well, now AMD is creating the kruftiest, heaviest, nastiest instruction set of backwards-compatible crud in the history of processor-dom. Intel comes out with a new, no-legacy 64-bit instruction set, and all of a sudden it is, "god, we hope AMD wins so that all our old crap still works".
Amen, brother. I was so happy when I heard about IA-64, and then sure enough, AMD has to drag us right back down into IA-32 hell.
If AMD wins, it will be through short term gains, and means that life will suck more for us in the long run.
Beside that, who cares for the CPU's instruction set?
Me. I used the PPC and then the x86, and boy oh boy would I like to see the x86 catch up and stop using those freaking variable length instructions. They're annoying as hell when you're disassembling chunks of code.
He wants hammer to succeed only so Intel will have to go 64 bit
This is kind of too bad, because from what I've seen AMD's Hammer has more x86 cruft than IA-64. Now I'll grant that Intel would love nothing more than to keep 64 bit architectures for servers for a nice long time and get a juicy enterprise business going (sticking consumers with a 32 bit architecture for years to come), but I don't know if I want AMD to end up on top, given their technology.
BTW, why the heck can't either AMD or Intel make a processor that doesn't give off enough heat to melt the ice caps? The Pentium III was a pretty good chip for a while, and then both camps decided to start dissapating huge amounts of heat again. I'd like to get a new processor, but I'm not going to get something that sucks down 70 watts, either, and takes a noisy fan and gets the whole case hot.
I always used to love the fact that Windows wasted so much memory and so many CPU cycles that by the time I had to get a piece of hardware for my Linux box, it was terribly cheap, driven down by commotitazation. However, it's now reached the point where people are trying to get CPU cycles even at the cost of a quiet, cool computing environment, which is not good.
All those folks who say that "open source doesn't improve security because no one actually reads the source" can take the parent post and stuff it up their collective arses.
The story needs an EMERGENCY addendum. Maybe this is nothing, but until this is resolved it should be treated as if there's a Trojan here, and a lot of people could be screwed over here.
I mean, okay, I understand that at some point, there may be a good reason. But it seems that before releasing a new version of a compiler with a new ABI, you'd get everything *right* first, given the huge number of compatibility problems that this switch causes.
So maybe the move from gcc 2.7 to 3.0 was well-founded. Red Hat just happened to unfortunately release an interim release. But now there's going to be a release incompatible with 3.0/3.1? Come *on*, guys!
Gcc is great, but this causes tons of grief for all the developers out there trying to use C++ in their code and support users.
Microsoft brings in many more tax $$$ and more economic power than Red Hat currently does, and the lock in factor happens to also lock people in to a US company.
BBEdit is nice, but if you've learned emacs well and have a beautiful environment built up, nothing can compete with the Win32 version of Xemacs. Nothing is nearly as powerful.
You think you're going to be attacked from foo.riaa.org?
They'll hire a consulting security company (probably full of a bunch of hackers-gone-commercial like l0pht) to do this. That company will almost certainly use throwaway accounts at various ISPs.
Basically, what it comes down to is that the RIAA/MPAA have no nice way to go after Gnutella. P2P networks with single points of failure have already been attacked. Their proposal is to legalize opening tons of connections to download files and then just letting data trickle through.
There has been extensive discussion among the many, many people involved with the Gnutella protocol on how to beat this. For example, instead of using "number of downloads" as a cap, one could use a hybrid "number of downloads/total bandwidth used" limiting factor.
Still no word on how they'd take out Freenet.
If you want to help fight this, grab an editor and start adding countermeasures and send in a patch to your favorite piece of Open Source P2P software. The coders already in the trenches would appreciate any additional help you could give.
Yes...read what you wrote. At a "MUCH lower salary". They were overpaying, and now they corrected the situation. If they can get someone who's good enough for much less money...well, there you go.
Slashdot readers are tech people (some incompetent IT people who are now out of work). But it's bad form to simply say that you want to screw over some foreigner or that you want to be paid tons of money regardless of whether you're worth it. So to "protect" the poor foreign workers, you want their jobs to be given to you at higher pay? Yeaaah...
And of course, if someone gets fired, it's *never* their fault...
Um...I suspect that if someone comes over (of their own free choice) and has as punishment only the spectre of returning, it beats the opportunities in Southeastern Wazooland.
I hate protectionism. The only thing that's happening is that all the incompetent people that got hired because they could say "computer" during the dot com boom are getting fired. If you really know your stuff and you're being paid a fair wage (not the ridiculous amounts that were going during the dot com boom), you're probably fine.
The thing is that people were paid obscene amounts for knowing very little and don't want to give that up. Well...that time is over.
In order to be able to pass Hayes commands to the modem, you first have to establish a terminal session to the modem itself
You are correct.
The problem is that normally "+++" drops the modem into terminal mode.
To keep this from being a problem (whereyou actually want to send "+++") is that modems are *supposed* to have a guard time where "+++" must not be followed by any data for a certain period of time. If any data comes in, they do not drop into terminal mode. This time is called the guard time. The guard time can be set to zero in software, however (if your dialup software is being braindead or is misconfigured), and a few modems (ones that Apple shipped) had a zero guard time by default. So all you had to do was get the remote computer to send *any* data containing +++AT(a Hayes command). This could be accomplished by sending an ICMP echo (ping) packet and waiting for the pong to hit the modem.
I thought this was fixed for just about everyone, but evidently the WebTV guys still have a zero guard time.
This "50% vulnerable" number is absolutely ludicrous. I've had a 33.6 and three 56k modems, and none of them have had a zero guard time by default or set to zero by the two Linux dialers, the two MacOS dialers, or the Windows NT dialer that I've used. I'd say that *maybe*.1% of modem users on the Internet are vulnerable, which is probably way too high. If you did have a system set up like this, you'd experience frequent hangups during normal operation.
Setting the guard time to 255 is probably overkill...I can't see it being a problem at much of anything but zero.
They can do whatever they want: you don't have the legal right to produce something if it infringes on patent A. They can charge a percentage, a flat fee, simply refuse to let you use the patent at all...whatever.
The first three -- Thad, Tiffany, and Gordon -- sound like just plain bad influence. Sorta sucks for Shae -- she's by far the youngest of the three and working as an intern there, and turned herself in.
My guess -- three idiots think they can run off with hundreds of thousands of high-profile goods, and now the fourth is screwed for life for letting them pull it off.
IBM, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Seagate, and Western Digital all have significant interest in PNG being used instead of JPEG.:-)
Seriously, though, JPEG was made in an era when the size of images was a serious issue. Heck, we can toss hundreds of full-length divx movies on a new hard drive. I'm not so sure that image compression is as big a deal any more. I sample-compressed Lena, and got these results:
263058 lena.bmp 32141 lena.jpg 151085 lena.png
So the png image is lossless (and thus can be edited and resaved and whatnot) and is only about five times as big. Can we seriously not handle images that are five times as large? Consumer demand for hard drives is way down right now because they don't need or want more space than they get with existing hard drives. Lossy compression has always been seen (at least by me) as a transitional thing.
So how about it? Throw off the bonds of lossy compression?
Slashdot Mirror
well, now AMD is creating the kruftiest, heaviest, nastiest instruction set of backwards-compatible crud in the history of processor-dom. Intel comes out with a new, no-legacy 64-bit instruction set, and all of a sudden it is, "god, we hope AMD wins so that all our old crap still works".
Amen, brother. I was so happy when I heard about IA-64, and then sure enough, AMD has to drag us right back down into IA-32 hell.
If AMD wins, it will be through short term gains, and means that life will suck more for us in the long run.
Beside that, who cares for the CPU's instruction set?
Me. I used the PPC and then the x86, and boy oh boy would I like to see the x86 catch up and stop using those freaking variable length instructions. They're annoying as hell when you're disassembling chunks of code.
HP having good compilers? These are the same people with the *abysmal* C++ compiler, the one years behind everyone else?
probably because they don't have nearly the money or resources as Intel
You're going to have a very hard time convincing me that a major chip manufacturer can't afford to field a few compiler designers.
He wants hammer to succeed only so Intel will have to go 64 bit
This is kind of too bad, because from what I've seen AMD's Hammer has more x86 cruft than IA-64. Now I'll grant that Intel would love nothing more than to keep 64 bit architectures for servers for a nice long time and get a juicy enterprise business going (sticking consumers with a 32 bit architecture for years to come), but I don't know if I want AMD to end up on top, given their technology.
BTW, why the heck can't either AMD or Intel make a processor that doesn't give off enough heat to melt the ice caps? The Pentium III was a pretty good chip for a while, and then both camps decided to start dissapating huge amounts of heat again. I'd like to get a new processor, but I'm not going to get something that sucks down 70 watts, either, and takes a noisy fan and gets the whole case hot.
I always used to love the fact that Windows wasted so much memory and so many CPU cycles that by the time I had to get a piece of hardware for my Linux box, it was terribly cheap, driven down by commotitazation. However, it's now reached the point where people are trying to get CPU cycles even at the cost of a quiet, cool computing environment, which is not good.
All those folks who say that "open source doesn't improve security because no one actually reads the source" can take the parent post and stuff it up their collective arses.
The story needs an EMERGENCY addendum. Maybe this is nothing, but until this is resolved it should be treated as if there's a Trojan here, and a lot of people could be screwed over here.
Read the parent and grandparent posts to mine. I'm just trying to demonstrate that the software is hardly "mainstream".
I mean, okay, I understand that at some point, there may be a good reason. But it seems that before releasing a new version of a compiler with a new ABI, you'd get everything *right* first, given the huge number of compatibility problems that this switch causes.
So maybe the move from gcc 2.7 to 3.0 was well-founded. Red Hat just happened to unfortunately release an interim release. But now there's going to be a release incompatible with 3.0/3.1? Come *on*, guys!
Gcc is great, but this causes tons of grief for all the developers out there trying to use C++ in their code and support users.
Microsoft brings in many more tax $$$ and more economic power than Red Hat currently does, and the lock in factor happens to also lock people in to a US company.
Pathetic, I know.
Indeed, I find emacs to be a better editor than many language specific IDE's
You can come out and say it -- Visual Studio's IDE sucks.
Ability to edit a file without loading the whole damn thing into memory?
BBEdit is nice, but if you've learned emacs well and have a beautiful environment built up, nothing can compete with the Win32 version of Xemacs. Nothing is nearly as powerful.
Are there open source versions to look at and play with?
Carnegie Mellon University does something like this for three dimensions. Remember the Super Bowl?
You just produce 3d models and then produce 3d vector data.
You think you're going to be attacked from foo.riaa.org?
They'll hire a consulting security company (probably full of a bunch of hackers-gone-commercial like l0pht) to do this. That company will almost certainly use throwaway accounts at various ISPs.
Basically, what it comes down to is that the RIAA/MPAA have no nice way to go after Gnutella. P2P networks with single points of failure have already been attacked. Their proposal is to legalize opening tons of connections to download files and then just letting data trickle through.
There has been extensive discussion among the many, many people involved with the Gnutella protocol on how to beat this. For example, instead of using "number of downloads" as a cap, one could use a hybrid "number of downloads/total bandwidth used" limiting factor.
Still no word on how they'd take out Freenet.
If you want to help fight this, grab an editor and start adding countermeasures and send in a patch to your favorite piece of Open Source P2P software. The coders already in the trenches would appreciate any additional help you could give.
Yes...read what you wrote. At a "MUCH lower salary". They were overpaying, and now they corrected the situation. If they can get someone who's good enough for much less money...well, there you go.
Slashdot readers are tech people (some incompetent IT people who are now out of work). But it's bad form to simply say that you want to screw over some foreigner or that you want to be paid tons of money regardless of whether you're worth it. So to "protect" the poor foreign workers, you want their jobs to be given to you at higher pay? Yeaaah...
And of course, if someone gets fired, it's *never* their fault...
Um...I suspect that if someone comes over (of their own free choice) and has as punishment only the spectre of returning, it beats the opportunities in Southeastern Wazooland.
I hate protectionism. The only thing that's happening is that all the incompetent people that got hired because they could say "computer" during the dot com boom are getting fired. If you really know your stuff and you're being paid a fair wage (not the ridiculous amounts that were going during the dot com boom), you're probably fine.
The thing is that people were paid obscene amounts for knowing very little and don't want to give that up. Well...that time is over.
In order to be able to pass Hayes commands to the modem, you first have to establish a terminal session to the modem itself
.1% of modem users on the Internet are vulnerable, which is probably way too high. If you did have a system set up like this, you'd experience frequent hangups during normal operation.
You are correct.
The problem is that normally "+++" drops the modem into terminal mode.
To keep this from being a problem (whereyou actually want to send "+++") is that modems are *supposed* to have a guard time where "+++" must not be followed by any data for a certain period of time. If any data comes in, they do not drop into terminal mode. This time is called the guard time. The guard time can be set to zero in software, however (if your dialup software is being braindead or is misconfigured), and a few modems (ones that Apple shipped) had a zero guard time by default. So all you had to do was get the remote computer to send *any* data containing +++AT(a Hayes command). This could be accomplished by sending an ICMP echo (ping) packet and waiting for the pong to hit the modem.
I thought this was fixed for just about everyone, but evidently the WebTV guys still have a zero guard time.
This "50% vulnerable" number is absolutely ludicrous. I've had a 33.6 and three 56k modems, and none of them have had a zero guard time by default or set to zero by the two Linux dialers, the two MacOS dialers, or the Windows NT dialer that I've used. I'd say that *maybe*
Setting the guard time to 255 is probably overkill...I can't see it being a problem at much of anything but zero.
Any knowledgeable hacker knows about ATH0, it effects around 50 percent of 56k/33/28 modems
If ATH0 didn't affect my modem, I think I'd return it as defective.
They can do whatever they want: you don't have the legal right to produce something if it infringes on patent A. They can charge a percentage, a flat fee, simply refuse to let you use the patent at all...whatever.
How about we let lossy image compression go the way of the dinosaurs? We've got the space now.
The first three -- Thad, Tiffany, and Gordon -- sound like just plain bad influence. Sorta sucks for Shae -- she's by far the youngest of the three and working as an intern there, and turned herself in.
My guess -- three idiots think they can run off with hundreds of thousands of high-profile goods, and now the fourth is screwed for life for letting them pull it off.
IBM, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Seagate, and Western Digital all have significant interest in PNG being used instead of JPEG. :-)
Seriously, though, JPEG was made in an era when the size of images was a serious issue. Heck, we can toss hundreds of full-length divx movies on a new hard drive. I'm not so sure that image compression is as big a deal any more. I sample-compressed Lena, and got these results:
263058 lena.bmp
32141 lena.jpg
151085 lena.png
So the png image is lossless (and thus can be edited and resaved and whatnot) and is only about five times as big. Can we seriously not handle images that are five times as large? Consumer demand for hard drives is way down right now because they don't need or want more space than they get with existing hard drives. Lossy compression has always been seen (at least by me) as a transitional thing.
So how about it? Throw off the bonds of lossy compression?