Hmmm...I'm looking for a new language to play with.
Would like pay-as-you-play a la C++ -- not massive overhead to run the thing if I'm not using features. Java is slow, verbose and has lame generic containers. C++ is nice but huge, complicated, and doesn't have native GC. C lacks GC, good generic containers, and has too weak typing. lisp lacks static typing. sml is a functional language (ick) and type inference sucks.
I'm not touching C# with a ten foot pole on general principle.
Right now, the things I'm thinking about looking at next are eiffel and objective C. I'd really like templating, which I know that you get with eiffel. Anyone have any likes/dislikes about these two?
Actually, having read the paper in more depth, the exploits aren't exactly the same -- one can send messages to a GTK app to make it do nasty things, but not make it jump to random memory by sending bogus pointers. The end result is the same either way, though.
Re:So let's see if I've got this right...
on
Shattering Windows
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· Score: 2
You mean the high security linux file server with an encrypted loopback filesystem preventing the exploit you're describing?
GTK+ has the same issue. It was a *huge* deal when people started fighting about this, and eventually the decision was to just not let GTK apps run suid root.
Given the huge outcry about GTK+, I'm impressed that MS has had the same flaw, but for so much longer, with no one talking about it.
I suspect that the MPAA/RIAA might actually manage to push something through like this, if they really needed to. But it would be silly to do so.
Actually breaking into computers has way too many legal issues. No one is proposing that -- they simply want to DoS computers, and the *only* method I've seen proposed so far is by eating up download slots by trickling out many, many downloads. Polluting the network with bogus files doesn't need the "DoS immunity" law, and that's already being done.
So, sexy as it may sound to have the RIAA/MPAA trying to "hack" into computers, they really aren't. They aren't trying to gain any form of additional access that a normal random computer on the Internet doesn't already have (at least last I've heard:-) ). They just want to eat up downloads. The Aussie law is probably not going to cover it, unless it also covers things like ping-flooding people.
The SEC also went after Rice, the guy that hired her. Everything got covered.
I've seen attempts to sue spammers, to complain to them, to flood their phones, to complain to local police/attorney general. Nothing does much...except this.
Seems that the first effective clean sweep against a spammer that I've ever seen -- and it was done by a black hat. Frankly, I'm quite pleased.
Anyway, that should give others a bit of incentive to actively counter spam...
A host of improvements in Linux 2.6 (which should be out by then), including much better latency (better than Windows) and ALSA (with good hardware mixing and hardware synth support) are just around the corner.
Finally, a Linux box is a nice, stable, you-can-depend-on-it-to-just-work system. If you've got a team, you can tie together boxes to do interesting processing on the audio. Linux is inexpensive, and free (as in beer) software is very attractive, compared to the normally pricy software in the audio field.
Having open source drivers usually means that even old hardware stays supported. This can be a big deal to musicians, who often have a lot of expensive, old audio hardware that they'd like to keep using.
I'd say RH could make a pretty good play. This is assuming that RH is willing to support this to musician types, that they're willing to make a decent setup environment to handle all this, and that they're willing to fund development to fill the few holes in the lineup.
Get a real OS that runs 90% of the world's software and you won't have these problems.
I kind of doubt that 90% of the world's software is win32 code. Perhaps 90% of current commercial software packages, yes...but I'd be surprised if there were more lines of code out for Windows than UNIX OSes, once you take into account 30 years of coding done for UNIX, tons of research code written on UNIX, lots of UNIX code written in perl...
OTOH, VB frontends and inhouse tools probably account for the lion's share of Windows code, and that's quite a big chunk...
Post offices are literally everywhere in the country. People who currently find email inaccessable because they're in the boondocks might not be in this situation
Yeah. All those locations with a post office but without any form of email access.
To transition to a DRM world: Examine current media playing system A. Determine neat enhancements that should have been done some time ago. Call new spec playing system A2. Require all manufacturers to support future media playing system B if they use A2 spec. Consumer wants A2, also gets B support. A few years down the road when 20% of the population can handle system B, some System A2 media is also available in System B format, with minor additions. This drives more demand. A few items come out System B only. When 80% of the population can handle system B, a mass migration to system B media begins. A lot of media is System B only, and (cheaper) System B only players start shipping. A year or two later, System B rereleases of System A/A2 stuff start shipping, giving the media moguls more money.
American citizens, on the whole, are *easy* to manipulate.
Actually, I believe what he meant was "(I wish someone would break into my website and put up a couple of divxes so that) every episode of Seinfeld would be available to download free to anyone with access to the Internet."
You're right as far as the 24 hour trial period thing is. The backup copy thing is real, though I'm not sure exactly how legal it is to get that legit backup copy from an infringing copy.
I agree that the primary motives of many are just to rip of artists, but there really are legitimate reasons for emulation.
(a) The emulation environment is often much better. I know someone who is a huge Final Fantasy fan. He owns all the games. However, he would much rather play them on the computer than on his systems (this is a guy who bought all his systems for the express purpose of playing Final Fantasy, as well) because of the ability to save/restore anywhere, the ability to skip through lengthy annoying bits, the better image, etc.
(b) Some games are not really playable without emulators.
Some arcade systems are going away, and there is no real way to play the games. That doesn't mean that it's legal, but perhaps you can understand the frusteration of people who love a game and cannot obtain it. Another example would be LucasArts' early adventure games. They require DOS. Lots of us folks don't own, like, or use DOS. We run Linux. Luckily, some smart people have written up an emulator for those games. I suspect that this is a major force driving current purchases of the games, which are still for sale, as it lets people buy the game and then enjoy it in a modern Windows or Linux environment. Furthermore, most abandonware sites refuse to carry games like this that are still being sold.
There are a lot of people out there with fairly pure motives who want emulation. Obviously not all of them, but they're certainly there.
Ars Technica (www.arstechnica.com) actually has a good writeup of why we should stop treating x86 as this bastard dog of an instruction set, although they mostly relied on the fact that we have a huge installed based of x86 software.
Who cares? You sorry that your bootloader is going to have to be rewritten? No, I didn't think so. So it comes down to apps in old operating systems.
DOS -- does anyone ever boot into true DOS any more? Just about everything is run in a compatibility box for Windows users. Just port that to IA-64 with an emulation layer. Performance already sucks, so it's no big deal. If MS manages to do *half* the job Apple did during the 680x0 to PPC transition (admittedly, a tough question) there won't be any problem at all.
BeOS -- Sorry, guy...
Windows9x/ME -- Die. I'm not sorry about it at all. Die.
Windows NT/2000/XP -- this line will definitely be ported to IA-64, and I'm sure there will be a compatibility environment. Quit whining.
Linux/BSD -- no problem at all. Just recompile.:-)
Honestly, I doubt x86 decoding seriously bloats the die that much - jeez, on a 0.13u process, how big would the original 8086 core be? Take a look at the die for a Hammer processor - x86 decoding doesn't take that much space
Why waste space at all that you could use for cache or something that would actually *help* performance?
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The Norton Mac defragger did do this. System files were on the outside.
Yeah...they were expecting a single hard drive to put through 30 megabytes a *second*? And on top of a filesystem, to boot?
Maybe try with some Seagate Cheetahs, but your average consumer drive is not coming anywhere *near* 30 MBps.
I suspect from here on out. Too much inertia.
Hmmm...I'm looking for a new language to play with.
Would like pay-as-you-play a la C++ -- not massive overhead to run the thing if I'm not using features. Java is slow, verbose and has lame generic containers. C++ is nice but huge, complicated, and doesn't have native GC. C lacks GC, good generic containers, and has too weak typing. lisp lacks static typing. sml is a functional language (ick) and type inference sucks.
I'm not touching C# with a ten foot pole on general principle.
Right now, the things I'm thinking about looking at next are eiffel and objective C. I'd really like templating, which I know that you get with eiffel. Anyone have any likes/dislikes about these two?
Actually, having read the paper in more depth, the exploits aren't exactly the same -- one can send messages to a GTK app to make it do nasty things, but not make it jump to random memory by sending bogus pointers. The end result is the same either way, though.
You mean the high security linux file server with an encrypted loopback filesystem preventing the exploit you're describing?
GTK+ has the same issue. It was a *huge* deal when people started fighting about this, and eventually the decision was to just not let GTK apps run suid root.
Given the huge outcry about GTK+, I'm impressed that MS has had the same flaw, but for so much longer, with no one talking about it.
In other words, you cannot access the data on your OWN DISCS by your own means.
Yeah...and the case is the same in the US under current law.
I suspect that the MPAA/RIAA might actually manage to push something through like this, if they really needed to. But it would be silly to do so.
:-) ). They just want to eat up downloads. The Aussie law is probably not going to cover it, unless it also covers things like ping-flooding people.
Actually breaking into computers has way too many legal issues. No one is proposing that -- they simply want to DoS computers, and the *only* method I've seen proposed so far is by eating up download slots by trickling out many, many downloads. Polluting the network with bogus files doesn't need the "DoS immunity" law, and that's already being done.
So, sexy as it may sound to have the RIAA/MPAA trying to "hack" into computers, they really aren't. They aren't trying to gain any form of additional access that a normal random computer on the Internet doesn't already have (at least last I've heard
Play a computer-based pinball, like Little Wing's offerings.
I've always prefered good computer-based pinball to the real thing (even setting aside cost).
The SEC also went after Rice, the guy that hired her. Everything got covered.
I've seen attempts to sue spammers, to complain to them, to flood their phones, to complain to local police/attorney general. Nothing does much...except this.
Seems that the first effective clean sweep against a spammer that I've ever seen -- and it was done by a black hat. Frankly, I'm quite pleased.
Anyway, that should give others a bit of incentive to actively counter spam...
Alsa is not really in a beta stage. I'd consider it production-quality.
The alsa folks are the sort of people that never reach 1.0 until the thing is perfect.
It's nice to dream, but for now and the forseeable future, the software just isn't there
I dunno. There seems to be a lot popping up all over these days.
They give it two years. That's a while, especially if they put a couple of engineers into helping out projects they want included.
There are a couple of MIDI sequencers out there. I'm not a musician, so I haven't played with them, but Rosegarden is from Guillame Laurent, one of the guys behind gtkmm. There's a sound font editor -- Smurf. I was just talking with someone about some mixing/synth software that's supposed to be pretty good for Linux, though the name escapes me ATM.
A host of improvements in Linux 2.6 (which should be out by then), including much better latency (better than Windows) and ALSA (with good hardware mixing and hardware synth support) are just around the corner.
Finally, a Linux box is a nice, stable, you-can-depend-on-it-to-just-work system. If you've got a team, you can tie together boxes to do interesting processing on the audio. Linux is inexpensive, and free (as in beer) software is very attractive, compared to the normally pricy software in the audio field.
Having open source drivers usually means that even old hardware stays supported. This can be a big deal to musicians, who often have a lot of expensive, old audio hardware that they'd like to keep using.
I'd say RH could make a pretty good play. This is assuming that RH is willing to support this to musician types, that they're willing to make a decent setup environment to handle all this, and that they're willing to fund development to fill the few holes in the lineup.
I mean, I create a mage that had only 4 hit points...
I take it that you aren't a big Dungeons & Dragons or zangband player.
Get a real OS that runs 90% of the world's software and you won't have these problems.
I kind of doubt that 90% of the world's software is win32 code. Perhaps 90% of current commercial software packages, yes...but I'd be surprised if there were more lines of code out for Windows than UNIX OSes, once you take into account 30 years of coding done for UNIX, tons of research code written on UNIX, lots of UNIX code written in perl...
OTOH, VB frontends and inhouse tools probably account for the lion's share of Windows code, and that's quite a big chunk...
In just about any war in the computer world, IBM has some sort of ties to both sides. They're just too big and too diverse not to.
Post offices are literally everywhere in the country. People who currently find email inaccessable because they're in the boondocks might not be in this situation
Yeah. All those locations with a post office but without any form of email access.
Actually, no one likes anything. Anyone looking interested or nonlethargic is hired by someone!
many people who know more about this issue than me consider it to be too complex and full of bad trade-offs
And those people that know more than you know more than the highly-paid, best of the best cabal of chip engineers at Intel?
What product placement was in Minority Report?
:-)
The most egregious product placement I've ever seen is easily in Sneakers, with the asprin bit.
To transition to a DRM world:
Examine current media playing system A. Determine neat enhancements that should have been done some time ago. Call new spec playing system A2. Require all manufacturers to support future media playing system B if they use A2 spec. Consumer wants A2, also gets B support. A few years down the road when 20% of the population can handle system B, some System A2 media is also available in System B format, with minor additions. This drives more demand. A few items come out System B only. When 80% of the population can handle system B, a mass migration to system B media begins. A lot of media is System B only, and (cheaper) System B only players start shipping. A year or two later, System B rereleases of System A/A2 stuff start shipping, giving the media moguls more money.
American citizens, on the whole, are *easy* to manipulate.
Actually, I believe what he meant was "(I wish someone would break into my website and put up a couple of divxes so that) every episode of Seinfeld would be available to download free to anyone with access to the Internet."
You're right as far as the 24 hour trial period thing is. The backup copy thing is real, though I'm not sure exactly how legal it is to get that legit backup copy from an infringing copy.
I agree that the primary motives of many are just to rip of artists, but there really are legitimate reasons for emulation.
(a) The emulation environment is often much better.
I know someone who is a huge Final Fantasy fan. He owns all the games. However, he would much rather play them on the computer than on his systems (this is a guy who bought all his systems for the express purpose of playing Final Fantasy, as well) because of the ability to save/restore anywhere, the ability to skip through lengthy annoying bits, the better image, etc.
(b) Some games are not really playable without emulators.
Some arcade systems are going away, and there is no real way to play the games. That doesn't mean that it's legal, but perhaps you can understand the frusteration of people who love a game and cannot obtain it. Another example would be LucasArts' early adventure games. They require DOS. Lots of us folks don't own, like, or use DOS. We run Linux. Luckily, some smart people have written up an emulator for those games. I suspect that this is a major force driving current purchases of the games, which are still for sale, as it lets people buy the game and then enjoy it in a modern Windows or Linux environment. Furthermore, most abandonware sites refuse to carry games like this that are still being sold.
There are a lot of people out there with fairly pure motives who want emulation. Obviously not all of them, but they're certainly there.
You could say that. A quote from their site:
How Does Nintendo Feel About the Emergence of Video Game Emulators?
The introduction of video game emulators represents the greatest threat to date to the intellectual property rights of video game developers.
Ars Technica (www.arstechnica.com) actually has a good writeup of why we should stop treating x86 as this bastard dog of an instruction set, although they mostly relied on the fact that we have a huge installed based of x86 software.
:-)
Who cares? You sorry that your bootloader is going to have to be rewritten? No, I didn't think so. So it comes down to apps in old operating systems.
DOS -- does anyone ever boot into true DOS any more? Just about everything is run in a compatibility box for Windows users. Just port that to IA-64 with an emulation layer. Performance already sucks, so it's no big deal. If MS manages to do *half* the job Apple did during the 680x0 to PPC transition (admittedly, a tough question) there won't be any problem at all.
BeOS -- Sorry, guy...
Windows9x/ME -- Die. I'm not sorry about it at all. Die.
Windows NT/2000/XP -- this line will definitely be ported to IA-64, and I'm sure there will be a compatibility environment. Quit whining.
Linux/BSD -- no problem at all. Just recompile.
Honestly, I doubt x86 decoding seriously bloats the die that much - jeez, on a 0.13u process, how big would the original 8086 core be? Take a look at the die for a Hammer processor - x86 decoding doesn't take that much space
Why waste space at all that you could use for cache or something that would actually *help* performance?