Really, what specifically made it a stupid move? I've been using a K6/200 for years (got it when it was THE hot (literally) chip on the block). It was my main machine until just a few months ago when I upgraded to 1.4 Athlon. Worked like a champ forever, though it did run hotter than the element on our kitchen stove.
Don't know if anyone remembers or not, but this is not the first time this PR thing has been tried. When the Pentium first came out, some cpu clone manufacturers adopted the PR rating, at least paritially because once Intel started using made up names for their chips, they couldn't (i.e. AMD could call their 486 a 486, Intel could not claim exclusive rights to the name since it only contained numbers). People like NexGen (remember them) used PR since (just like AMD) their chips, sorta, out performed Pentiums running at equivilent clock speeds. Once the NexGens of the world disappeared, PR feel out of favor, until now (though I think that maybe Cyrix still uses it?)
How is memory stick any more proprietary than the Handspring Springboard slot? I don't remember Handspring creating a consortium of Palm hardware manufacturers to agree on an expansion standard. It's only proprietary if the manufacturer is unwilling to allow others to implement it, which Sony is very willing to (just that no one wants to).
Remember, ISA was "proprietary", IBM controlled the definition. It's just that they didn't charge royalties to use it. MCA wasn't any different in the "proprietariness" standpoint, it's just that IBM wanted to force manufacturers to pay a royalty, hence the defection and creation of EISA.
Actually "Brain Dead" is the US name for "Dead Alive" (don't know why they felt compelled to change the name). Haven't seen "Bad Taste", though if it's anything like DA or MTF, then it must be worth a watch.
of "Dead Alive" and "Meet the Feebles" fame. If you haven't checked out "Dead Alive", run, don't walk to your nearest video store. Be sure to get the "unrated" version, the R rated version sucks and completely ruins the humor of the film. Then get a bunch of your friends, get knockered (using your method of choice) wait till 2am and then watch the film. Be prepared to have to change undies a couple of times as you'll be laughing so hard that accidents are almost guaranteed.
"Meet the Feebles" was, well, interesting. If you have fond memories of the Muppet Show and want to keep them fond, then avoid this movie, you'll never look at a muppet the same way again.
If the "graphic violence" is anything along line sof "DA" then sign me up for a copy!
Someone above posted that they'd pay to be able to put their sims on Myst island. That got me thinking, wouldn't it be cool if you could put the sims in other games as well.
You could get your sim to work out and become a football player and play him in the next Madden.
They could join STAR and be in the next Resident Evil game.
They could become drug lords and be in next GTA
The possibilities abound!
Me, I'm waiting for the iPod version, so I can upload my sim onto some computers at CompUSA, it would then lounge around with other uploaded sims, acting as an itelligent agent looking for kewl software for me to later download.
Think about it, how many PS2 are out there? This is a potentially awesome opportunity for someone to produce something very cool and very successful. Follow me on this, picture the PS2 as Sony's answer to Apples Digital Media Hub. You can hook your digital cam (or memory stick of course) to the thing and look at and edit pictures on your PS2 via USB/FireWire. Who needs a internet appliance. Just use your PS2 to take those pictures you took and email it to your buddies. Or have it setup a web page to share with your buddies. Use your PS2 to demo albums or DVD's or games and then order them online.
All of the above would be possible without the user having to have a hd, so you'd have access to the entire population of PS2 users. If Sony can properly market the hd (or ship PS3 with one), then you start being able to do things like editing your movies via FireWire (of course burning them onto DVD's would be an area of contention with Sony, but I'm sure they'll think of some proprietary solution;)
People are forgetting that just because the current incarnation of LinuxPS2 is restricted, it doesn't mean that they can't open it up more if the apps being developed would benifit them. Also keep in mind that they can come with a distro that boots from the cd/dvd and uses the memory card as swap space (i.e. a small tight app deployment distro). This is even easier if they decide to use larger capacity memory cards (or switch over to the memory stick).
This seems to me an exciting and rare opportunity to A) get in early on a "new" platform (i.e. hardware+software) B) have that platform have a huge potential audience right off the bat (vs praying that this new platform has more than a few hundred users ala Be).
Each entry in the routing tables of each router has a counter which is remaining quota of high-prio data that can come in through the interface. If someone tries to send too much high-prio data per timeframe (they recharge), the high-prio flag is cleared.
Right, but the reason for the encryption was to prevent "ordinary" people from sending "hi pri" packets. It would be very simple to DOS this type of scheme as well as send hi pri data when they shouldn't be (i.e. spoofing the hi pri flag).
Now a variation of the two could work. If the backbone isp's use the encrypted/more complex versions and throttled down to simply using the flag one you get down to the L2 isp's. In that way, someone messing with the packets could really only affect a smaller subset of points.
But this is what I'm talking about. Now we have some interesting conversation about solving the problem.
Yes, I do understand that there are problems (I did say that it was "just off the top of my head" didn't I;) There are a few things that make this scheme more reasonable than at first blush though:
- Former IETF chair Fred Baker, a Cisco Systems executive who is leading the emergency preparedness working group Ah, a Cisco exec is leading the group. Who do you think would MASSIVELY benefit from ISP's everywhere having to upgrade hardware?
- The precident of sorts has been set, the article mentions that the phone system having to be reprogrammed to support this emergency feature, plus the issuance of "special calling cards". I know that we're probably talking more infrastructure here, but once again, trying to think creatively, why couldn't this box be external to the router. Seeing packets before they arrive to the router and cherry picking the items that need to be priority routed. Or better yet, how about (again taking a page from the phone system) having all priority traffic go to a "dummy" ip with the "real" ip embedded within the packet. this would allow hardware to quickly pick these packets out. It would still be encrypted so the best someone could do is attempt to DOS the router by sending a flood of bogus packets targeted at that ip address.
- lastly and most importantly, how else would one attempt to do this. Is this simply a case of, "if you want the problem solved, you have to "pay the price". Imagine if 10 years ago someone said, hey lets build a national network capable of handling gigabytes (terabytes?) of data per day to allow almost any american who wants to to download porn and shop for books. People would say no way, would be way to expensive and require too much infrastructure, it's just not practical.
I can't believe how many people are saying something along the lines of:
golly gee willackers (sic), I think I'll just turn on the "no really, I'm important" flag in my packets...
Lets have just a modicum of creativity and problem solving here shall we? If you were going to try to setup a system to allow prioritzed traffic over a system that does not currently facilitate it (ignoring the ip flag since it's useless as is), you sure wouldn't have such a lame simplistic approach as simply marking a packet with a flag.
One way off the top of my head would be to send an encrpyted packet that has some type of auth flag, and a stream identifier. Routers would see the packet, decrypt it, check it, what ever, and then any other packets that are a part of the stream would also be given priority. Now admitidly, almost any scheme would appear to be vulnerable to hacking no matter what you do (unles we're starting to talk changes to router hardware and weird packets that can't be formed "normally"). But my point is that you'd think that as a group,/.'ers could be a bit more constructive, vs just kindergarten thinking.
Oh wait, I just read that last sentence again, what the hell was I thinking, this is how/.'ers think, my bad.
I wonder if Sony has plans on allowing the Aibo and SDR-4X to be controlled or programmed using the PS2? That would be pretty cool. You could use the PS2 to track them and download songs, etc, etc. Heck you could even play against SDR, now that would be serious cool. Definitely brings up some interesting possibilities.
Then IBM did the same mistake with MCA and EISA won out
Actually EISA didn't "win". Significantly more machines shipped with MCA than EISA. In the end PCI won out. Neither MCA nor EISA saw wide spread use (MCA did ship lots of units, but only for IBM, for the most part). You can also say that ISA also won, just look, you can still buy mb's with ISA slots.
This has to be one of the worst articles I've read in a long time. He presents no, even remotely, compelling arguments to prove his point (whatever that might have been). It reads more like a stream of consciousness than something with a point. But lets explore some of the concepts that come from his article.
Lets see, "taking other peoples ideas and ignoring conventions to protect those ideas, and then benefitting from those ideas is ok because it may help you to become big and strong as well as you're countries economy." Uh, ok.
Then he brings up a couple of "success" stories and somehow correlates that with the making of a healthy economy for entire countries.
This article is pure rubbish. It's like something a high schooler would write. "Corps are evil for pushing patents and here a few examples of why their arguments are weak". Sheesh, hardly what I'd call compelling. Focus on the negative aspects of this policy. Show how it needlessly stifles competition or prevents innovation from helping those who need it. Hell, if the problem is that "rich corps" are getting richer by gouging poor countries, then attack that problem. Saying that somehow patents are behind it all is silly.
Two thumbs down to this author for taking what really is a problem (access by poorer countries to inexpensive innovations) and trivializing the issue by heaping on their own politcal views.
Right, but the problem is that the all the Loki's of the world eventually add up to more than a single Enron. I personally have been in a company where the CEO cooked the books, the "innocent" upper management were rewarded for "salvaging the company" (i.e. sold it for next to nothing to someone else), and the employees got the super bonus of "at least having a job". My wife's situation was even worse, her company actually did a Loki (couldn't pay it's employees, etc). Now add us all up, and that's quite a few people getting screwed, but yet no one is looking into that. Where's Dianne Feinstein when you need her?
If you want just an MP3 player, then buy one (I hear those iPods are cool, and oh so versatile). If you want a digital camera, then buy one. The Clie is a PDA, that happens to play music (saving from having to have two devices if you want both sets of functionality). I think the music playing bit is an obvious addition to a PDA. Just look, people are trying to make PDA's out of iPods.
Now the camera, I think people are just totally missing the point here. Do you honestly believe that Sony thinks that someone will say, "dude, I don't need to buy a digital cam now that Sony has this". Uh WRONG. No, it's Sony having a decent grasp of their home market, one in which such gadgetry sells. (i.e. Now take your NR70V, stick in the blue tooth module and start communicating with other similarly equiped individuals, including sending pix.)
Also, what's the big deal. If they sold it ONLY with a camera, then I could see some people getting a bit miffed, but hey, you don't like it, save some bucks and just buy the model without it, duh.
re: Does the world need more C books
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..... the only book on C is K&R.
However, there seem to be many gaps in the C++ book market.
Of course this brings up an interesting point. One of the things I LOVE about C is that it's a straight forward language. Sure you can create some hairy messes, but once you understand some basic concepts, most of the language is accessable to you. It's also _MUCH_ easier to write code without side effects, which is a bane to programming. With little effort, one can look at some C code and have a reasonable idea about what's going on. With C++, a line of code is never what it seems, and you usually have to track down a dozen h or cpp files to figure out what the heck is going on. C++ is the best damn employment insurance ever created for programmers;)
With C, you can get away with a couple of good reference books. With C++, you can never have enough reference books.
Re:Why are people still using a 30 year old langua
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· Score: 1
I guess it's the programmers and not the language that determine the security
DING DING DING DING DING. Give the man a monkey!
Re:Why are people still using a 30 year old langua
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C
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· Score: 1
A good programmer can manage memory without the help of the runtime environment
I agree, however, one must consider that we live in the real world. A world in which a very small percentage of programmers are "good programmer"s. That's why there is a need for, um, simpler languages. One for the "common" programmer. Sort of a VolksLanguage, or VPL.
That's like me deciding to take up boxing and then someone saying that I was a rival of Mike Tyson (and I don't even like the taste of ears, at least not without a little Chianti).
Slashdot Mirror
Really, what specifically made it a stupid move? I've been using a K6/200 for years (got it when it was THE hot (literally) chip on the block). It was my main machine until just a few months ago when I upgraded to 1.4 Athlon. Worked like a champ forever, though it did run hotter than the element on our kitchen stove.
Don't know if anyone remembers or not, but this is not the first time this PR thing has been tried. When the Pentium first came out, some cpu clone manufacturers adopted the PR rating, at least paritially because once Intel started using made up names for their chips, they couldn't (i.e. AMD could call their 486 a 486, Intel could not claim exclusive rights to the name since it only contained numbers). People like NexGen (remember them) used PR since (just like AMD) their chips, sorta, out performed Pentiums running at equivilent clock speeds. Once the NexGens of the world disappeared, PR feel out of favor, until now (though I think that maybe Cyrix still uses it?)
(first good AMD chip).
;)
Nah, the 486 DX4/120 rocked. Who needs a stinkin Pentium anyways
.... can you take it down to CompUSA and download warez? Until then, forget it.
funny thought - you can use the 'V' model to take snappies of the clueless sales droids while you download M$ Offal X
How is memory stick any more proprietary than the Handspring Springboard slot? I don't remember Handspring creating a consortium of Palm hardware manufacturers to agree on an expansion standard. It's only proprietary if the manufacturer is unwilling to allow others to implement it, which Sony is very willing to (just that no one wants to).
Remember, ISA was "proprietary", IBM controlled the definition. It's just that they didn't charge royalties to use it. MCA wasn't any different in the "proprietariness" standpoint, it's just that IBM wanted to force manufacturers to pay a royalty, hence the defection and creation of EISA.
Actually "Brain Dead" is the US name for "Dead Alive" (don't know why they felt compelled to change the name). Haven't seen "Bad Taste", though if it's anything like DA or MTF, then it must be worth a watch.
"I kick ass for the Lord!" - Father McGruder
of "Dead Alive" and "Meet the Feebles" fame. If you haven't checked out "Dead Alive", run, don't walk to your nearest video store. Be sure to get the "unrated" version, the R rated version sucks and completely ruins the humor of the film. Then get a bunch of your friends, get knockered (using your method of choice) wait till 2am and then watch the film. Be prepared to have to change undies a couple of times as you'll be laughing so hard that accidents are almost guaranteed.
"Meet the Feebles" was, well, interesting. If you have fond memories of the Muppet Show and want to keep them fond, then avoid this movie, you'll never look at a muppet the same way again.
If the "graphic violence" is anything along line sof "DA" then sign me up for a copy!
And therefore I choose:
Cowboy Neal Bubble Butt Algorithm
Someone above posted that they'd pay to be able to put their sims on Myst island. That got me thinking, wouldn't it be cool if you could put the sims in other games as well.
You could get your sim to work out and become a football player and play him in the next Madden.
They could join STAR and be in the next Resident Evil game.
They could become drug lords and be in next GTA
The possibilities abound!
Me, I'm waiting for the iPod version, so I can upload my sim onto some computers at CompUSA, it would then lounge around with other uploaded sims, acting as an itelligent agent looking for kewl software for me to later download.
Think about it, how many PS2 are out there? This is a potentially awesome opportunity for someone to produce something very cool and very successful. Follow me on this, picture the PS2 as Sony's answer to Apples Digital Media Hub. You can hook your digital cam (or memory stick of course) to the thing and look at and edit pictures on your PS2 via USB/FireWire. Who needs a internet appliance. Just use your PS2 to take those pictures you took and email it to your buddies. Or have it setup a web page to share with your buddies. Use your PS2 to demo albums or DVD's or games and then order them online.
;)
....
All of the above would be possible without the user having to have a hd, so you'd have access to the entire population of PS2 users. If Sony can properly market the hd (or ship PS3 with one), then you start being able to do things like editing your movies via FireWire (of course burning them onto DVD's would be an area of contention with Sony, but I'm sure they'll think of some proprietary solution
People are forgetting that just because the current incarnation of LinuxPS2 is restricted, it doesn't mean that they can't open it up more if the apps being developed would benifit them. Also keep in mind that they can come with a distro that boots from the cd/dvd and uses the memory card as swap space (i.e. a small tight app deployment distro). This is even easier if they decide to use larger capacity memory cards (or switch over to the memory stick).
This seems to me an exciting and rare opportunity to A) get in early on a "new" platform (i.e. hardware+software) B) have that platform have a huge potential audience right off the bat (vs praying that this new platform has more than a few hundred users ala Be).
Gentlemen, start your editors
Each entry in the routing tables of each router has a counter which is remaining quota of high-prio data that can come in through the interface. If someone tries to send too much high-prio data per timeframe (they recharge), the high-prio flag is cleared.
Right, but the reason for the encryption was to prevent "ordinary" people from sending "hi pri" packets. It would be very simple to DOS this type of scheme as well as send hi pri data when they shouldn't be (i.e. spoofing the hi pri flag).
Now a variation of the two could work. If the backbone isp's use the encrypted/more complex versions and throttled down to simply using the flag one you get down to the L2 isp's. In that way, someone messing with the packets could really only affect a smaller subset of points.
But this is what I'm talking about. Now we have some interesting conversation about solving the problem.
Yes, I do understand that there are problems (I did say that it was "just off the top of my head" didn't I ;) There are a few things that make this scheme more reasonable than at first blush though:
- Former IETF chair Fred Baker, a Cisco Systems executive who is leading the emergency preparedness working group Ah, a Cisco exec is leading the group. Who do you think would MASSIVELY benefit from ISP's everywhere having to upgrade hardware?
- The precident of sorts has been set, the article mentions that the phone system having to be reprogrammed to support this emergency feature, plus the issuance of "special calling cards". I know that we're probably talking more infrastructure here, but once again, trying to think creatively, why couldn't this box be external to the router. Seeing packets before they arrive to the router and cherry picking the items that need to be priority routed. Or better yet, how about (again taking a page from the phone system) having all priority traffic go to a "dummy" ip with the "real" ip embedded within the packet. this would allow hardware to quickly pick these packets out. It would still be encrypted so the best someone could do is attempt to DOS the router by sending a flood of bogus packets targeted at that ip address.
- lastly and most importantly, how else would one attempt to do this. Is this simply a case of, "if you want the problem solved, you have to "pay the price". Imagine if 10 years ago someone said, hey lets build a national network capable of handling gigabytes (terabytes?) of data per day to allow almost any american who wants to to download porn and shop for books. People would say no way, would be way to expensive and require too much infrastructure, it's just not practical.
I can't believe how many people are saying something along the lines of:
...
/.'ers could be a bit more constructive, vs just kindergarten thinking.
/.'ers think, my bad.
golly gee willackers (sic), I think I'll just turn on the "no really, I'm important" flag in my packets
Lets have just a modicum of creativity and problem solving here shall we? If you were going to try to setup a system to allow prioritzed traffic over a system that does not currently facilitate it (ignoring the ip flag since it's useless as is), you sure wouldn't have such a lame simplistic approach as simply marking a packet with a flag.
One way off the top of my head would be to send an encrpyted packet that has some type of auth flag, and a stream identifier. Routers would see the packet, decrypt it, check it, what ever, and then any other packets that are a part of the stream would also be given priority. Now admitidly, almost any scheme would appear to be vulnerable to hacking no matter what you do (unles we're starting to talk changes to router hardware and weird packets that can't be formed "normally"). But my point is that you'd think that as a group,
Oh wait, I just read that last sentence again, what the hell was I thinking, this is how
I wonder if Sony has plans on allowing the Aibo and SDR-4X to be controlled or programmed using the PS2? That would be pretty cool. You could use the PS2 to track them and download songs, etc, etc. Heck you could even play against SDR, now that would be serious cool. Definitely brings up some interesting possibilities.
and plug itself into a Mac (hell it's Sony right, the thing MUST have a FireWire port) and start downloading stuff?
I also can't wait until Sony releases the Linux development kit for it and everyone complains that they can't see the point.
Minor quibble:
Then IBM did the same mistake with MCA and EISA won out
Actually EISA didn't "win". Significantly more machines shipped with MCA than EISA. In the end PCI won out. Neither MCA nor EISA saw wide spread use (MCA did ship lots of units, but only for IBM, for the most part). You can also say that ISA also won, just look, you can still buy mb's with ISA slots.
This has to be one of the worst articles I've read in a long time. He presents no, even remotely, compelling arguments to prove his point (whatever that might have been). It reads more like a stream of consciousness than something with a point. But lets explore some of the concepts that come from his article.
Lets see, "taking other peoples ideas and ignoring conventions to protect those ideas, and then benefitting from those ideas is ok because it may help you to become big and strong as well as you're countries economy." Uh, ok.
Then he brings up a couple of "success" stories and somehow correlates that with the making of a healthy economy for entire countries.
This article is pure rubbish. It's like something a high schooler would write. "Corps are evil for pushing patents and here a few examples of why their arguments are weak". Sheesh, hardly what I'd call compelling. Focus on the negative aspects of this policy. Show how it needlessly stifles competition or prevents innovation from helping those who need it. Hell, if the problem is that "rich corps" are getting richer by gouging poor countries, then attack that problem. Saying that somehow patents are behind it all is silly.
Two thumbs down to this author for taking what really is a problem (access by poorer countries to inexpensive innovations) and trivializing the issue by heaping on their own politcal views.
With Micro$oft going down the NT road, is there much need or call for RedHat? Oh sure there will be the minority who will want to try it out ....
In a word: Scale
Right, but the problem is that the all the Loki's of the world eventually add up to more than a single Enron. I personally have been in a company where the CEO cooked the books, the "innocent" upper management were rewarded for "salvaging the company" (i.e. sold it for next to nothing to someone else), and the employees got the super bonus of "at least having a job". My wife's situation was even worse, her company actually did a Loki (couldn't pay it's employees, etc). Now add us all up, and that's quite a few people getting screwed, but yet no one is looking into that. Where's Dianne Feinstein when you need her?
If you want just an MP3 player, then buy one (I hear those iPods are cool, and oh so versatile). If you want a digital camera, then buy one. The Clie is a PDA, that happens to play music (saving from having to have two devices if you want both sets of functionality). I think the music playing bit is an obvious addition to a PDA. Just look, people are trying to make PDA's out of iPods.
Now the camera, I think people are just totally missing the point here. Do you honestly believe that Sony thinks that someone will say, "dude, I don't need to buy a digital cam now that Sony has this". Uh WRONG. No, it's Sony having a decent grasp of their home market, one in which such gadgetry sells. (i.e. Now take your NR70V, stick in the blue tooth module and start communicating with other similarly equiped individuals, including sending pix.)
Also, what's the big deal. If they sold it ONLY with a camera, then I could see some people getting a bit miffed, but hey, you don't like it, save some bucks and just buy the model without it, duh.
However, there seem to be many gaps in the C++ book market.
Of course this brings up an interesting point. One of the things I LOVE about C is that it's a straight forward language. Sure you can create some hairy messes, but once you understand some basic concepts, most of the language is accessable to you. It's also _MUCH_ easier to write code without side effects, which is a bane to programming. With little effort, one can look at some C code and have a reasonable idea about what's going on. With C++, a line of code is never what it seems, and you usually have to track down a dozen h or cpp files to figure out what the heck is going on. C++ is the best damn employment insurance ever created for programmers
With C, you can get away with a couple of good reference books. With C++, you can never have enough reference books.
I guess it's the programmers and not the language that determine the security
DING DING DING DING DING. Give the man a monkey!
A good programmer can manage memory without the help of the runtime environment
I agree, however, one must consider that we live in the real world. A world in which a very small percentage of programmers are "good programmer"s. That's why there is a need for, um, simpler languages. One for the "common" programmer. Sort of a VolksLanguage, or VPL.
First thing is to pay off creditors and preferred shareholders. If there's anything left, then they'll disperse it to common shareholders.
That's like me deciding to take up boxing and then someone saying that I was a rival of Mike Tyson (and I don't even like the taste of ears, at least not without a little Chianti).