1250 is no longer the top 2%, it's about the top 10%. At or slightly before the recentering in '95, it was probably the top 2% (because it was roughly equivalent to a present-day 1400).
That's my reasoning, anyway. I wonder if figuring all this stuff out is part of the test. (Is there a reason that what any sane person would call a "zero" is a 400 on the SATs?)
There are a lot of things that can be meant by "auditing." At its most sensitive, you can audit all accesses to certain system resources (files, syscalls, device node accesses, that sort of thing), and at a more standard level you can audit failed accesses to system resources. Some of this is implemented in some way - "bad root login on tty1" - but usually when people talk about system security auditing, they are talking about a unified framework for controlling auditing of the entire system (the parts relevant to security, at least). The "unified" part is especially important because frequently you want to analyze the audit trail using automated tools, kind of like Snort and ACID, rather than viewing each entry individually. If you have 50 different programs auditing things in 50 different ways, that makes system-wide analysis much more difficult.
This isn't the sort of thing normal people will want or need on their Linux systems, but in some environments (military, government) it's really important. And you could, of course, use it to create a honeypot, if you're into that sort of thing.
In addition to this, it will include a journaling file system, so us mere mortals can enjoy what Linux Geeks have had for years.
NTFS is already a journaling filesystem, and has been for some time. From here:
NTFS guarantees the consistency of the volume by using standard transaction logging and recovery techniques. In the event of a system failure, NTFS uses its log file and checkpoint information to restore the consistency of the file system when the computer is restarted.
I haven't been able to find anything which says when this feature was introduced, so I can't say for certain that it's been around since NT 4.0. But it's definitely been around since 2000.
There are enough things wrong with Windows that you don't have to go making new ones up.
The description given sounds an awful lot like Splinter Cell. There are definitely parts in SC where you can track an enemy's progress by his shadow, and naturally sticking to the shadows yourself is a critical part of that game. Most of the lights in SC are also destroyable, which makes for great fun. The model physics are rag doll-like, though probably not as advanced in SC as in D3. I've never played Thief or any of the other games in this genre, but I imagine they are similar too.
It's interesting to imagine Doom with a kind of covert-mission aspect to it, instead of a mindless bloodbath. I'm sure there will be a bloodbath part of the game, and I'm sure it'll be significant, but... it's an interesting twist on the Doom series, which has never exactly been subtle.
Something Awful kills servers all the time. It was a game at one point: how long will the Geocities Awful Link of the Day last before getting throttled? I think the average time was about ten minutes, which is why they usually locally mirror the pictures and such they use for excerpts.
SA has the added trick of mentioning if the page has a guestbook. All sorts of fun things to do with guestbooks, from ASCII-art renderings of goatse to, well, ASCII-art renderings of tubgirl.
Well, you look at USENET the way it was described 10 years ago, then look at it now, and you won't see any changes. Seems depressing at first, but then look at the WWW. It's gotten orders of magnitude worse. It's populated by narcissistic children (mentally, at least) spewing forth their idiotic opinions from every orifice, completely free from any criticism or objective evaluation. Even worse, 90% of the Internet inexplicably thinks this is a good thing: they equate the freedom to express useful, new, creative ideas with the freedom to make a complete ass of yourself in front of millions of people. Ads on the WWW are unavoidable: we get excited when we find a website that only has 3 or 4 unobtrusive banners (this means banners that don't actively impede your ability to use your computer). Most of these trends were around then too, of course; they are, as others have noted, a part of human nature. But this self-indulgent celebration of some of the worst aspects of human nature is very new, and very unpleasant.
You look at all the shit that's gone horribly wrong with the WWW and how fundamentally worse it is compared to 10 years ago, and suddenly USENET's "lack of progress" looks pretty damn good. It's not perfect, but at least there's a core of really dedicated, smart, and talented people working really hard to keep it usable. And because of this, USENET continues to grow in utility and popularity, though probably not as fast as the rest of the Internet.
USENET has two things going for it. First, there is a much greater ratio of clueful people to clueless people, simply by virtue of USENET being less well-known than "the Web." This increases your chances of getting a useful reply, instead of "u 2? i have that problem, email me if u get an answer" over and over. And second, all this accumulated knowledge is really easy to access using Google Groups. It's like a search engine that ignores the 95% of the Internet that's useless trash.
I just can't explain your problem with spam. I see maybe one spam article per week on about 5 newsgroups. Either I have a really good feed or you have a really bad one (or both), but spam is simply not a problem here.
Look at how much time NASA's programmers spent writing bug-free code. That's a pretty reasonable estimate, unfortunately. The number of bugs in any given program increase dramatically with the size of the program. (I don't know if it's geometric or what, but trust me, it goes up fast.) So while you may be able to whip out 1000 lines of code a day at the beginning, by the end you'll be writing 5 new lines a day if you're lucky. The rest of your time will be spent making sure those 5 lines work correctly with the 150,000 you've already written.
This is what Microsoft is, quite rightly, afraid of. If I can sue Microsoft for $100k because IE crashed, MS isn't going to have time to do anything except fix bugs. This isn't even entirely their own fault, since the nature of programming makes it impossible to write any large program without bugs. And unless you grandfather all of MS's products, they'd be screwed.
But this is even worse. Unless the laws are written to special-case free software, we might see Linus sued because Linux crashed one day. RMS might end up $15m in debt because Emacs ate somebody's email. How's that for stifling innovation? If I (personally) might get sued for some bug I missed, there's no way I'm going to give away my programs.
The guy in the article advocates only a limited sort of liability: you're liable only up to a point, or only if you don't divulge the bugs you know about. But does anyone out there really think the politicians, who are more in the pocket of trial lawyers than of anyone else, are going to make it hard to sue?
I was just thinking of something like this while taking a shower this morning. I was thinking more of a world where all the standard Unix programs were written in an interpreted language (and Scheme was my choice since I like it). I guess I thought of this as a result of that Unix-haters book. We really do have powerful enough computers nowadays that we shouldn't be using the speed of C to justify its use, and interpreted languages allow us to avoid some of the most dangerous types of bugs. Perhaps more importantly, true high-level languages let us achieve a much higher degree of portability, at least in theory. And interpreted languages let us do all sorts of nifty things (like closures) for when you really need the power.
I expect that if this project ever takes off, what will happen is that someone will make it run Perl too. Then everyone will use that instead and duplicate 95% of the problems we already have. But then, I'm sure all the Perl advocates are complaining about how Schemix uses a language 95% of programmers have never used before.
Re:An idea to improve the automated collect calls
on
Phreaking Not Dead Yet
·
· Score: 1
It doesn't need to be that complicated. Seems like currently you need multiple pauses with multiple replies, so just mix up the timing a little. Instead of a.5 second pause, put in a 2 second pause; instead of saying "Hello" right after someone picks up, say "This is an automated call;" things like that. That will make it harder to have a single prerecorded message do the trick.
Ultimately all you have to do is keep trying until the pattern matches, but even if there are only 20 variations that means you have to try 20 times to get one call working. Meanwhile, the AT&T computers are analyzing your collect call patterns and thinking "Hey, something funny is going on..." The computers could then introduce a semirandom enforced delay between collect call attempts - say 2^n minutes between consecutive failed tries - that wouldn't severely hurt normal traffic while dramatically impeding phreaking.
Well, that's how I would do it, anyway. Maybe there's a reason it wouldn't work.
Remember back in school when you were asked to define something "in your own words?" The goal was to prevent you from just parroting the definition you got from the book. But most students eventually learn they can change the word order and substitute a few synonyms and still get away with it. The statement you quoted means that doing that doesn't count, since "the dullest of men can do" it: it requires only a basic knowledge of grammar.
Re:compensation != (dollars*hours)
on
Suing for Overtime?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The problem with unions trying to do that is they'll end up setting very specific limits: for example, 40-hour work weeks with 5 hours overtime. Net result will be that everyone will have to work that much, all the time. I think most people are willing to work overtime where reasonable; for example, if someone is sick or otherwise unavailable, other people need to step up and pick up the slack. And while we'd obviously prefer to be paid for the overtime, I think most people would be willing to do it "for free." It's only when employers start to take advantage of this willingness that we have problems.
But on the other side of the coin, look at the labor laws in much of Europe where it's impossible to work more than an hour or so of overtime. This is great for lazy slobs like myself who start complaining if they work 40 hours and 1 minute a week, but bad for people who want to pick up a little extra money. In particular, it's bad for those who are... well, not near the poverty line, but certainly on the lower end of middle class. For those people, 5 or 10 hours of regular overtime may mean the difference between eating enough and eating well. And it gives them more free time compared to getting a second job.
I think the moral of the story here is that we need common sense from both unions and management. After all, if management keeps setting up "mandatory overtime," then obviously the unions are going to find some way to effectively eliminate overtime entirely, which hurts both parties. But given the history of unions, and what we see from management right now, I have absolutely zero faith that any sort of compromise, rational or otherwise, will be reached.
1. Graphic Adventure
They are right again. Why did Graphic adventures died? I really really enjoid Maniac MAnsion, Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island (I II & III)... why aren't new-3d-full-of-eye-candies-graphic-adventures? Perhaps there's a need for a new Roberta.
I'm not sure how much it's died and how much it's evolved/merged. What seems to have happened is that the various parts of adventure games have merged into other genres, which isn't that bad a thing. After all, Sierra-style adventure games are basically evolutions/mixes with the old text adventures, so it's not like they were a totally original idea. It seems like RPGs are what have really picked up the adventure gamer, for all that a lot of them (like me) had to pick up a whole bunch of AD&D background in order to follow them.
Actually, one project I used to help familiarize myself with the Neverwinter Nights toolset was to mimic Quest for Glory I. I wasn't able to do everything quite right (you'd probably want a special hakpak for it), but it still went surprisingly well. Obviously, QFG is the best adventure game to remake using the NWN engine, but I think you could do a decent job with some other adventure games too. And that works so well because single-player NWN is basically an adventure/RPG game itself: it's nowhere near as heavy on the RPG aspect as, for example, BG and IWD are, and while RPG purists complain that the plot is scripted and dull, well, it's exactly the sort of plot you get from most adventure games. (Which, let's face it, are produced by an Adventure Game Cookie Cutter.)
Now that I talk about it, I am really tempted to make another go at finishing that QFG1 module. The thing that was holding me back was my inability to extract the conversations from the game without actually playing it through (not objectionable in itself, but it would involve a lot of note-taking and playing it through at least 3 times to get the different classes). Also Sierra would probably sue me if I tried to release it to anybody, and I can't really blame them.
I just want to add my voice to the support. We do understand the sacrifice, and it's even clearer to us because of the stance of most other countries. There's France, of course; I won't say any more than that. But the bulk of our support is of the "You go, girl!" variety. Lots of well-wishers - basically sycophants who will kiss our ass if GWB decides to sodomize Chirac on the UN floor - but not much actual, real support.
Britain has really impressed me over the past year or two as being a true friend of the US. While we may, and often do, disagree on any of a variety of issues, it seems that whenever it comes down to the line we're always back to back fighting the same cause. I think that really means something in the world today. I just hope that our politicians in Washington understand how much Britain's stance means to the rest of us, and that we use this to strengthen our mutual relationship. In other words, we're going to owe Britain big after this one, and I don't want to see some idiot politician doing something to make them hate and resent us as much as France (and, sadly, many other countries) do(es).
If most of your users are having trouble with your current methods, then you need to look at your current methods. Supply binary packages via whatever means necessary. By all means, make the source available too, but understand that 90% of even power users never need or want to see the source for a particular package.
This is a bit of a problem for open source, because most open source developers don't really think about end users (and if they do, think about them as "lusers"). And if they do, they tend to think the end users are as smart and experienced as they are, which is seldom true. So open source programs tend to get written for, well, programmers. If they work for other people too, that's viewed more as an added bonus that a requirement. I'm not mentioning this simply as a rant, but because you may be suffering from this yourself. And, more constructively, thinking about your program as a whole in this way may help you to improve it even more by making it useful to an even wider array of people.
I think the problem here is that HP is stuck with, four distinct architectures (IA32, IA64, Alpha, and whatever HP's own CPUs are called) and some five operating systems (Windows, Linux, Tru64 Unix, OpenVMS, HP-UX). While HP is forced to support all those platforms and all possible combinations thereof for legacy reasons, it can certainly pick a direction to go for future development. I think HP's sending very mixed signals on this one, but it's possible that they view Linux as a unifying OS for all their varying platforms, especially the Unix-like ones.
This is just guesswork, but HP does seem to be suggesting that IA64 is going to be their replacement for HP and DEC/Compaq hardware. The next reasonable step is doing something similar for software, which could ease a transition into a services-based company like IBM.
I don't know what chips you're using, but mine is overclocked by 700MHz. I expect I could probably take it up even more if I increased the voltage. The difference in my case is more like 50fps to 70fps. Is that noticeable? Not really. Except that when there's lots of action on-screen, my framerate is usually half the average. 25fps is playable for games where reflexes are important, but it's close. 35fps, however, is quite playable. For hardcore gamers, this is especially important. Serious gamers are almost becoming like athletes in their sensitivity to equipment. That 1% speedup you get may not seem huge to an outsider, but it can be the difference between you and a good opponent. Half the reason smoke grenades get used in CS tournaments is to lag people with slow computers. (If you have the detail up high, you can see through the smoke but it lags horribly on all but the fastest machines; if you have the detail down low, you can't see through the smoke and it still lags, just not as much.)
The correct solution for power gamers and such is obviously to get a faster CPU. But not all of us can afford that, so we buy the fastest we can afford and try to squeeze as much out of it as possible. And sometimes, as in my case, the performance increases can be quite substantial (45% speedup), though I certainly don't claim they're ordinary.
Evidence of what, owning a domain? Unless your domain name is ijoemurderedmywifesandraonthe24th.com, it's not going to be evidence of anything.
This strikes me as similar to cops staging a bust on a whorehouse and then shutting it down as soon as they've made the arrests. Maybe they have a sign up saying why it's closed, possibly with a stern warning not to be a john any more. After some convictions or pleas admitting guilt, I expect they could open the place up again and use it for stings if they wanted to.
I don't really see how monitoring visitors to a drug-accessories website - after legally seizing it - is different from monitoring visitors to a known crackhouse. Which cops use all the time as probable cause to pull people over and conduct searches, even when they don't control the crackhouse.
being a good programmer and being a person with whom other people want to spend a lot of time, who has good hygiene and good social skills, are not correlated.
I may not have good hygiene or social skills, but... what was the third thing again?
You're probably right, too. First there was radar to catch speeders. Then we got radar detectors, which are still illegal to use (if not to own) in some states. So the cops got radar detector detectors. To which my current radar detector is supposedly invisible... but it still features a radar detector detector detector. No joke.
Honestly, this sounds very much like they're replacing the BIOS with something that works very much like a BIOS, but prettier...
It's not just that. More flexible "BIOSes" can add so much power to a system. An example of this, and one that's very near to my heart, is the ability to boot from anything. Pretty much every BIOS out there is unable to boot from at least some devices; the most common approach is a catch-all "SCSI" boot entry, which may be a SCSI device or it may be a ZIP drive or... Even then, half the time it just doesn't work and you can't boot from your add-on IDE controller card.
A better BIOS would solve this by getting a much clearer idea of what sort of hardware is in the system and what can be done with it. Got a USB hard drive you want to boot from? No problem: EFI knows how to read USB disks, so it grabs the files it needs and boots from it. Want to boot from your second CD drive instead of your first? Just pick "cdrom1" instead of "cdrom0" and you're all set. Want to boot over the network, but don't have DHCP? Set your NIC's IP address in EFI and tell it where to grab the boot image from using TFTP.
And then there's the nifty trick Suns have of being able to interrupt the operating system, no matter what, and drop you back into the "BIOS." I'm told there's even a debugger in there that you can use to debug the same system you're using (in case of kernel traps and such).
A more flexible, versatile, and powerful BIOS is a very cool thing, and even everyday desktop users will be aware of its benefits (though they may not know the source of them). People who use PCs for serious work have lusted after this sort of thing for a long time.
Slashdot Mirror
That's my reasoning, anyway. I wonder if figuring all this stuff out is part of the test. (Is there a reason that what any sane person would call a "zero" is a 400 on the SATs?)
This isn't the sort of thing normal people will want or need on their Linux systems, but in some environments (military, government) it's really important. And you could, of course, use it to create a honeypot, if you're into that sort of thing.
There are enough things wrong with Windows that you don't have to go making new ones up.
It's interesting to imagine Doom with a kind of covert-mission aspect to it, instead of a mindless bloodbath. I'm sure there will be a bloodbath part of the game, and I'm sure it'll be significant, but... it's an interesting twist on the Doom series, which has never exactly been subtle.
Almost, hell! I knew there was a reason I stayed up till 4:15am!
(laughter)
"Bill Shatner might have something to say about that! 'You - sir, are - an - idiot! Beam me - up, Scotty!'"
(cheers and applause)
"But no, really, the best are post-apocalyptic steelworkers... 'Braaaaaains!'"
(laughter and shouts about almost being first post)
SA has the added trick of mentioning if the page has a guestbook. All sorts of fun things to do with guestbooks, from ASCII-art renderings of goatse to, well, ASCII-art renderings of tubgirl.
You look at all the shit that's gone horribly wrong with the WWW and how fundamentally worse it is compared to 10 years ago, and suddenly USENET's "lack of progress" looks pretty damn good. It's not perfect, but at least there's a core of really dedicated, smart, and talented people working really hard to keep it usable. And because of this, USENET continues to grow in utility and popularity, though probably not as fast as the rest of the Internet.
I just can't explain your problem with spam. I see maybe one spam article per week on about 5 newsgroups. Either I have a really good feed or you have a really bad one (or both), but spam is simply not a problem here.
This is what Microsoft is, quite rightly, afraid of. If I can sue Microsoft for $100k because IE crashed, MS isn't going to have time to do anything except fix bugs. This isn't even entirely their own fault, since the nature of programming makes it impossible to write any large program without bugs. And unless you grandfather all of MS's products, they'd be screwed.
But this is even worse. Unless the laws are written to special-case free software, we might see Linus sued because Linux crashed one day. RMS might end up $15m in debt because Emacs ate somebody's email. How's that for stifling innovation? If I (personally) might get sued for some bug I missed, there's no way I'm going to give away my programs.
The guy in the article advocates only a limited sort of liability: you're liable only up to a point, or only if you don't divulge the bugs you know about. But does anyone out there really think the politicians, who are more in the pocket of trial lawyers than of anyone else, are going to make it hard to sue?
I expect that if this project ever takes off, what will happen is that someone will make it run Perl too. Then everyone will use that instead and duplicate 95% of the problems we already have. But then, I'm sure all the Perl advocates are complaining about how Schemix uses a language 95% of programmers have never used before.
Ultimately all you have to do is keep trying until the pattern matches, but even if there are only 20 variations that means you have to try 20 times to get one call working. Meanwhile, the AT&T computers are analyzing your collect call patterns and thinking "Hey, something funny is going on..." The computers could then introduce a semirandom enforced delay between collect call attempts - say 2^n minutes between consecutive failed tries - that wouldn't severely hurt normal traffic while dramatically impeding phreaking.
Well, that's how I would do it, anyway. Maybe there's a reason it wouldn't work.
SunMicroDevices monopoly, here I come!
Remember back in school when you were asked to define something "in your own words?" The goal was to prevent you from just parroting the definition you got from the book. But most students eventually learn they can change the word order and substitute a few synonyms and still get away with it. The statement you quoted means that doing that doesn't count, since "the dullest of men can do" it: it requires only a basic knowledge of grammar.
But on the other side of the coin, look at the labor laws in much of Europe where it's impossible to work more than an hour or so of overtime. This is great for lazy slobs like myself who start complaining if they work 40 hours and 1 minute a week, but bad for people who want to pick up a little extra money. In particular, it's bad for those who are... well, not near the poverty line, but certainly on the lower end of middle class. For those people, 5 or 10 hours of regular overtime may mean the difference between eating enough and eating well. And it gives them more free time compared to getting a second job.
I think the moral of the story here is that we need common sense from both unions and management. After all, if management keeps setting up "mandatory overtime," then obviously the unions are going to find some way to effectively eliminate overtime entirely, which hurts both parties. But given the history of unions, and what we see from management right now, I have absolutely zero faith that any sort of compromise, rational or otherwise, will be reached.
Actually, one project I used to help familiarize myself with the Neverwinter Nights toolset was to mimic Quest for Glory I. I wasn't able to do everything quite right (you'd probably want a special hakpak for it), but it still went surprisingly well. Obviously, QFG is the best adventure game to remake using the NWN engine, but I think you could do a decent job with some other adventure games too. And that works so well because single-player NWN is basically an adventure/RPG game itself: it's nowhere near as heavy on the RPG aspect as, for example, BG and IWD are, and while RPG purists complain that the plot is scripted and dull, well, it's exactly the sort of plot you get from most adventure games. (Which, let's face it, are produced by an Adventure Game Cookie Cutter.)
Now that I talk about it, I am really tempted to make another go at finishing that QFG1 module. The thing that was holding me back was my inability to extract the conversations from the game without actually playing it through (not objectionable in itself, but it would involve a lot of note-taking and playing it through at least 3 times to get the different classes). Also Sierra would probably sue me if I tried to release it to anybody, and I can't really blame them.
Britain has really impressed me over the past year or two as being a true friend of the US. While we may, and often do, disagree on any of a variety of issues, it seems that whenever it comes down to the line we're always back to back fighting the same cause. I think that really means something in the world today. I just hope that our politicians in Washington understand how much Britain's stance means to the rest of us, and that we use this to strengthen our mutual relationship. In other words, we're going to owe Britain big after this one, and I don't want to see some idiot politician doing something to make them hate and resent us as much as France (and, sadly, many other countries) do(es).
This is a bit of a problem for open source, because most open source developers don't really think about end users (and if they do, think about them as "lusers"). And if they do, they tend to think the end users are as smart and experienced as they are, which is seldom true. So open source programs tend to get written for, well, programmers. If they work for other people too, that's viewed more as an added bonus that a requirement. I'm not mentioning this simply as a rant, but because you may be suffering from this yourself. And, more constructively, thinking about your program as a whole in this way may help you to improve it even more by making it useful to an even wider array of people.
This is just guesswork, but HP does seem to be suggesting that IA64 is going to be their replacement for HP and DEC/Compaq hardware. The next reasonable step is doing something similar for software, which could ease a transition into a services-based company like IBM.
The correct solution for power gamers and such is obviously to get a faster CPU. But not all of us can afford that, so we buy the fastest we can afford and try to squeeze as much out of it as possible. And sometimes, as in my case, the performance increases can be quite substantial (45% speedup), though I certainly don't claim they're ordinary.
This strikes me as similar to cops staging a bust on a whorehouse and then shutting it down as soon as they've made the arrests. Maybe they have a sign up saying why it's closed, possibly with a stern warning not to be a john any more. After some convictions or pleas admitting guilt, I expect they could open the place up again and use it for stings if they wanted to.
I don't really see how monitoring visitors to a drug-accessories website - after legally seizing it - is different from monitoring visitors to a known crackhouse. Which cops use all the time as probable cause to pull people over and conduct searches, even when they don't control the crackhouse.
You're probably right, too. First there was radar to catch speeders. Then we got radar detectors, which are still illegal to use (if not to own) in some states. So the cops got radar detector detectors. To which my current radar detector is supposedly invisible... but it still features a radar detector detector detector. No joke.
A better BIOS would solve this by getting a much clearer idea of what sort of hardware is in the system and what can be done with it. Got a USB hard drive you want to boot from? No problem: EFI knows how to read USB disks, so it grabs the files it needs and boots from it. Want to boot from your second CD drive instead of your first? Just pick "cdrom1" instead of "cdrom0" and you're all set. Want to boot over the network, but don't have DHCP? Set your NIC's IP address in EFI and tell it where to grab the boot image from using TFTP.
And then there's the nifty trick Suns have of being able to interrupt the operating system, no matter what, and drop you back into the "BIOS." I'm told there's even a debugger in there that you can use to debug the same system you're using (in case of kernel traps and such).
A more flexible, versatile, and powerful BIOS is a very cool thing, and even everyday desktop users will be aware of its benefits (though they may not know the source of them). People who use PCs for serious work have lusted after this sort of thing for a long time.