If we hadn't gone the polygon route, but used ray casting instead, I could see two big advanges:
You wouldn't need much from a graphics card (fill rate + 2D for the UI)
You would need a fast CPU (for software ray casting). In fact, you'd need so much CPU, and ray casting works so well in parallel, that gamers would be driving the SMP market, and SMP machines would be common.
I'd love the simplicity of more CPU == better quality graphics. It's a pity we missed it:(
More recently there was "Delta Force II", using software voxel rendering. As a game I didn't really like it, and as an engine, well, I didn't really like it;)
It just couldn't perform well enough in software to compare to the combined might of CPU+3D card that polygon based engines get to use. It's a shame, because it had some really good points:
* The terrain was really 'curvey', none of the up-a-ramp, down-a-ramp of the polygon style.
* The grass was cool.
* Erm...;)
Who knows, if these cards actually deliver (modulo cost, entry point, programming, etc), it might become a more popular approach.
best wishes,
Mike
ps) I notice they will have development kits for linux - hooray!
Usually - yes. Mostly, we are rendering objects that are actually 3D - people, monsters, houses, whatever. Granted, sometimes we render things that actually are purely 2D (CAD, FEM models, etc), but a 3D representation (ie Octree vs. BSP) is far more natural.
To put it another way - we actually spend time first creating a lot of polygons from a solid 3D model - for no other reason that the fact we need them for rendering, *and* decimating the very same meshes so that we have less facets! Bleugh!;)
Advantages of volume viz. include the ability the really parallelise the rendering in image space (ie CPU per screen pixel). This works well in software, but I'm not sure how well it scales in hardware. You can also do really cool QOS - degrading the rendering depending on available CPU much *much* easier than with polygon based systems.
My boss was looking at these at SIGGRAPH, so I might have one to play with with a bit of luck...
I also want it just cause it's got 256Meg of RAM on it;)
best wishes,
Mike.
ps) http://www.rtviz.com/technology/index.html
I agree with most of what you wrote, however, it is even clearer in the Time article that he wasn't jailed as a result of the IPR "crime", but as a result of directly disobeying the judge after the case.
I too was naive about IPR (and probably still am), and I created some work that I could have made some money out of (at university). What I wasn't naive about was the fact that I would have to act within the law, whatever I decided to do.
I just read the IEEE article and although I don't have any more background what you wrote misrepresents the IEEE article.
Taborsky was given probation by the court, but violated it twice by applying for a patent, and refusing to sign it over on the judges orders. The law may or may not be wrong, but he compounded any offence he may have made by these actions. If I understnad correctly, this was why he ended up in prison.
Furthermore the "some company" was the company funding the project at the university, not a random company.
If you have a big thing about keeping the IPR to your inventions, you should make sure that you *can* keep it *before* you start working. If you start, and then find out your conditions of employment claim your IPR, you can either quit, or put up with it. What it appears that you can't do, is to say "I don't care anyway" and attempt to take them.
Taborsky, upon finding out he appeared to have no claim on the discovery, could have walked away, a lesson wiser. He could have found out the legal position before doing anything. He didn't appear to do either of these things.
As I say, this is from the IEEE peice that you quoted, maybe the true facts are different, but if not, I can't feel that Taborsky is completely blameless.
As the result of the war led to the fueling of german imperialism, and helped make the french rather angry, it isn't a great example, but (s)he has a right to make whatever analogies (s)he likes.
I order you to be more polite in future.;)
best wishes,
Mike.
Re:FlatPlanet are wrong - they can be banned
on
Gnutella Vs. SPAM
·
· Score: 1
> You get the IP of the person responding in the packet directly, don't you? so just blacklist and send out a broadcast spam alert.
As far as my aging memory can remember, the IP:port pair in the reply is there so that firewalled machines can request a PUSH connection, instead of connecting themselves. In other words, it doesn't have to be correct, and I think the flatplanet site says that they munge this value.
From the other replies to the post, I'm thinking that although it would work, the "right thing" would be to do PK encryption. Then you can really trust a node. I think that something in the style of the PGP web-of-trust system would work here.
best wishes,
Mike.
FlatPlanet are wrong - they can be banned
on
Gnutella Vs. SPAM
·
· Score: 5
FWIW I wrote a gnutella clone in the early days, but I never got around to completing it. Back then, Gnutella itself wasn't too stable (TTL wraparound anyone?), and a lot of clone developers were sticking their creations on the net before they were (how shall I say it) properly debugged.
Anyway, as a consequence of this, I started collecting good/bad host information - I kept notes on the number of good (valid) and bad (invalid) packets coming in on every connection. Once the bad packets accounted for a certain percentage of the total packets, I said "fsck you" to the connection. Now note, it's not the node that you have the connection to that's creating the bad packets, it's just doing it's job in passing them around. What I was saying is "Hey, you're sending me junk - I don't care if it's not yours, I'm dropping you and talking to someone else". I would drop the connection, blacklist it for a few days, and start a new one instead. During the TTL wraparound time, whilst gnutella was totally unusable, my client was merely slow.
To get to the point: If every client allowed the user to say "this reply is spam", the route can be traced back (via MessageID) in the net to the clients that have a direct connection to the spambot. By creating a new (routed, so efficient) spam alert message, a client could be informed that one of it's neighbours was a spambot, and so (voluntarily) agree to both drop the spambot from the net *and* reply with the ip:port pair of the spambot, this could then be used to blacklist the ip:port pair for a limited time (again, voluntarily, per client).
Given that ip address are not yet (cf. ipv6) a dime-a-dozen, FlatPlanet would have to keep finding a new suply ip address blocks from which to attack.
I haven't kept up to date on gnutella development, but there must be a sizeable number of clones (with source!) by now. The major problem would be in moving people from the old unmodifiable Gnutella client, to a "new and improved" clone.
> But what's the probability of flipping a coin 100 times and only getting heads?
I'm not 100% certain, but I beleive it is one in 1267650600228229401496703205376
That's the same as getting 99 heads, and then a tail... It certainly isn't 50/50 though, think about it. If it was 50%, then half of the times that you tossed the coin a 100 times, it would be HHHH..HHH half of those times!
If you want HHHHHH from the begining, the probability is 1 in 64, if however, you already have HHHHH, then it is 50%.
best wishes,
Mike
ps) You can work this out without knowing probability per-se: for 1 toss, you can get a H or a T. For the second toss, well, you can get a H or T, followed by a "one toss" H or T. For 3 tosses, it's H or T, followed by whatever you could get for 2 tosses, and so on...
(Culled from the article):
Ed Weiler, NASA's associate administrator for space science : "Having very cheap missions that fail is not a good thing. Having little more expensive missions that succeed is a good thing."
Given that NASA have a fixed budget, and given that some of the recent disasters have not painted them in a good light, it seems quite prudent to make sure they don't have too many failures in the near future.
If they gamble now and lose, get a budget cut, and then have no choice but to do less in the future. If they're safe now, keep the budget, and hopefully have more support from both the public and government in the long term.
> *sigh* Yet again the unwashed hordes that > comprise the European Union are attempting to
OK, so you know how to be insulting. Well done.
> stifle the free flow of commerce with their
> anachronistic Marxist policies. When will they
> learn that in order to allow everyone the
> highest quality of life, the cut and thrust of
> capitalism needs to be unfettered by poorly
> thought out and implemented laws and
> "watchdogs".
I hate to burst your bubble, but as far as allowing "everyone" the highest quality of life, europe is way ahead.
In the HPI-2 measure (measuring human poverty in industrialised nations) from the UN Human Development Report 2000, the top 8 countries are all european. Japan is ninth, followed by spain.
The USA is last.
best wishes,
Mike.
ps) The report is available here: http://www.undp.org/hdro/
The Most Clueless Award of the Year goes to the poster who wrote, "...this is so lame! What if I were doing a search on such an innocuous term such as 'young-titties' or 'teen-sex'..." I dare you to find seven people on a libel jury who wouldn't label that as intent... Folks, there is no viable reason at all to be downloading files named "underage-titties.jpg" and "15yrold-lesbos.jpg".
Get a grip!
teensex.jpg: Do you know what most teenage boys think is the greatest thing in the world? TEENAGE GIRLS! Is that wrong? It's no more wrong than the fact that these boys are often having sex with (shock!) underage girls - their girlfriends!
Searching for 15yrold-lesbos.jpg? What if you were a 15 year old lesbian? Is that even slightly wrong?
When 'proper' scientific online journals emerge - ones that allow online peer review, rapid publication (by which I mean hours, not weeks),
That wouldn't be peer review. Certainly one of the problems with submission latency is that of paper shuffling, but the major problem is in the fact that a paper is condensed knowledge that has to be studied by someone who is really smart - Ideally smarter than the people who submit the paper;) These people tend to be busy doing other stuff. The only way I can see of getting that kind of turnaround would be with a large pool of referees, and I don't think it's generally feasable. Current peer review has problems, (a la the publications that appeared after the initial cold fusion annoucments (from, IIRC Utah), but it isn't that bad (IMHO)
A delay of weeks isn't a problem, that's excellent turnaround. Months is common, and I've seen years. That's a problem. I agree that in certain situations it might be very usful to be able to have some kind of net-meeting-house, where scientists can discuss ideas and exchange results whilst leaving an information trail so that there isn't a problem over credit when the dust settles and the papers are written.
best wishes,
Mike
Re:I'll take the karma hit...
on
Silicon Hell
·
· Score: 1
Welcome to the 00's : Transvestites are freaks,
Ah yes, after the caring-sharing 90's we really need the ignorant-intolerant-00's don't we?
It's not big; and it's not clever - do you actually think there's any more justification as labelling transvestites as freaks than any other group?
geeks jocks redheads Oh no! - then there's people with coloured skin (they're not like me!) people with/without a religion all those people with sexual organs that aren't like mine - freaks!
Wake the fuck up.
Guess what - freaks have feelings too, and they're just as (un)important as yours.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought I read that the casing is airtight and full of some gas, and if it's cracked the drive is ruined.
Don't believe the hype.
When I was a student I had one of my two drives die. I was quite resigned to the fact as it was 4 years old. Anyway, I'd always wanted to have a look inside and poke around, so I took the top off - had a look. Then I thought it'd be fun to see it spin up - so I plugged it in and booted, watched it stutter the drive arms (they seemed to be stuck). Then (you can see where this is heading;) I though - "cool! I can play with the drive arms!" so for like the next few minutes I was pulling the drive arms back and forwards (often against the opposition of the drive;). I pulled the heads up off the disk (they're on thin, really flexible struts), and bounced them back onto the platter...
Left it overnight. next day I boot up, still with the open drive connected, and it's working. I put the lid back on it. It's still working now, years later.
Forgive me if I've got the wrong end of the stick, but I was under the impression that Java had had its day and was pretty much on a downwards spiral.
I beleive the reverse is true (after 2 years of using Java after C). This is my version of history:
In ye olde time, Sun produced Java, and saith " run things over the web. Cools Toys!".
And the people jumped for joy and enjoyed pointless applets for a time.
And so saith Sun "And now you can use it for writing all your applications - and have them run anywhere"
And the people trieth, and soon realised that Java was not up to the job, and so the people began to bitch and whine and saith that Java was sh*te
That was then, and this is now: *Java is big. Expect 2x-3x memory usage over native code.
*Java is fast. *If you have the memory*. On win/solaris/linux, Java is really usable. The two caveats are a) you need the memory, and b) Swing is still slow, but not half as bad as it used to be. We have gotten Java scientific code running to within 5% of FORTRAN.
I use a Java program every day - in preference to numerous (native) alternatives. This is Borland JBuilder - so Java is certainly a usable platform these days for a "real world application".
Don't be put off by Java's history of underperformance, and Suns dodgy claims about world domination. If you're thinking of doing anything cross platform, Java is worth a good hard look.
Why would anybody sit down and write a novel if it's going to be pirated for free the first day it's released?
Doesn't this idea sound familiar to anyone? For some reason I thought of RMS, Linus et al...
I would have thought a lot of people here contribute to open source projects (If you don't - why not?;) so why do we do it? Because we're nice people surely? It's "pirated for free" in that we don't get money for it - yet it's just as much hard work as writing a novel or music.
So clearly there is some incentive for us to do it. Which makes me wonder, are musicians and writers actually different (are we special because we'll do stuff for free?), or are they only slowly catching up with the geek and hacker notion of contributing to a community?
In the future will perhaps more and more people be giving stuff away because it makes them feel good to do so?
> For example, if she is an American, reading a > couple of these: Animal Farm, 1984, Catch 22, > For Whom the Bell Tolls, Of Mice and Men, and > anything from Egar Allen Poe (Little heavy for > the young) would be a good start. I only say > this since I meet to many people who have not > read any of the American classics in America.
I hate to break the news to you, but Animal Farm and 1984 are hardly American classics. Orwell was English, even if he was born in India.
As for Catch-22 - please! You may as well recommend Ulysses!
I would also say that Catch-22 is a hard book to *read*, nevermind *enjoy*. I'd recommend readable "classics" well before the less readable stuff. 'To Kill A Mockingbird' would be a prime example.
On SF I'd add (to what other people have already suggested) some Iain M Banks, particularly 'The Player Of Games' and 'Consider Phlebas'. Best check them out yourself first of course;)
This is only with old versions of IRIX - with newer versions (certainly 6.5 (current), I'm not sure when the changed occured) you don't need to pay to run gcc. Install IRIX, download gcc, use it.
Whilst it's annoying for users of old versions of IRIX, it's misleading to suggest that this is the whole truth. If you buy an SGI now (or in the recent past), you get gcc for free.
Slashdot Mirror
If we hadn't gone the polygon route, but used ray casting instead, I could see two big advanges:
:(
You wouldn't need much from a graphics card (fill rate + 2D for the UI)
You would need a fast CPU (for software ray casting). In fact, you'd need so much CPU, and ray casting works so well in parallel, that gamers would be driving the SMP market, and SMP machines would be common.
I'd love the simplicity of more CPU == better quality graphics. It's a pity we missed it
best wishes,
Mike.
It was "Commanche", IIRC there were sequals also.
;)
;)
More recently there was "Delta Force II", using software voxel rendering. As a game I didn't really like it, and as an engine, well, I didn't really like it
It just couldn't perform well enough in software to compare to the combined might of CPU+3D card that polygon based engines get to use. It's a shame, because it had some really good points:
* The terrain was really 'curvey', none of the up-a-ramp, down-a-ramp of the polygon style.
* The grass was cool.
* Erm...
Who knows, if these cards actually deliver (modulo cost, entry point, programming, etc), it might become a more popular approach.
best wishes,
Mike
ps) I notice they will have development kits for linux - hooray!
> Are voxels somehow superior to polygons?
;)
;)
Usually - yes. Mostly, we are rendering objects that are actually 3D - people, monsters, houses, whatever. Granted, sometimes we render things that actually are purely 2D (CAD, FEM models, etc), but a 3D representation (ie Octree vs. BSP) is far more natural.
To put it another way - we actually spend time first creating a lot of polygons from a solid 3D model - for no other reason that the fact we need them for rendering, *and* decimating the very same meshes so that we have less facets! Bleugh!
Advantages of volume viz. include the ability the really parallelise the rendering in image space (ie CPU per screen pixel). This works well in software, but I'm not sure how well it scales in hardware. You can also do really cool QOS - degrading the rendering depending on available CPU much *much* easier than with polygon based systems.
My boss was looking at these at SIGGRAPH, so I might have one to play with with a bit of luck...
I also want it just cause it's got 256Meg of RAM on it
best wishes,
Mike.
ps) http://www.rtviz.com/technology/index.html
I agree with most of what you wrote, however, it is even clearer in the Time article that he wasn't jailed as a result of the IPR "crime", but as a result of directly disobeying the judge after the case.
I too was naive about IPR (and probably still am), and I created some work that I could have made some money out of (at university). What I wasn't naive about was the fact that I would have to act within the law, whatever I decided to do.
best wishes,
Mike.
You're over-educated *and* a lawyer? Now there's a rare (and completely offtopic) combination ;)
best wishes,
Mike.
I just read the IEEE article and although I don't have any more background what you wrote misrepresents the IEEE article.
Taborsky was given probation by the court, but violated it twice by applying for a patent, and refusing to sign it over on the judges orders. The law may or may not be wrong, but he compounded any offence he may have made by these actions. If I understnad correctly, this was why he ended up in prison.
Furthermore the "some company" was the company funding the project at the university, not a random company.
If you have a big thing about keeping the IPR to your inventions, you should make sure that you *can* keep it *before* you start working. If you start, and then find out your conditions of employment claim your IPR, you can either quit, or put up with it. What it appears that you can't do, is to say "I don't care anyway" and attempt to take them.
Taborsky, upon finding out he appeared to have no claim on the discovery, could have walked away, a lesson wiser. He could have found out the legal position before doing anything. He didn't appear to do either of these things.
As I say, this is from the IEEE peice that you quoted, maybe the true facts are different, but if not, I can't feel that Taborsky is completely blameless.
best wishes,
Mike.
> Choose your analogies with more care in future.
;)
OH NO! It's the analogy police!
As the result of the war led to the fueling of german imperialism, and helped make the french rather angry, it isn't a great example, but (s)he has a right to make whatever analogies (s)he likes.
I order you to be more polite in future.
best wishes,
Mike.
> You get the IP of the person responding in the packet directly, don't you? so just blacklist and send out a broadcast spam alert.
As far as my aging memory can remember, the IP:port pair in the reply is there so that firewalled machines can request a PUSH connection, instead of connecting themselves. In other words, it doesn't have to be correct, and I think the flatplanet site says that they munge this value.
From the other replies to the post, I'm thinking that although it would work, the "right thing" would be to do PK encryption. Then you can really trust a node. I think that something in the style of the PGP web-of-trust system would work here.
best wishes,
Mike.
FWIW I wrote a gnutella clone in the early days, but I never got around to completing it. Back then, Gnutella itself wasn't too stable (TTL wraparound anyone?), and a lot of clone developers were sticking their creations on the net before they were (how shall I say it) properly debugged.
Anyway, as a consequence of this, I started collecting good/bad host information - I kept notes on the number of good (valid) and bad (invalid) packets coming in on every connection. Once the bad packets accounted for a certain percentage of the total packets, I said "fsck you" to the connection. Now note, it's not the node that you have the connection to that's creating the bad packets, it's just doing it's job in passing them around. What I was saying is "Hey, you're sending me junk - I don't care if it's not yours, I'm dropping you and talking to someone else". I would drop the connection, blacklist it for a few days, and start a new one instead. During the TTL wraparound time, whilst gnutella was totally unusable, my client was merely slow.
To get to the point: If every client allowed the user to say "this reply is spam", the route can be traced back (via MessageID) in the net to the clients that have a direct connection to the spambot. By creating a new (routed, so efficient) spam alert message, a client could be informed that one of it's neighbours was a spambot, and so (voluntarily) agree to both drop the spambot from the net *and* reply with the ip:port pair of the spambot, this could then be used to blacklist the ip:port pair for a limited time (again, voluntarily, per client).
Given that ip address are not yet (cf. ipv6) a dime-a-dozen, FlatPlanet would have to keep finding a new suply ip address blocks from which to attack.
I haven't kept up to date on gnutella development, but there must be a sizeable number of clones (with source!) by now. The major problem would be in moving people from the old unmodifiable Gnutella client, to a "new and improved" clone.
best wishes,
Mike.
> But what's the probability of flipping a coin 100 times and only getting heads?
;)
I'm not 100% certain, but I beleive it is one in 1267650600228229401496703205376
That's the same as getting 99 heads, and then a tail... It certainly isn't 50/50 though, think about it. If it was 50%, then half of the times that you tossed the coin a 100 times, it would be HHHH..HHH half of those times!
If you want HHHHHH from the begining, the probability is 1 in 64, if however, you already have HHHHH, then it is 50%.
best wishes,
Mike
ps) You can work this out without knowing probability per-se: for 1 toss, you can get a H or a T. For the second toss, well, you can get a H or T, followed by a "one toss" H or T. For 3 tosses, it's H or T, followed by whatever you could get for 2 tosses, and so on...
(unless I'm wrong
I hope it's better than the BAIR system for recognising naughty pictures (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/07/21/1516
</skeptical>
Mike.
(Culled from the article):
Ed Weiler, NASA's associate administrator for space science : "Having very cheap missions that fail is not a good thing. Having little more expensive missions that succeed is a good thing."
Given that NASA have a fixed budget, and given that some of the recent disasters have not painted them in a good light, it seems quite prudent to make sure they don't have too many failures in the near future.
If they gamble now and lose, get a budget cut, and then have no choice but to do less in the future. If they're safe now, keep the budget, and hopefully have more support from both the public and government in the long term.
Just my $0.02,
Mike.
> Heheeh.
;)
Aha, gibbering idiot style kung-fu
> Why should I trust UN and their studies.
As a scientist I would say because they produce the most respected, comprehensive and *global* poverty research.
best wishes,
Mike.
> *sigh* Yet again the unwashed hordes that > comprise the European Union are attempting to
OK, so you know how to be insulting. Well done.
> stifle the free flow of commerce with their
> anachronistic Marxist policies. When will they
> learn that in order to allow everyone the
> highest quality of life, the cut and thrust of
> capitalism needs to be unfettered by poorly
> thought out and implemented laws and
> "watchdogs".
I hate to burst your bubble, but as far as allowing "everyone" the highest quality of life, europe is way ahead.
In the HPI-2 measure (measuring human poverty in industrialised nations) from the UN Human Development Report 2000, the top 8 countries are all european. Japan is ninth, followed by spain.
The USA is last.
best wishes,
Mike.
ps) The report is available here: http://www.undp.org/hdro/
Get a grip!
teensex.jpg: Do you know what most teenage boys think is the greatest thing in the world? TEENAGE GIRLS! Is that wrong? It's no more wrong than the fact that these boys are often having sex with (shock!) underage girls - their girlfriends!
Searching for 15yrold-lesbos.jpg? What if you were a 15 year old lesbian? Is that even slightly wrong?
best wishes,
Mike.
How about "You can't make jokes about murder if you're an unpopular American high-school or university student"?
tragically yours,
Mike.
That wouldn't be peer review. Certainly one of the problems with submission latency is that of paper shuffling, but the major problem is in the fact that a paper is condensed knowledge that has to be studied by someone who is really smart - Ideally smarter than the people who submit the paper
A delay of weeks isn't a problem, that's excellent turnaround. Months is common, and I've seen years. That's a problem. I agree that in certain situations it might be very usful to be able to have some kind of net-meeting-house, where scientists can discuss ideas and exchange results whilst leaving an information trail so that there isn't a problem over credit when the dust settles and the papers are written.
best wishes,
Mike
Ah yes, after the caring-sharing 90's we really need the ignorant-intolerant-00's don't we?
It's not big; and it's not clever - do you actually think there's any more justification as labelling transvestites as freaks than any other group?
geeks
jocks
redheads
Oh no! - then there's
people with coloured skin (they're not like me!)
people with/without a religion
all those people with sexual organs that aren't like mine - freaks!
Wake the fuck up.
Guess what - freaks have feelings too, and they're just as (un)important as yours.
not my especially best wishes,
Mike
Don't believe the hype.
When I was a student I had one of my two drives die. I was quite resigned to the fact as it was 4 years old. Anyway, I'd always wanted to have a look inside and poke around, so I took the top off - had a look. Then I thought it'd be fun to see it spin up - so I plugged it in and booted, watched it stutter the drive arms (they seemed to be stuck). Then (you can see where this is heading ;) I though - "cool! I can play with the drive arms!" so for like the next few minutes I was pulling the drive arms back and forwards (often against the opposition of the drive ;). I pulled the heads up off the disk (they're on thin, really flexible struts), and bounced them back onto the platter...
Left it overnight. next day I boot up, still with the open drive connected, and it's working. I put the lid back on it. It's still working now, years later.
best wishes,
Mike.
I beleive the reverse is true (after 2 years of using Java after C). This is my version of history:
In ye olde time, Sun produced Java, and saith " run things over the web. Cools Toys!".
And the people jumped for joy and enjoyed pointless applets for a time.
And so saith Sun "And now you can use it for writing all your applications - and have them run anywhere"
And the people trieth, and soon realised that Java was not up to the job, and so the people began to bitch and whine and saith that Java was sh*te
That was then, and this is now:
*Java is big. Expect 2x-3x memory usage over native code.
*Java is fast. *If you have the memory*. On win/solaris/linux, Java is really usable. The two caveats are a) you need the memory, and b) Swing is still slow, but not half as bad as it used to be. We have gotten Java scientific code running to within 5% of FORTRAN.
I use a Java program every day - in preference to numerous (native) alternatives. This is Borland JBuilder - so Java is certainly a usable platform these days for a "real world application".
Don't be put off by Java's history of underperformance, and Suns dodgy claims about world domination. If you're thinking of doing anything cross platform, Java is worth a good hard look.
IMHO,
Mike.
"Firewalls and Internet Security", by William R Cheswick and Steven M. Bellovin. Addison-Wesley 1994, ISBN 0-201-63357-4.
Has a chapter about a breakin where they construct a faked environment to observe the behaviour of the hacker.
Perhaps a little out of date now, but generally still interesting (both the chapter, and the rest of the book).
Mike
Why would anybody sit down and write a novel if it's going to be pirated for free the first day it's released?
Doesn't this idea sound familiar to anyone? For some reason I thought of RMS, Linus et al...
I would have thought a lot of people here contribute to open source projects (If you don't - why not? ;) so why do we do it? Because we're nice people surely? It's "pirated for free" in that we don't get money for it - yet it's just as much hard work as writing a novel or music.
So clearly there is some incentive for us to do it. Which makes me wonder, are musicians and writers actually different (are we special because we'll do stuff for free?), or are they only slowly catching up with the geek and hacker notion of contributing to a community?
In the future will perhaps more and more people be giving stuff away because it makes them feel good to do so?
I sure like to hope so.
> For example, if she is an American, reading a
;)
> couple of these: Animal Farm, 1984, Catch 22,
> For Whom the Bell Tolls, Of Mice and Men, and
> anything from Egar Allen Poe (Little heavy for
> the young) would be a good start. I only say
> this since I meet to many people who have not
> read any of the American classics in America.
I hate to break the news to you, but Animal Farm and 1984 are hardly American classics. Orwell was English, even if he was born in India.
As for Catch-22 - please! You may as well recommend Ulysses!
I would also say that Catch-22 is a hard book to *read*, nevermind *enjoy*. I'd recommend readable "classics" well before the less readable stuff. 'To Kill A Mockingbird' would be a prime example.
On SF I'd add (to what other people have already suggested) some Iain M Banks, particularly 'The Player Of Games' and 'Consider Phlebas'. Best check them out yourself first of course
my 0.02,
Mike
This is only with old versions of IRIX - with newer versions (certainly 6.5 (current), I'm not sure when the changed occured) you don't need to pay to run gcc. Install IRIX, download gcc, use it.
Whilst it's annoying for users of old versions of IRIX, it's misleading to suggest that this is the whole truth. If you buy an SGI now (or in the recent past), you get gcc for free.
Mike.