Where did Windows come into the conversation? The internal CPU cache can only cache the first 64MB of RAM. This has nothing to do with Windows or other OSs - 64MB and only 64MB is cached, whether you're running CP/M, DOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OS/2, or BeOS.
Sounds like a good idea to me - this would prevent one of the problems I see with the current alignment system, that users with high alignments would be discouraged from posting anything small or somewhat trivial, since those posts would be moderated down (not being deserving of a 3). This moderating down would then kick them down from their higher alignment, so the users would be discouraged from posting anything but long, likely-to-be-kept-at-3 posts in order to keep their high alignemtn. The good posters would therefore in effect be constrained because of their own merits, which isn't such a good thing.
Anyway, your proposal solves all of these problems by allowing the user to say "yes, i know this doesn't deserve a 3, but i want to say it anyway, so i'll give it a 1."
I think Rob has some sort of hard-coded "my posts start at 2" thing, because his posts have been starting at 2 for weeks now, long before this whole alignment thing was implemented.
as for the credit card numbers, Mitnick never used them. He had them, but never used them, which is why he's not being charged with credit card fraud. Maybe he should've used them and gotten himself a lot of stuff and a ticket to a nice country without an extradition treaty with the US. Instead he decided not to commit fraud, and is rewarded with 5 years in prison, more jail time than if he had embezzled money or assaulted somebody.
He didn't intentionally damage anything, and for that he's served more jail time than the average jail sentence for assault. He would've gotten off more easily if he went up and hit somebody over the head with a crowbar than he is now.
Not to mention his large libel lawsuit that he has indicated he will most likely bring against Miramax in the near future if they go forward with their plans to release their "Takedown" movie, which contains a bunch of mischaracterizations and blatant lies. (for example, Mitnick did not meet mr. shimomuru (sp?) in an alley and hit him over the head with a garbage lid - the two never met until Mitnick was arrested).
INCORRECT definition of cracker and hacker
on
CNN on "hackers"
·
· Score: 1
I am well aware of the Jargon File entry. I also happen to disagree with it, as using the term "cracker" instead of "hax0r" or "script kiddie" pollutes yet another perfectly good word, and does nothing to save the word "hacker" from misuse, since it's already irreparably lost.
It'd be nice if more of the replies to these sorts of essays were on topic. I see a few good responses above, but a whole lot of things such as "this doesn't belong on slashdot," and "that essay sucks," or "your writing style sucks."
If you don't like the author, his writing style, his punctuation, or whatever, email him about it. I read the comments because I want to see comments and discussions of the points raised, not whining about the essay. If you don't like Thieme's essays, you can set up your preferences so you don't see any of them.
INCORRECT definition of cracker and hacker
on
CNN on "hackers"
·
· Score: 1
A cracker is a talented assembly language programmer who reverse engineers software to crack copy protection schemes. Don't pollute their word in addition to the word "hacker," all it's going to end up doing is have two words polluted rather than one - you're not going to get the word "hacker" back, so no point in ruining another perfectly good word in the process.
No, the word "cracker" refers to the talented assembly language programmers who crack copy protection on software. There's no need to pollute their word in addition to the word "hacker" - that doesn't solve anything.
No, the people described in this article are, for the most part, neither hackers nor crackers. Hackers are those skilled in programming or some other aspect of computers, and some of the people who break into systems may indeed be hackers. Crackers are the talented assembly language programmers who remove copy protection from programs - I doubt that's what they're describing in this article.
In short, I can see why hackers are upset at the commandeering of the term "hacker" to be a general description of any computer intrusion, but the answer is not to describe them as crackers instead. "Crackers" is a term that is already taken by a group that does not be deserved to be lumped together with script kiddies any more than hackers do. Polluting one word as retaliation for the pollution of another word accomplishes nothing - the word "hacker" will still be polluted, and all that will have changed is that you'll have succeeded in polluting yet another word.
I agree...however the program is not just one of partitions and mount points, but also the rest of the installation.
When I recently installed win95 on a desktop, it auto-detected everything need to run properly, including everything needed for the GUI. My monitor was auto-detected (it even knew the name and model number), my video card was auto-detected, same with my serial mouse. In Linux, none of this happened. In order to get Linux running with a GUI, I had to mess around with XF86Setup, which attempted to autodetect some stuff, but resulted in a lot more mucking around with video modes and a lot more reboots due to not being able to get out of a video mode that I found out (too late) my monitor and/or video card didn't support. It'd be nice if Linux would auto-detect and auto-setup those sorts of things, letting you change them later if you so desire.
Dumbed Down Journalism
on
IBM and Mp3
·
· Score: 1
Was anybody else annoyed by this article's failure to mention how big the hard drive is exactly? From looking around at IBM's page, it appears it's 340MB, but the article doesn't say that. Instead it tells us that it can hold 1000 compressed images, or 6 hours of music, or 300 hefty e-books. No mention of megabytes though. I find stuff such as that extremely annoying - i know they want to dumb it down since your average person knows what "1000 images" means more than what "340 megabytes" means, but it'd be nice if they could also give us some real numbers somewhere in the article.
Umm, what are you talking about? Neither the MP Man nor the Rio use minidisc cartridges.
re-inventing the minidisc
on
IBM and Mp3
·
· Score: 1
The problem is that minidisc cartridges, AFAIK, are still only for audio storage, not data storage. That limits them to 74 minutes of normal uncompressed audio, while this 350MB hard drive would give you around 6 hours of 128kbps compressed audio. If somebody makes a player that uses minidics as data, rather than audio, storage, then 400MB of mp3s would be nice. However, I haven't seen anybody mention any plans to build such a device.
Why does it seem that most Free Software projects I see announced are clones of proprietary software? It seems the clones rarely reach the stability and features of the originals, so that cancels out one of the supposed advantages of Free Software, that the software ends up being better (take for example FreeCiv vs. the much-superior but proprietary Civ and CivII).
It seems that some originality is lacking. In fact, I'm hard pressed to find examples of originality in Free Software. I'm sure there are a few, but of the major Free Software projects I've seen out there, nearly all are clones. A few examples are Linux (UNIX clone), gcc (cc clone), harmony (Qt clone), and X11Amp (Amp clone).
Secondly, if this guy is so interested in cloning proprietary software, I'm sure he wouldn't mind a Free Software clone of Bochs. Or are things different when it's your software being cloned? Come to think of it, if he's so interested in Free Software, why doesn't he release Bochs under a Free Software license?
No, the point of GPL is to ensure the freedom of the code author to use derivatives of his own code. If i write a piece of software, and put it under a BSD license, a corporation can modify it, then sell it, and not give away the source code. That way, I can't even get the source code to a derivative work of my own code. If i write and give away software, I sure as hell want to see the modifications and enhancements to my own code. That's what the GPL is intended to do.
Supposedly the memory is tamper-resistant, so erasing it may be difficult. Also, it'll stop playing DivX discs after a certain number have been played until it can contact the company to sort out your bill, so you can't just somehow prevent it from ever calling.
The most feasible solution I've seen is for somebody with the appropriate equipment to watch their player make a few calls, and from them reverse-engineer the protocol it uses. Then you'd have to set up a closed-circuit fake phone circuit in your house, so when it dials the DivX billing number, your circuit connects it to your computer, which will then pretend to be the DivX billing computer.
If that's the case, that means that it should be technically possible to crack the player. Since it's not actually calling up when you want to play the disc, that means the keys to decrypt the discs are already available locally on the player. All you need to do is somehow modify the player so that it *thinks* it's calling up once a month, when in reality it never calls anybody.
Bah that's not the point. The point is to crack this player and then laugh at Circuit City's "strong" encryption methods, not to actually *use* the cracked player to watch movies that you could just rent on DVD anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Where did Windows come into the conversation? The internal CPU cache can only cache the first 64MB of RAM. This has nothing to do with Windows or other OSs - 64MB and only 64MB is cached, whether you're running CP/M, DOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OS/2, or BeOS.
According to netcraft, it's running Netscape-Enterprise/3.5.1G on Solaris.
Blaming Microsoft for everything that goes wrong just makes us look paranoid and delusional.
Either that or you could call some actual BBSs. There's some lists of ones still up you can find from directory.mozilla.org's BBS section.
/. does set one up, put up Falcon's Eye. Great game by the BRE people (similar, but with more features and more interesting gameplay).
I've heard of some problems in trying to get door games working with telnettable BBSs, as many of them have COM stuff hard-coded into the executable.
Anyway, if
Sounds like a good idea to me - this would prevent one of the problems I see with the current alignment system, that users with high alignments would be discouraged from posting anything small or somewhat trivial, since those posts would be moderated down (not being deserving of a 3). This moderating down would then kick them down from their higher alignment, so the users would be discouraged from posting anything but long, likely-to-be-kept-at-3 posts in order to keep their high alignemtn. The good posters would therefore in effect be constrained because of their own merits, which isn't such a good thing.
Anyway, your proposal solves all of these problems by allowing the user to say "yes, i know this doesn't deserve a 3, but i want to say it anyway, so i'll give it a 1."
I think Rob has some sort of hard-coded "my posts start at 2" thing, because his posts have been starting at 2 for weeks now, long before this whole alignment thing was implemented.
as for the credit card numbers, Mitnick never used them. He had them, but never used them, which is why he's not being charged with credit card fraud. Maybe he should've used them and gotten himself a lot of stuff and a ticket to a nice country without an extradition treaty with the US. Instead he decided not to commit fraud, and is rewarded with 5 years in prison, more jail time than if he had embezzled money or assaulted somebody.
He didn't intentionally damage anything, and for that he's served more jail time than the average jail sentence for assault. He would've gotten off more easily if he went up and hit somebody over the head with a crowbar than he is now.
Not to mention his large libel lawsuit that he has indicated he will most likely bring against Miramax in the near future if they go forward with their plans to release their "Takedown" movie, which contains a bunch of mischaracterizations and blatant lies. (for example, Mitnick did not meet mr. shimomuru (sp?) in an alley and hit him over the head with a garbage lid - the two never met until Mitnick was arrested).
I am well aware of the Jargon File entry. I also happen to disagree with it, as using the term "cracker" instead of "hax0r" or "script kiddie" pollutes yet another perfectly good word, and does nothing to save the word "hacker" from misuse, since it's already irreparably lost.
It'd be nice if more of the replies to these sorts of essays were on topic. I see a few good responses above, but a whole lot of things such as "this doesn't belong on slashdot," and "that essay sucks," or "your writing style sucks."
If you don't like the author, his writing style, his punctuation, or whatever, email him about it. I read the comments because I want to see comments and discussions of the points raised, not whining about the essay. If you don't like Thieme's essays, you can set up your preferences so you don't see any of them.
A cracker is a talented assembly language programmer who reverse engineers software to crack copy protection schemes. Don't pollute their word in addition to the word "hacker," all it's going to end up doing is have two words polluted rather than one - you're not going to get the word "hacker" back, so no point in ruining another perfectly good word in the process.
No, the word "cracker" refers to the talented assembly language programmers who crack copy protection on software. There's no need to pollute their word in addition to the word "hacker" - that doesn't solve anything.
No, the people described in this article are, for the most part, neither hackers nor crackers. Hackers are those skilled in programming or some other aspect of computers, and some of the people who break into systems may indeed be hackers. Crackers are the talented assembly language programmers who remove copy protection from programs - I doubt that's what they're describing in this article.
In short, I can see why hackers are upset at the commandeering of the term "hacker" to be a general description of any computer intrusion, but the answer is not to describe them as crackers instead. "Crackers" is a term that is already taken by a group that does not be deserved to be lumped together with script kiddies any more than hackers do. Polluting one word as retaliation for the pollution of another word accomplishes nothing - the word "hacker" will still be polluted, and all that will have changed is that you'll have succeeded in polluting yet another word.
I agree...however the program...
Oops, I meant "the problem..."
I agree...however the program is not just one of partitions and mount points, but also the rest of the installation.
When I recently installed win95 on a desktop, it auto-detected everything need to run properly, including everything needed for the GUI. My monitor was auto-detected (it even knew the name and model number), my video card was auto-detected, same with my serial mouse. In Linux, none of this happened. In order to get Linux running with a GUI, I had to mess around with XF86Setup, which attempted to autodetect some stuff, but resulted in a lot more mucking around with video modes and a lot more reboots due to not being able to get out of a video mode that I found out (too late) my monitor and/or video card didn't support. It'd be nice if Linux would auto-detect and auto-setup those sorts of things, letting you change them later if you so desire.
Was anybody else annoyed by this article's failure to mention how big the hard drive is exactly? From looking around at IBM's page, it appears it's 340MB, but the article doesn't say that. Instead it tells us that it can hold 1000 compressed images, or 6 hours of music, or 300 hefty e-books. No mention of megabytes though. I find stuff such as that extremely annoying - i know they want to dumb it down since your average person knows what "1000 images" means more than what "340 megabytes" means, but it'd be nice if they could also give us some real numbers somewhere in the article.
Umm, what are you talking about? Neither the MP Man nor the Rio use minidisc cartridges.
The problem is that minidisc cartridges, AFAIK, are still only for audio storage, not data storage. That limits them to 74 minutes of normal uncompressed audio, while this 350MB hard drive would give you around 6 hours of 128kbps compressed audio. If somebody makes a player that uses minidics as data, rather than audio, storage, then 400MB of mp3s would be nice. However, I haven't seen anybody mention any plans to build such a device.
Why does it seem that most Free Software projects I see announced are clones of proprietary software? It seems the clones rarely reach the stability and features of the originals, so that cancels out one of the supposed advantages of Free Software, that the software ends up being better (take for example FreeCiv vs. the much-superior but proprietary Civ and CivII).
It seems that some originality is lacking. In fact, I'm hard pressed to find examples of originality in Free Software. I'm sure there are a few, but of the major Free Software projects I've seen out there, nearly all are clones. A few examples are Linux (UNIX clone), gcc (cc clone), harmony (Qt clone), and X11Amp (Amp clone).
Secondly, if this guy is so interested in cloning proprietary software, I'm sure he wouldn't mind a Free Software clone of Bochs. Or are things different when it's your software being cloned? Come to think of it, if he's so interested in Free Software, why doesn't he release Bochs under a Free Software license?
This is something that will get us all out of our houses. Anything that can get so many nerds to go outdoors has to be exceptional.
No, the point of GPL is to ensure the freedom of the code author to use derivatives of his own code. If i write a piece of software, and put it under a BSD license, a corporation can modify it, then sell it, and not give away the source code. That way, I can't even get the source code to a derivative work of my own code. If i write and give away software, I sure as hell want to see the modifications and enhancements to my own code. That's what the GPL is intended to do.
Supposedly the memory is tamper-resistant, so erasing it may be difficult. Also, it'll stop playing DivX discs after a certain number have been played until it can contact the company to sort out your bill, so you can't just somehow prevent it from ever calling.
The most feasible solution I've seen is for somebody with the appropriate equipment to watch their player make a few calls, and from them reverse-engineer the protocol it uses. Then you'd have to set up a closed-circuit fake phone circuit in your house, so when it dials the DivX billing number, your circuit connects it to your computer, which will then pretend to be the DivX billing computer.
If that's the case, that means that it should be technically possible to crack the player. Since it's not actually calling up when you want to play the disc, that means the keys to decrypt the discs are already available locally on the player. All you need to do is somehow modify the player so that it *thinks* it's calling up once a month, when in reality it never calls anybody.
Bah that's not the point. The point is to crack this player and then laugh at Circuit City's "strong" encryption methods, not to actually *use* the cracked player to watch movies that you could just rent on DVD anyway.
You mean you can get software that works without paying for it?
I guess this is another one of those April Fools jokes...