Just look at the title of the article linked in this story - "A Call to Arms - A Proposal for Open-Source Benchmarks". WTF? Why is this a call to arms?
Because most of the section names in the article, "A Call To Arms" included, are the names of episodes of Babylon 5.
Ah, crap. I don't know what I was thinking. Sid Vicious played bass. Shoot me or something.
That's OK, I don't want to shoot you.
I want to shoot the goddamn moderator who marked your first post as "Informative"!! ARGH!! Christ, moderators, if you don't have a fucking clue about a subject, don't slap an "Informative" label on every comment that says something! If you don't know if it's correct or not, then you don't know if it's informative!
Hell, the only movie I can think of offhand that has a really cool ending is Star Wars. Even after 16 years of avoiding the film, when I saw it, I was suprised.
Really?? Did you see some alternate director's cut of Star Wars where the corny hero didn't prevail against the odds and miraculously destroy the Death Star mere seconds before it came into firing range of the rebel base? 'Cos that's what happened at the end of the version of Star Wars that I saw, and I wasn't surprised a bit.
Damn it galls me to post a "me too!" comment, but, well, me too! I bought an nVidia based card (Diamond Viper 770 w/ TNT2) a while back, not solely because of nVidia's apparent stance towards Linux, but that was a definite influence. Now.. well.. I'm not in the market for a new card now, but one day I will be. If nVidia's stance is the same then as it is now, I can guarantee that they won't be considered when I decide what to buy.
The entire point of it is that it is for multiplayer over the internet. And nobody is going to be Darth Maul because that will almost certainly be a reserved name.
But how many people will be variations on "D4r+h M4u1" ?:-)
..so how many people, who have absolute no need for a Cyber Patrol blocklist decoder (and indeed, have never even seen a machine which was running Cyber Patrol) just rushed over to the Swedish server in question and downloaded cphack.exe ? Just so they could make the download log bigger?
Labeling/rating whatever is basically stamping something so someone who wants to censor it can. It's not censorship. It enables censorship, but it is not censorship. In this country anyone is free to go buy music as long as someone is willing to sell it. Someone else does the censorship.
I'm not from the USA, so don't kill me if I'm wrong here: but isn't it against your constitution for the goverment to censor? If so, is it not an end run around the constitution to have government enforced labelling in the full knowledge that many private companies (e.g. Walmart) will censor the music with "bad" labels?
Hmm, I followed that link to the Ain't It Cool News article about Jeff Garner. Now I personally have no interest in the subject, but I must say one thing:
Damn, the comments are funny!!
Check this shit out! These guys flame and whine and bitch and swear so much, they make Slashdot look a garden party! Sorry guys, the AICN trolls are way better than any Slashdot trolls!
Damn, which $3-crack-smoking moderator called that flamebait? I've been one of Terry Pratchett's biggest fans for many many years, and I pretty much agree with tacpprm's post, which was fair criticism, not flamebait, even if it did include the word "shite". Ever since about 10 books into the Discworld series, he's fallen into a complete rut of "write a book about Rincewind, write a book about the Watch, write a book about the witches". Since The Truth is the 25th Discworld book, that makes 5 repetitions so far.
As an aside, what's with that ass-ugly cover? Don't you get Josh Kirby covers on your Pratchett books in America??
If they were using a real address, it takes very little effort to block it from the router side.
But they're not using a real address. They're using lots of real addresses.
At least this is how I understand it:
The attacks are distributed, that is, they are being launched from a large number of cracked boxes around the net.
So they're probably not spoofed - the attacker doesn't really care if they get traced back to any given source, because he's not associated with the source.
It takes very little effort to block traffic from one source. But to block all of them would be a massive job.
The only weakness, as I see it, of this type of attack is that each box you try to crack to get launch hosts carries the possibility of you being traced. Sure you might crack a hundred unsecured boxes for every clueful admin you piss off with your portscanning, but it only takes one clueful admin to nail you.
All that said, I freely admit that I'm talking out of my arse. I'd love it if someone could point to a report with more info on what it actually happening. How is service being denied? Is it a massive overload of HTTP requests or a "traditional" DoS like a pingflood? Are the attackers spoofing? Is it a script-kiddie tool being spectacularly well applied or are we talking real skill?
OK, I know the only thing I've said about the Amiga in recent years has been the "it's dead, dead, DEAD!" of an ex-loyalist. But reading about these Transmeta chips, it occurred to me that it really is a damn shame that nobody's trying to make an Amiga with them.
I mean, think about it. What really ruined the Amiga was development of the 680x0 line ceasing. It hit the point where a whole new CPU family was needed, PowerPC was chosen, but it all fell apart because there was no C= anymore, and all the peripheral companies like Phase5 were competing to see who could produce the most vapourware. Rewriting the OS was a job that nobody was really up for, nor even writing an emulator. So all we got were hugely expensive PPC addon cards with libraries for running routines on them while the 680x0 ran the main system.
Imagine, though. If a Transmeta chip can code-morph x86 code and perform like a 500MHz P3, surely with a rewrite of the software layer, it could code-morph 680x0 code and perform like a (some hundreds of MHz) 68060? Just because the physical 680x0 architecture petered out at 50MHz doesn't mean the logical architecture has to die there!
You could make a new Amiga without even having to rewrite any software.;-) Retargetable graphics was a mostly solved problem towards the end of the Amiga's life (I had a CyberVision3D and it worked fine), so all you need is a modern-specced box with a Transmeta CPU and.. well, there you go.
Sorry, the X Movie is already in shooting and it's not Glenn Danzig as Wolverine. Hugh Jackman (I've never heard of him either) is playing Logan.
I don't expect anyone outside of Australia is likely to have heard of him! He's done a couple of movies here, seems quite a decent actor. Hopefully X-fans will enjoy his Logan.
torpor wrote: If you ask me, the Gameboy platform is a hackers delight... I know I love mine, and the tools I've gotten from the Asian GB Hacker contingency definitely make life more interesting.
Herbmaster wrote: If you spend a majority of your time on a project waiting for it to compile rather than writing code, you either have a really slow processor or a really small project.
ajs replied: I just compiled GNOME from scratch, including glib, gtk+, ORBIt, all of the other support libraries, GIMP and a number of other applications. It took all morning and some of the afternoon. I have a six-month-old machine with 64MB of RAM. Would you care to re-think that statement?
And how many mornings and afternoons do you think it would take you to code GNOME from scratch? Sounds like you're backing up Herbmaster's comment, not undermining it.
Yes, this is probably off topic, but there are tons of religious linux themes possible: Atheix -- for the non-beleivers. Catholix -- the choice of the pope. Baptix -- for all the PWT south of the mason-dixon Islamix -- middle eastern distro. Buddhix -- what is the sound of one hand booting?
Actually, those are not Linux distributions - they are characters from Asterix The Gaul
Re:Why I will never be addicted to eBay
on
On eBay Addiction
·
· Score: 2
I think that eBay is a terrible place to buy anything that you can buy elsewhere. Like that digital camera. I guess there's a few reasons for this.
As someone else said, people will bid stupidly just because they don't want to lose. So you bid $50 for something that costs $100 in the shops, and you feel pretty good. Then someone outbids you. You get into a bidding war. Even when it goes over $100, it seems worth paying "that little bit extra" not to LOSE. Not me, of course, but I'm sure some people feel this way.:-)
Then there's flat-out ignorant buyers. Don't know what somethings costs in the shops, can't be bothered to comparison shop, it's easier just to bid some bucks on eBay.
Then there was the interesting comment someone made about high-priced localities. I bought a Diamond Viper 770 TNT2 card on eBay for more than what it costs in the shops. The American shops, that is. But all the places I found that had lower prices wouldn't ship internationally (I live in Australia). The eBay seller was happy to. I paid twenty bucks less than any price I could find here in Sydney. Maybe similar things were going on with those digital cameras?
But for old stuff, weird stuff, I love eBay. I'm mostly interested in music (that TNT2 card was the only computer related thing I ever bought there). I can find so many old singles, bootlegs, LPs, stuff that simply is not to be found in record shops. Unfortunately there's a lot of stupid bidding goes on. A lot of the time I get outbid so fiercely I just have to think "what is wrong with this idiot, that they would pay so much?!". But maybe it's the last item they need to finish collecting someone's entire discography? All you can do is shrug and assume that sometime someone else will be auctioning the same thing some time soon..
I've only ever sold a few things there.. records that while not bona-fide "rarities" or "collectibles", aren't things you can just go out and shop for. I've gotten good prices.. in the vicinity of $US20 for CDs. If I took these to a second-hand record shop, they'd give me $5 or $10 for them, and that's Australian dollars. So I'm happy.. the buyer is presumably happy.. and eBay are certainly happy.
I have nothing to add to this (excellent) message, except..
One of these ways is this: my boss is totally aware of who I am and where I'm coming from, and from day one I have arranged that I do not answer the telephone.
..to mention that as I was reading this very sentence, my phone rang.;-)
Sure, you can look at the assembly output, but then you can't use anything you gain from that viewing in another product. Doing so would leave you extremely legally vulnerable - you've been "tainted" by viewing their code.
Are you sure about this? I'm not talking about disassembling the Compaq compiler to see how it works, I'm talking about examining its output, the compiled object code..
That's why reverse-engineering is done with a clear-room implementation. However, even that would be illegal with the license agreement.
I don't think we're reverse-engineering here. That, to my mind, would be disassembling the compiler to see, for instance, how it handles "a = ((b + c) * ++d) ^ (1/e);". I don't think writing that code, compiling it and looking at the output is reverse-engineering, and therefore wouldn't need a clean-room implementation.
Sigh. Unfortunately this method would also be against the license agreement. Remember, the license specifically forbids using the beta compiler for anything besides evaluation and testing.
How is downloading it, compiling some stuff, seeing that it is faster than what GCC can do, and looking at the generated assembly against the license. This is testing (compiling you code, seeing how fast it runs) and evaluating (having a look at the generated assembly), exactly what the license allows.
Saying you can't look at the assembly output of a compiler you're beta-testing is like saying, I dunno, like saying you can't look at a picture produced by a raytracer you're beta-testing!
Can't do it. The laws say that not only can't you have encryption, you can't even have any hooks that can be used for encryption.
So you have generic hooks. A hook to apply some plug-in to a mail message before it is sent. Your standard distribution contains plug-ins to pass your mail through a spell-checker, grammar-checker, whatever, and you leave those sneaky for'ners to come up with a GPG plug-in. Easy!
macmillin is a publisher that has a very good & innovative site. www.mcp.com offers the ability to maintian a personal library of books that they make freely available. also beta books that are not yet in stores are available as they are being written, giving the opportinity for reader feedback & info & advance looks at books on new technologies.
Macmillan's personal bookshelf blew me away! They have hundreds of their books available for browsing online, all you have to do is register and cop the occasional spam (which generally announces new books available for you to read). And of course, all it takes is a "Save As.." and you're browsing them offline too! I pulled up "Teach Yourself Perl In 21 Days" and "Teach Yourself CGI Programming In A Week" and voila! this was the result.
Slashdot Mirror
Just look at the title of the article linked in this story - "A Call to Arms - A Proposal for Open-Source Benchmarks". WTF? Why is this a call to arms?
Because most of the section names in the article, "A Call To Arms" included, are the names of episodes of Babylon 5.
(okay, out with the anecdotes now, everyone over 35 will now come out with the time they saw a VMS machine crash)
Hey, I'm only 26 and I've seen a VMS machine crash. Once. In the 5 years I've been programming them. I think that's a pretty good recommendation. ;-)
Linux has crashed on me twice in the 3 years I've been using it. Comparatively lame. ;-)
NT.. well, the last crash was our mailserver a few hours ago <sigh>
Ah, crap. I don't know what I was thinking. Sid Vicious played bass. Shoot me or something.
That's OK, I don't want to shoot you.
I want to shoot the goddamn moderator who marked your first post as "Informative"!! ARGH!! Christ, moderators, if you don't have a fucking clue about a subject, don't slap an "Informative" label on every comment that says something! If you don't know if it's correct or not, then you don't know if it's informative!
Hell, the only movie I can think of offhand that has a really cool ending is Star Wars. Even after 16 years of avoiding the film, when I saw it, I was suprised.
Really?? Did you see some alternate director's cut of Star Wars where the corny hero didn't prevail against the odds and miraculously destroy the Death Star mere seconds before it came into firing range of the rebel base? 'Cos that's what happened at the end of the version of Star Wars that I saw, and I wasn't surprised a bit.
Damn it galls me to post a "me too!" comment, but, well, me too! I bought an nVidia based card (Diamond Viper 770 w/ TNT2) a while back, not solely because of nVidia's apparent stance towards Linux, but that was a definite influence. Now.. well.. I'm not in the market for a new card now, but one day I will be. If nVidia's stance is the same then as it is now, I can guarantee that they won't be considered when I decide what to buy.
The entire point of it is that it is for multiplayer over the internet. And nobody is going to be Darth Maul because that will almost certainly be a reserved name.
But how many people will be variations on "D4r+h M4u1" ? :-)
..so how many people, who have absolute no need for a Cyber Patrol blocklist decoder (and indeed, have never even seen a machine which was running Cyber Patrol) just rushed over to the Swedish server in question and downloaded cphack.exe ? Just so they could make the download log bigger?
I sure did! Blow me, Mattel!
(so, what's Cyber Patrol again?)
You need a distribution that uses glibc 2.1 which includes RedHat 6.0, Slackware 7.0 and the latest Debian (I think - not 100% sure).
The reasons for glibc2.0 not being supported are here.
Here is a working link to that message.
Take a look at the hall of fame, and see what's popular by this metric.
Aha, the stories with the worst troll invasions! Hmm, I don't think that's quite the point you were trying to make.. ;-)
Labeling/rating whatever is basically stamping something so someone who wants to censor it can. It's not censorship. It enables censorship, but it is not censorship. In this country anyone is free to go buy music as long as someone is willing to sell it. Someone else does the censorship.
I'm not from the USA, so don't kill me if I'm wrong here: but isn't it against your constitution for the goverment to censor? If so, is it not an end run around the constitution to have government enforced labelling in the full knowledge that many private companies (e.g. Walmart) will censor the music with "bad" labels?
Hmm, I followed that link to the Ain't It Cool News article about Jeff Garner. Now I personally have no interest in the subject, but I must say one thing:
Damn, the comments are funny!!
Check this shit out! These guys flame and whine and bitch and swear so much, they make Slashdot look a garden party! Sorry guys, the AICN trolls are way better than any Slashdot trolls!
Copyleft is an application of Copyright to subvert copyright itself.
Could this be an "Open"Patent...an application of the patent system intended to subvert the patent?
A Freetent! (opposite of pay-tent)
Damn, which $3-crack-smoking moderator called that flamebait? I've been one of Terry Pratchett's biggest fans for many many years, and I pretty much agree with tacpprm's post, which was fair criticism, not flamebait, even if it did include the word "shite". Ever since about 10 books into the Discworld series, he's fallen into a complete rut of "write a book about Rincewind, write a book about the Watch, write a book about the witches". Since The Truth is the 25th Discworld book, that makes 5 repetitions so far.
As an aside, what's with that ass-ugly cover? Don't you get Josh Kirby covers on your Pratchett books in America??
If they were using a real address, it takes very little effort to block it from the router side.
But they're not using a real address. They're using lots of real addresses.
At least this is how I understand it:
The only weakness, as I see it, of this type of attack is that each box you try to crack to get launch hosts carries the possibility of you being traced. Sure you might crack a hundred unsecured boxes for every clueful admin you piss off with your portscanning, but it only takes one clueful admin to nail you.
All that said, I freely admit that I'm talking out of my arse. I'd love it if someone could point to a report with more info on what it actually happening. How is service being denied? Is it a massive overload of HTTP requests or a "traditional" DoS like a pingflood? Are the attackers spoofing? Is it a script-kiddie tool being spectacularly well applied or are we talking real skill?
OK, I know the only thing I've said about the Amiga in recent years has been the "it's dead, dead, DEAD!" of an ex-loyalist. But reading about these Transmeta chips, it occurred to me that it really is a damn shame that nobody's trying to make an Amiga with them.
I mean, think about it. What really ruined the Amiga was development of the 680x0 line ceasing. It hit the point where a whole new CPU family was needed, PowerPC was chosen, but it all fell apart because there was no C= anymore, and all the peripheral companies like Phase5 were competing to see who could produce the most vapourware. Rewriting the OS was a job that nobody was really up for, nor even writing an emulator. So all we got were hugely expensive PPC addon cards with libraries for running routines on them while the 680x0 ran the main system.
Imagine, though. If a Transmeta chip can code-morph x86 code and perform like a 500MHz P3, surely with a rewrite of the software layer, it could code-morph 680x0 code and perform like a (some hundreds of MHz) 68060? Just because the physical 680x0 architecture petered out at 50MHz doesn't mean the logical architecture has to die there!
You could make a new Amiga without even having to rewrite any software. ;-) Retargetable graphics was a mostly solved problem towards the end of the Amiga's life (I had a CyberVision3D and it worked fine), so all you need is a modern-specced box with a Transmeta CPU and.. well, there you go.
'Course it'll never happen.
Sorry, the X Movie is already in shooting and it's not Glenn Danzig as Wolverine. Hugh Jackman (I've never heard of him either) is playing Logan.
I don't expect anyone outside of Australia is likely to have heard of him! He's done a couple of movies here, seems quite a decent actor. Hopefully X-fans will enjoy his Logan.
torpor wrote:
If you ask me, the Gameboy platform is a hackers delight... I know I love mine, and the tools I've gotten from the Asian GB Hacker contingency definitely make life more interesting.
Is there a demoscene for the Gameboy?
Herbmaster wrote:
If you spend a majority of your time on a project waiting for it to compile rather than writing code, you either have a really slow processor or a really small project.
ajs replied:
I just compiled GNOME from scratch, including glib, gtk+, ORBIt, all of the other support libraries, GIMP and a number of other applications. It took all morning and some of the afternoon. I have a six-month-old machine with 64MB of RAM. Would you care to re-think that statement?
And how many mornings and afternoons do you think it would take you to code GNOME from scratch? Sounds like you're backing up Herbmaster's comment, not undermining it.
Yes, this is probably off topic, but there are tons of religious linux themes possible:
Atheix -- for the non-beleivers.
Catholix -- the choice of the pope.
Baptix -- for all the PWT south of the mason-dixon
Islamix -- middle eastern distro.
Buddhix -- what is the sound of one hand booting?
Actually, those are not Linux distributions - they are characters from Asterix The Gaul
I think that eBay is a terrible place to buy anything that you can buy elsewhere. Like that digital camera. I guess there's a few reasons for this.
As someone else said, people will bid stupidly just because they don't want to lose. So you bid $50 for something that costs $100 in the shops, and you feel pretty good. Then someone outbids you. You get into a bidding war. Even when it goes over $100, it seems worth paying "that little bit extra" not to LOSE. Not me, of course, but I'm sure some people feel this way. :-)
Then there's flat-out ignorant buyers. Don't know what somethings costs in the shops, can't be bothered to comparison shop, it's easier just to bid some bucks on eBay.
Then there was the interesting comment someone made about high-priced localities. I bought a Diamond Viper 770 TNT2 card on eBay for more than what it costs in the shops. The American shops, that is. But all the places I found that had lower prices wouldn't ship internationally (I live in Australia). The eBay seller was happy to. I paid twenty bucks less than any price I could find here in Sydney. Maybe similar things were going on with those digital cameras?
But for old stuff, weird stuff, I love eBay. I'm mostly interested in music (that TNT2 card was the only computer related thing I ever bought there). I can find so many old singles, bootlegs, LPs, stuff that simply is not to be found in record shops. Unfortunately there's a lot of stupid bidding goes on. A lot of the time I get outbid so fiercely I just have to think "what is wrong with this idiot, that they would pay so much?!". But maybe it's the last item they need to finish collecting someone's entire discography? All you can do is shrug and assume that sometime someone else will be auctioning the same thing some time soon..
I've only ever sold a few things there.. records that while not bona-fide "rarities" or "collectibles", aren't things you can just go out and shop for. I've gotten good prices.. in the vicinity of $US20 for CDs. If I took these to a second-hand record shop, they'd give me $5 or $10 for them, and that's Australian dollars. So I'm happy.. the buyer is presumably happy.. and eBay are certainly happy.
I have nothing to add to this (excellent) message, except..
One of these ways is this: my boss is totally aware of who I am and where I'm coming from, and from day one I have arranged that I do not answer the telephone.
..to mention that as I was reading this very sentence, my phone rang. ;-)
Sure, you can look at the assembly output, but then you can't use anything you gain from that viewing in another product. Doing so would leave you extremely legally vulnerable - you've been "tainted" by viewing their code.
Are you sure about this? I'm not talking about disassembling the Compaq compiler to see how it works, I'm talking about examining its output, the compiled object code..
That's why reverse-engineering is done with a clear-room implementation. However, even that would be illegal with the license agreement.
I don't think we're reverse-engineering here. That, to my mind, would be disassembling the compiler to see, for instance, how it handles "a = ((b + c) * ++d) ^ (1/e);". I don't think writing that code, compiling it and looking at the output is reverse-engineering, and therefore wouldn't need a clean-room implementation.
Anyone else agree or disagree?
Sigh. Unfortunately this method would also be against the license agreement. Remember, the license specifically forbids using the beta compiler for anything besides evaluation and testing.
How is downloading it, compiling some stuff, seeing that it is faster than what GCC can do, and looking at the generated assembly against the license. This is testing (compiling you code, seeing how fast it runs) and evaluating (having a look at the generated assembly), exactly what the license allows.
Saying you can't look at the assembly output of a compiler you're beta-testing is like saying, I dunno, like saying you can't look at a picture produced by a raytracer you're beta-testing!
Can't do it. The laws say that not only can't you have encryption, you can't even have any hooks that can be used for encryption.
So you have generic hooks. A hook to apply some plug-in to a mail message before it is sent. Your standard distribution contains plug-ins to pass your mail through a spell-checker, grammar-checker, whatever, and you leave those sneaky for'ners to come up with a GPG plug-in. Easy!
macmillin is a publisher that has a very good & innovative site. www.mcp.com offers the ability to maintian a personal library of books that they make freely available. also beta books that are not yet in stores are available as they are being written, giving the opportinity for reader feedback & info & advance looks at books on new technologies.
Macmillan's personal bookshelf blew me away! They have hundreds of their books available for browsing online, all you have to do is register and cop the occasional spam (which generally announces new books available for you to read). And of course, all it takes is a "Save As.." and you're browsing them offline too! I pulled up "Teach Yourself Perl In 21 Days" and "Teach Yourself CGI Programming In A Week" and voila! this was the result.