true however great
working with Javascript it may be.
Just use <noscript> tag and your
website will work great for everyone.
People with working Javascript interpreters
won't see
<noscript>this code</noscript>
at all, so your site will be exactly the same
for those who can use it today.
The only difference will be to those people
who can't use it today.
Please read
my web design rules,
I believe you'll find
quite a few good points there.
I'm glad that you answered and
I'm honored that you probably
made
your account just to answer my comment.
The main reason I posted my comment
(other than a joke about tiny games and
tiny fonts correlation)
was to ask if these games are available
only for Windows,
because I don't have Windows
(I use Debian)
but I'd like to check them out.
So please tell me:
what platforms do you support?
Are those games released as
free software (in the
FSF sense)?
If your games work under GNU/Linux systems,
then I'll be glad to check them out.
If they are written only for Windows
but they are released as free software,
then I'll maybe try to port some of them
when I find any time for that.
Please tell me where I can find the
working screenshots, I'd like to see how
do these games look like in the first place.
Thanks and, once again, I'm sorry
if you misunderstood my intentions,
I really didn't want to offend you.
Please don't confuse
my post with
the somehow more offensive parent post by
limbostar.
Oh wow... you got a Hercules card?
Man, I was thinking of upgrading my text adaptor to one of those but I don't know if
my old orange-phosphor CRT could handle it.
Funny, but just FYI I do have
a working Hercules and I'll tell you something:
it displays 80x25 text mode as fast
as your GeeForce78 5000000 (or whatever
is c00l today), i.e. much
faster than I can read.
I use it in my web/mail/ftp/dns server
with 500MHz AMD K6-2 and 256MB of RAM.
The advantage is that the 14" monitor
is in size (the depth)
between the smallest new 14" CRT
I've seen and 14" LCD
(something in the middle).
Works great.
Very low power consumption (the card
and the monitor).
Total cost: $0.
Great for servers where you need a display
but you don't want to waste a lot of space and power.
Well, however, I loved Q3 because you could do "bind ENTER quit" and it exited the
game sooooo quickly. It saved me on more that a couple of boss-raides:)
I remember a DOS program Game Wizard.
It was used to stop the game any time
and save the game memory, find the address where
is your energy and increase it, etc.
It had to be quite an intelligent program
to stay as TSR and interrupt games
in a single-tasking OS
(games which were often normally
running in their own protected mode,
with CLI (interrupts turned off), etc.
taking over the whole computer).
It had an option called "boss" and you could
set it up like this:
first you took a screenshot of some program,
then you set a password, and then when
you hit some key combination anytime later
to "boss the screen",
the screenshot apeared instantly
(it was done really good, in text mode
even the cursor was blinking),
and the computer was halted until you
typed the password
(nothing was happening while you were typing it,
only when you finished you were back in the game).
You couldn't work
when the screen was "bossed" but you could
always pretend that the system crashed.
And what's the most important,
you could continue the game where you left it.
Great program, I wonder if it is still
developed.
No kidding. A lot of that site is designed under the assumption that everyone has
Javascript enabled.
<noscript> motherfucker, do you speak it?
A lot of that site is also designed under the assumption that everyone can see fonts
smaller than pixels
(which is actually
quite a sane assumption, considering the
fact that they provide games
4x4 pixels large).
That said, as I am unable to read their website
without getting my lazy ass off the chair and
staring from the distance of 2mm from the screen
using a magnifying glass, so
my question is: are they available only for Windows?
As for the Javascript, I enabled the damn thing,
but I still can't see their screenshots.
But then again I probably
wouldn't be able to see them
even if I could display them,
if they are as small as fonts...
Oh, well, it's only my own fault
that I bought a 15" monitor
having problems with sight.
I should've bought 50" projector instead,
then I
wouldn't complain about
incompetent web designers,
like I always do...
http://www.tinywindowsgames.com/tiny/ has really small games perfect for workers,
play chess at 74x74 pixels. Hours of fun instead of work, and you wont get cought!
Wait a minute, I'm not sure if I understand...
You won't get cought, because
these are really small games?
Are they so tiny that
nobody will see them?
Is it safe for the eyes?
We have 15 people employed to work from 10pm to 6am and they take maybe 8 calls
that last for 10 minutes each at most.
What do they do??
Well they each have several high level characters in diablo II.
Excuse me, do you maybe need a 16th employee?
I haven't played Diablo II yet,
but I learn very fast.
I have a long experience in RTS's and FPS's,
as well as with MMORPG's.
I also know the older technology like
Sierra and LucasArts early software very well,
some people say I'm an expert in that field.
I am very laborious,
I can play video games for 10 hours non-stop
for very affordable prices.
Learning new knowledge and skills is my hobby,
when I was in primary school and
in high school I learned how to play games
all the time.
I wish more work places would take this example.
Yeah, tell me about it!
Unfortunately most of my employers
said that
their companies need to be profitable or
some other bullshit,
greedy bastards!
So anyway,
where can I send my resume?
Even if the
msie-crash.txt
file was named msie-crash.html
but there was "Content-Type: text/plain" in HTTP response headers it should be displayed as plain text,
and in fact I was sure that this IE bug
is only present in exactly such a situations.
I'm really surprised that if MIME type and file suffix
(the main data type indicator in MS software)
tell the IE that it's a plain text, it still
tries to render it as HTML.
It's a very serious problem if you want to
make an HTML tutorial website, having links
such as:
http://tutorial.host/example/foo.html and
http://tutorial.host/source/foo.html
where both foo.html are
just symlinks to the same file but you set
up your web server to send
"Content-Type: text/html" under/example
to show how it looks like
and
"Content-Type: text/plain" under/source
to show the source.
Not to mention problems with
sending different MIME type
to force the download and saving of file
instead of displaying it
(try downloading
a 100MB flat text database when your browser
wants to display it first).
It's a serious problem and
making all of the workarounds can
be often a real pain in the ass
(like when you have to display HTML source, as HTML page including HTML source with s/</</g etc.)
because 90% of "web browsers" out there
can't even understand a
damned Content-Type header,
the most important HTTP response header,
present in six years old HTTP 1.0 specification
(and with the Web,
six years are the whole ages),
and I'm sure it was used in pre-RFC, pre-1.0
HTTP much earlier
(if anyone knows, I'll be glad
to hear about the real age of Content-Type
header - thanks).
OK, I'm glad you touched this subject.
For those who don't know about it,
let me quote
HTTP 1.0 from May 1996:
"HTTP uses Internet Media Types in the Content-Type header field in
order to provide
open and extensible data typing."
and HTTP 1.1 from June 1999:
"HTTP uses Internet Media Types in the Content-Type and Accept header
fields in order to provide open and extensible data typing and type
negotiation."
It's not used without an important reason.
Secondly, if they somehow get the guy to stop allowing people to download from the
website the guy can just go and stick it on Gnutella or another P2P service and magic -
suddnely it's on 1000s of computers out there.
Or stick it on that Kazaa network.
As some people say, it's very good for
that sort of thing.
No, really, if they would block it then
they
would have to block all of the warez/"pirate"
traffic on their network
(i.e. 99% of the traffic on their network)
after demonstrating that it's possible,
and just go out of business.
Yes, I know,
we needed newer version than
the precompiled one
(and also linked with OpenSSL).
I'm just curious what was that,
I thought that it may be common.
You haven't built your own MySQL?
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking about the Star Wars phenomenon, David Brin's "Star Wars" despots vs. "Star Trek" populists: Why is George Lucas peddling an elitist, anti-democratic agenda under the guise of escapist fun? is worth reading. Let me quote few paragraphs:
Great read, in my opinion. I'd like to hear some comments from people here.
For all of the people who don't understand how hard it is to write drivers for Linux I suggest to read Linux Device Drivers by Alessandro Rubini and Jonathan Corbet:
This book has 586 pages and it is still not everything there is to know about writing device drivers for Linux. And this is only if you have the hardware specification, because if you don't, then the reverse engineering makes it a whole lot more difficult task. Those "lazy open source driver authors with selfish attitudes" are actually working very hard to provide their drivers to the community, and they deserve a lot of respect for what they do for us, as well as for their great knowledge, skills and experience.
Truly amazing. This is one of the strongest arguments of people being against Microsoft shameful business tactics... People are trying to punish Microsoft for not allowing the installation of competing operating systems like Linux by OEMs, and how does Microsoft defend itself? Saying that it would allow a competing operating system like Linux to start up instead of Windows! Well, duh... Earth to MS: this is the whole damned point! Wait a minute... If a company has citizen rights in court... Could its main line of defense be insanity?
If you want to finish the harmful existence of Microsoft, then just spread the word about Bill Parish's MSFT Fraud Facts: Microsoft Financial Pyramid Summary and other updates to current and potential MSFT shareholders. That should do it.
You're right. Of course the security of UNIX doesn't fall down because I can bypass it with direct access to the hardware. The AC said that the standard Unix file permission bits are archaic. They are in fact archaic in a sense of ancient and old-fashioned, but they are not archaic in a sense of no longer current or applicable. They are archaic like the Kant's categorical imperative is.
However there are actually not 9 but 12 bits (set-uid, set-gid and sticky bit, owner read, write and execute, group read, write and execute, and others read, write and execute). This system is very simple and extremely practical, but this is not the end of Unix security mechanisms. You can mount filesystems with different restrictions, you can use additional file attributes of your filesystem, there are POSIX capabilities, etc.
With ACs there's a problem, that you never know if the one who answers is the original AC, or a different one, but I'll ask anyway: What would you change with the Unix (POSIX) security system? I guess that you only said it to start a flame war, but just in case you had anything insightful in mind, I'd like you to say some more details about Unix/Linux security and other models which you prefer, or any suggestions about features you would change or add. It could be very interesting.
I think, however, that when you fully understand Unix, you will appreciate and enjoy this powerful and flexible security model. But, as Henry Spencer once said, "Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."
I haven't thought about it. It's even better, because you can do it on a machine without floppy and CD drive, or without knowing/cracking BIOS password, however you have to do everything manually. But it's easy to e.g. copy /bin/sh to /bin/cracksh with suid root, or even make
a simple remote backdoor.
What's important is that people think they
have hard to guess root password and a secure
system, but with access to reset switch and
keyboard anyone can be root after 10 seconds.
Yes, you're right. Sometimes you can even use a backdoor password. I remember that password AMI worked for every AmiBIOS some time ago (extremely stupid idea, once someone knows such a password, every system can be compromised). There's a lot of interesting articles on the Web about cracking BIOS passwords:
A Google search for BIOS Passwords gives quite a few hits. Putting your floppy into the drive is the fastest and easiest thing you can do if you have physical access, but it's not the only issue. No one should ever be allowed to be near the important servers, except people responsible for the security.
Somehow off-topic, but speaking about security, I have to recommend one of the best texts about security (mostly about secure programming) I've ever read: Secure Programming for Linux and Unix HOWTO by David A. Wheeler. Great read. And speaking about passwords, it's good to read great publications of Alec Muffett, the author of the famous crack(1) and CrackLib:
It's maybe not very on-topic when speaking about physical security, but it's very important to understand the security as a whole.
What I find kind of disturbing is asking me what language version do I want to read after my browser has already told them that I want Polish or English... Obviously, they haven't read my web design rules and not reading my web design rules is the root of all web-related evil, now isn't it?
Other very common mistake is leaving a floppy drive set up as the first booting device, or not having password protected BIOS settings.
With e.g. Debian boot floppies or any other mini Linux and mini Unix distribution you can just insert a floppy, hit reset and wait a while until you got r00t and do whatever you want (like change the real root password in /etc/shadow on the main partition
to whatever you want).
I'm talking about it, because it's much easier than trying to write a remote exploit, much easier than writing a local exploit and much easier than actually stealing the whole hardware. It's usually also much easier than social engineering.
It wouldn't be even hard to make a floppy which automatically do something to the system (like adding new users and adding them to every group, changing passwords, reading encrypted passwords for later cracking, leaving backdoors, etc.). When you have such a floppy, you only need few seconds to insert it, hit reset, come back after a minute when everything is done, take your floppy and hit reset again.
You can even prepare this floppy in a way, that when everything is done, your files from the floppy are deleted and "shutdown -r" is run. That way even when someone enters the room before you, he'll only find a normally working system with empty floppy in the drive. The chances are that no one will even go there to see what's wrong if the server was down for a minute and now it's OK, especially if it's a lunch brake or something.
Very dangerous and very easy if you can only go near a computer, and if it can boot the system from the floppy. And I've already seen servers without BIOS passwords and those set to boot in order of floppy,cd,hdd. It's very important and often forgotten issue, it's somewhere between physical and non-physical (logical?) security.
When I found Parish's analysis some time ago, that's what I thought: If this is all true, than just letting people know about it can kill Microsoft. Because if some potential Microsoft stockholders know about it, they will wait before they buy the stock, if they don't buy the stock, the value of other stock won't increase so fast any more, the existing stockholders would notice that and some of them will start selling their stock, if finally so many people starts selling the stock that its value starts decreasing, then even more of stockholders will start to sell, but no one will want to buy it at that point (those who will want to buy it, would want to wait until it's even cheaper), etc.
The only condition needed for such scenerio is the critical mass of people reading Parish's Microsoft Financial Pyramid. I assume that Microsoft stockholders are smart people, not the kind investing in other pyramids.
If I was Bill G. & Co. I would hire Bill Parish for $100M/year as a financial consultant working at home and doing nothing, if he only agrees to stop publishing his reports. And if I was Bill Parish I would accept this offer...
Bill Parish's Microsoft Financial Pyramid is now on the first place in Google results when searching for Microsoft fraud. Just imagine if we all started linking to his article and it will became the first place when searching Google for Microsoft, just like the Anti-DMCA website is the first hit searching for DMCA. Something to think about. If this is true and if Microsoft is the greatest financial pyramid scheme and the greatest financial fraud of 20th and 21st century, then it would be really interesting to see it finally collapsing. Our granchildren will read books and watch movies about it.
Have you read the Microsoft Financial Pyramid, the MS financial fraud analysis from November 1999 by Bill Parish? There's more on Parish's Research and Press Release Archive. Let me quote few paragraphs:
What do you people think about it?
OK. No problem.
I don't have much of free time right now, but I could take a look at the source of a simple game and see if I could port it. I don't know how your games are written but if it's standard C or C++ and if you have some internal frame buffer, than it shouldn't be hard to output that buffer to SDL window. Even if it had to be converted to different format with every frame, the overhead shouln't be high with small screen.
Actually, you may want to take a look at the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) library. Using SDL, you could write portable games working under Windows, Linux, MacOS, MacOS X, Solaris, IRIX, FreeBSD, QNX, OSF/True64. Here's a short summary from SDL website:
I really recomend SDL. It's developed mostly by Sam Lantinga, who worked in Loki porting Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns, Tribes 2, Heavy Gear II, Heretic II, Heroes of Might and Magic III, Railroad Tycoon II, Civilization: Call To Power and few other titles, and is now working in Blizzard on the World of Warcraft - in other words, he knows how to code games, and it shows with the SDL. Check out the games, demos and other applications which use SDL.
For the portable sound code you can use SDL_mixer and for more advanced effects I recommend the OpenAL which takes care for you about the 3-D sound effects in a similar fashion as OpenGL with graphics.
What language and libraries do you use anyway?
what is Sub7?
It's a Trojan Horse.
It can be done without water flowing from one brick to another. If every brick is built in a metal shield/radiator, then the water only flows between the hot parts and that shield within every brick, and the bricks are touching with these metal shields. But I haven't read the article, so I don't know how they actually did it, I just point that it is possible.
I agree with you and here's what I've observed: When I do something for myself, everything works great. I can work 20 hours non stop, than sleep 6 hours, than work another 20 hours, sleep 6, work 20, sleep, work... and I'm not even tired. I'm working better with quiet and when no one interrupts me, but I still can work with random noise of kids playing outside, with phones ringing and with people interrupting me. I'm in hack mode and I'm just hacking.
But when I work for someone else, while I should have a better motivation being paid, I just can't focus, every little sound is disturbing, I'm angry all of the time, etc. So my strongest problems with work are of the emotional nature, while I have no intellectual problems with that work at all.
When I do what I want, I usually (not always of course, but 95% of the time) can easily find my zone. When I do what I have to, I usually (95% of the time) cannot easily find my zone and have to work under heavy stress.
I suppose that it is somehow similar to writing a novel, i.e. when an author is writing for himself, when all that matters is a great novel, his own novel, everything works. But when he has to write a novel, his employer's novel, because he needs money, nothing works the same.
When I work for money it's no longer a hobby, I do it because I have to, not because I want to and this is a great difference for me. I can't have to do something, I have to want to do it, in order to do it well. I hope you people understand what I'm trying to say, it's kind of my self-psychoanalysis, quite a difficult task.
When I have to do something, anything, I don't feel that I do something important, and I just don't see much sense in doing it. The one and only sense is money, but this is unfortunately quite a poor imperative for me. (Don't get me wrong, I don't consider it a virtue, because I have serious troubles with money all the time. I'm trying to convince myself that this money is very important, which it is, but I feel that I'm doing something completely stupid and pointless, and I just can't focus and relax at all.)
It's actually a very serious problem, if anyone is or was experiencing similar problems, please answer, I'd like to know how do you solve them or live with them. I know that this thread is somehow old, but I hope someone will read it and answer. Every comment to this article I read talks about the furniture, equipment, noise, music, drinks and other elements of physical environment. It could really help me if I could read comments of people who deal with similar problems as mine. Thanks.
Yes, it's like when you buy a book, or a CD, or anything protected by the copyright law without an explicite license, you can do certain things (like everything under the fair use term), but you can't e.g. copy and redistribute that work. When you buy a protected work, you have some rights provided by the copyright law. With most of software licenses (especially EULA's) you have less rights than under the standard copyright law, while with the GPL you have more rights than under the standard copyright law.
This
is not new technology. It's actually very outdated way to control text appearance. If you want to exploit technology, use XHTML Strict and Cascading Style Sheets.
But I wasn't talking about the way how the fonts are made smaller than the default size (size="+1" is the font larger than the user default and size="-2" is font smaller than the user default font, i.e. this size which I find the most readable - see my web design rules if you're not sure what I mean). I was only commenting the idea of using fonts smaller than the size which I have chosen as the best size for me.
Of course I can set my default font so large that when the size is decreased twice the result will be my favorite size. But this way the correctly designed websites would have fonts too large and it's completely backwards and doesn't make much sense.
I'm sorry if you found my comment offensive. I was mostly joking because I visited a website with tiny games and I found the fonts so tiny that I couldn't read anything, which kind of made sense, because people who play so tiny games obviously has to have great sight, unlike myself. The first thing I thought was that you may have set the fonts so small, so the people with poor sight (those who wouldn't be able to play those games anyway), won't waste your bandwidth downloading games to small for them to play, because they won't find the download links. I found that kind of funny.
As for the Javascript, as I said (please read my comment), I couldn't see the screenshots even after I enabled Javascript, so something is just broken. (JavaScript Error: http://www.tinywindowsgames.com/tiny/: document.all has no properties.)
Yes, most of people, but not everyone. Unless you use the <noscript> tag, you have to understand that those who don't have Javascript enabled, or those who don't use Javascript browsers at all, will complain that your website simply don't work, which is true however great working with Javascript it may be.
Just use <noscript> tag and your website will work great for everyone. People with working Javascript interpreters won't see <noscript>this code</noscript> at all, so your site will be exactly the same for those who can use it today. The only difference will be to those people who can't use it today. Please read my web design rules, I believe you'll find quite a few good points there.
I'm glad that you answered and I'm honored that you probably made your account just to answer my comment. The main reason I posted my comment (other than a joke about tiny games and tiny fonts correlation) was to ask if these games are available only for Windows, because I don't have Windows (I use Debian) but I'd like to check them out. So please tell me: what platforms do you support? Are those games released as free software (in the FSF sense)?
If your games work under GNU/Linux systems, then I'll be glad to check them out. If they are written only for Windows but they are released as free software, then I'll maybe try to port some of them when I find any time for that. Please tell me where I can find the working screenshots, I'd like to see how do these games look like in the first place.
Thanks and, once again, I'm sorry if you misunderstood my intentions, I really didn't want to offend you. Please don't confuse my post with the somehow more offensive parent post by limbostar.
Funny, but just FYI I do have a working Hercules and I'll tell you something: it displays 80x25 text mode as fast as your GeeForce78 5000000 (or whatever is c00l today), i.e. much faster than I can read. I use it in my web/mail/ftp/dns server with 500MHz AMD K6-2 and 256MB of RAM. The advantage is that the 14" monitor is in size (the depth) between the smallest new 14" CRT I've seen and 14" LCD (something in the middle). Works great. Very low power consumption (the card and the monitor). Total cost: $0. Great for servers where you need a display but you don't want to waste a lot of space and power.
I remember a DOS program Game Wizard. It was used to stop the game any time and save the game memory, find the address where is your energy and increase it, etc. It had to be quite an intelligent program to stay as TSR and interrupt games in a single-tasking OS (games which were often normally running in their own protected mode, with CLI (interrupts turned off), etc. taking over the whole computer). It had an option called "boss" and you could set it up like this: first you took a screenshot of some program, then you set a password, and then when you hit some key combination anytime later to "boss the screen", the screenshot apeared instantly (it was done really good, in text mode even the cursor was blinking), and the computer was halted until you typed the password (nothing was happening while you were typing it, only when you finished you were back in the game). You couldn't work when the screen was "bossed" but you could always pretend that the system crashed. And what's the most important, you could continue the game where you left it. Great program, I wonder if it is still developed.
A lot of that site is also designed under the assumption that everyone can see fonts smaller than pixels (which is actually quite a sane assumption, considering the fact that they provide games 4x4 pixels large). That said, as I am unable to read their website without getting my lazy ass off the chair and staring from the distance of 2mm from the screen using a magnifying glass, so my question is: are they available only for Windows? As for the Javascript, I enabled the damn thing, but I still can't see their screenshots. But then again I probably wouldn't be able to see them even if I could display them, if they are as small as fonts... Oh, well, it's only my own fault that I bought a 15" monitor having problems with sight. I should've bought 50" projector instead, then I wouldn't complain about incompetent web designers, like I always do...
Wait a minute, I'm not sure if I understand... You won't get cought, because these are really small games? Are they so tiny that nobody will see them? Is it safe for the eyes?
Excuse me, do you maybe need a 16th employee? I haven't played Diablo II yet, but I learn very fast. I have a long experience in RTS's and FPS's, as well as with MMORPG's. I also know the older technology like Sierra and LucasArts early software very well, some people say I'm an expert in that field. I am very laborious, I can play video games for 10 hours non-stop for very affordable prices. Learning new knowledge and skills is my hobby, when I was in primary school and in high school I learned how to play games all the time.
Yeah, tell me about it! Unfortunately most of my employers said that their companies need to be profitable or some other bullshit, greedy bastards! So anyway, where can I send my resume?
Even if the msie-crash.txt file was named msie-crash.html but there was "Content-Type: text/plain" in HTTP response headers it should be displayed as plain text, and in fact I was sure that this IE bug is only present in exactly such a situations. I'm really surprised that if MIME type and file suffix (the main data type indicator in MS software) tell the IE that it's a plain text, it still tries to render it as HTML.
It's a very serious problem if you want to make an HTML tutorial website, having links such as: http://tutorial.host/example/foo.html and http://tutorial.host/source/foo.html where both foo.html are just symlinks to the same file but you set up your web server to send "Content-Type: text/html" under /example
to show how it looks like
and
"Content-Type: text/plain" under /source
to show the source.
Not to mention problems with sending different MIME type to force the download and saving of file instead of displaying it (try downloading a 100MB flat text database when your browser wants to display it first). It's a serious problem and making all of the workarounds can be often a real pain in the ass (like when you have to display HTML source, as HTML page including HTML source with s/</</g etc.) because 90% of "web browsers" out there can't even understand a damned Content-Type header, the most important HTTP response header, present in six years old HTTP 1.0 specification (and with the Web, six years are the whole ages), and I'm sure it was used in pre-RFC, pre-1.0 HTTP much earlier (if anyone knows, I'll be glad to hear about the real age of Content-Type header - thanks).
OK, I'm glad you touched this subject. For those who don't know about it, let me quote HTTP 1.0 from May 1996: "HTTP uses Internet Media Types in the Content-Type header field in order to provide open and extensible data typing." and HTTP 1.1 from June 1999: "HTTP uses Internet Media Types in the Content-Type and Accept header fields in order to provide open and extensible data typing and type negotiation." It's not used without an important reason.
See also:
Very serious bug, I wonder when are they planning to fix it.
Or stick it on that Kazaa network. As some people say, it's very good for that sort of thing. No, really, if they would block it then they would have to block all of the warez/"pirate" traffic on their network (i.e. 99% of the traffic on their network) after demonstrating that it's possible, and just go out of business.
Yes, I know, we needed newer version than the precompiled one (and also linked with OpenSSL). I'm just curious what was that, I thought that it may be common. You haven't built your own MySQL?