I wish that they'd bring Picross DS to America. I loved playing SNES Mario Picross in two-player mode with my friends. Sudoku somehow made it here, so why not Picross?
My Compaq laptop's rubber feet fell off a few months ago, which is still under warranty. I emailed them asking to get replacement rubber feet, and they asked for my home address to mail them. Instead of a tiny package in a tiny box with the rubber feet, I received a large UPS box in which to send the whole laptop! So I'd lose the use of my laptop for several days just for little rubber things. As much as I'd love to make HP pay for the shipping just because they annoyed me, I need that laptop.
I called them and told them to cancel, asking for their parts department. The parts department took a while to understand what "rubber feet" are, but then they quoted the cost: $41. The laptop doesn't have feet.
At least they didn't get on my case about me replacing the preinstalled XP with XP 64. They should be sued for false advertising if they advertise the laptop as 64-bit then don't honor the warranty if you actually use the 64-bit feature.
The next step will be for Microsoft to embrace-extend-exterminate the design for.NET, then use it to run legacy applications on a new OS that locks out native code and unsigned code.
Even if you're programming C# or Java the rest of your life, go learn it. The lessons you learn will apply everywhere, even if you never write assembly language again.
In college, there was a mandatory assembly language class. The assembly language that was being used was MIPS. There's probably no better assembly language to learn first, because MIPS doesn't do anything for you. You have to learn how to manage memory and registers yourself because there's nothing helping you.
However, it was taught by a professor that wasn't particularly good at it, and the class suffered as a result. I got a low grade on a test because I did this to calculate the absolute value of register "a0":
bgtz a0, label label: subu a0, zero, a0
"bgtz" is "branch if greater than zero" and "subu x, y, z" means "x = y - z". Register "zero" is simply a register whose value is hardwired to 0, so that "subu" means "a0 = -a0".
The reason that this works is because in MIPS, the instruction immediately after a branch executes before the branch takes effect, but after the branch condition is checked. If the branch happens (a0 > 0), a0 is negated twice; if not, a0 is negated once. The reason for this effect in MIPS is due to pipelined CPUs not being able to "stop on a dime". Learning this effect and why MIPS has this design quirk is an interesting discussion of modern processor design and very important for understanding computers.
The professor teaching the class hadn't seen this before. This is probably because "gas" actually abstracts this out: unless you use ".set noreorder", gas will actually reorder the opcodes such that your code executes as if on a traditional CPU. Professors shouldn't be teaching things they're not experts in. Also, not teaching the real MIPS hides an important computer science lesson.
The Firefox team somehow has a better policy about this type of bug than the OpenBSD team. Denial-of-service bugs that show signs of memory corruption are considered the same as actual remote code execution exploits, even if no method of executing code is known. (Of course, "remote code execution" in Firefox means visiting a malicious website.) Such exploits appear in red on this page along with the direct exploits: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/known-vul nerabilities.html
XP 64, which is a non-server edition of Windows 2003, was sold to consumer markets a little bit. Of course, the people using XP 64 are probably technically savvy and read about it on Slashdot.
Microsoft released a simple, direct service pack today and it works well. It's about time they did that. My only complaint is the size: are there really 350 megabytes of binary diffs to apply?
The "traditional" casinos are on the side of legalization. They all want to set up gambling sites online. The reason that they never did is because of the previous laws that forbade online casinos. When the casinos whined to Congress about the offshore casinos, what they wanted was a level playing field: casinos could be set up offshore, but could not be set up here. The offshore companies had an advantage.
Instead, the far right got involved and shoved through a law to ban it entirely. Now there's a level playing field, but not what the "traditional" casinos wanted.
Because I don't have the patience to play WoW for long periods of time, I'll never get to 60. I have an 18 rogue, 21 shaman, 33 priest, and 36 paladin, all Alliance. Between each character is a time when I quit the game when I got tired of it.
I'll never get to 60, so from my perspective, Outland simply doesn't exist. I think that that is the big flaw with the expansion.
The Draenei and Blood Elf zones are pretty, but they seem quite short, and they are the entire expansion to me.
Ubuntu still can't run x86-32 Linux programs on x86-64 OS decently. Its support for this is the bare minimum, whereas Fedora's works great and can even run Wine.
The "weak sectors" used by SafeDisc 2 and later are the same technique that was invented by Sega for the Saturn - and is patented by Sega. I wonder whether Sega knows that Macrovision patented the same technique after Sega had patented it. I wish I could find the patent numbers.
In the area that contains the human-visible "TRADEMARK "SEGA"" message, the data is a bunch of Y's: YYYYYYYYYY... On SafeDisc 2, it's a bunch of XY pairs: XYXYXYXYXY... The basis of the protection is that these regular bit patterns after EFM encoding induce a DC bias on the signal to the write laser. I wish I could find the original article on it, but Google has some sites if you search for "XYXYXY safedisc".
You can test this yourselves. Make a 44100 Hz 16-bit stereo.wav file at least a minute long. Use a hex editor to replace the sample area with Y's (59's). Burn the.wav file as audio track onto a CD-R. Try to rip it, and it'll fail for most drives. (The real failure was during write, not read, which is why the protection works.)
Regardless of your opinion about Microsoft, it seems like this is a case of stupidity of either Microsoft IT or their contractor, not malice. The last thing you want to do when you're being sued is destroy the documents subpoenaed during discovery. Having a corporate policy of deleting all emails regularly is one thing; expressing deleting a document that you know will be subpoenaed is quite another.
Microsoft's lawyers aren't stupid, though other parts of the company may be. If Microsoft were deleting incriminating documents that are subpoenaed, how does my signature exist? How could these documents be any more damaging than the others that did get released?
I remember hearing the whining about IBM's monopoly when I was a child, with Microsoft the savior. IBM changed its practices only because it was kicked out of the top spot. IBM is no different from Microsoft philosophically - their current attitudes and actions are a simple reflection of their market position.
When Microsoft falls back in favor of Apple or IBM, don't expect the "newcomer" to be any better.
Windows programs have had to deal with relocation of DLLs since the beginning of Win32. Service packs and even security updates have changed the base address of DLLs, so only marginal programs have problems.
Many Windows programs have the unfortunate habit of assuming that the address of a kernel32.dll function in one process is the same as another (see LoadLibraryW code injection trick). Because of this, and because a relocator that doesn't waste memory is difficult, Vista only changes addresses on boot.
My understanding of fair use law is that the proportion of copied code matters. Copying a few paragraphs from a book to comment on them is clearly fair use. However, commentary on this program would necessarily be a complete copy because the program is so small. See point 3 on Wikipedia.
I don't think it's likely that they are sending the BIOS to their servers. I have no idea what they're doing with it, but I don't feel like bypassing their anti-debug stuff to find out. Like others here have mentioned, it's most likely just to get a unique identifier.
NTVDM, the DOS emulator in NT, needs a BIOS image to place for DOS programs to use, since many depend on it. Rather than provide such an image with NT, Microsoft decided just to map the real image into user space 000F0000 on request. This is done with the (officially) undocumented system call NtVdmControl.
Other than perhaps revealing a unique identifier, there isn't a security risk to allowing unprivileged programs access to it. The mapping is read-only, and only the BIOS and video BIOS can be mapped this way.
I don't know why they want the BIOS so much. The Windows product key, the primary MAC address and the computer SID all make good identifiers if you combine them.
"Shy gypsy, slyly spryly tryst by my crypt." I figured out "shy gypsy" from the book clue but that's it. It wasn't until years later that I saw the solution online.
Then there's the microscope puzzle: it punishes you for having a fast computer. If you could get the game to run on modern hardware, you wouldn't be able to beat it.
Windows Vienna, their next planned OS, is going to use.NET entirely, and sandbox native code. No programs will be allowed to run with more than "anonymous" access unless they're verifiable, and the only programs allowed to run with administrator rights will be ones signed by a large company approved by the VeriSign cartel.
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I wish that they'd bring Picross DS to America. I loved playing SNES Mario Picross in two-player mode with my friends. Sudoku somehow made it here, so why not Picross?
Melissa
They just want to transmute the thorium into arcanite.
My Compaq laptop's rubber feet fell off a few months ago, which is still under warranty. I emailed them asking to get replacement rubber feet, and they asked for my home address to mail them. Instead of a tiny package in a tiny box with the rubber feet, I received a large UPS box in which to send the whole laptop! So I'd lose the use of my laptop for several days just for little rubber things. As much as I'd love to make HP pay for the shipping just because they annoyed me, I need that laptop.
I called them and told them to cancel, asking for their parts department. The parts department took a while to understand what "rubber feet" are, but then they quoted the cost: $41. The laptop doesn't have feet.
At least they didn't get on my case about me replacing the preinstalled XP with XP 64. They should be sued for false advertising if they advertise the laptop as 64-bit then don't honor the warranty if you actually use the 64-bit feature.
The next step will be for Microsoft to embrace-extend-exterminate the design for .NET, then use it to run legacy applications on a new OS that locks out native code and unsigned code.
(This is cynicism - I'm not being too serious.)
Even if you're programming C# or Java the rest of your life, go learn it. The lessons you learn will apply everywhere, even if you never write assembly language again.
In college, there was a mandatory assembly language class. The assembly language that was being used was MIPS. There's probably no better assembly language to learn first, because MIPS doesn't do anything for you. You have to learn how to manage memory and registers yourself because there's nothing helping you.
However, it was taught by a professor that wasn't particularly good at it, and the class suffered as a result. I got a low grade on a test because I did this to calculate the absolute value of register "a0":
bgtz a0, label
label:
subu a0, zero, a0
"bgtz" is "branch if greater than zero" and "subu x, y, z" means "x = y - z". Register "zero" is simply a register whose value is hardwired to 0, so that "subu" means "a0 = -a0".
The reason that this works is because in MIPS, the instruction immediately after a branch executes before the branch takes effect, but after the branch condition is checked. If the branch happens (a0 > 0), a0 is negated twice; if not, a0 is negated once. The reason for this effect in MIPS is due to pipelined CPUs not being able to "stop on a dime". Learning this effect and why MIPS has this design quirk is an interesting discussion of modern processor design and very important for understanding computers.
The professor teaching the class hadn't seen this before. This is probably because "gas" actually abstracts this out: unless you use ".set noreorder", gas will actually reorder the opcodes such that your code executes as if on a traditional CPU. Professors shouldn't be teaching things they're not experts in. Also, not teaching the real MIPS hides an important computer science lesson.
Melissa
By the time we all reach that age, we will think differently.
The current generation of Congress critters were teenagers in the 1960's. If it worked as you said, why aren't drugs legal now?
The Firefox team somehow has a better policy about this type of bug than the OpenBSD team. Denial-of-service bugs that show signs of memory corruption are considered the same as actual remote code execution exploits, even if no method of executing code is known. (Of course, "remote code execution" in Firefox means visiting a malicious website.) Such exploits appear in red on this page along with the direct exploits: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/known-vul nerabilities.html
XP 64, which is a non-server edition of Windows 2003, was sold to consumer markets a little bit. Of course, the people using XP 64 are probably technically savvy and read about it on Slashdot.
Microsoft released a simple, direct service pack today and it works well. It's about time they did that. My only complaint is the size: are there really 350 megabytes of binary diffs to apply?
...against free software. License fees from other companies don't mean anything to Microsoft - it's locking out free software that they care about.
The "traditional" casinos are on the side of legalization. They all want to set up gambling sites online. The reason that they never did is because of the previous laws that forbade online casinos. When the casinos whined to Congress about the offshore casinos, what they wanted was a level playing field: casinos could be set up offshore, but could not be set up here. The offshore companies had an advantage.
Instead, the far right got involved and shoved through a law to ban it entirely. Now there's a level playing field, but not what the "traditional" casinos wanted.
Because I don't have the patience to play WoW for long periods of time, I'll never get to 60. I have an 18 rogue, 21 shaman, 33 priest, and 36 paladin, all Alliance. Between each character is a time when I quit the game when I got tired of it.
I'll never get to 60, so from my perspective, Outland simply doesn't exist. I think that that is the big flaw with the expansion.
The Draenei and Blood Elf zones are pretty, but they seem quite short, and they are the entire expansion to me.
Ubuntu still can't run x86-32 Linux programs on x86-64 OS decently. Its support for this is the bare minimum, whereas Fedora's works great and can even run Wine.
The "weak sectors" used by SafeDisc 2 and later are the same technique that was invented by Sega for the Saturn - and is patented by Sega. I wonder whether Sega knows that Macrovision patented the same technique after Sega had patented it. I wish I could find the patent numbers.
.wav file at least a minute long. Use a hex editor to replace the sample area with Y's (59's). Burn the .wav file as audio track onto a CD-R. Try to rip it, and it'll fail for most drives. (The real failure was during write, not read, which is why the protection works.)
In the area that contains the human-visible "TRADEMARK "SEGA"" message, the data is a bunch of Y's: YYYYYYYYYY... On SafeDisc 2, it's a bunch of XY pairs: XYXYXYXYXY... The basis of the protection is that these regular bit patterns after EFM encoding induce a DC bias on the signal to the write laser. I wish I could find the original article on it, but Google has some sites if you search for "XYXYXY safedisc".
You can test this yourselves. Make a 44100 Hz 16-bit stereo
Regardless of your opinion about Microsoft, it seems like this is a case of stupidity of either Microsoft IT or their contractor, not malice. The last thing you want to do when you're being sued is destroy the documents subpoenaed during discovery. Having a corporate policy of deleting all emails regularly is one thing; expressing deleting a document that you know will be subpoenaed is quite another.
Microsoft's lawyers aren't stupid, though other parts of the company may be. If Microsoft were deleting incriminating documents that are subpoenaed, how does my signature exist? How could these documents be any more damaging than the others that did get released?
I remember hearing the whining about IBM's monopoly when I was a child, with Microsoft the savior. IBM changed its practices only because it was kicked out of the top spot. IBM is no different from Microsoft philosophically - their current attitudes and actions are a simple reflection of their market position.
When Microsoft falls back in favor of Apple or IBM, don't expect the "newcomer" to be any better.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryu_Hayabusa
Windows programs have had to deal with relocation of DLLs since the beginning of Win32. Service packs and even security updates have changed the base address of DLLs, so only marginal programs have problems.
Many Windows programs have the unfortunate habit of assuming that the address of a kernel32.dll function in one process is the same as another (see LoadLibraryW code injection trick). Because of this, and because a relocator that doesn't waste memory is difficult, Vista only changes addresses on boot.
It's much easier to simply read the disk then write a program to extract the data. Since Wii mod chips are coming, at least some people can read them.
Cisco Security Agent takes over half of Windows XP's system calls. It's a rootkit.
CSA is fairly worthless against an expert who designs their programs to get around it.
...so I can be the first person running Linux on an unopened Xbox (or Xbox 360) with just a burned Linux CD.
My understanding of fair use law is that the proportion of copied code matters. Copying a few paragraphs from a book to comment on them is clearly fair use. However, commentary on this program would necessarily be a complete copy because the program is so small. See point 3 on Wikipedia.
I don't think it's likely that they are sending the BIOS to their servers. I have no idea what they're doing with it, but I don't feel like bypassing their anti-debug stuff to find out. Like others here have mentioned, it's most likely just to get a unique identifier.
NTVDM, the DOS emulator in NT, needs a BIOS image to place for DOS programs to use, since many depend on it. Rather than provide such an image with NT, Microsoft decided just to map the real image into user space 000F0000 on request. This is done with the (officially) undocumented system call NtVdmControl.
Other than perhaps revealing a unique identifier, there isn't a security risk to allowing unprivileged programs access to it. The mapping is read-only, and only the BIOS and video BIOS can be mapped this way.
I don't know why they want the BIOS so much. The Windows product key, the primary MAC address and the computer SID all make good identifiers if you combine them.
"Shy gypsy, slyly spryly tryst by my crypt." I figured out "shy gypsy" from the book clue but that's it. It wasn't until years later that I saw the solution online.
Then there's the microscope puzzle: it punishes you for having a fast computer. If you could get the game to run on modern hardware, you wouldn't be able to beat it.
Windows Vienna, their next planned OS, is going to use .NET entirely, and sandbox native code. No programs will be allowed to run with more than "anonymous" access unless they're verifiable, and the only programs allowed to run with administrator rights will be ones signed by a large company approved by the VeriSign cartel.