During the heydey of the dot-com "revolution," my employer and several
others in the Valley supplied their employees with shiny new computers
equipped with the latest in gaming hardware. Amongst the GeForce3's, 21
inch "perfectly flat" displays, and Windows 98 licenses, there were - you
guessed it - vibrating controllers. Which are now apparently being deemed
a health
hazard.
Some of my former co-workers with whom I have kept in touch have been
consulting lawyers in the area in the hopes of "demonstrating" that the
vibrating controllers and other ergonomic no-nos committed in our workplace
are grounds for getting some quick cash through the legal system. Because
of the very nature of this sort of damage - that it is very difficult to
prove whether or not somebody is feeling pain in their arm - they believe
that it will be an open-and-shut case and that most companies will want to
settle quickly to avoid further damage to stock prices and profits.
I don't wholehartedly condone this sort of behavior, but some companies have such an atrocious
employee relations record that they almost deserve the misery...
A couple of months ago, I was hell-bent on purchasing a new flat screen LCD
monitor. I learned the hard way that these devices are nothing more than
overpriced toys that have few advantages
over a CRT monitor. After buying and returning three LCD panels, I come to
share my experiences with you. This is what I found out:
Price. Unless you've been living under a rock, you know
that LCDs cost about 5-7 times a comparable CRT. The simple fact of the
matter is that manufacturers understand how to make CRTs well, and
the same cannot be said of LCDs.
Picture quality. All of my LCDs had a terrible viewing angle -
no better than 15 degrees to either side. Furthermore, ghosting was a big
problem with games (even with active matrix, or DSTN, displays), and all of
my units had several always-dark or always-light pixels. This should not
come as a surprise, as most manufacturers will tolerate shipping units that
have as many as 25 or 30 broken pixels.
Weight. OLED products promise to significantly reduce the
weight of the display, because they will not require so much glass to
produce.
Durability. LCD displays are scads more sensitive to EMF,
shock, and time than CRT displays are. Dropping my CRT resulted in a few
scratches; dropping an LCD results in a sloppy mess and a couple hundred
dollars down the tubes.
Compatibility. I had problems getting two out of the three LCD
monitors to run with Linux. Since they rarely use a standard VGA
connector, they require a proprietary video card which sometimes will not
have open source driver support. Given that I run an all-open source shop
this was unacceptable.
What will OLED help address? Well, the simple answer is "everything." I
have tested prototype OLED displays and I would recommend them over
anything the LCD manufacturers offer. LCD is a technology that deserves to
die, and I only hope that we will be giving it a proper burial in short
order.
will
There are major problems with compartmentalization
on
HP-LX 1.0 Secure Linux
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Having worked on a similar project in the past, I can tell you that UNIX
kernels are not as amenable to compartmentalization as HP would have you
believe. Consider the following potential holes:
Buffer overflows and improper argument checking plague every modern
UNIX kernel. Think about the recent sysctl() input validation hole in
Linux. Or the recent/proc bugs in FreeBSD. Or the LDT handling bugs in
NetBSD, Solaris, and many others.
Most kernels were not designed with least privilege in mind. For
instance, the mount() syscall allows ordinary users to mount and umount
filesystems. Access checks are performed (to make sure it is mounted
nosuid, and such) but there are undoubtedly holes waiting to be discovered.
Until only recently, Linux had several bugs allowing users to
commandeer each others' shared memory segments. This could be used to
corrupt memory used by init(1) and several other critical programs, causing
a major security breach.
Because the X server needs low level hardware access, most OS kernels
allow access to iopl(2) and ioperm(2). This means that attackers can talk
directly with the hardware, bypassing the OS security. The alternative, of
course, is to ban the use of graphical interfaces on that system; but
usually that is unacceptable.
Although these issues can all be addressed, the problem of proper kernel
security is at best a "whack a mole" situation in which a new hole will
arise shortly after an existing hole is patched. Thus, the HP-LX software
probably isn't worth the CD it is pressed onto.
Slashdot Mirror
Some of my former co-workers with whom I have kept in touch have been consulting lawyers in the area in the hopes of "demonstrating" that the vibrating controllers and other ergonomic no-nos committed in our workplace are grounds for getting some quick cash through the legal system. Because of the very nature of this sort of damage - that it is very difficult to prove whether or not somebody is feeling pain in their arm - they believe that it will be an open-and-shut case and that most companies will want to settle quickly to avoid further damage to stock prices and profits.
I don't wholehartedly condone this sort of behavior, but some companies have such an atrocious employee relations record that they almost deserve the misery...
will
- Price. Unless you've been living under a rock, you know
that LCDs cost about 5-7 times a comparable CRT. The simple fact of the
matter is that manufacturers understand how to make CRTs well, and
the same cannot be said of LCDs.
- Picture quality. All of my LCDs had a terrible viewing angle -
no better than 15 degrees to either side. Furthermore, ghosting was a big
problem with games (even with active matrix, or DSTN, displays), and all of
my units had several always-dark or always-light pixels. This should not
come as a surprise, as most manufacturers will tolerate shipping units that
have as many as 25 or 30 broken pixels.
- Weight. OLED products promise to significantly reduce the
weight of the display, because they will not require so much glass to
produce.
- Durability. LCD displays are scads more sensitive to EMF,
shock, and time than CRT displays are. Dropping my CRT resulted in a few
scratches; dropping an LCD results in a sloppy mess and a couple hundred
dollars down the tubes.
- Compatibility. I had problems getting two out of the three LCD
monitors to run with Linux. Since they rarely use a standard VGA
connector, they require a proprietary video card which sometimes will not
have open source driver support. Given that I run an all-open source shop
this was unacceptable.
What will OLED help address? Well, the simple answer is "everything." I have tested prototype OLED displays and I would recommend them over anything the LCD manufacturers offer. LCD is a technology that deserves to die, and I only hope that we will be giving it a proper burial in short order.will
- Buffer overflows and improper argument checking plague every modern
UNIX kernel. Think about the recent sysctl() input validation hole in
Linux. Or the recent
/proc bugs in FreeBSD. Or the LDT handling bugs in
NetBSD, Solaris, and many others.
- Most kernels were not designed with least privilege in mind. For
instance, the mount() syscall allows ordinary users to mount and umount
filesystems. Access checks are performed (to make sure it is mounted
nosuid, and such) but there are undoubtedly holes waiting to be discovered.
- Until only recently, Linux had several bugs allowing users to
commandeer each others' shared memory segments. This could be used to
corrupt memory used by init(1) and several other critical programs, causing
a major security breach.
- Because the X server needs low level hardware access, most OS kernels
allow access to iopl(2) and ioperm(2). This means that attackers can talk
directly with the hardware, bypassing the OS security. The alternative, of
course, is to ban the use of graphical interfaces on that system; but
usually that is unacceptable.
Although these issues can all be addressed, the problem of proper kernel security is at best a "whack a mole" situation in which a new hole will arise shortly after an existing hole is patched. Thus, the HP-LX software probably isn't worth the CD it is pressed onto.vw