One thing that might be helpful is a sort of comparison between Win/Mac concepts and terminology to the Unix-style equivalents..
Has anyone written a set of aliases for the various shells that map standard DOS/Win commands to their Linux equivalents? Maybe someone should write equivalent programs that will accept the same syntax (yep, slash-prefixed options & all). Or perhaps it would be better to write a "preprocessor" that would trap DOS commands, explain to the user what the equivalent command would be under Linux and then execute the translated command. I guess this could be implemented with a Perl script without too much trouble.
But did they reverse engineer the Xing player in order to retrieve that first key? I would argue that they did NOT, since the key was plainly obvious in the first place.
Was it? Just because something is not encrypted doesn't make it equivalent to "plainly obvious" (unless of course it was in a separate file marked "decrypt.dat".;) Just looking at a hex dump of a file can be considered reverse engineering.
I believe the prior^^ poster had a good point, though -- the DCMA expressly permits reverse-engineering for the purpose of making software interoperable with other programs. Although in this case it was the data format that was RE'd, it was done to permit the use of DVDs with Linux, which I would argue was a legitimate commercial* endeavor.
* Can OSS be considered "commercial", if it's free (as in beer)? Does the GPL secure "commercial" rights, or does there explicitly have to be some pecuniary consideration?
IMAO, HN was invented by someone who was too lazy to write a simple cross-referencer. Any bugs dealing with incompatible varible types should have been worked out long before a maintenance programmer gets hold of the code. While some may complain about having to scroll up to the top of the routine to check a variable's type, what am I supposed to do with someone who uses their own personal "Hungarian" notation? Like (my favorite) the person who bases their notation on their redefinition of the standard C types: #define UINT unsigned short/* Actual example */ UINT uiCounter;
And what the hell's up with "lpsz" anyway? Long Pointer[1] to String, Zero-terminated -- what other kinds do you work with? Sure there are fixed-length strings, but do you then feel compelled to prefix them "lpsf30" to indicate a Long Pointer to String Fixed at 30 characters? Why not just prefix with "s" for String and special-case the exceptions? Not that I care; I tend to use string descriptors & my own string library to prevent buffer overruns & other associated problems -- but I imagine lots of people do that.
[1] And don't get me started on Long Pointers! If you're using a proper (non-segmented) CPU, you don't have to waste time considering pointer size and memory models...
Yeah, his name was (John?) Stapp. There's actually an annual conference named after him, where people go to present papers on high-impact/high-stress safety testing. I believe this is the conference where they first announced that air bags were dangerous to people under a certain height, and gave (detailed!) accounts of fatal accidents directly attributable to air bag usage. My wife usually goes (she's a mechanical engineer) and always comes back with...interesting...stories.
My wife's Toshiba Libretto has a sidelit screen which has teriffic brightness. Of course, it's only about a 6" screen, but I'm betting that you could sidelight each side of a 20" and get decent results.
Now imagine a screen that is like your computer case turned sideways on the back of your desk
Now *there's* an idea -- why not bond them to the side of your tower case? You either gain a ton of desk space back by getting rid of your monitor, or you get some desk space and the convenience of having your switches & media slots conveniently located by having your CPU on the desktop.
My server is named spicerack, and the other nodes on my net are basil, oregano, pepper and tarragon (and soon garlic, thyme, and cinnamon, as soon as I get an additional outlet wired in down in the basement...)
Presumably not in a big computing facility, since they should have multiple sets of full-size tools for use (we ain't all elves...) Actually, that's exactly where you need such a tool. Why should you put in a call to the help desk, then wait until somebody gets time to pick up the tool kit and walk all the way across campus when all you wanted to do was open a case and see what model of ethernet card was installed? Not to mention the fact that help desk personnel usually won't pull a hard drive so you can mount it in another machine and do a high-speed copy of one of the partitions...;) I have carried a Leatherman tool for several years and it has been invaluable. That and one of those mini MAGlites have permananent homes in my briefcase.
In many engineering disciplines, there is a well-understood, well agreed-to body of practices
This is because engineering is based on physics, which has a strong basis in mathematics. There is no "physics of software" on which to base standard practices. Engineering would be a far different practice if the force of gravity, the rules of calculus, or the tensile strength of steel were dictated by "user requirements"...
It was the first (in the US) to use binary as its internal representation, and it had a form of dynamic RAM (a cylinder of capacitors that rotated past a brush assembly that kept them refreshed/charged). The sad thing is, this capacitor drum is the only thing that remains. When a grad student (later head of the CS dept) needed an office, he was told that he could have one "if he cleaned the junk out of it". Guess what the "junk" consisted of?
Defacing a web site, like grafitti on a wall is hardly a major offence.
But it isn't "like grafitti [sic] on a wall". It's more akin to screwing up traffic lights. You remove links from a web page, you're denying access to resources. Carving your initials in a tree is one thing, dropping that tree across a major highway is another.
I don't think that massive buffering on the disk is the answer, but I imagine there is a lot that could be done with more memory on disk controllers. If a controller could cache several hundred pages, it could more easily order writes according to locality. This could also extend to reads, to a lesser extent. We now have video cards with 16 and 32 MB of memory, why not a disk controller with a similar amount? Of course, there's a problem with system crashes causing "written" blocks to be lost, how long to copy 32M of memory to flash ram?
Actually, IBM did this with their (3350?) series of disks for mainframes. It was a conventional disk, with the addition of a separate set of heads fixed over the (I believe) outermost two tracks of the disk. Very handy for swap space and system libraries.
so if silicon goes 10-12 years, what's next? organic comptuers? daveo read some time ago in the ny times about carbon strings that could be randomly formed at high temperatures. does any one have any more information on this?
They've been experimenting with silicon-on-sapphire (SOS) technology for awhile (I always seem to associate this with ECL, for some reason). And I'd be surprised if there wasn't a significant amount of research into synthetic diamond substrate structures. There are also people researching carbon microtubules (strings of Bucky balls), creating circuits using atomic force microscopes to lay them out. So I'd say once the CMOS processes "mature", there'll be a new batch of technologies to pick up where CMOS leaves off.
This doesn't make any sense to me. If you lower the resistance in the chip, it still has to change states based on the clock signal. Just because the chip is more efficient doesn't mean that an instruction that executes in three clocks is going to start executing in two. You still have to run the chip at the faster speed, which is essentially "overclocking" (since the chip isn't specified to run at that speed).
ISTR that Cray did a primitive form of this for the Cray-IV. They actaully machined off the top and bottom of ICs and made some hellishly dense interconnects...
Slashdot Mirror
Is that, like, meta-fucking?
I had a girlfriend who was into that -- and boy was I glad I meta!
Try "man -k "
One thing that might be helpful is a sort of comparison between Win/Mac concepts and terminology to the Unix-style equivalents..
Has anyone written a set of aliases for the various shells that map standard DOS/Win commands to their Linux equivalents? Maybe someone should write equivalent programs that will accept the same syntax (yep, slash-prefixed options & all). Or perhaps it would be better to write a "preprocessor" that would trap DOS commands, explain to the user what the equivalent command would be under Linux and then execute the translated command. I guess this could be implemented with a Perl script without too much trouble.
I plan to tie my network cables to my disk drives and create a 25GB bolo.
But did they reverse engineer the Xing player in order to retrieve that first key? I would argue that they did NOT, since the key was plainly obvious in the first place.
;) Just looking at a hex dump of a file can be considered reverse engineering.
Was it? Just because something is not encrypted doesn't make it equivalent to "plainly obvious" (unless of course it was in a separate file marked "decrypt.dat".
I believe the prior^^ poster had a good point, though -- the DCMA expressly permits reverse-engineering for the purpose of making software interoperable with other programs. Although in this case it was the data format that was RE'd, it was done to permit the use of DVDs with Linux, which I would argue was a legitimate commercial* endeavor.
* Can OSS be considered "commercial", if it's free (as in beer)? Does the GPL secure "commercial" rights, or does there explicitly have to be some pecuniary consideration?
Just change to = in the targetting routine...
Given NASA's recent "targeting" problems, I'd be reeeeeal wary about that one...
IMAO, HN was invented by someone who was too lazy to write a simple cross-referencer. Any bugs dealing with incompatible varible types should have been worked out long before a maintenance programmer gets hold of the code. While some may complain about having to scroll up to the top of the routine to check a variable's type, what am I supposed to do with someone who uses their own personal "Hungarian" notation? Like (my favorite) the person who bases their notation on their redefinition of the standard C types:
#define UINT unsigned short
UINT uiCounter;
And what the hell's up with "lpsz" anyway? Long Pointer[1] to String, Zero-terminated -- what other kinds do you work with? Sure there are fixed-length strings, but do you then feel compelled to prefix them "lpsf30" to indicate a Long Pointer to String Fixed at 30 characters? Why not just prefix with "s" for String and special-case the exceptions? Not that I care; I tend to use string descriptors & my own string library to prevent buffer overruns & other associated problems -- but I imagine lots of people do that.
[1] And don't get me started on Long Pointers! If you're using a proper (non-segmented) CPU, you don't have to waste time considering pointer size and memory models...
Yeah, his name was (John?) Stapp. There's actually an annual conference named after him, where people go to present papers on high-impact/high-stress safety testing. I believe this is the conference where they first announced that air bags were dangerous to people under a certain height, and gave (detailed!) accounts of fatal accidents directly attributable to air bag usage. My wife usually goes (she's a mechanical engineer) and always comes back with...interesting...stories.
My wife's Toshiba Libretto has a sidelit screen which has teriffic brightness. Of course, it's only about a 6" screen, but I'm betting that you could sidelight each side of a 20" and get decent results.
Now imagine a screen that is like your computer case turned sideways on the back of your desk
Now *there's* an idea -- why not bond them to the side of your tower case? You either gain a ton of desk space back by getting rid of your monitor, or you get some desk space and the convenience of having your switches & media slots conveniently located by having your CPU on the desktop.
My server is named spicerack, and the other nodes on my net are basil, oregano, pepper and tarragon (and soon garlic, thyme, and cinnamon, as soon as I get an additional outlet wired in down in the basement...)
OTOH, the computer where I work is MDSC0700512...
Presumably not in a big computing facility, since they should have multiple sets of full-size tools for use (we ain't all elves...)
Actually, that's exactly where you need such a tool. Why should you put in a call to the help desk, then wait until somebody gets time to pick up the tool kit and walk all the way across campus when all you wanted to do was open a case and see what model of ethernet card was installed? Not to mention the fact that help desk personnel usually won't pull a hard drive so you can mount it in another machine and do a high-speed copy of one of the partitions...;) I have carried a Leatherman tool for several years and it has been invaluable. That and one of those mini MAGlites have permananent homes in my briefcase.
In many engineering disciplines, there is a well-understood, well agreed-to body of practices
This is because engineering is based on physics, which has a strong basis in mathematics. There is no "physics of software" on which to base standard practices. Engineering would be a far different practice if the force of gravity, the rules of calculus, or the tensile strength of steel were dictated by "user requirements"...
This is true. If you're doing any sort of consulting work, you can justify more $$$ for your time if you have the PE.
OTOH, equating a professional license with some bullshit "certification" is an insult....
Actually, through the preferences feature, Slashdot can be customized for anyone's tastes.
It was the first (in the US) to use binary as its internal representation, and it had a form of dynamic RAM (a cylinder of capacitors that rotated past a brush assembly that kept them refreshed/charged). The sad thing is, this capacitor drum is the only thing that remains. When a grad student (later head of the CS dept) needed an office, he was told that he could have one "if he cleaned the junk out of it". Guess what the "junk" consisted of?
Defacing a web site, like grafitti on a wall is hardly a major offence.
But it isn't "like grafitti [sic] on a wall". It's more akin to screwing up traffic lights. You remove links from a web page, you're denying access to resources. Carving your initials in a tree is one thing, dropping that tree across a major highway is another.
I don't think that massive buffering on the disk is the answer, but I imagine there is a lot that could be done with more memory on disk controllers. If a controller could cache several hundred pages, it could more easily order writes according to locality. This could also extend to reads, to a lesser extent. We now have video cards with 16 and 32 MB of memory, why not a disk controller with a similar amount? Of course, there's a problem with system crashes causing "written" blocks to be lost, how long to copy 32M of memory to flash ram?
Actually, IBM did this with their (3350?) series of disks for mainframes. It was a conventional disk, with the addition of a separate set of heads fixed over the (I believe) outermost two tracks of the disk. Very handy for swap space and system libraries.
so if silicon goes 10-12 years, what's next? organic comptuers? daveo read some time ago in the ny times about carbon strings that could be randomly formed at high temperatures. does any one have any more information on this?
They've been experimenting with silicon-on-sapphire (SOS) technology for awhile (I always seem to associate this with ECL, for some reason). And I'd be surprised if there wasn't a significant amount of research into synthetic diamond substrate structures. There are also people researching carbon microtubules (strings of Bucky balls), creating circuits using atomic force microscopes to lay them out. So I'd say once the CMOS processes "mature", there'll be a new batch of technologies to pick up where CMOS leaves off.
This doesn't make any sense to me. If you lower the resistance in the chip, it still has to change states based on the clock signal. Just because the chip is more efficient doesn't mean that an instruction that executes in three clocks is going to start executing in two. You still have to run the chip at the faster speed, which is essentially "overclocking" (since the chip isn't specified to run at that speed).
Dunno, kinda hard to father children if you've got a busted skull...
They say it runs "Unix" and NT (yeah, right!).
Their specs say it has a 1600W power supply. Does that come with a wall plug or a set of jumper cables?
ISTR that Cray did a primitive form of this for the Cray-IV. They actaully machined off the top and bottom of ICs and made some hellishly dense interconnects...