That'd be pretty awesome, but the 64-bits would only be required on the server hosting the thing since that has to be authorative for the whole map at all times. Clients running the game locally could do with only smaller portions of the map in memory. That'd save bandwidth and increase performance a lot. The server just takes care of relations between map shards and makes sure players move between them properly. It does sound awesome though..:-))
..couldn't that be useful for plants in greenhouses? I can imagine the distorted ecosystem of a greenhouse, where there are hardly any animals to exhale CO2, adding the CO2 left by the combustion of CH4 could have the plants create clean O2 that can be let out into the atmosphere with no further risks thus eliminating all pollution.
But of course I don't know shit about chemistry.. so I could easily be wrong.
As as journalist I couldn't keep myself from replying to this. It's all about the target audience. The difference, for instance, between the audience of a university's internal magazine/newspaper and that of a national news network's online 'science' section is tremendous. University students and staff know science, and so the journalist can cut through a lot of the over-simplified and therefore shoddy (at best) explanations that are needed for Joe Sixpack who watches the evening news or reads a computer mag.
However I feel that there is a genuine need for some simplification when it comes to science journalism. For example I once interviewed a researcher at the aforementioned university about his project on video codecs. You and I probably both know what motion compensation is. So I asked this man "Wat makes your new implementations so special?" And he went off for over 15 minutes and a whiteboard full of complicated formulae. All well and good, and I could probably reproduce the gist of it in my article, but that's not the point. The point I wanted to make was that this professor was in fact doing something revolutionary and explain to my readership the practical implications of his work. The man just couldn't explain those to me in plain language, so he gave me a paper version of the formulae on the whiteboard.
It's then the "stupid" journalist's job to turn those into a digestible article. Here's a quick knock-up of what I wrote in the university magazine:
Prof. xxx methods greatly reduce the amount of perceived distortion in a video image apparent in video encoding using common motion compensating codecs. The improvements are in part due to the larger sequence of frames analyzed and improved object-detection algorithms which find more significant details and preserve them better. Xxx's technique doesn't require any extra bandwidth for the improvement to be visible.."
At the end of the article I included a URL for the reader to find the techy details.
Joe Sixpack would have probably abandoned my article straight away. Instead:
"Digital video will soon look a whole lot better without the need for faster networks. A new technique created by prof. xxx ensures that a video will look much sharper, especially in parts with a lot of action, than we're used to seeing on the internet. And what's best: you don't need broadband internet to see the difference."
The above paragraph is a translation, the original was in Dutch and written in 1998 so I'm not inserting the man's name. Don't want to accidentally misquote him.
I hope my example illustrates somewhat the dillemma faced by journalists every day. They always have to write for the weakest link to understand things, otherwise sales go down and the media company's bottom line is obviously connected to the individual reporter's bottom line: his job.
Furthermore, try man hier to learn about the filesystem layout. Most apps should go into/usr/local/bin but that depends highly on your distro. Some distro's have a tendency to put user executables in/opt.
As a rule of thumb:/bin contains that which lives in C:\Windows\Command ,/sbin contains administrator-only binaries (a distinction not found in Windows).
If you're trying to get familiar with filesystem layouts on Unix, I suggest you give FreeBSD a whirl. It has a very consistent and clean filesystem tree. I found FreeBSD a great place to learn about actual Unix. As I'm typing this my other box is compiling Gentoo Linux, which looks promising too but I can't comment on it yet. In a few hours maybe;-)
10 REM *** EFFICIENT SCREENSAVER 1.01 ***
20 POKE 53280,0:POKE 53281,0:POKE 646,0: REM BLACK SCREEN
30 PRINTCHR$(147): REM CLEAR SCREEN
35 REM *** START BUTT-UGLY-BUT-FAST-KEY-DECTECTION LOOP ***
40 GET A$
50 IF A$="" GOTO 40: IF A$"" GOTO 60
60 POKE 53280,14:POKE 53281,6:POKE 646,14: REM RESET COLOURS
If all is well this snippet of BASIC should get you something more screensaver-like. It turns the screen black and clears it, and as soon as you hit a key it returns your screen to its default settings of dark blue inside, light blue outside and a light blue cursor.
I intended 14 to be light blue and 6 dark blue, but not sure about the values. This screensaver is distributed under the GPL and is the very first piece of Free Software I ever wrote! Yay, I feel all warm and fuzzy now! Except that it's pretty dismal really.. but hey, I'm no coder (hardly) and it's been YEARS since I even tried BASIC let alone on a C64. Wonder if this actually does what I think it will.. gotta fire up the emulator later;-)
It's Commodore 64 BASIC. The screen has a center, a border and a cursor.
The POKE instruction sets the colour value for the center (53281), the border (53280) and the cursor (646) to 0 (black). Funny nobody found the *FUNDAMENTAL* bug in my sig yet. I get many comments on it, but never a bug-report;-)
The US already has a president to take care of endangering National Security.. and not just that of the US. Let China and Russia have M$ to endanger theirs. Over there the DMCA circumvents YOU.. or something like that..
It's just that M$ can't go after China with an army of lawyers. When a school or corp breaks their NDA, they end up in court. I wonder what happens when China breaks NDA.
How difficult would it be to leak the source to Windows XP out of China? I don't know really, but it seems to me a heck of a lot easier than to get it out of Redmond. And M$ can't go after the Chinese government with a lawsuit.. that'd create a sweet precedent. Would Bush bomb Beijing over Windows XP? Sad thing.. he probably would..;-)
That's because WinME has its roots back in the MS-DOS days and Windows 3.x. Check it out, and you'll see similarities.
WinXP has its roots in Windows NT. If you were to look at Windows NT 3.1 (1991 if I'm not mistaken) you'd recognise a lot of concepts but in a very raw form and with the same GUI as Windows 3.1.
Too bad OS/2 Warp lost the battle with Win95. OS/2 was by far the better OS.
No don't laugh right away! FreeBSD is one of the most easily configurable *NIX'es I've worked with. Just do a base install, keep the handbook close at hand (just install the doc package) and you can set it all up the way you want it. And you don't need a CS degree to do it.
Admitted it will take a lot of your time initially but it *NEVER* crashes.. (insert appropriate disclaimer: it never crashed for me yet).
You'll also learn very much about UNIX and the way computers work in general while going through setting up your own box. The main reason people don't understand Linux is, IMHO, the fact that every distribution does things differently from the other. Even across versions of the same distro. And they all come with everything and -recently- even the kitchen sink preinstalled. I run a FreeBSD desktop at home which took me ages to set up, but I know exactly where everything is and how things interact. At work I have RedHat 8.0 running on a scanner workstation. The thing installs within minutes and has everything I need on it by default. No tweaking needed and RH-Network keeps the box up to date quite reasonably. If it ever fails I just reinstall RH and the defaults work again, just need to add some NFS mounts.
Linux' complexity lies in its distributors trying to over-simplify an inherently complex system. And the reason for it being complex is the fact that everything about it is open and configurable. Want simple linux? You have to cut down on configurability. Yes, even *SHUDDER* hard-code settings in there maybe.
EULA could still be illegal in spite of agreement
on
Examining Microsoft Update
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Here in Holland (I don't know the laws in the rest of the world too well) any contract that you sign which contains clauses that are illegal, is null and void. Any statement of MS having the right to download anything off MY computer would seem to me totally illegal and would probably void the whole EULA. I did read the EULA of the Dutch version of Win2K SP3 completely and never found any clause that would allow them to download anything off my PC without my consent. Sadly I'm stuck with Windows since I cant (yet) afford a mac to run Adobe apps on. When oh when will Linux/FreeBSD/X get decent colour management and ports of proper graphics apps like Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign??? The GIMP is a nice toy, but it's hardly of any use for print production work. And KIllustrator and the like are simply a laugh too for any real work.. The Linux/BSD vs. Windows ratio is now 4:1 in the favor of the free, but I'd like to get rid of Windows altogether. Give me my killer graphics apps!! I'll even pay for them!;-)
Saving up for that Mac in the mean time..
This is actually quite true. I've done work as a journalist (particularly as a student) and snuck into places just by acting as if I belonged there. I'm not so stupid as to venture into military labs though.. What I'm talking about is ordering a platter of beer and sneaking backstage with it at concerts to talk to bands without their pesky PR-managers present.. Much more innocent I'd say, but it proves a point.. and the beer loosend their lips very nicely!;-)
This is funny.. I actually am/was (have to call my college on that *lol*) a journalism major, and got sick and tired of it very soon. There is NO decent money in journalism. All these jobs demand academic level of thinking, and the reward is the same or less than that of a garbage collector! I didn't study 6 years for that. At least the corps value an academic according to their level of skill and competence. I just broke out of the world of journalism and now do just about anything that has to do with communications and IT. And it pays me at least fourfold what I earned at this country's largest news network.
Re:"One Linux operator can manage 45 computers whi
on
Linux in High School Labs
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The *nix-side of the story on configuring desktops:
Standardize on a *proper* free OS for corporate desktop use and no that's probably not Gentoo or Slack. Yes you will spend time setting up the groundwork. However once you have the apps you need all neatly packaged up in your own.rpm's (or other package format) there's hardly anything that can go wrong upon distributing them. You can easily write a shell script that checks for updates upon every login and have those fetched from a server. That'd be YOUR installations, set up by YOUR scripts, conforming to YOUR company's policy and the way they do business, so that YOU are in control and not some closed group policy service which you can only trust because there's no way for you to find out what it actually does. Nice pickle when something goes wrong.. and I've been there..
Then there's NFS and such things as mounting things like/usr and/home directories remotely. Everything is always available to everyone and given a few clever shell scripts on the clients and some replication between servers this can be very easily load-balanced, centrally managed and backed up at the same time as well.
Your Apache vs. IIS example isn't a very strong one either. Many good tools are available to configure Apache, check the recent RedHat ISO's. And even if you were to compile it from source because of some funky module requirement, you could package the resulting binary for re-use on every other box you need to serve pages. For IIS the funky functionality would most likely simply not even be available.. Besides, how often do you set up a real webserver anyway?
Final example: FreeBSD actually does let me set up a DNS/DHCP/LDAP server the way *I* want it.. Win2K is easy until you want something out of the ordinary or something goes south and it's not in the knowledge base yet. I'm in love with my/var/log;-)
Ok, so far for my ranting. A constructive suggestion: just give SuSE 8.1 or Redhat 8.0 a whirl. Your post sounds like you've been away from Linux for quite some time. It's come a long way, and the configurability has gotten much easier. I popped in a RH 8.0 CD a few weeks ago, clicked a few simple buttons, and was up and running with a system that'd be right at home in any small office environment. I had a full office suite, could use my fairly exotic scanner, printer works, ADSL works, could burn CD's.. if it werent for the butt-ugly BlueCurve theme I'd say I was on an Apple;-)
5 minutes?? At one of my previous jobs I had to wait 45 yes forty-five minutes when I first logged in.. and it still takes 20 minutes now that "the network knows me", or so the support guy said. How's that for expenses? I cost money per hour.. three reboots and that's an hour's productivity lost due to Win2K's crappy manageability.
I had more of a desktop setting in mind where most of the physical security is needed most of the time (concerning compromisable swapfiles, temp files, user profiles, unclean "deletion" and what not). Your point about the remote server is very valid. Smartcards are very impractical on remote servers but those servers that actually require such stringent security measures are hopefully set up in a datacenter that has physical access locks and policies up to and including the actual rack.. probably also involving credit card sized electronic keys;-))
Do your friends have any details on this PCI-card posted anywhere? I'd like to learn some more about it! It would seem to me pretty much the ultimate way to secure a key.. but they did weld the card into the slot, right?
Why did you let an intern deviate from company standards??? I don't blame the guy/gal for being a beginner and thus writing "sucky" scripts in whatever language. But you guys have been so plain DUMB for letting the intern go ahead with Python and Ruby knowing full well that you couldn't support these languages. It's sometimes too easy to just blame the intern... YOU (experienced script guru familiar with company policy) should have instructed him/her (fresh out of school newbie) to use Perl and nothing else. And if that weren't an option, why did you hire this intern in the first place?
Re:Encrypted File System
on
Storage Security
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Would a smartcard system not solve this problem? Smartcard reading will bring some overhead, but it needn't be done every time a file is accessed, just once during the user session. Store the key in RAM and make sure that particular bit of RAM never gets swapped to disk. That way the key remains outside the computer, and gets permanently erased when the user logs out or the screensaver kicks in. The user only gets their desktop back from the screensaver after they plug their smartcard back in and enter their password. Combined with S/Key passwords this could be pretty secure... though I'm no expert, so comments more than welcome!
Slashdot Mirror
That'd be pretty awesome, but the 64-bits would only be required on the server hosting the thing since that has to be authorative for the whole map at all times. Clients running the game locally could do with only smaller portions of the map in memory. That'd save bandwidth and increase performance a lot. The server just takes care of relations between map shards and makes sure players move between them properly. It does sound awesome though.. :-))
..couldn't that be useful for plants in greenhouses? I can imagine the distorted ecosystem of a greenhouse, where there are hardly any animals to exhale CO2, adding the CO2 left by the combustion of CH4 could have the plants create clean O2 that can be let out into the atmosphere with no further risks thus eliminating all pollution.
But of course I don't know shit about chemistry.. so I could easily be wrong.
However I feel that there is a genuine need for some simplification when it comes to science journalism. For example I once interviewed a researcher at the aforementioned university about his project on video codecs. You and I probably both know what motion compensation is. So I asked this man "Wat makes your new implementations so special?" And he went off for over 15 minutes and a whiteboard full of complicated formulae. All well and good, and I could probably reproduce the gist of it in my article, but that's not the point. The point I wanted to make was that this professor was in fact doing something revolutionary and explain to my readership the practical implications of his work. The man just couldn't explain those to me in plain language, so he gave me a paper version of the formulae on the whiteboard.
It's then the "stupid" journalist's job to turn those into a digestible article. Here's a quick knock-up of what I wrote in the university magazine:
At the end of the article I included a URL for the reader to find the techy details.
Joe Sixpack would have probably abandoned my article straight away. Instead:
The above paragraph is a translation, the original was in Dutch and written in 1998 so I'm not inserting the man's name. Don't want to accidentally misquote him.
I hope my example illustrates somewhat the dillemma faced by journalists every day. They always have to write for the weakest link to understand things, otherwise sales go down and the media company's bottom line is obviously connected to the individual reporter's bottom line: his job.
Finding apps in Linux:
/usr/local/bin but that depends highly on your distro. Some distro's have a tendency to put user executables in /opt. /bin contains that which lives in C:\Windows\Command , /sbin contains administrator-only binaries (a distinction not found in Windows).
;-)
find / -name [appname]
Furthermore, try man hier to learn about the filesystem layout. Most apps should go into
As a rule of thumb:
If you're trying to get familiar with filesystem layouts on Unix, I suggest you give FreeBSD a whirl. It has a very consistent and clean filesystem tree. I found FreeBSD a great place to learn about actual Unix. As I'm typing this my other box is compiling Gentoo Linux, which looks promising too but I can't comment on it yet. In a few hours maybe
Good luck learning *NIX!
The latest offerings from AMD have 640K.. of on-die cache! Does that mean I could run MS-DOS games in cache? That'd rock ;-)
That'd be megaflora, not fauna ;-)
Submit a patch! ;-)))
I was wondering if C64 Basic supported WHILE-loops.. DO WHILE A$="":GET A$:WEND :-((
if I'm not mistaken.. indeed slashdot ate my pointy brackets
Firing up the C64 Emulator.. hehe.. this has to be tested.
10 REM *** EFFICIENT SCREENSAVER 1.01 ***
;-)
20 POKE 53280,0:POKE 53281,0:POKE 646,0: REM BLACK SCREEN
30 PRINTCHR$(147): REM CLEAR SCREEN
35 REM *** START BUTT-UGLY-BUT-FAST-KEY-DECTECTION LOOP ***
40 GET A$
50 IF A$="" GOTO 40: IF A$"" GOTO 60
60 POKE 53280,14:POKE 53281,6:POKE 646,14: REM RESET COLOURS
If all is well this snippet of BASIC should get you something more screensaver-like. It turns the screen black and clears it, and as soon as you hit a key it returns your screen to its default settings of dark blue inside, light blue outside and a light blue cursor.
I intended 14 to be light blue and 6 dark blue, but not sure about the values.
This screensaver is distributed under the GPL and is the very first piece of Free Software I ever wrote! Yay, I feel all warm and fuzzy now! Except that it's pretty dismal really.. but hey, I'm no coder (hardly) and it's been YEARS since I even tried BASIC let alone on a C64. Wonder if this actually does what I think it will.. gotta fire up the emulator later
It's Commodore 64 BASIC. The screen has a center, a border and a cursor. The POKE instruction sets the colour value for the center (53281), the border (53280) and the cursor (646) to 0 (black). Funny nobody found the *FUNDAMENTAL* bug in my sig yet. I get many comments on it, but never a bug-report ;-)
The US already has a president to take care of endangering National Security.. and not just that of the US. Let China and Russia have M$ to endanger theirs. Over there the DMCA circumvents YOU.. or something like that..
Ok.. forget this post already!
It's just that M$ can't go after China with an army of lawyers. When a school or corp breaks their NDA, they end up in court. I wonder what happens when China breaks NDA.
How difficult would it be to leak the source to Windows XP out of China? I don't know really, but it seems to me a heck of a lot easier than to get it out of Redmond. And M$ can't go after the Chinese government with a lawsuit.. that'd create a sweet precedent. Would Bush bomb Beijing over Windows XP? Sad thing.. he probably would.. ;-)
That's because WinME has its roots back in the MS-DOS days and Windows 3.x. Check it out, and you'll see similarities.
WinXP has its roots in Windows NT. If you were to look at Windows NT 3.1 (1991 if I'm not mistaken) you'd recognise a lot of concepts but in a very raw form and with the same GUI as Windows 3.1.
Too bad OS/2 Warp lost the battle with Win95. OS/2 was by far the better OS.
No don't laugh right away! FreeBSD is one of the most easily configurable *NIX'es I've worked with. Just do a base install, keep the handbook close at hand (just install the doc package) and you can set it all up the way you want it. And you don't need a CS degree to do it.
Admitted it will take a lot of your time initially but it *NEVER* crashes.. (insert appropriate disclaimer: it never crashed for me yet).
You'll also learn very much about UNIX and the way computers work in general while going through setting up your own box.
The main reason people don't understand Linux is, IMHO, the fact that every distribution does things differently from the other. Even across versions of the same distro. And they all come with everything and -recently- even the kitchen sink preinstalled.
I run a FreeBSD desktop at home which took me ages to set up, but I know exactly where everything is and how things interact.
At work I have RedHat 8.0 running on a scanner workstation. The thing installs within minutes and has everything I need on it by default. No tweaking needed and RH-Network keeps the box up to date quite reasonably. If it ever fails I just reinstall RH and the defaults work again, just need to add some NFS mounts.
Linux' complexity lies in its distributors trying to over-simplify an inherently complex system. And the reason for it being complex is the fact that everything about it is open and configurable. Want simple linux? You have to cut down on configurability. Yes, even *SHUDDER* hard-code settings in there maybe.
Here in Holland (I don't know the laws in the rest of the world too well) any contract that you sign which contains clauses that are illegal, is null and void. Any statement of MS having the right to download anything off MY computer would seem to me totally illegal and would probably void the whole EULA. ;-)
I did read the EULA of the Dutch version of Win2K SP3 completely and never found any clause that would allow them to download anything off my PC without my consent.
Sadly I'm stuck with Windows since I cant (yet) afford a mac to run Adobe apps on. When oh when will Linux/FreeBSD/X get decent colour management and ports of proper graphics apps like Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign??? The GIMP is a nice toy, but it's hardly of any use for print production work. And KIllustrator and the like are simply a laugh too for any real work.. The Linux/BSD vs. Windows ratio is now 4:1 in the favor of the free, but I'd like to get rid of Windows altogether. Give me my killer graphics apps!! I'll even pay for them!
Saving up for that Mac in the mean time..
This is actually quite true. I've done work as a journalist (particularly as a student) and snuck into places just by acting as if I belonged there. I'm not so stupid as to venture into military labs though.. What I'm talking about is ordering a platter of beer and sneaking backstage with it at concerts to talk to bands without their pesky PR-managers present.. Much more innocent I'd say, but it proves a point.. and the beer loosend their lips very nicely! ;-)
This is funny.. I actually am/was (have to call my college on that *lol*) a journalism major, and got sick and tired of it very soon. There is NO decent money in journalism. All these jobs demand academic level of thinking, and the reward is the same or less than that of a garbage collector! I didn't study 6 years for that. At least the corps value an academic according to their level of skill and competence.
I just broke out of the world of journalism and now do just about anything that has to do with communications and IT. And it pays me at least fourfold what I earned at this country's largest news network.
..what other use could an XXX-box have?? ;-)
The *nix-side of the story on configuring desktops:
.rpm's (or other package format) there's hardly anything that can go wrong upon distributing them. You can easily write a shell script that checks for updates upon every login and have those fetched from a server. That'd be YOUR installations, set up by YOUR scripts, conforming to YOUR company's policy and the way they do business, so that YOU are in control and not some closed group policy service which you can only trust because there's no way for you to find out what it actually does. Nice pickle when something goes wrong.. and I've been there.. /usr and /home directories remotely. Everything is always available to everyone and given a few clever shell scripts on the clients and some replication between servers this can be very easily load-balanced, centrally managed and backed up at the same time as well.
/var/log ;-)
;-)
Standardize on a *proper* free OS for corporate desktop use and no that's probably not Gentoo or Slack.
Yes you will spend time setting up the groundwork. However once you have the apps you need all neatly packaged up in your own
Then there's NFS and such things as mounting things like
Your Apache vs. IIS example isn't a very strong one either. Many good tools are available to configure Apache, check the recent RedHat ISO's. And even if you were to compile it from source because of some funky module requirement, you could package the resulting binary for re-use on every other box you need to serve pages. For IIS the funky functionality would most likely simply not even be available.. Besides, how often do you set up a real webserver anyway?
Final example: FreeBSD actually does let me set up a DNS/DHCP/LDAP server the way *I* want it.. Win2K is easy until you want something out of the ordinary or something goes south and it's not in the knowledge base yet. I'm in love with my
Ok, so far for my ranting. A constructive suggestion: just give SuSE 8.1 or Redhat 8.0 a whirl. Your post sounds like you've been away from Linux for quite some time. It's come a long way, and the configurability has gotten much easier. I popped in a RH 8.0 CD a few weeks ago, clicked a few simple buttons, and was up and running with a system that'd be right at home in any small office environment. I had a full office suite, could use my fairly exotic scanner, printer works, ADSL works, could burn CD's.. if it werent for the butt-ugly BlueCurve theme I'd say I was on an Apple
5 minutes?? At one of my previous jobs I had to wait 45 yes forty-five minutes when I first logged in.. and it still takes 20 minutes now that "the network knows me", or so the support guy said. How's that for expenses? I cost money per hour.. three reboots and that's an hour's productivity lost due to Win2K's crappy manageability.
I had more of a desktop setting in mind where most of the physical security is needed most of the time (concerning compromisable swapfiles, temp files, user profiles, unclean "deletion" and what not). Your point about the remote server is very valid. Smartcards are very impractical on remote servers but those servers that actually require such stringent security measures are hopefully set up in a datacenter that has physical access locks and policies up to and including the actual rack.. probably also involving credit card sized electronic keys ;-))
Do your friends have any details on this PCI-card posted anywhere? I'd like to learn some more about it! It would seem to me pretty much the ultimate way to secure a key.. but they did weld the card into the slot, right?
Then forward my previous post to the kid's boss ;-))
The world is sadly too much like Dilbert's universe...
Why did you let an intern deviate from company standards??? I don't blame the guy/gal for being a beginner and thus writing "sucky" scripts in whatever language. But you guys have been so plain DUMB for letting the intern go ahead with Python and Ruby knowing full well that you couldn't support these languages. It's sometimes too easy to just blame the intern... YOU (experienced script guru familiar with company policy) should have instructed him/her (fresh out of school newbie) to use Perl and nothing else. And if that weren't an option, why did you hire this intern in the first place?
Would a smartcard system not solve this problem? Smartcard reading will bring some overhead, but it needn't be done every time a file is accessed, just once during the user session. Store the key in RAM and make sure that particular bit of RAM never gets swapped to disk. That way the key remains outside the computer, and gets permanently erased when the user logs out or the screensaver kicks in. The user only gets their desktop back from the screensaver after they plug their smartcard back in and enter their password. Combined with S/Key passwords this could be pretty secure... though I'm no expert, so comments more than welcome!