Gateway2k used to make this great keyboard called the AnyKey (I'm typing on one right now). I can remap keys to my heart's content, adjust the repeat rate, and even assign macros to keys on a hardware level (works in any application, with no drivers!)
Unfortunately, this was the ULTIMATE case of a newbie killer. The crazy people would accidentally hit "Remap" or "Program macro" and start typing like normal. Pretty soon every key on the keyboard would be remapped to something else, or the keyboard would stop functioning. One sysadmin even built a box to put over the dreaded program keys to keep the dumb users from hitting them. Pretty soon, Gateway succumbed to popular demand and started producing dumb keyboards again. They haven't sold AnyKeys for years. But I'll stick with this thing as long as it lasts! It's great!
On the other hand, this could be because enthusiasm about DoSing it seems to have decreased. Now hopefully it will stay up long enough for intelligent attacks to have a chance.
I might have to change my opinion about the whole thing. It might actually have been a not-so-bad thing for MS to put this server up. If they can use this to find better ways to code NT and to choose some defaults that keep the system more stable, more power to them.
One of the big deals about the LinuxPPC system was that it was really secure by default. I think MS is trying to get Win2k more secure on initial install (to get any kind of security out of NT4, you have to change a bunch of config settings) - at least that was one of their selling points for Win2k. As far as that goes, this is probably the best thing they could have done. I'm sure Win2k won't be as stable as Linux, but this is a good step in the right direction.
Then again, it would be nice to be able to like the company that you are making rich. I know that I really have a lot of problems with Microsoft as a company. But I do want their products to improve, since I'll have to live and work with them, like them or not.
Yep. I believe Darwin wrote something along the lines of "praise God for His great intelligence in creating such a wonderful means for the survival of His creations."
Well, looks like somebody on the other side of the issue ought to speak up.
I admit that it is pretty tough to draw the line between what should/shouldn't be taught at schools. What do you do when x% of the people in your school district believe in God and Creation, and get offended when Evolution is taught at school, y% don't care, and z% demand that it be taught? The question is not whether morals/religious beliefs are taught at school, but WHOSE morals are taught--the athiest's morals or the believer's morals. When a theory is not accepted by everyone, should it be taught?
I believe in Evolution. There is far too much evidence to deny it. However, I do not believe that man evolved from the apes. (They evolved from dolphins. Just kidding.) There is plenty of evidence that species change over time, diversify, etc. Humans, too. But the evidence that man evolved from apes is fairly sparse, and a lot of it depends on unconfirmed assumptions (that the fossilized skull came from the same person as the hip bone found nearby, etc.). And nobody can prove that God didn't create man, who then spread over the earth and killed a bunch of ugly hairless apes. In other words, there is a point at which the argument is not complete. It depends on whether you believe in God.
I have no problem with schools teaching evolution, to tell you the truth. Evolution, as a theory for the origin of the species, is fine and I think it is true.
I take some issue with teaching that mankind evolved from apes. It isn't outlandish to teach about it, in my opinion. Every teacher needs a certain amount of leeway in teaching their own opinions. But to present it as absolute truth, to not allow dissenting opinions, and, as sometimes happens, to ridicule those who don't believe it, is wrong.
The last thing I want to mention is something about the place for morals in our society. There is a small trend (my prediction is that it is short-term) to put religion back into school. I don't think it will work. What needs to be taught is not religion but morals: absolute truths that everyone can agree on. They are the things I learned in Sunday School, like "don't steal," "be good," "you are responsible for your own actions," "you are loved," and "your personal integrity is worth more than all the money in the world." Teaching this in school as much as possible hopefully won't offend anyone.
On the other hand, what happens when you tell a kid that everyone is just an animal? That human life is worth no more than the life of that cow that died to make that hamburger? There will be a little bit of confusion, and for most people it will be resolved ok, but some might just come to the conclusion that "if it is ok to kill the cow and take meat from it when I wanted to, what is wrong with killing/stealing from another person?"
No. It seems that the webserver is connected to a serial port on a DEC machine, which listens on a port and routes all traffic going to that port to the webserver, and all traffic leaving the webserver back onto the net. So I think you are pinging the DEC machine, not the chip.
Yeah. You can have too much of a good thing. Yes, Hungarian notation should be used, but sparingly. Using m_ for member variables and g_ for globals helps keep me straight on the variables not declared within the procedure. A prefix of p is a must for pointers. Beyond that, though, you won't see a whole lot. I get a lot more done with variable names like "pName" than "lpszNm".
On the other hand, the fact that this is Windows 2000 (a relatively new operating system) means there might not be as many known exploits out there as there would be otherwise.
This is a big issue. It is really unfair for MS to put out a "special test version" of Windows and challenge everyone to crack it. It means nothing. Just assume that nobody gets in, because they have done their homework and fixed all of the NT4 holes. MS claims victory. Win2k gets released. Crackers install it on their home machines, look it over from the advantage of home court, and find the holes. Two weeks later, the OS that crackers couldn't crack is wide open, with scripts for the script kiddies on all the hot web sites. Just because you win when your opponent is fighting blind doesn't mean you are invincible. Just wait until you have to fight again on fair terms, and then you can say you are, well, not invincible, but at least "tough."
Of cource, even fighting blind, the guys working on it (I'm not one of them) seem to have done pretty darn well. I don't know what more to expect than periodic system crashes. With MS admins watching over the system, as soon as anything screwball happens, they are going to reboot, change the accounts, and remove the crack. A watched pot never boils, especially if you take it off the burner every time it starts to simmer.
On the other hand, the source code for the Linux box is out there. The guys setting up the contest, without going into specifics, have pretty much told everyone how the thing was set up: stock install, with apache added and Telnet enabled. This is a fair test of a system's security. It may go down. Maybe not. Who knows?
I'm not taking a position for or against MS or Linux. I think they both have good things to offer. I wouldn't put mission-critical stuff on an NT box, but it has a lot of good uses. I like Linux, too, but it isn't for everything, either. Heck, even Macs have strengths!:P
MS's challenge is pretty much worthless. (I hope they get torched, though!)
I have three XWindows servers installed on my computer: XFree86 (whoops, doesn't count, only works when I'm not running Windows), StarNet's X-Win32, and MI/X (free version) which I run when the other two aren't convenient.
I get best compatibility and features with XFree (duh) but when I need to multitask with Win apps, it doesn't always work.
StarNet puts out an excellent XWindows server at $200, with special academic licensing. It has some pretty nifty features, like automatic rsh login, various windowing models (my favorite just puts each app in its own windows-style window), and scrolling (if part of your app's window is offscreen and you move the mouse "off the edge of the screen," if moves the clipped portion of the window onto the screen, providing an excellent "virtual desktop" but on the app level, not on the desktop level).
I don't have the pay version, but a demo is available (requires registration with StarNet). The demo version that I have has two restrictions: 2 hour session time limit (logs out after 2 hours), and it won't let you log in if someone else on your subnet is using the demo version (so you might not want to share with other people on your network if you are selfish). This usually isn't a problem for me, since I use the program for academic work, not professional work. The demo restrictions may have been changed since I got my copy.
When someone else on my net is already using it (I wasn't selfish enough ) I load up MI/X and it works fine.
I'm an X user, not an X programmer. I think X is great. Its client/server architecture saved me a whole lot of blood, sweat, and tears last year. I wish Windows did the same. However, for what it's worth, here are the issues I have with X.
Connection speed. It's acceptable now. I can get work done over a 28.8 connection. But it would be great if the compression were internal to the architecture so that you didn't have to worry about compatibility and getting it installed on computers that you don't administer. And from what I hear other people saying about the protocol, there is some room for simplification.
Efficiency. The protocol needs to make better use of information already sent. Invalidate-areas would be great. Additional primitives to do basic stuff like BitBlt could help things along.
Common controls aka widgets. You shouldn't need a toolkit to draw the standard user interface. There is a lot to be said for a few simple controls built into the standard. (This might be a "layer" issue--do they go in the window manager, the toolkit, or the GUI?) I think widgets belong in the GUI so every programmer can depend on them being there. I've seen 10 different shapes of buttons, 3 major types of scroll bars, etc. etc. Make it standard, so the programmer doesn't have to worry about it, and the user understands what they see!
Window manager/utilities. Ok, so not technically part of the GUI. But there is a lot of room for improvement in the installation process of the window manager and the utilities.
Again, I'm not an expert, but I would love to see X++ (grin) take over the world.
But X, although slow over slow links, actually WORKS. Every once in a while, I have to connect to some Unix machines and run GUI apps over a 28.8 modem with an X server. I have to be pretty patient while the app loads, but once things are running, it is actually useable. It would be nice if it were faster, but it's not too bad as is.
Yeah. And configuring the Window manager is a pain the the rear. I LOVE the flexibility of Fvwm2, but it took me quite a bit of work to get it set up to my taste.
That was actually kindof a worthwhile read. Not in the sense of trying to track down names, but it was nice to see a few of my favorite IP addresses on the list.
I agree. I learned 8086 assembly while I was in 5th grade. I grew up with a PC/XT, and I learned about counting clock cycles, using registers, and basically how to milk my 4.77 Mhz for all they were worth. The first time I ever earned money for programming was when I wrote a TSR program for some guy... I've never regretted the time I spent in DEBUG.
Moving ahead 10 years, in one of my CS classes, the teacher was trying to explain why you can't return a pointer to a local variable. I was dumbfounded, thinking, "duh! It's on the stack, dummy!" But nobody else in the class except for the teacher had ever really done anything with assembly language, and they were pretty much clueless about what actually goes on behind the scenes. In another class, where part of the grade was the speed of the executable, again few people had used ASM, so it wasn't too hard to stay in the top 6 for most of the programs. Nobody else even considered how long it takes to divide, or how to organize the arrays (or use pointers) so that a multiply isn't needed on array access (or at least keep it to one multiply, not two or three).
On the other hand, the optimizing compilers are making this a confusing issue. Some tricks still work, but I am no longer sure of the fastest way to do things.
Nowadays, hardware is getting cheaper while programmer time is getting more and more scarce. Often, it seems that it is more important to make the code readable and logical than to make it fast and efficient. Or is that just an excuse...
With something this sensitive to shock, penny-sized is probably pretty close to as big as you get. Somebody else mentioned that bigger disks wobble more. Definitely a problem. I would guess that if you want bigger, it will have to be some kind of disk array, like a bunch of pennies laid out next to each other on the table. Maybe like a caddy system that holds 18 disks instead of 1, and then it would be big enough to not lose. And maybe even big enough to hold Windows 2008:)
I suppose I'll get flamed for this. And it it somewhat off topic (how do we get off on these subjects??). Oh well.
Sure, capitalism isn't perfect. And depending on your definition of "works" it may or may not work. (However, even those who are "just scraping by" in the United States do better than about 90% of the rest of the world.) But as long as most people are mostly honest and until everyone in the world can be depended on to be completely honest, nothing else is going to work nearly as well.
When society is perfect and everyone is honest, some "shared wealth" program would probably be the best way to go. Unfortunately, this probably won't happen anytime soon. And when it has been attempted in the past, generally a few dishonest people run off with the spoils.
When most people are fairly honest, capitalism generally works pretty well, and I haven't seen anything that works better.
When society is completely corrupt and dishonest, some domineering economic strategy is necessary to protect people from each other. That is when things get bad. I would venture to say that we are headed in this direction with more and more lawsuits, antitrust actions, etc.
Anyway, just my 2c. I don't claim to be an expert, but I'm thankful for what I have, and my discussions with people from foreign countries have reinforced this opinion.
Slashdot Mirror
Gateway2k used to make this great keyboard called the AnyKey (I'm typing on one right now). I can remap keys to my heart's content, adjust the repeat rate, and even assign macros to keys on a hardware level (works in any application, with no drivers!)
Unfortunately, this was the ULTIMATE case of a newbie killer. The crazy people would accidentally hit "Remap" or "Program macro" and start typing like normal. Pretty soon every key on the keyboard would be remapped to something else, or the keyboard would stop functioning. One sysadmin even built a box to put over the dreaded program keys to keep the dumb users from hitting them. Pretty soon, Gateway succumbed to popular demand and started producing dumb keyboards again. They haven't sold AnyKeys for years. But I'll stick with this thing as long as it lasts! It's great!
On the other hand, this could be because enthusiasm about DoSing it seems to have decreased. Now hopefully it will stay up long enough for intelligent attacks to have a chance.
I might have to change my opinion about the whole thing. It might actually have been a not-so-bad thing for MS to put this server up. If they can use this to find better ways to code NT and to choose some defaults that keep the system more stable, more power to them.
One of the big deals about the LinuxPPC system was that it was really secure by default. I think MS is trying to get Win2k more secure on initial install (to get any kind of security out of NT4, you have to change a bunch of config settings) - at least that was one of their selling points for Win2k. As far as that goes, this is probably the best thing they could have done. I'm sure Win2k won't be as stable as Linux, but this is a good step in the right direction.
Then again, it would be nice to be able to like the company that you are making rich. I know that I really have a lot of problems with Microsoft as a company. But I do want their products to improve, since I'll have to live and work with them, like them or not.
if(crash==crack){
I.eat(My.shorts);
Win2k = cracked;
}
Yep. I believe Darwin wrote something along the lines of "praise God for His great intelligence in creating such a wonderful means for the survival of His creations."
Hmm, I don't see why one should conclude that it's ok to kill people from that it's ok to kill cows.
Good for you. Unfortunately, not everyone here in the US has your logical abilities.
Well, looks like somebody on the other side of the issue ought to speak up.
I admit that it is pretty tough to draw the line between what should/shouldn't be taught at schools. What do you do when x% of the people in your school district believe in God and Creation, and get offended when Evolution is taught at school, y% don't care, and z% demand that it be taught? The question is not whether morals/religious beliefs are taught at school, but WHOSE morals are taught--the athiest's morals or the believer's morals. When a theory is not accepted by everyone, should it be taught?
I believe in Evolution. There is far too much evidence to deny it. However, I do not believe that man evolved from the apes. (They evolved from dolphins. Just kidding.) There is plenty of evidence that species change over time, diversify, etc. Humans, too. But the evidence that man evolved from apes is fairly sparse, and a lot of it depends on unconfirmed assumptions (that the fossilized skull came from the same person as the hip bone found nearby, etc.). And nobody can prove that God didn't create man, who then spread over the earth and killed a bunch of ugly hairless apes. In other words, there is a point at which the argument is not complete. It depends on whether you believe in God.
I have no problem with schools teaching evolution, to tell you the truth. Evolution, as a theory for the origin of the species, is fine and I think it is true.
I take some issue with teaching that mankind evolved from apes. It isn't outlandish to teach about it, in my opinion. Every teacher needs a certain amount of leeway in teaching their own opinions. But to present it as absolute truth, to not allow dissenting opinions, and, as sometimes happens, to ridicule those who don't believe it, is wrong.
The last thing I want to mention is something about the place for morals in our society. There is a small trend (my prediction is that it is short-term) to put religion back into school. I don't think it will work. What needs to be taught is not religion but morals: absolute truths that everyone can agree on. They are the things I learned in Sunday School, like "don't steal," "be good," "you are responsible for your own actions," "you are loved," and "your personal integrity is worth more than all the money in the world." Teaching this in school as much as possible hopefully won't offend anyone.
On the other hand, what happens when you tell a kid that everyone is just an animal? That human life is worth no more than the life of that cow that died to make that hamburger? There will be a little bit of confusion, and for most people it will be resolved ok, but some might just come to the conclusion that "if it is ok to kill the cow and take meat from it when I wanted to, what is wrong with killing/stealing from another person?"
Anyway, FWIW my 2c. Hope it made sense.
No. It seems that the webserver is connected to a serial port on a DEC machine, which listens on a port and routes all traffic going to that port to the webserver, and all traffic leaving the webserver back onto the net. So I think you are pinging the DEC machine, not the chip.
Yeah. You can have too much of a good thing. Yes, Hungarian notation should be used, but sparingly. Using m_ for member variables and g_ for globals helps keep me straight on the variables not declared within the procedure. A prefix of p is a must for pointers. Beyond that, though, you won't see a whole lot. I get a lot more done with variable names like "pName" than "lpszNm".
An act of God beat both hackers and beta testers to the punch this week when lightning crashed a Microsoft test site. - CNET News
Cool. God wins the contest! The greatest hacker of them all. Nobody ever taught me about this trick in kiddie hacker school.
Unless this is considered a DoS attack. Whoops. Guess He's disqualified.
More accurately, that IIS uses multiple processors better than Apache.
On the other hand, the fact that this is Windows 2000 (a relatively new operating system) means there might not be as many known exploits out there as there would be otherwise.
:P
This is a big issue. It is really unfair for MS to put out a "special test version" of Windows and challenge everyone to crack it. It means nothing. Just assume that nobody gets in, because they have done their homework and fixed all of the NT4 holes. MS claims victory. Win2k gets released. Crackers install it on their home machines, look it over from the advantage of home court, and find the holes. Two weeks later, the OS that crackers couldn't crack is wide open, with scripts for the script kiddies on all the hot web sites. Just because you win when your opponent is fighting blind doesn't mean you are invincible. Just wait until you have to fight again on fair terms, and then you can say you are, well, not invincible, but at least "tough."
Of cource, even fighting blind, the guys working on it (I'm not one of them) seem to have done pretty darn well. I don't know what more to expect than periodic system crashes. With MS admins watching over the system, as soon as anything screwball happens, they are going to reboot, change the accounts, and remove the crack. A watched pot never boils, especially if you take it off the burner every time it starts to simmer.
On the other hand, the source code for the Linux box is out there. The guys setting up the contest, without going into specifics, have pretty much told everyone how the thing was set up: stock install, with apache added and Telnet enabled. This is a fair test of a system's security. It may go down. Maybe not. Who knows?
I'm not taking a position for or against MS or Linux. I think they both have good things to offer. I wouldn't put mission-critical stuff on an NT box, but it has a lot of good uses. I like Linux, too, but it isn't for everything, either. Heck, even Macs have strengths!
MS's challenge is pretty much worthless. (I hope they get torched, though!)
I have three XWindows servers installed on my computer: XFree86 (whoops, doesn't count, only works when I'm not running Windows), StarNet's X-Win32, and MI/X (free version) which I run when the other two aren't convenient.
I get best compatibility and features with XFree (duh) but when I need to multitask with Win apps, it doesn't always work.
StarNet puts out an excellent XWindows server at $200, with special academic licensing. It has some pretty nifty features, like automatic rsh login, various windowing models (my favorite just puts each app in its own windows-style window), and scrolling (if part of your app's window is offscreen and you move the mouse "off the edge of the screen," if moves the clipped portion of the window onto the screen, providing an excellent "virtual desktop" but on the app level, not on the desktop level).
I don't have the pay version, but a demo is available (requires registration with StarNet). The demo version that I have has two restrictions: 2 hour session time limit (logs out after 2 hours), and it won't let you log in if someone else on your subnet is using the demo version (so you might not want to share with other people on your network if you are selfish). This usually isn't a problem for me, since I use the program for academic work, not professional work. The demo restrictions may have been changed since I got my copy.
When someone else on my net is already using it (I wasn't selfish enough ) I load up MI/X and it works fine.
- Connection speed. It's acceptable now. I can get work done over a 28.8 connection. But it would be great if the compression were internal to the architecture so that you didn't have to worry about compatibility and getting it installed on computers that you don't administer. And from what I hear other people saying about the protocol, there is some room for simplification.
- Efficiency. The protocol needs to make better use of information already sent. Invalidate-areas would be great. Additional primitives to do basic stuff like BitBlt could help things along.
- Common controls aka widgets. You shouldn't need a toolkit to draw the standard user interface. There is a lot to be said for a few simple controls built into the standard. (This might be a "layer" issue--do they go in the window manager, the toolkit, or the GUI?) I think widgets belong in the GUI so every programmer can depend on them being there. I've seen 10 different shapes of buttons, 3 major types of scroll bars, etc. etc. Make it standard, so the programmer doesn't have to worry about it, and the user understands what they see!
- Window manager/utilities. Ok, so not technically part of the GUI. But there is a lot of room for improvement in the installation process of the window manager and the utilities.
Again, I'm not an expert, but I would love to see X++ (grin) take over the world.I haven't used PCAnywhere.
But X, although slow over slow links, actually WORKS. Every once in a while, I have to connect to some Unix machines and run GUI apps over a 28.8 modem with an X server. I have to be pretty patient while the app loads, but once things are running, it is actually useable. It would be nice if it were faster, but it's not too bad as is.
Yeah. And configuring the Window manager is a pain the the rear. I LOVE the flexibility of Fvwm2, but it took me quite a bit of work to get it set up to my taste.
That was actually kindof a worthwhile read. Not in the sense of trying to track down names, but it was nice to see a few of my favorite IP addresses on the list.
I agree. I learned 8086 assembly while I was in 5th grade. I grew up with a PC/XT, and I learned about counting clock cycles, using registers, and basically how to milk my 4.77 Mhz for all they were worth. The first time I ever earned money for programming was when I wrote a TSR program for some guy... I've never regretted the time I spent in DEBUG.
Moving ahead 10 years, in one of my CS classes, the teacher was trying to explain why you can't return a pointer to a local variable. I was dumbfounded, thinking, "duh! It's on the stack, dummy!" But nobody else in the class except for the teacher had ever really done anything with assembly language, and they were pretty much clueless about what actually goes on behind the scenes. In another class, where part of the grade was the speed of the executable, again few people had used ASM, so it wasn't too hard to stay in the top 6 for most of the programs. Nobody else even considered how long it takes to divide, or how to organize the arrays (or use pointers) so that a multiply isn't needed on array access (or at least keep it to one multiply, not two or three).
On the other hand, the optimizing compilers are making this a confusing issue. Some tricks still work, but I am no longer sure of the fastest way to do things.
Nowadays, hardware is getting cheaper while programmer time is getting more and more scarce. Often, it seems that it is more important to make the code readable and logical than to make it fast and efficient. Or is that just an excuse...
With something this sensitive to shock, penny-sized is probably pretty close to as big as you get. Somebody else mentioned that bigger disks wobble more. Definitely a problem. I would guess that if you want bigger, it will have to be some kind of disk array, like a bunch of pennies laid out next to each other on the table. Maybe like a caddy system that holds 18 disks instead of 1, and then it would be big enough to not lose. And maybe even big enough to hold Windows 2008 :)
I suppose I'll get flamed for this. And it it somewhat off topic (how do we get off on these subjects??). Oh well.
Sure, capitalism isn't perfect. And depending on your definition of "works" it may or may not work. (However, even those who are "just scraping by" in the United States do better than about 90% of the rest of the world.) But as long as most people are mostly honest and until everyone in the world can be depended on to be completely honest, nothing else is going to work nearly as well.
When society is perfect and everyone is honest, some "shared wealth" program would probably be the best way to go. Unfortunately, this probably won't happen anytime soon. And when it has been attempted in the past, generally a few dishonest people run off with the spoils.
When most people are fairly honest, capitalism generally works pretty well, and I haven't seen anything that works better.
When society is completely corrupt and dishonest, some domineering economic strategy is necessary to protect people from each other. That is when things get bad. I would venture to say that we are headed in this direction with more and more lawsuits, antitrust actions, etc.
Anyway, just my 2c. I don't claim to be an expert, but I'm thankful for what I have, and my discussions with people from foreign countries have reinforced this opinion.