I knew I saved all those old Atari cartridges for something!!!.... wait, wait, I don't think Pole Position came in.mp3 format. Damn.
If they used one of those Via micro-ITX boards in a modern version of a C64 (built-in keyboard, big damn-heavy external power supply, and CardBus), and sold it w/ TV out for ~$250, then we'd be celebrating the return of Commodore!
Make it w/ 64 MB for history's sake, and have a 128 MB version <grin>.
Because I can strip it to the bones and make it into a custom router, or print server, or whatnot very, very easily. Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE and the rest try to put their "brand" on just about anything - Slackware hasn't been tinkered with overmuch, hasn't had 2.5 kernel stuff backported to 2.4 (breaking gawd-knows how many libraries, libdnet for one - sorry, no Nessus on your Fedora box!) and generally just behaves itself better.
OTOH, it is definitely not a beginner's OS. Sort of like how no novice rider could ride a Ducati even close to it's peak, but with experience, a rider can do amazing things with the same bike.
Plus, Slackware (and Debian) are the only distros left that can install on really old PC's - 486's and 386DX's. 'Bout the only thing they're good for is a poor man's remote terminal server, tho...
Yep - seen a few of those on some of the bowels-of-the-internet pr0n sites. Most of 'em choke with "Sorry, your browser is not Win32 compatible", but then offer to install a browser-bar. As soon as they get an x86-linux version that tries to auto-install, I'm using my Sun for web browsing.
Got a Tandy 1000 RSX doing similar duty - jammed a SCSI card and a NIC in it, threw Slackware on it, and it became a SSH-addressable serial console for some of my AIX toys - granted, SSH + minicom + kernel + not much else = 90% system utilization, but it's just *$%&% cool...
If you want my advice, do a trial by fire. Do something REALLY hard and unpleasant, like outward bound, the AIDS ride across Alaska, or spend a summer of thankless backbreaking toil on an Alaskan fishing boat. Ultimately, you will be glad you did.
That's just about what I did. 6 years as a diesel mechanic - that's after being put up for AP CompSci as a sophomore in high school. Trust me - re-wiring heavy trucks and computerized engine controls in 110 degree heat, with your continued employment resting on completing the job fast, with no fuck-ups, did wonders for my mental stamina. I really want an office job now...
Challenge yourself. Buy an old SparcStation and teach yourself Solaris. Set insane goals for yourself. Genius is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration - shlocky saying, but true nonetheless.
My *%&^#% 60Mhz dual-processor SS20 is faster sometimes - but I kept the groovy Gateway 2000 server chassis! I feel like I'm really using UNIX - some whacking-big tower under the desk! Plus, there's enough drive bays that I'll never fill them up.
Man-in-the-middle attacks are still (theoretically) possible against quantum encryption. You just splice two quantum transceivers in the middle of the cable, and there's no way to tell if the transceiver is communicating end-to-end, or is being intercepted in the middle. Not without using tamper-resistant cable, armed guards and whatnot.
Plus, you need dedicated fiber for the quantum channel. Any relays, repeaters or switches in the channel and you lose the end-to-end quantum effect AFAIK.
Seems like a cool technology that is completely impractical right now - kind of like carbon fiber in the early 80's. Let the military play with it, work the bugs out, and by the time I'm over the hill (2017 or so) it might be actually worth it for someone who doesn't have a DoD-level budget.
That'd be kinda cool - I've seen the UltraSPARC laptops - - but they're a bit out of my league ($3000+).
After all, AIX isn't going away for quite some time, and there are craploads of gov't/public utility programs that only run on RS/6000's with AIX, and would cost a great deal to replace. Having a portable AIX system for coding/debugging/beta testing/demos would be a neat niche product.
Hope they've got Linux/BSD drivers for it - since MS still doesn't have XP 64-bit ready, and we all know that Nvidia won't release the programming info on the (very, very proprietary) chipset.
Guess the $499 is no memory, processors, drives, or whatnot - but it's still cheaper than the Tyan or MSI mobos. Just gotta save up the $2000 for the Opteron 250's...<grin>
Yeah, Verizon is the same way - called in tech support on my brother's DSL, (connected to an XP box), and got the "I'm reading from a script, do the magic dance around the computer, yaddah, yaddah" crap that everyone gets.
Calling from home, selecting the "other" OS option, and mentioning the magic trio - FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris - gets me to a competent tech in record time.
Traceroute/whois results work good when filing spammer complaints, too - one guy I've dealt with for the last 6 months has gone through 4 web hosting companies...;)
The price of fuel is not due to the refineries - $40/bbl prices set by a cartel are to blame.
Have you ever been to East Texas, around Houston/Galveston? That's where a lot of the big refineries in the Gulf Coast area are, and that's where I went to college. Not a place where I'd want my children to live, frankly. NIMBY is a perfectly valid reaction to a plant that spews carcinogens by the ton into the land, water, and air. But it doesn't matter to you, now does it? Just discount poor people organizing to kick fat-cat polluters out of their communities as "NIMBY people", associate them with "wacko environmental laws", and imply that they are damaging the American way of life.
Give me a break. The crude supply is drying up - why else would we be invading other countries despite the human, military, political, and fiscal cost? The White House is full of oil execs - they're just trying to ensure future profitability.
Anyone who does what they do for a living because they enjoy it will refuse to do slipshod work for long. Either you lose your best techs, or they get demoralized and work performance goes way dowm. I speak from experience - I am not the fastest technician, but my anal-retentive, plodding pace means that I catch a lot of subtle problems before they become major issues.
Management knows this, and accepts less throughput for better quality. I also get the more entertaining (and challenging) problems assigned to me because I can figure them out, whereas Mr. Speedy gets frustrated when he can't fix it in 5 minutes.
BTW - I work in a union shop, and although it isn't great, it does protect you when some manager decides to make your life a living hell. Also rewards you when you stay put for a few years, as I'm starting to find out. OTOH, they also protect some drooling morons who shouldn't have been hired in the first place.
And Black and Decker costs jobs because they sell power saws and nailers that allow a single carpenter to frame out a new structure, when once upon a time it would have taken dozens to complete it in the same timeframe.
We should pass a law barring people from creating better tools for getting things done. Everything should be like the way Linux and the Amish do it - as backbreaking and labor intensive as possible, because that means more work!
Bullshit. Utter bullshit. The problem with things like Front Page and Visual Basic is that they remove the craftsmanship.
I took some of the Front Page-generated HTML documentation from my job and re-did it with standards-based HTML & CSS, that would render properly in IE, and fixed layout mistakes that were part of the ball of snot that Front Page spewed, and chopped the size of the archive down by 2/3.
Check those bandwidth bills out, baby.
It's more like, when you work on aircraft, you have to use Federally-certified tools - because if you don't, you could damage the parts woth poor-fitting sockets and out-of-calibration torque wrenches. POS Chinese tools may be fine for fixing a leaky faucet, but check your auto mechanic's toolbox, and you'll find Mac, Matco, Proto, or Snap-On tools are in the majority - That's what's in my toolbox at work. MS's products are okay for hobbyist/short-term use, but don't have the features that make for excellence (At least their consumer-level products, anyway).
Picture this. You are taken prisoner. An interrogator drops those pictures on the table and says "cooperate, or we'll send you to this prison". Dunno about you, but that shit'll make me sing like a damn canary.
Sounds like the dumb-fuck ideas the CIA came up with during the Cold War. After all, who created psyops?
Sorry, but I've got residential DSL, and the business class is sooooo much better - at least for the/. crowd.
I'm upgrading to business class soon to do some community webhosting (church groups, etc) and if those groups couldn't access their web page, they'd be mighty pissed - and so would I. Telcos have always treated their "business-class" customers with a degree of respect that only money can buy.
After all, it's cheaper than a T1, which is the other "business-class" connection offered in our area (short of fiber). If they don't provide me with the kind of service I want, there are no less than three other DSL providers in my city - I'm sure one of them would be happy to snatch my business if I'm disappointed.
Both me and my brother went to Henrico County schools (before the laptops came out). Maybe in the West End of the county (where the money was) those laptops would have made a difference, but most of the teachers in our high school were clueless - you couldn't enter a science fair project unless you took a "science" course - not computer programming. That was a blow to someone who had 2 first place ribbons in the state level science fair - for computer science.
I remember the fun my brother had with all the Macs in the school - there was *one* IT guy for the entire school system's Mac & PC collection (granted, early to mid 90's but damn!).
Anyway, the info the local news has been putting out is that Henrico may be scaling back the funding - apparently, the funding for those laptops came from the textbook budget, and the textbooks are getting rather.. er... used. Sad state of affairs, when we can spend buttloads of money on building schools in Iraq, but our own school districts have to scrimp to make effective use of corporate largesse.
Anyone who's heard of buffer overflows knows you should NEVER trust the string you're working with, and always check its size. Why on earth is the code written such that a \0 will break it?
Because it's running in kernel space, loaded by root. Extra security checks would slow down function calls related to modules.
This isn't a network-exposed service - it's an internal kernel function. Not safe - yes. But if an attacker has got to the point where they can buffer-overflow a module license string, I think you have bigger worries...
Probably using the "copyright" flag in the ID3 header - after all, most of the people who write crap like this would never take the time to read sox's man page.
After all, when I take the same CD and rip it on two different machines, the checksums for the resulting mp3's don't match. Copyright tags could be stripped out of your mp3 collection with a shell script - and the games that spammers play with keywords could be used to make a keyword search pointless.
You can make a p2p client that emulates a web browser - download an mp3 chopped into bits and stegoed into 20 pictures put on an auto-generated web page. Almost impossible to detect or block, especially if you use porn as the images.:)
Or AIX. Or IRIX. Or Tru64. All OS's developerd by big, powerful companies, for computers using the same PCI bus as on your crappy old 486.
Now, granted, not everyone has an Ultra80 or RS/6000 sitting on their desks, but those who do, have money to blow. Why don't most companies write for those architectures?
Probably, because supporting 95% of their customers seems good enough to them - better than paying for a pack of hackers to debug a PA-RISC / SPARC / MIPS / PowerPC / x86 / x86-64 driver for a commodity component with razor-thin margins.
I've had a lawsuit threatened against me from some things I posted online - cost a company some major sales, and they came after me. It worked - I couldn't defend myself, my boss said the company couldn't defend me, so I caved in. Stopped posting on the offending sites, and haven't been there in years.
Let's say you wrote a program that could compete with ACID, Sound Forge or one of the other pro-level audio editing programs. One lawsuit about some obscure, obsolete codec could delay release in the United States for years - look at the 2600 case. During that time, they continue to make profits unchallenged, and they continue to use baroque legalisms to run up your lawyer's bill until you cry "uncle" and give up.
It really seems like this insurance is intended for software companies and in-house developement teams that have overly-cautious bosses. Cool idea. Dunno if it'll survive a major assault, though.
But since corporations have been given the same rights as citizens, it is correct (from a legal standpoint, anyway) to use the singular - after all, not everyone at Microsoft is a strutting prick.
God knows, I'd hate to be blamed/associated with everything my company does...
C'mon. Mandatory utility control of HVAC systems? The implications boggle the mind.
From software bugs/malicious individuals killing all the air conditioning in NYC on the hottest day of the year to the Big Brother-type monitoring and control that definitely will not fly down here in the South, that's just not going to work.
The fact that there have not been problems like the NE outage on a regular basis tells a bit about the competence of those working the grid right now - sometimes, adding technology removes reliability, especially if the technology is not fully thought out.
About Austin, TX's South by Southwest musician's convention, where the attendees were saying about the same thing - that the Internet is the least of the industry's problems. That big-box retailers and cowardly radio conglomerate execs are much bigger problems.
IMHO, suck-ass music by canned pop thuglings and diva princesses are the reason people aren't buying overpriced major-label CD's - but the local and underground music scenes are doing fine.
My brother works in a record store, and he said that their sales are doing okay - in the old catalog stuff, but not in the mew releases.
Slashdot Mirror
If they used one of those Via micro-ITX boards in a modern version of a C64 (built-in keyboard, big damn-heavy external power supply, and CardBus), and sold it w/ TV out for ~$250, then we'd be celebrating the return of Commodore!
Make it w/ 64 MB for history's sake, and have a 128 MB version <grin>.
OTOH, it is definitely not a beginner's OS. Sort of like how no novice rider could ride a Ducati even close to it's peak, but with experience, a rider can do amazing things with the same bike.
Plus, Slackware (and Debian) are the only distros left that can install on really old PC's - 486's and 386DX's. 'Bout the only thing they're good for is a poor man's remote terminal server, tho...
Yep - seen a few of those on some of the bowels-of-the-internet pr0n sites. Most of 'em choke with "Sorry, your browser is not Win32 compatible", but then offer to install a browser-bar. As soon as they get an x86-linux version that tries to auto-install, I'm using my Sun for web browsing.
Got a Tandy 1000 RSX doing similar duty - jammed a SCSI card and a NIC in it, threw Slackware on it, and it became a SSH-addressable serial console for some of my AIX toys - granted, SSH + minicom + kernel + not much else = 90% system utilization, but it's just *$%&% cool...
That's just about what I did. 6 years as a diesel mechanic - that's after being put up for AP CompSci as a sophomore in high school. Trust me - re-wiring heavy trucks and computerized engine controls in 110 degree heat, with your continued employment resting on completing the job fast, with no fuck-ups, did wonders for my mental stamina. I really want an office job now...
Challenge yourself. Buy an old SparcStation and teach yourself Solaris. Set insane goals for yourself. Genius is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration - shlocky saying, but true nonetheless.
After all, Mr. Bill's Software Co. had to be sued to make the Alpha release of NT, and they still won't make an OS for other architectures.
My *%&^#% 60Mhz dual-processor SS20 is faster sometimes - but I kept the groovy Gateway 2000 server chassis! I feel like I'm really using UNIX - some whacking-big tower under the desk! Plus, there's enough drive bays that I'll never fill them up.
Plus, you need dedicated fiber for the quantum channel. Any relays, repeaters or switches in the channel and you lose the end-to-end quantum effect AFAIK.
Seems like a cool technology that is completely impractical right now - kind of like carbon fiber in the early 80's. Let the military play with it, work the bugs out, and by the time I'm over the hill (2017 or so) it might be actually worth it for someone who doesn't have a DoD-level budget.
Probably someone who has had one of the Brit language-police around here jump on their throat with both boots. Not a pleasant experience.
After all, AIX isn't going away for quite some time, and there are craploads of gov't/public utility programs that only run on RS/6000's with AIX, and would cost a great deal to replace. Having a portable AIX system for coding/debugging/beta testing/demos would be a neat niche product.
Guess the $499 is no memory, processors, drives, or whatnot - but it's still cheaper than the Tyan or MSI mobos. Just gotta save up the $2000 for the Opteron 250's...<grin>
Calling from home, selecting the "other" OS option, and mentioning the magic trio - FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris - gets me to a competent tech in record time.
Traceroute/whois results work good when filing spammer complaints, too - one guy I've dealt with for the last 6 months has gone through 4 web hosting companies... ;)
Have you ever been to East Texas, around Houston/Galveston? That's where a lot of the big refineries in the Gulf Coast area are, and that's where I went to college. Not a place where I'd want my children to live, frankly. NIMBY is a perfectly valid reaction to a plant that spews carcinogens by the ton into the land, water, and air. But it doesn't matter to you, now does it? Just discount poor people organizing to kick fat-cat polluters out of their communities as "NIMBY people", associate them with "wacko environmental laws", and imply that they are damaging the American way of life.
Give me a break. The crude supply is drying up - why else would we be invading other countries despite the human, military, political, and fiscal cost? The White House is full of oil execs - they're just trying to ensure future profitability.
</flamebait-response>
Management knows this, and accepts less throughput for better quality. I also get the more entertaining (and challenging) problems assigned to me because I can figure them out, whereas Mr. Speedy gets frustrated when he can't fix it in 5 minutes.
BTW - I work in a union shop, and although it isn't great, it does protect you when some manager decides to make your life a living hell. Also rewards you when you stay put for a few years, as I'm starting to find out. OTOH, they also protect some drooling morons who shouldn't have been hired in the first place.
We should pass a law barring people from creating better tools for getting things done. Everything should be like the way Linux and the Amish do it - as backbreaking and labor intensive as possible, because that means more work!
Bullshit. Utter bullshit. The problem with things like Front Page and Visual Basic is that they remove the craftsmanship.
I took some of the Front Page-generated HTML documentation from my job and re-did it with standards-based HTML & CSS, that would render properly in IE, and fixed layout mistakes that were part of the ball of snot that Front Page spewed, and chopped the size of the archive down by 2/3.
Check those bandwidth bills out, baby.
It's more like, when you work on aircraft, you have to use Federally-certified tools - because if you don't, you could damage the parts woth poor-fitting sockets and out-of-calibration torque wrenches. POS Chinese tools may be fine for fixing a leaky faucet, but check your auto mechanic's toolbox, and you'll find Mac, Matco, Proto, or Snap-On tools are in the majority - That's what's in my toolbox at work. MS's products are okay for hobbyist/short-term use, but don't have the features that make for excellence (At least their consumer-level products, anyway).
Sounds like the dumb-fuck ideas the CIA came up with during the Cold War. After all, who created psyops?
I'm upgrading to business class soon to do some community webhosting (church groups, etc) and if those groups couldn't access their web page, they'd be mighty pissed - and so would I. Telcos have always treated their "business-class" customers with a degree of respect that only money can buy.
After all, it's cheaper than a T1, which is the other "business-class" connection offered in our area (short of fiber). If they don't provide me with the kind of service I want, there are no less than three other DSL providers in my city - I'm sure one of them would be happy to snatch my business if I'm disappointed.
</rant>
I remember the fun my brother had with all the Macs in the school - there was *one* IT guy for the entire school system's Mac & PC collection (granted, early to mid 90's but damn!).
Anyway, the info the local news has been putting out is that Henrico may be scaling back the funding - apparently, the funding for those laptops came from the textbook budget, and the textbooks are getting rather.. er... used. Sad state of affairs, when we can spend buttloads of money on building schools in Iraq, but our own school districts have to scrimp to make effective use of corporate largesse.
Because it's running in kernel space, loaded by root. Extra security checks would slow down function calls related to modules.
This isn't a network-exposed service - it's an internal kernel function. Not safe - yes. But if an attacker has got to the point where they can buffer-overflow a module license string, I think you have bigger worries...
Probably using the "copyright" flag in the ID3 header - after all, most of the people who write crap like this would never take the time to read sox's man page.
After all, when I take the same CD and rip it on two different machines, the checksums for the resulting mp3's don't match. Copyright tags could be stripped out of your mp3 collection with a shell script - and the games that spammers play with keywords could be used to make a keyword search pointless.
You can make a p2p client that emulates a web browser - download an mp3 chopped into bits and stegoed into 20 pictures put on an auto-generated web page. Almost impossible to detect or block, especially if you use porn as the images. :)
Now, granted, not everyone has an Ultra80 or RS/6000 sitting on their desks, but those who do, have money to blow. Why don't most companies write for those architectures?
Probably, because supporting 95% of their customers seems good enough to them - better than paying for a pack of hackers to debug a PA-RISC / SPARC / MIPS / PowerPC / x86 / x86-64 driver for a commodity component with razor-thin margins.
I've had a lawsuit threatened against me from some things I posted online - cost a company some major sales, and they came after me. It worked - I couldn't defend myself, my boss said the company couldn't defend me, so I caved in. Stopped posting on the offending sites, and haven't been there in years.
Let's say you wrote a program that could compete with ACID, Sound Forge or one of the other pro-level audio editing programs. One lawsuit about some obscure, obsolete codec could delay release in the United States for years - look at the 2600 case. During that time, they continue to make profits unchallenged, and they continue to use baroque legalisms to run up your lawyer's bill until you cry "uncle" and give up.
It really seems like this insurance is intended for software companies and in-house developement teams that have overly-cautious bosses. Cool idea. Dunno if it'll survive a major assault, though.
But since corporations have been given the same rights as citizens, it is correct (from a legal standpoint, anyway) to use the singular - after all, not everyone at Microsoft is a strutting prick.
God knows, I'd hate to be blamed/associated with everything my company does...
C'mon. Mandatory utility control of HVAC systems? The implications boggle the mind.
From software bugs/malicious individuals killing all the air conditioning in NYC on the hottest day of the year to the Big Brother-type monitoring and control that definitely will not fly down here in the South, that's just not going to work.
The fact that there have not been problems like the NE outage on a regular basis tells a bit about the competence of those working the grid right now - sometimes, adding technology removes reliability, especially if the technology is not fully thought out.
About Austin, TX's South by Southwest musician's convention, where the attendees were saying about the same thing - that the Internet is the least of the industry's problems. That big-box retailers and cowardly radio conglomerate execs are much bigger problems. IMHO, suck-ass music by canned pop thuglings and diva princesses are the reason people aren't buying overpriced major-label CD's - but the local and underground music scenes are doing fine. My brother works in a record store, and he said that their sales are doing okay - in the old catalog stuff, but not in the mew releases.