Well, it isn't. Sure, if you're so lazy uou want to have source rebuilt from binaries with one click, complete with comments, makefile and documentation, that's of no use.
But imagine the program does some very clever trick. Something you ooh about, "How the hell does he do that? It's impossible?". You want to include that trick in your code. You need it. So - you have three options:
1) Try to design it from scratch. Helluva work, you don't know where to start.
2) Look into the binary. If you're ASM guru, you MAY succeed. But ASM from high-level languages is hell to read.
3) Decompile the puppy, look for that piece through what looks like piles of junk, but is way more readable than ASM and find it. Then just rewrite it in pretty fashion, changing variable names and functions to your needs and include in your own software.
It's "the best of the worst", last resort at finding a solution to a small problem. Not a way to edit the source and add a single feature to the original program, like remove print protection from Acrobat Reader. The decompiled program most probably won't be possible to compile. You won't make a cow from hamburgers. But with some luck you may find out the cow was a bull and got killed by a truck.
The worst pain about Solaris I found was that it comes with nearly no preinstalled software. Oh, yes, it has the GUI, it has the web browser and several demo movies, a huge documentation database and a lot of other stuff I completely don't need. It lacks the basic stuff though.
Say, I want to install some software. I try to open the website with HotJava, manage to get to the downloads, but on my poor connection I can't grab it - the download breaks and doesn't resume. Nothing wget wouldn't handle... So I quickly grab wget.rpm and the source, just in case. Luckily, small enough so I could download it. Ok... rpm -i wget*. Ooops, no rpm, that's rather obvious. I quickly look for rpm and after a good while find rpm.tgz lying next to rpm.rpm. I download after several retries and get to notice there's no gzip!
Okay, I download gzip.tar. I untar it (luckily tar works) and see it's a source. But there's no compiler in the system. I grab a binary of GCC and notice bastard is available either as.rpm or as.gz. At this point I start getting mad:
-Can't install gzip - requires gcc or rpm.
-Can't install rpm - requires gzip or rpm.
-Can't install gcc - requires gzip or rpm.
I grab Linux install and get a full system, with perl, php, webserver, all client and server software I'd ever desire and everything I'd ever want. Upgrading and maintaining it will be less of a hell than installing Solaris from scratch, with poor internet connection and no binaries from older Solaris installs. I just feel envious about some guys that have one CD full of free Solaris binaries, starting with uncompressed, ready to use statically linked gzip and gcc, instead of 6 CDs of demos, 2 of docs and 4 of patches.
Somebody write a seti@home client in postscript to help seek extraterrestial life forms using your printer's spare CPU power? Ahhh.... A beowulf cluster of printers...A postscript-based AI... Printers will take over the world!
...a remote-controlled robot be build so you can "walk it" to the shop behind the corner, get your kid back home from school, go to work...
Will two people never seeing each other send their robots to marry each other remotely? And then go to honeymoon, to Niagara Falls, to watch the views on monitors from home...
Will a day come when leaving your house will be scarce and you'll be doing everything by controlling your robot?
I don't really like this vision of future.
[i]I'm sure the guys who build little model trainsets are the same way, I wouldn't really call them "hackers."[/i]
People who assemble prefabricated trainsets - surely not. But if some of them create a Turing machine from that...? The problem is if the hobby is plain re-creating old achievements, art (making it LOOK better but without change in the ground basis) or really making something really new and insightful. I would call the person who made the first real train a hacker. A person who made the first train set - possibly too, but that was much less of ana chievement. Making such a set from scratch or from some spare parts would be something - but buying ready models at a shop - sorry. It's just repeating great inventions of the human history yourself, that excites hackers. No matter it's considered "hobby" nowadays. There's nothing that would bring world's break-through in having a gold fish or a horse, in gardening, in collecting ancient alchemy glass. That's hobby. But try to mutate the goldfish into piranha, try to understand the horse language, repeat Mendel's genetic experiments in your garden, try to re-create all greatest world chemical inventions of past millenium at your home lab - That's hacking.
Add some small steering devices that will allow to deflect it by 5% from the wind route, and with average Martian hurricane at about 200km/h you can get it anywhere you desire even in relatively way weaker winds.
Anchoring it at some interesting place is quite a different matter though.
Hackers do. What could be possibly more exciting than hacking yourself - gaining insight of your own psyche, find ways how your thoughts run, find patterns how you are similar to other hackers... A good piece of that job was done by makers of The Hacker Jargon Dictionary and this is just another detail noticed by another hacker...
1GB of downloadable stuff (say an iso image and some extras)
3000 downloads a day. (say it's a common app)
Say, 360 days uptime a year:)
About 1 petabyte transferred in a year.
That IS something worth $1000, isn't it?
If you need a personal "harddrive space on the net" though, that's a different matter, only you and a few friends (or company partners) will use it - just arrange transfer limits... or set up a DSL 24/7 linux at home.
In the park of Krynica town in Poland, there is the REAL thing where water actually flows uphill. But there's no magic in that. Simply, there's quite a steep slope down which the stream runs, gaining considerable speed, and then a short part of the concrete bed of the stream runs uphill, where the water loses speed gradually, but not before it reaches the top, and continues downhill again. The uphill part is just several meters long and not really steep.
There's a semi-port of Linux to Commodore 64 (called Lunix) and it provides very wide functionality (as for such a platform:) Personally I'd love to see a 100% C64 compatibile handheld running such thing. And I'm not talking about emulators - I just dream about a sentimental fully-featured 8-bit computer compatibile with some of the old ones (Atari, Commodore, Spectrum, Amstrad...) that's portable.
I didn't use C, because contrary to popular belief, ASP and VB can go just as low level as C can
shareware versions of software that we needed, including sendmail, apache, and BIND.
GNU community has close ties to former communist leaders
x' in Linux was a tribute to the former Communist philosopher, Carl Marx, whose name also ends in 'x'
kernel panics caused by mod_perl
IIS servers running on Windows2000 had never experienced a worm attack. Microsoft has always provided us with patches in the unlikely event that an exploit was found.
After just 48 hours of operating Linux servers in our server pool, we had exhausted our budget for the entire year! It was costing us approximately 75% more to run Linux than Windows2000.
They will stop people from patenting popups, spam, embedded music in pages, misleading links and all such stuff, and then for charging anyone who uses them for patent violation?!
NO WAY!
', () - used in SQL.
" - used in HTML. ( are always used outside the quotes, so they shouldn't be a big problem.
Give up these 4 characters and there's nothing to quote. Use ` for strings, [] for brackets, there's some characters left for arrays yet... Remember F77 used ".eq." for "=" and ".gt." for ">" and it is still one of languages of choice for science.
I really wonder, why is PHP a language of choice for interacting with databases and writing HTML. I mean, it's not a bad language by itself, a bit like Perl, maybe slightly clearer (though personally I prefer Perl), maybe not as easy in common use... But it has one TERRIBLE drawback:
Quotes and brackets.
Nothing evil by themselves, they are unfortunately just the same kind as used in HTML and SQL, which makes creating SQL queries on the fly, printing HTML piece by piece and a lot of similar work worst mess I've ever seen. I've been successful at creating Perl regexp patterns that needs a minute to be understood, but I've never before been tempted to try to optimise fragments of my program to anything like: $a.='('.$_POST["it$f['n1'][$i]"]."='${q2}') ;";
Is there any good CGI language that doesn't have this kind of problems?
The problem is: M$ loses maybe $10 on one Xbox, gaining nothing (I buy no games). That's a really small fraction of their cash. I lose $180 and gain a piece of junk hardware, that's worth about nothing to me. That's a considerable piece of my income. That's why it's not going to work.
But in the other hand - Does anyone know of any good ways to run some distributed computing by creating a big cluster of Xboxes? They really look like great machines for that! Just enough of everything to run a single "cell" of such a cluster, hardware below "stock" prices, small, reliable, standarised... Hmm, a good idea for a business. Too bad I don't have enough cash to start it.
Re:$336 with a 120GB disk
on
Hacking the XBox
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Why buy an Xbox with a warranty if you're just going to void it anyway?
Maybe because if there IS warranty, you may be pretty sure the box is not broken? But in the other hand, you can buy an used Xbox with a warranty that's about-to-expire and get just enough time to test if you should make use of the warranty and take the xbox to service or void it safely...
Games - nope. But all that PR0N - Aaaah, that's quite a different story! No popups, no misleading links, no spam, just all the hot babes you ever wanted!
Best Xbox hacking device
on
Hacking the XBox
·
· Score: 5, Funny
I have a feeling that every time new Mozilla is released, old bugs I wanted to be fixed, will be fixed. Few are, but quite a few new ones are introduced as well, and most of old ones remain in place. Some people must feel just that way about MS Windows. It's just that I don't have to pay for that.
The problem with Opera is that to achieve such a speed, it uses some really nasty hacks, worst of them I think, being any dynamic page content not being related to the rest of the page. Like, if you want to create a retraceable menu by changing 'span style="display:none'" ' dynamically, it won't work. The span becomes visible, its contents - not. Same if you want to resize a cell of the table. The cell will overlap the other cells, get beyond the table borders, onto other elements... the table won't change dimensions accordingly.
Just as if I told you to move your ass and you cut your buttocks off and put them aside...
WorksForMe Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030507 Could you provide a minimised testcase and file a bug at bugzilla.mozilla.org ?/. is not really meant for that.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it isn't. Sure, if you're so lazy uou want to have source rebuilt from binaries with one click, complete with comments, makefile and documentation, that's of no use. But imagine the program does some very clever trick. Something you ooh about, "How the hell does he do that? It's impossible?". You want to include that trick in your code. You need it. So - you have three options: 1) Try to design it from scratch. Helluva work, you don't know where to start. 2) Look into the binary. If you're ASM guru, you MAY succeed. But ASM from high-level languages is hell to read. 3) Decompile the puppy, look for that piece through what looks like piles of junk, but is way more readable than ASM and find it. Then just rewrite it in pretty fashion, changing variable names and functions to your needs and include in your own software. It's "the best of the worst", last resort at finding a solution to a small problem. Not a way to edit the source and add a single feature to the original program, like remove print protection from Acrobat Reader. The decompiled program most probably won't be possible to compile. You won't make a cow from hamburgers. But with some luck you may find out the cow was a bull and got killed by a truck.
The worst pain about Solaris I found was that it comes with nearly no preinstalled software. Oh, yes, it has the GUI, it has the web browser and several demo movies, a huge documentation database and a lot of other stuff I completely don't need. It lacks the basic stuff though. Say, I want to install some software. I try to open the website with HotJava, manage to get to the downloads, but on my poor connection I can't grab it - the download breaks and doesn't resume. Nothing wget wouldn't handle... So I quickly grab wget .rpm and the source, just in case. Luckily, small enough so I could download it. Ok... rpm -i wget*. Ooops, no rpm, that's rather obvious. I quickly look for rpm and after a good while find rpm.tgz lying next to rpm.rpm. I download after several retries and get to notice there's no gzip!
Okay, I download gzip.tar. I untar it (luckily tar works) and see it's a source. But there's no compiler in the system. I grab a binary of GCC and notice bastard is available either as .rpm or as .gz. At this point I start getting mad:
-Can't install gzip - requires gcc or rpm.
-Can't install rpm - requires gzip or rpm.
-Can't install gcc - requires gzip or rpm.
I grab Linux install and get a full system, with perl, php, webserver, all client and server software I'd ever desire and everything I'd ever want. Upgrading and maintaining it will be less of a hell than installing Solaris from scratch, with poor internet connection and no binaries from older Solaris installs. I just feel envious about some guys that have one CD full of free Solaris binaries, starting with uncompressed, ready to use statically linked gzip and gcc, instead of 6 CDs of demos, 2 of docs and 4 of patches.
Somebody write a seti@home client in postscript to help seek extraterrestial life forms using your printer's spare CPU power? Ahhh.... A beowulf cluster of printers...A postscript-based AI... Printers will take over the world!
...a remote-controlled robot be build so you can "walk it" to the shop behind the corner, get your kid back home from school, go to work... Will two people never seeing each other send their robots to marry each other remotely? And then go to honeymoon, to Niagara Falls, to watch the views on monitors from home... Will a day come when leaving your house will be scarce and you'll be doing everything by controlling your robot? I don't really like this vision of future.
[i]I'm sure the guys who build little model trainsets are the same way, I wouldn't really call them "hackers."[/i] People who assemble prefabricated trainsets - surely not. But if some of them create a Turing machine from that...? The problem is if the hobby is plain re-creating old achievements, art (making it LOOK better but without change in the ground basis) or really making something really new and insightful. I would call the person who made the first real train a hacker. A person who made the first train set - possibly too, but that was much less of ana chievement. Making such a set from scratch or from some spare parts would be something - but buying ready models at a shop - sorry. It's just repeating great inventions of the human history yourself, that excites hackers. No matter it's considered "hobby" nowadays. There's nothing that would bring world's break-through in having a gold fish or a horse, in gardening, in collecting ancient alchemy glass. That's hobby. But try to mutate the goldfish into piranha, try to understand the horse language, repeat Mendel's genetic experiments in your garden, try to re-create all greatest world chemical inventions of past millenium at your home lab - That's hacking.
Add some small steering devices that will allow to deflect it by 5% from the wind route, and with average Martian hurricane at about 200km/h you can get it anywhere you desire even in relatively way weaker winds.
Anchoring it at some interesting place is quite a different matter though.
What's next? MS Canada?
Nope. Exon Iraq.
Hackers do. What could be possibly more exciting than hacking yourself - gaining insight of your own psyche, find ways how your thoughts run, find patterns how you are similar to other hackers... A good piece of that job was done by makers of The Hacker Jargon Dictionary and this is just another detail noticed by another hacker...
1GB of downloadable stuff (say an iso image and some extras) 3000 downloads a day. (say it's a common app) Say, 360 days uptime a year :)
About 1 petabyte transferred in a year.
That IS something worth $1000, isn't it?
If you need a personal "harddrive space on the net" though, that's a different matter, only you and a few friends (or company partners) will use it - just arrange transfer limits... or set up a DSL 24/7 linux at home.
In the park of Krynica town in Poland, there is the REAL thing where water actually flows uphill. But there's no magic in that. Simply, there's quite a steep slope down which the stream runs, gaining considerable speed, and then a short part of the concrete bed of the stream runs uphill, where the water loses speed gradually, but not before it reaches the top, and continues downhill again. The uphill part is just several meters long and not really steep.
There's a semi-port of Linux to Commodore 64 (called Lunix) and it provides very wide functionality (as for such a platform :) Personally I'd love to see a 100% C64 compatibile handheld running such thing. And I'm not talking about emulators - I just dream about a sentimental fully-featured 8-bit computer compatibile with some of the old ones (Atari, Commodore, Spectrum, Amstrad...) that's portable.
I didn't use C, because contrary to popular belief, ASP and VB can go just as low level as C can
shareware versions of software that we needed, including sendmail, apache, and BIND.
GNU community has close ties to former communist leaders
x' in Linux was a tribute to the former Communist philosopher, Carl Marx, whose name also ends in 'x'
kernel panics caused by mod_perl
IIS servers running on Windows2000 had never experienced a worm attack. Microsoft has always provided us with patches in the unlikely event that an exploit was found.
After just 48 hours of operating Linux servers in our server pool, we had exhausted our budget for the entire year! It was costing us approximately 75% more to run Linux than Windows2000.
communist GNU license.
provided that gcc won't kernel panic the machine
They will stop people from patenting popups, spam, embedded music in pages, misleading links and all such stuff, and then for charging anyone who uses them for patent violation?! NO WAY!
Could you explain some of these mysterious names to a non-Mac'er?
Please, don't mark as flamebait/troll, I'm asking seriously: Is there a chance for release of OS X for PC? (reasons left aside)
', () - used in SQL. " - used in HTML. ( are always used outside the quotes, so they shouldn't be a big problem. Give up these 4 characters and there's nothing to quote. Use ` for strings, [] for brackets, there's some characters left for arrays yet... Remember F77 used ".eq." for "=" and ".gt." for ">" and it is still one of languages of choice for science.
I really wonder, why is PHP a language of choice for interacting with databases and writing HTML. I mean, it's not a bad language by itself, a bit like Perl, maybe slightly clearer (though personally I prefer Perl), maybe not as easy in common use... But it has one TERRIBLE drawback:
) ;";
Quotes and brackets.
Nothing evil by themselves, they are unfortunately just the same kind as used in HTML and SQL, which makes creating SQL queries on the fly, printing HTML piece by piece and a lot of similar work worst mess I've ever seen. I've been successful at creating Perl regexp patterns that needs a minute to be understood, but I've never before been tempted to try to optimise fragments of my program to anything like:
$a.='('.$_POST["it$f['n1'][$i]"]."='${q2}'
Is there any good CGI language that doesn't have this kind of problems?
The problem is: M$ loses maybe $10 on one Xbox, gaining nothing (I buy no games). That's a really small fraction of their cash. I lose $180 and gain a piece of junk hardware, that's worth about nothing to me. That's a considerable piece of my income. That's why it's not going to work. But in the other hand - Does anyone know of any good ways to run some distributed computing by creating a big cluster of Xboxes? They really look like great machines for that! Just enough of everything to run a single "cell" of such a cluster, hardware below "stock" prices, small, reliable, standarised... Hmm, a good idea for a business. Too bad I don't have enough cash to start it.
Why buy an Xbox with a warranty if you're just going to void it anyway? Maybe because if there IS warranty, you may be pretty sure the box is not broken? But in the other hand, you can buy an used Xbox with a warranty that's about-to-expire and get just enough time to test if you should make use of the warranty and take the xbox to service or void it safely...
Games - nope. But all that PR0N - Aaaah, that's quite a different story! No popups, no misleading links, no spam, just all the hot babes you ever wanted!
Something like this
I have a feeling that every time new Mozilla is released, old bugs I wanted to be fixed, will be fixed. Few are, but quite a few new ones are introduced as well, and most of old ones remain in place. Some people must feel just that way about MS Windows. It's just that I don't have to pay for that.
The problem with Opera is that to achieve such a speed, it uses some really nasty hacks, worst of them I think, being any dynamic page content not being related to the rest of the page. Like, if you want to create a retraceable menu by changing 'span style="display:none'" ' dynamically, it won't work. The span becomes visible, its contents - not. Same if you want to resize a cell of the table. The cell will overlap the other cells, get beyond the table borders, onto other elements... the table won't change dimensions accordingly.
Just as if I told you to move your ass and you cut your buttocks off and put them aside...
WorksForMe Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030507 /. is not really meant for that.
Could you provide a minimised testcase and file a bug at bugzilla.mozilla.org ?
Doh. My first troll and it gets so many serious responses... :)