No-one really sits in the zone all day, it's more like a few minutes when the germ of an idea comes to you and you want to flesh it out, and that's the time when it's bad to be interrupted.
Bzzzt... Wrong!
And if you are indeed a programmer and not a suit trolling around, I pity you.
I think he is talking about code implementing rules which are likely to change so he decides to implement a state machine for it. At this stage I wonder if it wouldn't be simpler to just change the code than to program transitions of a state machine in a database:)
These kind of approaches inevitably end with the programmer inventing a new, personal language for expressing the rules and writing a small interpreter for it (which he basically did).
The same result and much more can probably be achieved by utilizing a full-featured embedded scripting engine (such as Perl or Python) that is already available. Then again perhaps the entire application can be at least prototyped that way.
I am just wondering how signing all the executables will protect anyone from viruses. Most viruses today are macro or scripted.
It's worth nothing that the behemoth apps (Outlook, Word, Excel etc) are signed, they will probably keep their embedded superscripting features, so viruses will still happily run on them.
I am curious about buffer overflows. Stack checks are not infallible, code is not read-only and and I can't imagine the palladium system checking the signature for each 4k block as it runs (since if decent encryption is used it will be quite expensive in CPU time). So, will we have signed apps that might still have such bugs ?
But, seriously. If you back up Gb of data and millions of files with tar periodically, I bow to you. Don't get me wrong, I like this tool (I happen to use it every day), it's just that the incremental backup support you mentioned is fairly primitive (it almost always needs custom helper scripts) and not at all adequate at that scale.
tar lacks things related to data management, which I kind of expect when it comes to periodic backup software. An example is file archival history and tape mapping, without which you'd have to search scores of tapes sequentially to find all the versions of a given file (yeah you can store the index somewhere else and cut and grep at it but somehow that does not seem all that exciting).
Also, for incremental backups running for hours (or continuously!), you need to know the actual time a file has been backed up as opposed to when you started or stopped the entire process to determine whether the file needs a new backup or not.
All the drives on the market today do internal translation from the C/H/S numbers they advertize to their own internal structure. So I think that implementing elevator sorting or other such algorithms at the OS level is a waste of time unless you know the mapping method (which isn't going to be the same on all drives). You can guess that increasing linear addresses correspond to higher cylinders but even if that were true, you can't tell where the boundaries are, since not all cylinders are created equal.
Furthermore, drives have large caches today which depending on how they are used (and I imagine they are used in write-back mode mostly) effectively hide the disk operations from the OS.
I would assume that this kind of stuff should be performed in the drive's firmware anyway, if it's not already. If the communication protocol supports sending multiple commands to the drive (I think SCSI does that, not sure about IDE) then the drive could reorder the requests to make better use of the drive geometry.
The above would give you a shell sitting on the read-only root fs. You'd need to remount it read-write - mount -o rw,remount -n / and possibly mount the other partitions such as/usr to get to the rest of the binaries.
I don't understand then. If they tax people for not using the electricity from the grid, that must mean there isn't enough demand for what they have (otherwise they would have no basis). How does that work with the "Real Californians don't do their laundry... except after 7" ads ?
Unfortunately for them, nobody uses printers connected to computers any more (nobody who might give a damn about the patent anyway). These days the printers are network-enabled. I guess Sim's exciting new technology is about 20 years too late.
By the way the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) was standardized in 1999 (RFC 2565 signed by people from Xerox, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and Sharp Labs) and is currently implemented in almost all network printers.
I know there are fully programmable ECUs out there that replace your standard box and allow to fully tune the fuel map using a laptop connected to it. AEM EMS is one of these, Haltech makes another.
Plus there are plenty of other "hard" ways you can "mod" your car (cams, exhaust, sway bars, shocks etc, depending on what you need to improve).
These guys found a way to exploit an algorithm to push their stuff higher than it deserved. Now that Google has discovered their method, I think Google should sue them for corrupting the search results that is essentially Google's product and revenue source.
Plus, since when is exploiting loopholes protected by law ?!
- A law has a "hole" that allows one to avoid taxes;
- Company X is createad to sell this service for a profit;
- Congress fixes the law and closes the loophole;
- Company X feels its business model has been depreciated by the lawmakers and sues them.
Same works for say, software bugs that are exploited in a profitable way by other software makers. Can McAffee sue Microsoft because Windows 5000 (let's be realistic here) made even the notion of a virus unthinkable ?
This has been on./ very recently. In addition to downloading the ttf mozilla rpm for RH8.0, you also need to "build" and install the MS core font set for the web from corefonts.sourceforge.net.
Not true any more
on
802.11 RF Amp
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The new NAT mechanism implemented in the Linux 2.4 kernels tries to use the same source port as the translated packet. I suspect other NAT implementations might be doing the same.
One wonders, if mp3 compressed audio damages hearing, then does MPEG compression damage vision ?
I can finally sue Time Warner for unspecified damages for watching digital TV:)
fill out game publishers' OS polls
on
More on Longhorn
·
· Score: 1
That reminds me: we should all go fill out the polls that most game publishers have (the ones with what kind of harware, software you have on your machine), and tell them we use Windows 98 or Linux (where applicable), to prevent them from releasing a next XP-only version of their game, because by the time they released it will be too late to complain.
MS has left large doors open for tools that are as easy to install or run as are difficult to remove or stop. No other company has been so careless in providing dangerous "features" that 99% of the people don't use and that are mostly used by people with malicious intent.
- activeX
- allowing "Open" to do "Execute" has basically fueled the vast generations of email viruses (before it was impossible to run something just by "opening" it)
- document macros in a non-sandboxed general-purpose programming language
- extension hiding in the name of user-friendliness that has caused so many problems with the.jpg.exe viruses
- no real protection scheme for memory, files or processes running on a machine despite all the required hardware capabilities being available since the '386.
I'm sure there are others, but you get the idea. Adware/spyware would be much more difficult, if not impossible to install browsers driven by our goals rather than a corporation's. Look at where the first "no javascript in email", "no remote images in email", "disable popup windows", "no animated images" options have appeared.
So to make your analogy more accurate, it's like not buying a Honda because they are made to open their doors automatically every time somebody gets nearby.
1) select a large enough X (company size)
2) send letters to companies of size X
3) companies make good and pay off
4) if X>1 with money gained repeat from (1) where X=X/2
5) mega PROFIT:)
As soon as they finished all the companies and universities, they will come after individuals, no doubt about it.
How is this "interesting" ?! This is the biggest load of crap I have ever read.
These people have no idea that they are handling poisons. That this will kill them early. They have to cope with each day as it comes because they are so poor, so it's their government's job to look into the future for them. But their government does not care. The current generation does not care either, same way YOU don't care if there is going to be enough oil for your SUV in 2050.
I'm sure these people would be happy to take up nuclear waste too if its effects on people wouldn't have been so immediately obvious.
This is where our plastics are also "recycled", releasing large quantities of toxic gases in the atmosphere. Which is not only "their" atmosphere by the way. Same goes for the ocean that toxic rivers dumps into.
It is obvious that the industrialized countries want all the poor countries to stay the same so we can use them as cheap work and trash cans, but at least I was hoping that supposedly intelligent people are not in denial and see this for what it is - exploitation, nothing less. It's convenient for us therefore it must be right. Bah.
Grounding both ends of the cable would definitely be a serious problem. The lower the wire gauge is, the worse the effect is going to be (you are creating a low-resistance connection between two points of different potential, this will generate significant current draw through the wire).
I would suggest to go fiber, it's immune to this kind of problems and I have seen fiber optic cards for decent prices in stores. Or use fiber for long distance connections and regular wired ethernet for LANs.
If you must do copper, ask someone who has done a copper-based university or large building WAN. They will likely have had to solve the same problems, as the same grounding issues can appear between equipment powered from AC sourced different phase lines. I don't recall exactly but grounding at only one end and leaving the other in the air might have been the solution.
Aren't application startup speeds mainly influenced by disk and memory performance ?
Re:I was lucky enough to see one of these in actio
on
Transmeta Astro Processor
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I think this CPU is built with low-power consumption as its primary goal and performance second, thus is unlikely that you will see it in high-end desktops. But you might see it in other laptops that will keep running and running after your P4-2Ghz laptop finished your second battery...
Do you have any references on the large amount of system RAM you mentioned is needed for code morphing ? I find it hard to believe that 1) you need that amount of memory for instruction translation and 2) that a hardware device using that much memory to emulate a CPU (at CPU clock speeds) can be too efficient both in terms of performance and heat dissipation.
Slashdot Mirror
And if you are indeed a programmer and not a suit trolling around, I pity you.
These kind of approaches inevitably end with the programmer inventing a new, personal language for expressing the rules and writing a small interpreter for it (which he basically did).
The same result and much more can probably be achieved by utilizing a full-featured embedded scripting engine (such as Perl or Python) that is already available. Then again perhaps the entire application can be at least prototyped that way.
It's worth nothing that the behemoth apps (Outlook, Word, Excel etc) are signed, they will probably keep their embedded superscripting features, so viruses will still happily run on them.
I am curious about buffer overflows. Stack checks are not infallible, code is not read-only and and I can't imagine the palladium system checking the signature for each 4k block as it runs (since if decent encryption is used it will be quite expensive in CPU time). So, will we have signed apps that might still have such bugs ?
But, seriously. If you back up Gb of data and millions of files with tar periodically, I bow to you. Don't get me wrong, I like this tool (I happen to use it every day), it's just that the incremental backup support you mentioned is fairly primitive (it almost always needs custom helper scripts) and not at all adequate at that scale.
tar lacks things related to data management, which I kind of expect when it comes to periodic backup software. An example is file archival history and tape mapping, without which you'd have to search scores of tapes sequentially to find all the versions of a given file (yeah you can store the index somewhere else and cut and grep at it but somehow that does not seem all that exciting).
Also, for incremental backups running for hours (or continuously!), you need to know the actual time a file has been backed up as opposed to when you started or stopped the entire process to determine whether the file needs a new backup or not.
A decent backup tool (as opposed to an archival tool) must absolutely have incremental backup support.
All the drives on the market today do internal translation from the C/H/S numbers they advertize to their own internal structure. So I think that implementing elevator sorting or other such algorithms at the OS level is a waste of time unless you know the mapping method (which isn't going to be the same on all drives). You can guess that increasing linear addresses correspond to higher cylinders but even if that were true, you can't tell where the boundaries are, since not all cylinders are created equal.
Furthermore, drives have large caches today which depending on how they are used (and I imagine they are used in write-back mode mostly) effectively hide the disk operations from the OS.
I would assume that this kind of stuff should be performed in the drive's firmware anyway, if it's not already. If the communication protocol supports sending multiple commands to the drive (I think SCSI does that, not sure about IDE) then the drive could reorder the requests to make better use of the drive geometry.
The above would give you a shell sitting on the read-only root fs. You'd need to remount it read-write - mount -o rw,remount -n / and possibly mount the other partitions such as /usr to get to the rest of the binaries.
I don't understand then. If they tax people for not using the electricity from the grid, that must mean there isn't enough demand for what they have (otherwise they would have no basis). How does that work with the "Real Californians don't do their laundry... except after 7" ads ?
These people have an online traffic school that ends with, guess what, an online test!
Domain Name: ONLINETRAFFICSCHOOL.COM
Status: ACTIVE
Creation Date: 19-nov-1997
[whois.opensrs.net]
Registrant:
Online Traffic School
645 Fourth Street
Santa Rosa, CA 95404
US
By the way the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) was standardized in 1999 (RFC 2565 signed by people from Xerox, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and Sharp Labs) and is currently implemented in almost all network printers.
Plus there are plenty of other "hard" ways you can "mod" your car (cams, exhaust, sway bars, shocks etc, depending on what you need to improve).
I guess next time should read the summary first huh ? :)
Why not post the link to the actual patent instead of a useless uspto.gov main page, if it does indeed exist ?
Plus, since when is exploiting loopholes protected by law ?!
- A law has a "hole" that allows one to avoid taxes;
- Company X is createad to sell this service for a profit;
- Congress fixes the law and closes the loophole;
- Company X feels its business model has been depreciated by the lawmakers and sues them.
Same works for say, software bugs that are exploited in a profitable way by other software makers. Can McAffee sue Microsoft because Windows 5000 (let's be realistic here) made even the notion of a virus unthinkable ?
This has been on ./ very recently. In addition to downloading the ttf mozilla rpm for RH8.0, you also need to "build" and install the MS core font set for the web from corefonts.sourceforge.net.
The new NAT mechanism implemented in the Linux 2.4 kernels tries to use the same source port as the translated packet. I suspect other NAT implementations might be doing the same.
One wonders, if mp3 compressed audio damages hearing, then does MPEG compression damage vision ? I can finally sue Time Warner for unspecified damages for watching digital TV :)
That reminds me: we should all go fill out the polls that most game publishers have (the ones with what kind of harware, software you have on your machine), and tell them we use Windows 98 or Linux (where applicable), to prevent them from releasing a next XP-only version of their game, because by the time they released it will be too late to complain.
- activeX - allowing "Open" to do "Execute" has basically fueled the vast generations of email viruses (before it was impossible to run something just by "opening" it) - document macros in a non-sandboxed general-purpose programming language - extension hiding in the name of user-friendliness that has caused so many problems with the .jpg.exe viruses
- no real protection scheme for memory, files or processes running on a machine despite all the required hardware capabilities being available since the '386.
I'm sure there are others, but you get the idea. Adware/spyware would be much more difficult, if not impossible to install browsers driven by our goals rather than a corporation's. Look at where the first "no javascript in email", "no remote images in email", "disable popup windows", "no animated images" options have appeared.
So to make your analogy more accurate, it's like not buying a Honda because they are made to open their doors automatically every time somebody gets nearby.
2) send letters to companies of size X
3) companies make good and pay off
4) if X>1 with money gained repeat from (1) where X=X/2
5) mega PROFIT
As soon as they finished all the companies and universities, they will come after individuals, no doubt about it.
It may be just that we are all helping them test and refine their "technology" by accessing that page.
These people have no idea that they are handling poisons. That this will kill them early. They have to cope with each day as it comes because they are so poor, so it's their government's job to look into the future for them. But their government does not care. The current generation does not care either, same way YOU don't care if there is going to be enough oil for your SUV in 2050.
I'm sure these people would be happy to take up nuclear waste too if its effects on people wouldn't have been so immediately obvious.
This is where our plastics are also "recycled", releasing large quantities of toxic gases in the atmosphere. Which is not only "their" atmosphere by the way. Same goes for the ocean that toxic rivers dumps into.
It is obvious that the industrialized countries want all the poor countries to stay the same so we can use them as cheap work and trash cans, but at least I was hoping that supposedly intelligent people are not in denial and see this for what it is - exploitation, nothing less. It's convenient for us therefore it must be right. Bah.
I would suggest to go fiber, it's immune to this kind of problems and I have seen fiber optic cards for decent prices in stores. Or use fiber for long distance connections and regular wired ethernet for LANs.
If you must do copper, ask someone who has done a copper-based university or large building WAN. They will likely have had to solve the same problems, as the same grounding issues can appear between equipment powered from AC sourced different phase lines. I don't recall exactly but grounding at only one end and leaving the other in the air might have been the solution.
Aren't application startup speeds mainly influenced by disk and memory performance ?
Do you have any references on the large amount of system RAM you mentioned is needed for code morphing ? I find it hard to believe that 1) you need that amount of memory for instruction translation and 2) that a hardware device using that much memory to emulate a CPU (at CPU clock speeds) can be too efficient both in terms of performance and heat dissipation.