That's a really weird outlook. You sound like somebody who wears his necktie too tight or something.
Writing self-replicating code that 'lives' in cyberspace is 'cool.' It's completely uncool when it is used in malevolent ways and/or damages anything.
The hacker 'ethic' demands that nothing be damaged, it's more like climbing a mountain 'because it is there.'
Oh the other hand, most of the 'modern' viruses are neither interesting nor technically oriented. Hell, I remember peeking into 'virus writing newsletters' half a decade ago, and even then it was almost entirely people distributing debug shell scripts to generate virus binaries. There was very little of the commented ASM source code that would be technically interesting.
There are a few thoughtful and interesting places to find info about and study computer viruses. Chase down a copy of 'A Pathology of Computer Viruses' by David Ferbrache, Springer-Verlag, 1992. If you can find one. (I notice Amazon has one used copy available for $240.)
Whether or not you are altruistic or not, I don't care, because I believe there are people who have less than they deserve and that society is obligated to help them out.
You really should have trimmed your comment down to just the above, so people wouldn't have to waste so much time reading all of it.
While it was clear that the socialist nations during the Cold War didn't have as good quality of life as the first world nations, people there lived much better than in most capitalist third-world nations.
Indeed. Under socialism, most people are sentenced to live in a permanent lower-middle-class existence. There's no economic reward for striving to do better, so they just exist.
However, some people won't settle for living a small petty life in a dusty suburb or housing project. They'd be boxed in or, worse, isolated and ostracized under a socialist regime.
What you fail to recognize is that this proposal means you'd not be allowed to 'close the source' on any software projects.
'The Freedom Software Committee' would send out an 'enforcer squadron' to your basement if you tried to release binaries without source. Their public domain rubber truncheons would swing forth with righteousness, and you'd find yourself in the back of a dark van headed to who-knows-where to toil for the rest of your life on embedded firmware, in 4-bit assembly language, for the touch panel controller of a children's play-robot.
There's no way the kind of thing being proposed could be carried out in 'sweet niceness.' Force would be needed, and a very different sort of people would be attracted to the project.
I wasn't 'wrong.' I was contributing to topic drift with a comment about how Republicans depend on a membership base who make small contributions, whereas the Democrats get their money from meddlesome rich liberals.
It was 'changing the subject to something more interesting' and you raised the off-topic flag.
If I'm 'bitter' about anything, it's that NPR can take the McDonalds wealth and use it to attack everything that allowed the billionare to accumulate it, while assauging his ditzy wife that she's doing a 'wonderful thing.'
I wouldn't lay odds that the OS for these new boxes will be a linear evolution from Solaris x86. That would be such a pitiful way of going about the software design. Sun already has a 64-bit true version of Solaris they can port over to a new Opteron box. Solaris x86 is and has always been about running Solaris on 'IBM Compatible' PeeCee boxes. A Sun design that uses an Opteron processor is not (at least we can HOPE it is not) a warmed-over PeeCee design. Sun has the staff to do so much better than that, and why would they need any x86 legacy crap?
Sun will have three ports of Solaris in the end. Solaris/sparc, Solaris/Opteron, and Solaris/junk-intel.
I'm sure a lot of us have headless x86 boxes like you describe shoved off in a corner that work as you say.
But that's not a statistical model of reliability, thats an anecdotal case. PC systems, for one example, almost without exception have shit power supplies. If you've never been inside a Sun box, you probably just don't understand.
I'm hoping, and I'm sure a lot of people are hoping, that Sun's x86 boxes will be so different (and so much better) than a clone x86 design that nothing Microsoft sells will run on it at all. Boo hoo. It doesn't pass the 'flight simulator' test.
SGI is an example of a company that nudged their way into x86 hardware without differentiating themselves, or coming out with a design with any distinct advantages. Look what it did to them.
But if the best you can offer as a reason to select Mozilla over IE is pop-up blocking, Mozilla may be in trouble. Microsoft could put that feature into a service pack and get their whole market back.
I don't agree that pop-up blocking is the whole advantage of running Mozilla as opposed to IE, and I think you make a mistake by emphasizing it too much. Though it may be true that that's the only reason a lot of people switch... which is not good.
These distinctions... seperate it from the Opteron environment which will have horizonal vendor support - you'll be able to mix and match hardware and software as you see fit.
Are you certain that Sun deciding to design in Opteron processors means they're adopting an x86 architecture whole-cloth? I wouldn't think they'd be that interested in a legacy design. They can drop Opteron into their own architecture and run with it. Share the foundry costs for the chip with cloners and low-end vendors like Dell, but use their engineering expertise to make it a real box. Sun isn't known as a screwdriver shop. Dell sure is.
Somewhat hard to tell, unless you look inside, because Sun controls Solaris and Solaris controls you.
I just checked, and yes, NetBSD/sparc64 is supported on a lot of the architectures that you're talking about. (I had to check because I don't run any of that new 'icky' Sun hardware with PCI and IDE drives- my newest stuff is Ultra 1 boxes I got at auction for $12.50 each- still not a bad price to get an entry into 64 bit Unix...)
So where's this deep-dark-hidden stuff that you're fretting about? Download the NetBSD kernal source and dig around some.
Also, I doubt if the fact that Sun designs an x86 processor into one of their systems, that it means they're dragging in all the croft and architectural compromises that Dell does. Sun's box doesn't have to run NT or anything at all Microsoft to be successful. Dell's boxes almost certainly must.
Heck, I don't think a Sun 386i box, from back when Sun made their first try at selling an x86 box back in the early 90's, will run DOS or Windows or anything. It was a Unix box designed to run Sun's Unix software.
I don't know for sure, though, as I'm not lucky enough to have a Sun 386i box in my collection of Sun hardware.
So are you going to get up on a soap box and say 'My company is using Linux on the desktop on about 40% of our machines. Oh, and we're going out of business.'
Maybe you'll want to wait on calling that a Linux success story of any kind...
I look forward (or not) to the day when there is trojan code out there that drills holes in the memory map of flash drives through repetetive writes.
I'm sure there will be people tuning the code to do the maximum damage. How tightly spaced do burned out locations need to be on a flash drive before it renders big chunks of the drive useless?
So you're chosing to call the rigid vendor lock-in with Apple's iTunes site a postive feature, in this era of a volatile and growing market for online music?
I ride mountain bikes and BMX bikes with my iPod turned on,
I thought it was illegal to ride a bike wearing headphones with the sound turned up to block out traffic noise, people shouting 'look out' and what-not.
If it's not illegal, it's still stupid and dangerous.
Slashdot Mirror
Books about IC logic and assembler are nice
WTF??? My copy of the TTL Cookbook is gonna help somebody write a virus?
Don Lancaster, hang your head in shame!
heh
That's a really weird outlook. You sound like somebody who wears his necktie too tight or something.
Writing self-replicating code that 'lives' in cyberspace is 'cool.' It's completely uncool when it is used in malevolent ways and/or damages anything.
The hacker 'ethic' demands that nothing be damaged, it's more like climbing a mountain 'because it is there.'
Oh the other hand, most of the 'modern' viruses are neither interesting nor technically oriented. Hell, I remember peeking into 'virus writing newsletters' half a decade ago, and even then it was almost entirely people distributing debug shell scripts to generate virus binaries. There was very little of the commented ASM source code that would be technically interesting.
There are a few thoughtful and interesting places to find info about and study computer viruses. Chase down a copy of 'A Pathology of Computer Viruses' by David Ferbrache, Springer-Verlag, 1992. If you can find one. (I notice Amazon has one used copy available for $240.)
Whether or not you are altruistic or not, I don't care, because I believe there are people who have less than they deserve and that society is obligated to help them out.
You really should have trimmed your comment down to just the above, so people wouldn't have to waste so much time reading all of it.
it is the only way to allow art to embrace technology
Wow. What a bold claim.
I donated a tiny amount of money to the EFF using PayPal last week.
I did it hoping that their overhead cost for accepting and acknowledging the donation would exceed the amount I gave.
Next, I am going to see if they accept an even smaller amount through PayPal.
I encourage others who find the EFF annoying to do the same.
While it was clear that the socialist nations during the Cold War didn't have as good quality of life as the first world nations, people there lived much better than in most capitalist third-world nations.
Indeed. Under socialism, most people are sentenced to live in a permanent lower-middle-class existence. There's no economic reward for striving to do better, so they just exist.
However, some people won't settle for living a small petty life in a dusty suburb or housing project. They'd be boxed in or, worse, isolated and ostracized under a socialist regime.
What you fail to recognize is that this proposal means you'd not be allowed to 'close the source' on any software projects.
'The Freedom Software Committee' would send out an 'enforcer squadron' to your basement if you tried to release binaries without source. Their public domain rubber truncheons would swing forth with righteousness, and you'd find yourself in the back of a dark van headed to who-knows-where to toil for the rest of your life on embedded firmware, in 4-bit assembly language, for the touch panel controller of a children's play-robot.
There's no way the kind of thing being proposed could be carried out in 'sweet niceness.' Force would be needed, and a very different sort of people would be attracted to the project.
Boies is just a lawyer, which is an exotic varity of whore. He also tried to help Algore steal the election in Florida.
Mylar punched 'paper' tape rulez.
I have some shellac recordings, 78 RPM, some of which date from the 1910's. Too bad they don't make CDs out of shellac. heh
I wasn't 'wrong.' I was contributing to topic drift with a comment about how Republicans depend on a membership base who make small contributions, whereas the Democrats get their money from meddlesome rich liberals.
It was 'changing the subject to something more interesting' and you raised the off-topic flag.
If I'm 'bitter' about anything, it's that NPR can take the McDonalds wealth and use it to attack everything that allowed the billionare to accumulate it, while assauging his ditzy wife that she's doing a 'wonderful thing.'
I wouldn't lay odds that the OS for these new boxes will be a linear evolution from Solaris x86. That would be such a pitiful way of going about the software design. Sun already has a 64-bit true version of Solaris they can port over to a new Opteron box. Solaris x86 is and has always been about running Solaris on 'IBM Compatible' PeeCee boxes. A Sun design that uses an Opteron processor is not (at least we can HOPE it is not) a warmed-over PeeCee design. Sun has the staff to do so much better than that, and why would they need any x86 legacy crap?
Sun will have three ports of Solaris in the end. Solaris/sparc, Solaris/Opteron, and Solaris/junk-intel.
I'm sure a lot of us have headless x86 boxes like you describe shoved off in a corner that work as you say.
But that's not a statistical model of reliability, thats an anecdotal case. PC systems, for one example, almost without exception have shit power supplies. If you've never been inside a Sun box, you probably just don't understand.
I'm hoping, and I'm sure a lot of people are hoping, that Sun's x86 boxes will be so different (and so much better) than a clone x86 design that nothing Microsoft sells will run on it at all. Boo hoo. It doesn't pass the 'flight simulator' test.
SGI is an example of a company that nudged their way into x86 hardware without differentiating themselves, or coming out with a design with any distinct advantages. Look what it did to them.
I like Mozilla a lot better than IE as well.
But if the best you can offer as a reason to select Mozilla over IE is pop-up blocking, Mozilla may be in trouble. Microsoft could put that feature into a service pack and get their whole market back.
I don't agree that pop-up blocking is the whole advantage of running Mozilla as opposed to IE, and I think you make a mistake by emphasizing it too much. Though it may be true that that's the only reason a lot of people switch... which is not good.
These distinctions ... seperate it from the Opteron environment which will have horizonal vendor support - you'll be able to mix and match hardware and software as you see fit.
Are you certain that Sun deciding to design in Opteron processors means they're adopting an x86 architecture whole-cloth? I wouldn't think they'd be that interested in a legacy design. They can drop Opteron into their own architecture and run with it. Share the foundry costs for the chip with cloners and low-end vendors like Dell, but use their engineering expertise to make it a real box. Sun isn't known as a screwdriver shop. Dell sure is.
Wow.
And Dell orders the UltraSparc processor for said machines from whom?
My point is, you're talking about one low-end Sun box in a market segment where Sun doesn't even consider it worth their time to design the box.
Somewhat hard to tell, unless you look inside, because Sun controls Solaris and Solaris controls you.
I just checked, and yes, NetBSD/sparc64 is supported on a lot of the architectures that you're talking about. (I had to check because I don't run any of that new 'icky' Sun hardware with PCI and IDE drives- my newest stuff is Ultra 1 boxes I got at auction for $12.50 each- still not a bad price to get an entry into 64 bit Unix...)
So where's this deep-dark-hidden stuff that you're fretting about? Download the NetBSD kernal source and dig around some.
Also, I doubt if the fact that Sun designs an x86 processor into one of their systems, that it means they're dragging in all the croft and architectural compromises that Dell does. Sun's box doesn't have to run NT or anything at all Microsoft to be successful. Dell's boxes almost certainly must.
Heck, I don't think a Sun 386i box, from back when Sun made their first try at selling an x86 box back in the early 90's, will run DOS or Windows or anything. It was a Unix box designed to run Sun's Unix software.
I don't know for sure, though, as I'm not lucky enough to have a Sun 386i box in my collection of Sun hardware.
So are you going to get up on a soap box and say 'My company is using Linux on the desktop on about 40% of our machines. Oh, and we're going out of business.'
Maybe you'll want to wait on calling that a Linux success story of any kind...
though many have learned to avoid these steps to avoid the costs of upgrades to software and hardware
By running Slackware 4.0??
OS/2??
Certainly not by running Windows or a bloat freenix desktop.
Nothing you say about George W. Bush detracts from the fact that Algore is a hereditary politician, and not a very bright one at that.
I look forward (or not) to the day when there is trojan code out there that drills holes in the memory map of flash drives through repetetive writes.
I'm sure there will be people tuning the code to do the maximum damage. How tightly spaced do burned out locations need to be on a flash drive before it renders big chunks of the drive useless?
So you're chosing to call the rigid vendor lock-in with Apple's iTunes site a postive feature, in this era of a volatile and growing market for online music?
Oh.
I ride mountain bikes and BMX bikes with my iPod turned on,
I thought it was illegal to ride a bike wearing headphones with the sound turned up to block out traffic noise, people shouting 'look out' and what-not.
If it's not illegal, it's still stupid and dangerous.