Sure, thats true. But that doesn't mean the unsuspecting can't infect themselves by opening the attachment. The exploit in IE just lets the thing run without the user actually doing anything, but there are other possible transit mechanisms, which is what I think the parent's parent was trying to point out.
Oh god... I wasn't thinking of this before, but what this really means is that we're going to see MORE of those unbelievably idiotic MS advertisements they've already got all over TV. I'm not even talking about the MSN ones, which are pretty dumb in their own right. I mean those "We are inspired by your potential", "we're doing it for the children" big load of crap ads. Oh well, I guess when people ask why I have no love for Microsoft, I can just point to their TV ads and say "See what I mean?"
Heh, that wasn't so long ago. Heck, people still say it all the time. I find that choosing an OS is a lot about to what degree do you want to give up on application diversity and driver support. Some people need the comfort of knowing that every product caters to them. Those people run Windows. Others don't need every product, just so long as they have a few of each type. Those are Mac people. When you get down to Linux vs FreeBSD vs BeOS vs whatever else, I find it comes down to which one supports most of my existing hardware and most of my apps, which is why I end up back with Linux every time. Beyond Linux, it becomes a question of what you can do without. And such is the saga of choosing OS's.
My freshman year of college, a friend down the hall from me was buying all kinds of strange stuff on ebay. At one point he bought this case of miscellaneous scsi cards and cables. It turned out it was all 50pin cables and scsi cards from old Apple machines, in other words absolutely useless. Now, being engineers, and being freshmen, and being dumb, we decided it would be a good idea to break a few of them. Specifically, we wanted my roommate (who had, I believe, a red belt in Tai Kwon Doe at the time. He's got a blackbelt now.) to punch one in half they way he breaks wood at tests. Somehow we convinced him to do this.
The first time he tried to break the card, the kid who was holding it didn't have a tight enough grip, so it went flying and hit him in the face. The second time, he held on, but the card didn't break or even crack, and he cut his hand on the solder on the bottom of the board. Undeterred, we got two people to hold the card, while my roommate tried a third time. This time, the board went flying again, cut one of the guys hands, hit me in the forehead, and my roommate cut a big gash in his hand. This was no longer amusing.
My roommate was pretty pissed, and he tried to break the card over his knee, but with no success. We stomped on it, we threw it. Eventually we had to have one person step on one end while another pulled up the other. It finally broke, but only after leaving scores of wounded combatants. That day I developed a new respect for the durability of printed circuit boards.
I guess thats a little off topic, since the card obviously didn't work again. To save this post, I should mention that the same ebaying friend bought a full-height 2GB scsi drive, which we used to run around the floor hitting people with. It was known lovingly as the "People-Hitting SCSI Drive". It continued to work, and he eventually sold it to some other poor sap on ebay, as I recall.
This reminds me of my CounterStrike server from last year. It had two hard drives in it: a 1.2GB WD Caviar and a 2.0GB of the same type. I had gotten the former from a closet at my dad's work (the local electric company), where it had been sitting for god knows how long. It had a few bad sectors, and didn't format the first time I tried it, but eventually I got it to work, and made it the main drive of my server.
A few months later, I got the 2.0GB drive from my job. My 1.2gig drive was getting pretty full, but I didn't want to rebuild my system, so I just moved/usr over onto the new drive. Now, my CS server was in/usr/local/hlds, so it got moved too.
A few weeks later, I woke up in the middle of the night to hear an awful clanking coming from the server box. I ssh'd into the box, and observed that I was unable to run several system utilities, and I was getting a bunch of I/O errors on the console. Sure enough, the 1.2gig drive was dead. However, my server lived! In fact, it was fully populated at the time. So I just let it go, and of course went around bragging to all my Windows-using friends how my server was uber-L337 and indestructable. It ran for another couple of months, then I had to reboot for some reason (I don't remember why now), and of course it didn't come back up.
Boston Univerity started registering MACs this year, ostensibly because they had to do so much work backtracking IPs to shut off all the Nimda-infected boxes last year. Its pretty ingenious, really. Basically, their dhcp servers check each mac that requests an IP against a database of registered macs. If its not there, the server assigns an IP which the routers will auto-redirect all http traffic to a site where the user can register their IP, and presumably drops all other traffic. I'm off campus now, so I didn't experience the system firsthand, but supposedly its worked really well.
I am not a game developer, but I don't think I buy this. For graphics we have OpenGL, which is as good as, if not better than Direct3d. For sound and other multimedia stuff we have SDL, which seemed to work just fine for Loki, may they rest in peace. I guess we probably don't have DirectX's networking component, but any game I can't play through a NAT firewall setup isn't worth my time anyway. I suppose we don't have DirectX-style peripheral drivers, though I never understood why people needed a wrapper around the joystick interface anyway.
Now, I am a WineX subscriber, and I like their product, but it does not even remotely cut it as a Linux gaming solution. Every game has its own bizarre bugs, no game works on every system, performance is not great, and the sound support is abysmal. Its a stopgap solution at best.
In short, the tools for making great games are there, we just need people to use them, which is what this project is all about.
I'm sorry, but the Voodoo 5 was an apocalyptically bad card. My roommate bought one before 3dfx went under, and its the most ungodly slow thing I've ever seen. We tested it against my Geforce2 MX, which I bought around the same time (for about half what he payed for his card), and it ran circles around his 5500. In fact, my card in my 500Mhz PIII system beat out his card in his 850MHz PIII system in 3dmark 2000 and 3dmark 2001. I let him try my card in his system, and it at least doubled his 3dmark score. In the end, 3dfx wasn't even remotely keeping up, and they payed the price. Nvidia, at least for the moment, is competitive, even if they're no longer the leader.
Of course, in addition to that there'll be the demand charge. Unfortunately, I have no idea what the going rate on that is, but my understanding is that for a high-consumption user, that part of the bill is MUCH higher than the regular KWh part. At least, thats what they told me when I used to read meters.
For those who don't know, its basically a charge based on the peak amount of power you drew over the course of the billing cycle. They take that peak (~76KW in this case), and multiply it by a constant (on the order of 10 or 100, depending on the customer), and multiply that by whatever the rate is (I don't think its the same rate as they multiply KWh by). Anyway, they always told us to be extremely careful reading the demand, because being off by even the lowest order digit could cost the customer thousands extra in some cases.
The press release is new, but Solaris 9 x86 has been available on Sun's site for a while now. Also, only the SPARC version is free, the x86 version still costs $20 to download or $95 for the media kit. However, since they were originally planning on canning Solaris x86 altogether, this is great.
Solaris is a neat system, and I've enjoyed playing with x86 version 8, though it couldn't replace Linux on my desktop. I have seriously considered using it on my servers though.
That always strikes me as odd. It seems there are 2 likely scenarios: either the patch is broken in some way, which implies lack of testing on Microsoft's part, which makes me wonder what all that supposed "regression testing" is about. The other possibility is that this functionality they're breaking is in fact the security hole, and shouldn't have been there in the first place. That implies bad design on Microsoft's part, but also shows bad judgement on the admin's part for not patching and then working around whatever's broken.
At first, I didn't think this was so bad (atm, I'm just a home user, afterall). But thinking a little further, I don't like it at all. I moved from Debian to Redhat recently, which I know sounds crazy, but basically I wanted the "more professional" feel and I wanted to do software raid on my root drive, which is nontrivial in Debian.
So far its worked out well, though I miss the huge apt-repository sometimes. But if I have to do a cd-based upgrade every 6 months, well, to hell with that! Heck, $20 says Debian woody is still getting security updates this time next year. I'm not sure they've even stopped patching potato yet. Seriously, how can Redhat make money when their non-free support expires more quickly than Debian's free support? I don't know how long other distros go on support generally, but Redhat can't afford to give up their edge in this area.
Oh, bah... when I was in grade school we had Apple II's. No hard disk, no OS to speak of, just 5.25" floppies. In short, nothing even remotely resembling the "fundamental computer applications" you speak of. Can I use a Windows machine now? Yup. Can the kids I grew up with? Yup. And you'd better believe that KDE, StarOffice, and Mozilla are a hell of a lot more like the apps found on a "normal computer" than anything I had back in the day.
Heck, to me the real crime is teaching kids nothing BUT Windows, by which I mean not really teaching them anything but to click A to make B happen, and to go into a panic if they can't find a button labelled "Start". People should be subjected to all sorts of different computer environments, otherwise how will they really know what they prefer? And since these kids will inevitably see windows later in life if they haven't already, school doesn't really need to spend much time on it.
Computers are all basically the same. The important thing is that when they're faced with Windows, or Linux, or MacOS, or *BSD, or whatever, that they're not immediately put off by it, because after all, a computer is a computer is a computer.
> we are being given a tax break that is less then ten percent of the US military Budget, this year alone.
I think if you take out the words "ten percent of" or "this year alone", you're right. Otherwise I don't see how the math works out, assuming the given figures are accurate. Maybe I'm just misreading.
Read it again. He's saying that Hacking Linux Exposed is unlike many other hacking books. He then mentions Hacking Exposed as an example of the "other" hacking books, which he says was overblown, outdated, and obsolete.
True enough... my question, though, is will there be any appreciable improvement for those of us running 2.4 with the lowlatency and preempt patches? From what I'm reading, it sounds like those are really the only desktop improvements.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah so they say... they also say that they don't use their drivers to cheat at benchmarks.
Sure, thats true. But that doesn't mean the unsuspecting can't infect themselves by opening the attachment. The exploit in IE just lets the thing run without the user actually doing anything, but there are other possible transit mechanisms, which is what I think the parent's parent was trying to point out.
Oh god... I wasn't thinking of this before, but what this really means is that we're going to see MORE of those unbelievably idiotic MS advertisements they've already got all over TV. I'm not even talking about the MSN ones, which are pretty dumb in their own right. I mean those "We are inspired by your potential", "we're doing it for the children" big load of crap ads. Oh well, I guess when people ask why I have no love for Microsoft, I can just point to their TV ads and say "See what I mean?"
Heh, that wasn't so long ago. Heck, people still say it all the time. I find that choosing an OS is a lot about to what degree do you want to give up on application diversity and driver support. Some people need the comfort of knowing that every product caters to them. Those people run Windows. Others don't need every product, just so long as they have a few of each type. Those are Mac people. When you get down to Linux vs FreeBSD vs BeOS vs whatever else, I find it comes down to which one supports most of my existing hardware and most of my apps, which is why I end up back with Linux every time. Beyond Linux, it becomes a question of what you can do without. And such is the saga of choosing OS's.
Or going to the Annual "Big Science Thing" and shouting "Pi is exactly 3!"
My freshman year of college, a friend down the hall from me was buying all kinds of strange stuff on ebay. At one point he bought this case of miscellaneous scsi cards and cables. It turned out it was all 50pin cables and scsi cards from old Apple machines, in other words absolutely useless. Now, being engineers, and being freshmen, and being dumb, we decided it would be a good idea to break a few of them. Specifically, we wanted my roommate (who had, I believe, a red belt in Tai Kwon Doe at the time. He's got a blackbelt now.) to punch one in half they way he breaks wood at tests. Somehow we convinced him to do this.
The first time he tried to break the card, the kid who was holding it didn't have a tight enough grip, so it went flying and hit him in the face. The second time, he held on, but the card didn't break or even crack, and he cut his hand on the solder on the bottom of the board. Undeterred, we got two people to hold the card, while my roommate tried a third time. This time, the board went flying again, cut one of the guys hands, hit me in the forehead, and my roommate cut a big gash in his hand. This was no longer amusing.
My roommate was pretty pissed, and he tried to break the card over his knee, but with no success. We stomped on it, we threw it. Eventually we had to have one person step on one end while another pulled up the other. It finally broke, but only after leaving scores of wounded combatants. That day I developed a new respect for the durability of printed circuit boards.
I guess thats a little off topic, since the card obviously didn't work again. To save this post, I should mention that the same ebaying friend bought a full-height 2GB scsi drive, which we used to run around the floor hitting people with. It was known lovingly as the "People-Hitting SCSI Drive". It continued to work, and he eventually sold it to some other poor sap on ebay, as I recall.
This reminds me of my CounterStrike server from last year. It had two hard drives in it: a 1.2GB WD Caviar and a 2.0GB of the same type. I had gotten the former from a closet at my dad's work (the local electric company), where it had been sitting for god knows how long. It had a few bad sectors, and didn't format the first time I tried it, but eventually I got it to work, and made it the main drive of my server.
/usr over onto the new drive. Now, my CS server was in /usr/local/hlds, so it got moved too.
A few months later, I got the 2.0GB drive from my job. My 1.2gig drive was getting pretty full, but I didn't want to rebuild my system, so I just moved
A few weeks later, I woke up in the middle of the night to hear an awful clanking coming from the server box. I ssh'd into the box, and observed that I was unable to run several system utilities, and I was getting a bunch of I/O errors on the console. Sure enough, the 1.2gig drive was dead. However, my server lived! In fact, it was fully populated at the time. So I just let it go, and of course went around bragging to all my Windows-using friends how my server was uber-L337 and indestructable. It ran for another couple of months, then I had to reboot for some reason (I don't remember why now), and of course it didn't come back up.
Boston Univerity started registering MACs this year, ostensibly because they had to do so much work backtracking IPs to shut off all the Nimda-infected boxes last year. Its pretty ingenious, really. Basically, their dhcp servers check each mac that requests an IP against a database of registered macs. If its not there, the server assigns an IP which the routers will auto-redirect all http traffic to a site where the user can register their IP, and presumably drops all other traffic. I'm off campus now, so I didn't experience the system firsthand, but supposedly its worked really well.
I am not a game developer, but I don't think I buy this. For graphics we have OpenGL, which is as good as, if not better than Direct3d. For sound and other multimedia stuff we have SDL, which seemed to work just fine for Loki, may they rest in peace. I guess we probably don't have DirectX's networking component, but any game I can't play through a NAT firewall setup isn't worth my time anyway. I suppose we don't have DirectX-style peripheral drivers, though I never understood why people needed a wrapper around the joystick interface anyway.
Now, I am a WineX subscriber, and I like their product, but it does not even remotely cut it as a Linux gaming solution. Every game has its own bizarre bugs, no game works on every system, performance is not great, and the sound support is abysmal. Its a stopgap solution at best.
In short, the tools for making great games are there, we just need people to use them, which is what this project is all about.
> 3) go to 0
Dijkstra is rolling over in his grave...
I'm sorry, but the Voodoo 5 was an apocalyptically bad card. My roommate bought one before 3dfx went under, and its the most ungodly slow thing I've ever seen. We tested it against my Geforce2 MX, which I bought around the same time (for about half what he payed for his card), and it ran circles around his 5500. In fact, my card in my 500Mhz PIII system beat out his card in his 850MHz PIII system in 3dmark 2000 and 3dmark 2001. I let him try my card in his system, and it at least doubled his 3dmark score. In the end, 3dfx wasn't even remotely keeping up, and they payed the price. Nvidia, at least for the moment, is competitive, even if they're no longer the leader.
Of course, in addition to that there'll be the demand charge. Unfortunately, I have no idea what the going rate on that is, but my understanding is that for a high-consumption user, that part of the bill is MUCH higher than the regular KWh part. At least, thats what they told me when I used to read meters.
For those who don't know, its basically a charge based on the peak amount of power you drew over the course of the billing cycle. They take that peak (~76KW in this case), and multiply it by a constant (on the order of 10 or 100, depending on the customer), and multiply that by whatever the rate is (I don't think its the same rate as they multiply KWh by). Anyway, they always told us to be extremely careful reading the demand, because being off by even the lowest order digit could cost the customer thousands extra in some cases.
The press release is new, but Solaris 9 x86 has been available on Sun's site for a while now. Also, only the SPARC version is free, the x86 version still costs $20 to download or $95 for the media kit. However, since they were originally planning on canning Solaris x86 altogether, this is great.
Solaris is a neat system, and I've enjoyed playing with x86 version 8, though it couldn't replace Linux on my desktop. I have seriously considered using it on my servers though.
Oh, and also the one with Frank Grimes. The original, not the one with his son.
Well, they got Cape Feare, they got Treehouse of horror V, but they're blatantly missing some of the very best.
1. Homer vs. the 18th Amendment
2. Homer the Astronaut (thats not what its called, but you get the idea)
3. Simpson Tide
If you ask me, Homer vs the 18th Amendment is the best, period. The other two should have been on the list somewhere.
"...Many times a patch breaks functionality"
That always strikes me as odd. It seems there are 2 likely scenarios: either the patch is broken in some way, which implies lack of testing on Microsoft's part, which makes me wonder what all that supposed "regression testing" is about. The other possibility is that this functionality they're breaking is in fact the security hole, and shouldn't have been there in the first place. That implies bad design on Microsoft's part, but also shows bad judgement on the admin's part for not patching and then working around whatever's broken.
At first, I didn't think this was so bad (atm, I'm just a home user, afterall). But thinking a little further, I don't like it at all. I moved from Debian to Redhat recently, which I know sounds crazy, but basically I wanted the "more professional" feel and I wanted to do software raid on my root drive, which is nontrivial in Debian.
So far its worked out well, though I miss the huge apt-repository sometimes. But if I have to do a cd-based upgrade every 6 months, well, to hell with that! Heck, $20 says Debian woody is still getting security updates this time next year. I'm not sure they've even stopped patching potato yet. Seriously, how can Redhat make money when their non-free support expires more quickly than Debian's free support? I don't know how long other distros go on support generally, but Redhat can't afford to give up their edge in this area.
Ah, but what happens when they put RFID transmitters in the tin foil?
Bah, its their own fault for not reading the description under the title. I won't even bother to hold them responsible for reading the story.
Oh, bah... when I was in grade school we had Apple II's. No hard disk, no OS to speak of, just 5.25" floppies. In short, nothing even remotely resembling the "fundamental computer applications" you speak of. Can I use a Windows machine now? Yup. Can the kids I grew up with? Yup. And you'd better believe that KDE, StarOffice, and Mozilla are a hell of a lot more like the apps found on a "normal computer" than anything I had back in the day.
Heck, to me the real crime is teaching kids nothing BUT Windows, by which I mean not really teaching them anything but to click A to make B happen, and to go into a panic if they can't find a button labelled "Start". People should be subjected to all sorts of different computer environments, otherwise how will they really know what they prefer? And since these kids will inevitably see windows later in life if they haven't already, school doesn't really need to spend much time on it.
Computers are all basically the same. The important thing is that when they're faced with Windows, or Linux, or MacOS, or *BSD, or whatever, that they're not immediately put off by it, because after all, a computer is a computer is a computer.
> we are being given a tax break that is less then ten percent of the US military Budget, this year alone.
I think if you take out the words "ten percent of" or "this year alone", you're right. Otherwise I don't see how the math works out, assuming the given figures are accurate. Maybe I'm just misreading.
Well since the CERT page says IBM's not vulnerable, I guess something must have happened.
Read it again. He's saying that Hacking Linux Exposed is unlike many other hacking books. He then mentions Hacking Exposed as an example of the "other" hacking books, which he says was overblown, outdated, and obsolete.
True enough... my question, though, is will there be any appreciable improvement for those of us running 2.4 with the lowlatency and preempt patches? From what I'm reading, it sounds like those are really the only desktop improvements.
Funny... while I don't live in my parents' basement, my OpenBSD box does, so I guess the first poster is half right.