So when someone says, "Hey dude, come over and checkout my new 160 gibs", I can just brush them off and say that they've been spending way too much time playing Quake.
That shouldn't really be a problem -- if you can expect to write to Program Files and install new system wide software as a normal user, then there are other issues:)
</obvious>
That may have applied 5 years ago, but now, almost all games are at least 3D, which means that the player kind of expects some sort of realistic physics. Maybe "modified" physics (as discussed in earlier posts, where there is less gravity or something like that), but still following real-world models.
> so what made those that were selected so special?
You might ask that question about the more than 35 Texas state flags they have up there (far more than any other state, as far as I can tell). Did Mr. Bush have something to do with that?:) It seems like a waste of resources to send all that weight (1 pound of flags, @ $10,000 a pound).
The TTL is not a measure of time, it is a measure of how many more "hops" a packet is allowed to go through until it dies. When you send out an IP packet, it starts out with a given TTL, say 30. Every time it passes through a router, the router decrements that TTL by one. When the TTL gets to 0 (which will not usually happen unless there is some problem in the network like a routing loop) the router drops the packet, which prevents packets from being passed around forever (which would be bad).
So it is in fact very easily measurable, since the act of a packet passing through a NAT router would cause it to have a TTL of one less than the expected value. You are right that if it were a measure of time, it would be impossible to reliably test the miniscule amount of time that it takes to pass through a router, especially with other factors like network congestion and other bottlenecks. However, this is not the case.
The only problem is that, as a previous responder pointed out, there is no requirement as to what this number is set to initially, and thus it might be unreliable if a cable company were to use this as a failsafe test of whether a NAT router is in use.
Well, it's not like I'm planning on not having a job forever. Believe me, I'm actually very frugal, and because of this I have several thousand dollars saved up - enough to last me at least until I can find a job at Burger King. Besides, I actually hate the concept of "net gadgets", and I will never personally buy one.
I was only trying to emphasize that in this economy, tech companies cannot expect people to want to both 1) buy those gadgets and 2) pay even more for them to be connected to the net. My own employment status is actually irrelevant, and I'm sorry I brought it up.
You're right, I shouldn't have said "worst case". But difficult problems like yours are much less common than in a situation where there are no checked exceptions at all -- you could write a large section of code without realizing that an IOException could be thrown inside, and then you'd have to go back and update each affected method call. Yes you would get a nice little stack trace, but, as you pointed out, even still it can be hard to debug.
A packet coming from port 80 on $PRIVATE_IP gets remapped so that it appears as some oddball port number on $PUBLIC_IP. If they see lots of activity involving strange port numbers, they might conclude that $PUBLIC_IP is assigned to a router or a firewall.
I don't think this would matter, because port 80 would never be used in connections going from inside the network to the outside world. Yes, you are *connecting* to port 80 on some other server, but *your* computer uses some random port number anyway. So NAT would only change it from one random port to another.
Maybe they can check the number of hops a packet has made. I would think that all of the packets coming from a machine would be allowed so many hops before they expire. Machines behind a firewall would use one hop to go from the machine to the firewall...so unless the firewall also rewrites that part of the packet, that's possibly another method by which a firewall could be sniffed out.
This might be possible, I don't know enough about how NAT works to verify or refute this. To some networking genious: is this possible?
Something similar to the "OS identification" function in nmap ought to fairly easily tell the firewall appliances from Linksys and such apart from a computer. Just as the network stacks in Linux and Windows respond to the same types of traffic in different ways, there's no doubt a similar difference with the firewall appliances.
Many routers have the option of setting up a "DMZ" (demiliterized zone?) in addition to NAT, where you can set up a single computer to accept *all* incoming connections. Outgoing connections via NAT still work normally. This makes the router effectively invisible, even to OS scans (although it does eliminate any of NAT's security benifits). A scan of my box from another computer reveales that I am running Linux 2.4.x on i386, and not Lynksys BIOS 4.235 or whatever.
I know I've done my fair share of software pirating, but I am not one to steal cable, steal cable internet, or set up a 802.11 network in my apartment building. So I should have nothing to worry about, right? Wrong. What about people like me who have two computers and a roommate's laptop? I'm not going to pay $10 extra in addition to the $40 they already charge. My jobless self can only take so much "nickle and diming".
It would be awesome if they could just do what the cable TV companies (at least here in Seattle) has done forever. I'm allowed to have an unlimited number of TVs connected, so long as they are in the same household (and I have enough outlets, which I could install myself if I didn't live in an apartment). So it seems like the only reason this is a problem is because of the 802.11 situation -- why should I be punished? The poster raised another good point -- what happens when I get my internet-enabled toaster, refrigerator, answering machine, jukebox, etc... this would absolutely kill the "internet appliance" industry, because I sure as hell am not going to pay $5/mo for each device, and I'm sure as hell not going to run them all off of dialup -- I'd rather just not buy the device.
Another problem: my apartment is not wired for a home network, since it has no CAT/5 wiring and only one phone outlet. My roommate has a powerbook with an Airport card. What if I want to set up a little wireless network so that she can have access without dragging a CAT/5 cable across the floor? All of a sudden, even though my intentions are honest, I become part of the problem that this NAT -> CAT suggestion is designed to solve.
Bottom line is that there are too many situations where this hurts honest people. The cable internet industry is already in trouble -- if I were them, I'd be worried about profits lost from illegal sharing too. But I'd be more worried about pissing off the honest people on the network, which probably vastly outnumber the dishonest ones. I, for one, would be seriously pissed off if this transition from NAT to CAT were to be enforced.
Awesome! It doesn't sound as good this way as the tempest.mp3 did (not that that sounded "good" either), but this is the coolest thing that has ever come out of/.:)!
1) What this (CVS) guy needs is some advertising. I've looked all over the web for a replacement for WinCVS, and because I couldn't find one, my work decided to use Visual Source Safe instead. I had no idea that this increadibly cool, useful, and covers-99%-of-what-i-needed-to-do thing existed. Yes, I suppose he does have ~20,000 downloads under his belt, but given more exposure, it shouldn't be as difficult to get other developers interested.
2) These projects are lucky, in that being posted to the front page of Slashdot is likely to give them a *lot* of exposure (countering point #1), and hopefully someone in this crowd will choose to take up the ball. Other projects doing the same thing probably won't be posted to/., so I wish them good luck. There are some excellant comments above that should help.
At my workplace, it turns out that we all like basically the same kind of music (hardcore/metal), so we sometimes go to concerts together. The scars from the mosh pit are just as fun to talk about:)
I don't mean to be rude, since you are obviously already aware of my point. But who cares if the build system is slow? I could argue that all the milliseconds spent waiting for the slower build would easily be exceeded by the time spent writing and maintaining cryptic Makefiles for each new component that is added to the project. In fact, I could use this same argument for many other aspects of programming, in general, in Java.
Lesson learned: never mention C++ and Java in the same paragraph on Slashdot!:)
Forgetting a try-catch is not a problem -- worse case is your program crashes and you get a *nice* stack trace telling you all the state you need to do some debugging triage before pulling out a real debugger. More often than not, the error is a simple NullPointerException and you can trace down the offending variable simply by looking at the line number provided in the stack trace.
The bigger problem is *overuse* of try-catches, in which errors are caught and not rethrown or at least.printStackTrace()ed. Then errors become almost impossible to track down. But this is much simpler to avoid than if the problem was *forgetting* the try-catches, since all you have to do is not do that.
*Might* survive? Please! If every package came out of the truck like that, UPS would be out of business by next week. You'll probably have to send 10000 packages all wired up before you'll find one that is that fucked up.
Besides, why would a "simple, solid state memory audio device" survive better than a tape recorder set on "slow"? You crack a tape, you re-spool it. You crack a memory chip, you're up shit creak just as bad as this guy.
Exactly, and if you can't figure out how to do that, then there are a dozen other servents that you can download and run -- many of which I like better than LimeWire anyway. That's the beauty of both the gnutella network and open source in general - *choice*.
The problem is that sometimes X will barf so bad that the entire box will stop responding to mouse or keyboard input all together, making it impossible to kill X with CTRL-ALT-BKSP or to switch to another virtual terminal. If you don't have another box available from which to telnet/ssh in and kill X remotely, then it's time to hit the power switch.
I have to kind of disagree with you about the greatness of MDI apps. Sure, it keeps the taskbar un-polluted, but I can't think of many other reasons to use it. First and formost, I love to be able to Alt-Tab and find the window I want. And when I do want to use the task bar to select a window by its title (say when I'm on another virtual desktop and need to switch to a browser on another), MDI prevents me from doing that.
Personally, I would rather open new windows when I want, and then the rest of the time use Konqueror's split-windows or Mozilla's tabs. These interfaces are IMHO much more innovative than MDI. Mozilla's tabs are a near-total substitute for MDI, and Konqueror's frames are even cooler.
In Konqueror, right-click on the status bar and choose "split vertically" or "split horizontally". Voila, you have two windows. Granted, you can't get 10 windows this way, but 10 MDI windows are just too much for me to deal with. The best part about this, though, is dragging and dropping files. In Windows Explorer or other FM's, you have to open two windows and try to size them so that they don't overlap each other, and then tediously drag the files around. In the Konq, I can open up three different frames and D&D files around till the cows come home.
Talk about charm, go get the Liquid theme and watch all the pretty widgets and translucent menus. It's a hell of a lot better looking than WinXP's new blue and red color scheme, that's for sure. KDE is just so pretty, the widgets are responsive, and (I don't know why or how) applications written in QT just always seem to be designed better than those in GTK.
80 Gigs == how many different songs? I'm too lazy to count, but it's many many thousand. So would you rather listen to the same top 20 on the radio over and over (not to mention commercials), or twenty thousand of your own hand picked songs? I'll take the latter (although my collection is only up to 2K songs at the moment)
Slashdot Mirror
So when someone says, "Hey dude, come over and checkout my new 160 gibs", I can just brush them off and say that they've been spending way too much time playing Quake.
I really miss my DSL connection I had in Long Beach, CA. With GTE I got 768k both ways.
Isn't 1.5m > 768k? Sure, if you're running a server, 128 might be kinda slow, but IIRC 1.5 is as fast as the T1 that most offices have.
Of course, I was happier when I used to get > 450kBps (bytes) from some sites, but 1.5 isn't terrible.
That shouldn't really be a problem -- if you can expect to write to Program Files and install new system wide software as a normal user, then there are other issues
</obvious>
That may have applied 5 years ago, but now, almost all games are at least 3D, which means that the player kind of expects some sort of realistic physics. Maybe "modified" physics (as discussed in earlier posts, where there is less gravity or something like that), but still following real-world models.
Besides that he says he uses vi in his answers...
Duh, brain fart! How could I forget, "Houston, we have a problem."
a.k.a Mir
> so what made those that were selected so special?
:) It seems like a waste of resources to send all that weight (1 pound of flags, @ $10,000 a pound).
You might ask that question about the more than 35 Texas state flags they have up there (far more than any other state, as far as I can tell). Did Mr. Bush have something to do with that?
The TTL is not a measure of time, it is a measure of how many more "hops" a packet is allowed to go through until it dies. When you send out an IP packet, it starts out with a given TTL, say 30. Every time it passes through a router, the router decrements that TTL by one. When the TTL gets to 0 (which will not usually happen unless there is some problem in the network like a routing loop) the router drops the packet, which prevents packets from being passed around forever (which would be bad).
So it is in fact very easily measurable, since the act of a packet passing through a NAT router would cause it to have a TTL of one less than the expected value. You are right that if it were a measure of time, it would be impossible to reliably test the miniscule amount of time that it takes to pass through a router, especially with other factors like network congestion and other bottlenecks. However, this is not the case.
The only problem is that, as a previous responder pointed out, there is no requirement as to what this number is set to initially, and thus it might be unreliable if a cable company were to use this as a failsafe test of whether a NAT router is in use.
Well, it's not like I'm planning on not having a job forever. Believe me, I'm actually very frugal, and because of this I have several thousand dollars saved up - enough to last me at least until I can find a job at Burger King. Besides, I actually hate the concept of "net gadgets", and I will never personally buy one.
I was only trying to emphasize that in this economy, tech companies cannot expect people to want to both 1) buy those gadgets and 2) pay even more for them to be connected to the net. My own employment status is actually irrelevant, and I'm sorry I brought it up.
You're right, I shouldn't have said "worst case". But difficult problems like yours are much less common than in a situation where there are no checked exceptions at all -- you could write a large section of code without realizing that an IOException could be thrown inside, and then you'd have to go back and update each affected method call. Yes you would get a nice little stack trace, but, as you pointed out, even still it can be hard to debug.
A packet coming from port 80 on $PRIVATE_IP gets remapped so that it appears as some oddball port number on $PUBLIC_IP. If they see lots of activity involving strange port numbers, they might conclude that $PUBLIC_IP is assigned to a router or a firewall.
I don't think this would matter, because port 80 would never be used in connections going from inside the network to the outside world. Yes, you are *connecting* to port 80 on some other server, but *your* computer uses some random port number anyway. So NAT would only change it from one random port to another.
Maybe they can check the number of hops a packet has made. I would think that all of the packets coming from a machine would be allowed so many hops before they expire. Machines behind a firewall would use one hop to go from the machine to the firewall...so unless the firewall also rewrites that part of the packet, that's possibly another method by which a firewall could be sniffed out.
This might be possible, I don't know enough about how NAT works to verify or refute this. To some networking genious: is this possible?
Something similar to the "OS identification" function in nmap ought to fairly easily tell the firewall appliances from Linksys and such apart from a computer. Just as the network stacks in Linux and Windows respond to the same types of traffic in different ways, there's no doubt a similar difference with the firewall appliances.
Many routers have the option of setting up a "DMZ" (demiliterized zone?) in addition to NAT, where you can set up a single computer to accept *all* incoming connections. Outgoing connections via NAT still work normally. This makes the router effectively invisible, even to OS scans (although it does eliminate any of NAT's security benifits). A scan of my box from another computer reveales that I am running Linux 2.4.x on i386, and not Lynksys BIOS 4.235 or whatever.
I know I've done my fair share of software pirating, but I am not one to steal cable, steal cable internet, or set up a 802.11 network in my apartment building. So I should have nothing to worry about, right? Wrong. What about people like me who have two computers and a roommate's laptop? I'm not going to pay $10 extra in addition to the $40 they already charge. My jobless self can only take so much "nickle and diming".
It would be awesome if they could just do what the cable TV companies (at least here in Seattle) has done forever. I'm allowed to have an unlimited number of TVs connected, so long as they are in the same household (and I have enough outlets, which I could install myself if I didn't live in an apartment). So it seems like the only reason this is a problem is because of the 802.11 situation -- why should I be punished? The poster raised another good point -- what happens when I get my internet-enabled toaster, refrigerator, answering machine, jukebox, etc... this would absolutely kill the "internet appliance" industry, because I sure as hell am not going to pay $5/mo for each device, and I'm sure as hell not going to run them all off of dialup -- I'd rather just not buy the device.
Another problem: my apartment is not wired for a home network, since it has no CAT/5 wiring and only one phone outlet. My roommate has a powerbook with an Airport card. What if I want to set up a little wireless network so that she can have access without dragging a CAT/5 cable across the floor? All of a sudden, even though my intentions are honest, I become part of the problem that this NAT -> CAT suggestion is designed to solve.
Bottom line is that there are too many situations where this hurts honest people. The cable internet industry is already in trouble -- if I were them, I'd be worried about profits lost from illegal sharing too. But I'd be more worried about pissing off the honest people on the network, which probably vastly outnumber the dishonest ones. I, for one, would be seriously pissed off if this transition from NAT to CAT were to be enforced.
Awesome! It doesn't sound as good this way as the tempest.mp3 did (not that that sounded "good" either), but this is the coolest thing that has ever come out of /. :)!
1) What this (CVS) guy needs is some advertising. I've looked all over the web for a replacement for WinCVS, and because I couldn't find one, my work decided to use Visual Source Safe instead. I had no idea that this increadibly cool, useful, and covers-99%-of-what-i-needed-to-do thing existed. Yes, I suppose he does have ~20,000 downloads under his belt, but given more exposure, it shouldn't be as difficult to get other developers interested.
/., so I wish them good luck. There are some excellant comments above that should help.
2) These projects are lucky, in that being posted to the front page of Slashdot is likely to give them a *lot* of exposure (countering point #1), and hopefully someone in this crowd will choose to take up the ball. Other projects doing the same thing probably won't be posted to
At my workplace, it turns out that we all like basically the same kind of music (hardcore/metal), so we sometimes go to concerts together. The scars from the mosh pit are just as fun to talk about :)
I think that this shows a far bigger problem in Win98 than with the JLS.
I don't mean to be rude, since you are obviously already aware of my point. But who cares if the build system is slow? I could argue that all the milliseconds spent waiting for the slower build would easily be exceeded by the time spent writing and maintaining cryptic Makefiles for each new component that is added to the project. In fact, I could use this same argument for many other aspects of programming, in general, in Java.
:)
Lesson learned: never mention C++ and Java in the same paragraph on Slashdot!
Forgetting a try-catch is not a problem -- worse case is your program crashes and you get a *nice* stack trace telling you all the state you need to do some debugging triage before pulling out a real debugger. More often than not, the error is a simple NullPointerException and you can trace down the offending variable simply by looking at the line number provided in the stack trace.
.printStackTrace()ed. Then errors become almost impossible to track down. But this is much simpler to avoid than if the problem was *forgetting* the try-catches, since all you have to do is not do that.
The bigger problem is *overuse* of try-catches, in which errors are caught and not rethrown or at least
*Might* survive? Please! If every package came out of the truck like that, UPS would be out of business by next week. You'll probably have to send 10000 packages all wired up before you'll find one that is that fucked up.
Besides, why would a "simple, solid state memory audio device" survive better than a tape recorder set on "slow"? You crack a tape, you re-spool it. You crack a memory chip, you're up shit creak just as bad as this guy.
Exactly, and if you can't figure out how to do that, then there are a dozen other servents that you can download and run -- many of which I like better than LimeWire anyway. That's the beauty of both the gnutella network and open source in general - *choice*.
The problem is that sometimes X will barf so bad that the entire box will stop responding to mouse or keyboard input all together, making it impossible to kill X with CTRL-ALT-BKSP or to switch to another virtual terminal. If you don't have another box available from which to telnet/ssh in and kill X remotely, then it's time to hit the power switch.
I have to kind of disagree with you about the greatness of MDI apps. Sure, it keeps the taskbar un-polluted, but I can't think of many other reasons to use it. First and formost, I love to be able to Alt-Tab and find the window I want. And when I do want to use the task bar to select a window by its title (say when I'm on another virtual desktop and need to switch to a browser on another), MDI prevents me from doing that.
Personally, I would rather open new windows when I want, and then the rest of the time use Konqueror's split-windows or Mozilla's tabs. These interfaces are IMHO much more innovative than MDI. Mozilla's tabs are a near-total substitute for MDI, and Konqueror's frames are even cooler.
In Konqueror, right-click on the status bar and choose "split vertically" or "split horizontally". Voila, you have two windows. Granted, you can't get 10 windows this way, but 10 MDI windows are just too much for me to deal with. The best part about this, though, is dragging and dropping files. In Windows Explorer or other FM's, you have to open two windows and try to size them so that they don't overlap each other, and then tediously drag the files around. In the Konq, I can open up three different frames and D&D files around till the cows come home.
Talk about charm, go get the Liquid theme and watch all the pretty widgets and translucent menus. It's a hell of a lot better looking than WinXP's new blue and red color scheme, that's for sure. KDE is just so pretty, the widgets are responsive, and (I don't know why or how) applications written in QT just always seem to be designed better than those in GTK.
80 Gigs == how many different songs? I'm too lazy to count, but it's many many thousand. So would you rather listen to the same top 20 on the radio over and over (not to mention commercials), or twenty thousand of your own hand picked songs? I'll take the latter (although my collection is only up to 2K songs at the moment)