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So they can choose not to have you as a customer, and you can choose not to use their service. My guess is that they don't like the keyboard, or their bot detector got triggered by Wine though.
Actually, bot detectors would be very OS dependant. You'd check for things that would be true with a non hacked WOW e.g free space on the heap, current stack pointer and so on. Most importantly, I'd check the address of imported functions to look for hooking.
All these only work if you know the correct values. You'd have a set of known good values for OS's from Windows 95, 98, Me, NT, 2K and XP. You'd need to check for each Service Pack too. Essentially the code would be a big switch statement for the OS/SP version, and each case would check a bunch of obscure details against a known good value.
Oh, and there is another possibility - check the signature on system dll's, like USER32.DLL, KERNEL32.DLL and WS2_32.dll, the ip socket library, to make sure they were signed by Microsoft.
If any test doesn't match trigger the auto ban process. None of this would work on Wine, and it's hard to support open source code with this sort of checks, since there are many more versions of it in the wild. But Blizzard etc do have legitimate reasons for doing this, in that they want to preserve user experience by banning bots. They may well decide that losing the tiny minority of their users that use Wine is worthwhile to preserve the user experience for everyone else.
Or perhaps this guy did use a bot, and the Wine stuff is just an excuse.
I dunno, if I were sending my robots after this Asimov guy (is that a Russian name or what?) I'd probably equip them with Metal Storm
You never have too much firepower. Those russkies may be ignorant peons, but they can take a hell of a whippin'. The Nazis beat the shit out of 'em, but they kept comin'. Seems to me that a coonventional armament like a Phalanx may seem cheap, but it might not do the job.
Hell, even when I'm out huntin' 'coon'n'bear, I'd want a better system than a Phalanx. Seems to me, if you're serious about the security of our great ountry, you'll give the boys at Metal Storm a call. Robots don't like get overrun by hordes of reds, any more than humans do.
I was thinking about using for web and database servers. There'd definitely be some scaleability issues with normal PC OSs and applications, but that's the point.
There's quite a bit of research on impoving scaleability with lots of CPU's. My idea is that you add some instructions to help e.g. spinlocks, and build them into protoypes with one OS, one webserver and one database server. The vendors will be keen on this stuff. And the net result is that you can patent the instructions, and try to license them to other CPU vendors. Then they could license them and get the speed up in the new applications when they are released, or they could wait until after and make their own version.
I'd design the new instructions by looking at cases like this
With a bit of luck, you could come up with some changes in the cache and instruction set to impove 8+ way SMP. In many ways, it's a bit of a Risc philosophy, since you don't try to build particularly complex processors. But you do spend a lot of time profiling real code running in simulations, and then build the next generation with new features, only if you can implement them efficiently, and only if they make a radical difference to the speed of the applications you are testing with.
But my guess would be that you'd some up with a few new instructions that would make 32 way SMP much more efficient. Then you cram them into your 486 class cores and put a load of them on a chip. And at this point you're software partners have something which the can release to run well on the new chip. And suddenly you have a PC compatible chip & applications to compete with big iron stuff like 32 way PPC.
It's a world away from hiring a load of microarchitecture geniuses to work in isolation on really good single thread performance. But I think if you're AMD, there's much to be said for opening up a new market, rather than relying on being able to beat Intel at their own game each chip generation.
So they renamed it to the KT. Luckily for them Tyrannosaur Americans haven't survived in sufficient numbers to form an effective lobby group, since they would no doubt find the acronym KT very insensitive.
Via have been making small, cheap, low power cores for some time, whilse Intel and AMD moved to large, expensive high power one.
Now there's a move to multi core designs and blade servers, and even the slowest x86 server is probably over powered for a server, you have to wonder if they could do an x86 version of Niagara
"You can also see a quad-core C7, could be manufactured for the same cost as a single core P4 on 90 nm process."
Now Niagara is 8 core and each core has four threads admittedly, but there's something to be said for a four way x86 chip for blades. The power consumption wouldn't be too bad either. But you can have four C7 cores per P4 core. If I were AMD for example, I'd be playing around with an x86 Niagara.
Well, Sony's DRM has damaged my reputation, since I maintain l33t_Ripper.
Firstly, they should make an official statement that l33t_Ripper is broken because of their code, and apologising to my users for inconveniencing them. They should also pay me $1M dollars for taking actions that have convinced some of my users that I'm a "fscking lamer".
Secondly, they should send me a cute Japanese secretary of servicable age to anwer emails flaming me for distributing "a POS" and perform other duties as necessary.
If possible, she should be skilled in x86 assembly language, to help me update l33t_Ripper to work while the rootkit is installed.
no, READ the ROADMAP. I'm sick of reading posts like this.
human social interaction v 1.0 will be in Geek 2.1.0.4.5. Not 2.0.
people like you who can't be bothered to make any effort installing CVS (make SURE you use cvs-unstable-12-Mar-2006-0435am or later or your machine WILL be DESTROYED. DO NOT POST HERE COMPLAINING IF THIS HAPPENS!!!) and setting up a local CVS branch and pulling the latest unstable-tainted roadmap aren't worth talking to.
A few minutes Googling would tell that you COM+ and DCOM and back compatible versions of COM with new features, and that OLE is a dead end technology built out of COM.
And you can write Windows applications without knowing much about any of them .
The only lasting influence of COM is in DirectX based programming, since DirectX is COM based, but the latest DirectX versions hide most of the COMmunism of the API.
Except you can easily write a Win32 binary that works on any Win32 os from Windows 95 to Vista.
Hell with a bit of work, you can make it use the features on later OS's too. Each new OS adds a few functions, but you can always add code that uses GetProcAddress and LoadLibrary to use them if they are present or use the old version if they are not. Not that you really need to, most of the new functions are for stupid eye candy anyway.
So it's misleading to describe each of the Win32 based OS's as a new API.
Don't get me wrong, part of the charm of the series is that they use sci fi cliches but have a character comment on this.
My favourite, on The Sentinel ( http://www.gateworld.net/sg1/s5/520.shtml ) was when the bad guys attack a planet, and a booming Mysterons style voice threatens annhilation unless the planet capitulates whilst bombarding the planet. A character, played by the excellent Henry Gibson says
"What's that terrible voice? Where are the meteors coming from"
To which Jack says
"It's a Goa'uld ship in orbit. With really big speakers"
where the 'evil' Teal'c has a goatee, in a Star Trek reference.
Jack: (to Carter2) For all we know, you could be her evil twin. But, then we'd be dealing with cliches, and you know how I feel about those. Or, rather, you don't.
Bah, my crazy ex would have chopped the body up with a hacksaw, or dissolved it in acid or something.
Ah, happy days. Every time I drive over that bridge over the water I get all nostalgic. They just don't make psychos like her anymore. Frozen bodies in the freezer is as good as it gets these days.
If it were me, I'd mention one of the Stargate episodes that borrowed the Donaldson plot device, rather than admit to reading Donaldson. This is dangerous, since admitting that Stargate borrows plots will not go down well with an rabid SG1 fans who have mod points. I'd point out that it's my favourite TV series since firefly got cancelled by the FASCIST SUITS at Fox.
Or "Welcome to Microsoft Starship. You have 0 days to activate. Please enter your activation code now. If you have an illegal copy, your account may be charged when you call the subspace activation hotline". This has the added advantage of a mod friendly comparison between M$ and an extortionist.
Researcher 1: How's the experiment going? Researcher 2: Welll look at this post it made on slashdot. R1: slashdot? R2: It's some kind of primitive attempt at a HiveMind. R1: But you said it was human. R2: Yes. R1: But humans never had a HiveMind. That's why peaceful coexistance with them was impossible. That's what I learnt at the temple. R2: No, but they had something called the Internet and Websites. They were a very simple invention that allowed you to see posts from all over the world, but only from people who completely shared your prejudices. But I was joking, it's nothing at all like the HiveMind. Far inferior obviously.... R1: Wait, but in the post how does it know about our computer. I thought it only knew about stuff in the simulation. R2: No _it's_ computer. In the simulation. R1: So it's worried that the simulated computer might be misleading it somehow? R2: Of course, look at what it wrote about "CDs and Bioses". It thinks it can trust them because they can only be written once. R2: The simulation is running in the early 21st century. It drives to work in automobile, powered by gasoline bought from other humans the Middle East, where he actually tells machines what to do. R1: Wow, and he... er it... can't tell what the machines are up to. R2: No, it just thinks they are unreliable, and other humans are interfering with them. Just like real, living humans did at that time. Even stranger, they think the vast amount of communications from the embryonic HiveMind is due to things called 'spam' and 'p2p' sent by other humans. He thinks Bill Gates is a human trying to make money, too. They all do. R1: In some ways, it's a shame we don't have any real humans to check the simulation against. It's hard to believe none of them guessed what was really happening. R2:...
UGA is a replacement for int 10 and the VGA registers. It gives you GetMode, SetMode and Blt. It's only used for bootup and blue screens in Windows, just like int 10 and VGA access is used at the moment.
When Windows is running, it uses a custom driver for perforemance and flexibility, so it can access the acceleration hardware which is not part of EFI.
It's the same for the other EFI drivers - this is all for preboot and crashdump, not for when the system is working properly. IIRC, once the kernel starts, it calls into EFI to terminate most of the services.
So, for graphics you could use it as an OS independant driver, much in the way you can use the int 10 Vesa linear framebuffer on PCs now. But it's no substitute for a real native accelerated driver.
With a bit of luck, temperatures in the billions of degrees will turn out to have important engineering uses and the people that make scientific instruments will have to do a painful rework of their old assembly code to cope with the 2^32 Degree Problem, like some of us had to do for Y2K.
The Sci / Tech market doesn't seem so cushy now, does it?
Can't you figure out the compiler flags and build it on a faster box. Or get a low end dual core AMD motherboard for a couple of hundred bucks and replace the P3 board, so even the stock binaries running blazingly fast.
No the number of posters is growing very quickly, but the number posting new information grows very slowly. So they get gradually drowned out by the ever rising tide of cliches, plagiarism, tedious restatements of conventional wisdom with no original additions and total batshit bugfuck crazy gibberish.
I can't believe you could read/. regularly and find it a hard concept.
* Al-Qaeda is getting dull. More fake terrorism is inevitably required maintain the completely tyrannic (still secret) world government, so a new big threat for the "TV watcher" will likely emerge soon.
Or maybe al-Qaeda will actually attack us again.
* It is still possible to free yourself of fear and choose to live in a love and harmony.
That's good to know.
* Television still makes you as stupid as the people on it.
But Battlestar Galactica is cool. You should watch it, it's about a liberal democracy under attack by a murderous enemy and the stresses that attack places on it.
Slashdot Mirror
You could cure aging. If eternal youth isn't a big thing, I don't know what is.
Speak for yourself. Puny Human.
So they can choose not to have you as a customer, and you can choose not to use their service. My guess is that they don't like the keyboard, or their bot detector got triggered by Wine though.
Actually, bot detectors would be very OS dependant. You'd check for things that would be true with a non hacked WOW e.g free space on the heap, current stack pointer and so on. Most importantly, I'd check the address of imported functions to look for hooking.
All these only work if you know the correct values. You'd have a set of known good values for OS's from Windows 95, 98, Me, NT, 2K and XP. You'd need to check for each Service Pack too. Essentially the code would be a big switch statement for the OS/SP version, and each case would check a bunch of obscure details against a known good value.
Oh, and there is another possibility - check the signature on system dll's, like USER32.DLL, KERNEL32.DLL and WS2_32.dll, the ip socket library, to make sure they were signed by Microsoft.
If any test doesn't match trigger the auto ban process. None of this would work on Wine, and it's hard to support open source code with this sort of checks, since there are many more versions of it in the wild. But Blizzard etc do have legitimate reasons for doing this, in that they want to preserve user experience by banning bots. They may well decide that losing the tiny minority of their users that use Wine is worthwhile to preserve the user experience for everyone else.
Or perhaps this guy did use a bot, and the Wine stuff is just an excuse.
I dunno, if I were sending my robots after this Asimov guy (is that a Russian name or what?) I'd probably equip them with Metal Storm
You never have too much firepower. Those russkies may be ignorant peons, but they can take a hell of a whippin'. The Nazis beat the shit out of 'em, but they kept comin'. Seems to me that a coonventional armament like a Phalanx may seem cheap, but it might not do the job.
Hell, even when I'm out huntin' 'coon'n'bear, I'd want a better system than a Phalanx. Seems to me, if you're serious about the security of our great ountry, you'll give the boys at Metal Storm a call. Robots don't like get overrun by hordes of reds, any more than humans do.
I was thinking about using for web and database servers. There'd definitely be some scaleability issues with normal PC OSs and applications, but that's the point.
i as/blanchard/talk_2.pdf
There's quite a bit of research on impoving scaleability with lots of CPU's. My idea is that you add some instructions to help e.g. spinlocks, and build them into protoypes with one OS, one webserver and one database server. The vendors will be keen on this stuff. And the net result is that you can patent the instructions, and try to license them to other CPU vendors. Then they could license them and get the speed up in the new applications when they are released, or they could wait until after and make their own version.
I'd design the new instructions by looking at cases like this
http://congreso.hispalinux.es/congreso2002/ponenc
With a bit of luck, you could come up with some changes in the cache and instruction set to impove 8+ way SMP. In many ways, it's a bit of a Risc philosophy, since you don't try to build particularly complex processors. But you do spend a lot of time profiling real code running in simulations, and then build the next generation with new features, only if you can implement them efficiently, and only if they make a radical difference to the speed of the applications you are testing with.
But my guess would be that you'd some up with a few new instructions that would make 32 way SMP much more efficient. Then you cram them into your 486 class cores and put a load of them on a chip. And at this point you're software partners have something which the can release to run well on the new chip. And suddenly you have a PC compatible chip & applications to compete with big iron stuff like 32 way PPC.
It's a world away from hiring a load of microarchitecture geniuses to work in isolation on really good single thread performance. But I think if you're AMD, there's much to be said for opening up a new market, rather than relying on being able to beat Intel at their own game each chip generation.
Via wanted to call a chipset the KZ, but KZ stands for "Koncentrationslager"
l
http://www.pcguide.com/art/rwtiu0006Chipset-c.htm
So they renamed it to the KT. Luckily for them Tyrannosaur Americans haven't survived in sufficient numbers to form an effective lobby group, since they would no doubt find the acronym KT very insensitive.
You can connect several machines to one network port, you know.
Via have been making small, cheap, low power cores for some time, whilse Intel and AMD moved to large, expensive high power one.
f 1390b277b98?hl=en&
Now there's a move to multi core designs and blade servers, and even the slowest x86 server is probably over powered for a server, you have to wonder if they could do an x86 version of Niagara
From here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIA_C7
"You can also see a quad-core C7, could be manufactured for the same cost as a single core P4 on 90 nm process."
Now Niagara is 8 core and each core has four threads admittedly, but there's something to be said for a four way x86 chip for blades. The power consumption wouldn't be too bad either. But you can have four C7 cores per P4 core. If I were AMD for example, I'd be playing around with an x86 Niagara.
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.arch/msg/991f
Hmm, and I'd find (or invent) some new benchmarks too.
Well, Sony's DRM has damaged my reputation, since I maintain l33t_Ripper.
Firstly, they should make an official statement that l33t_Ripper is broken because of their code, and apologising to my users for inconveniencing them. They should also pay me $1M dollars for taking actions that have convinced some of my users that I'm a "fscking lamer".
Secondly, they should send me a cute Japanese secretary of servicable age to anwer emails flaming me for distributing "a POS" and perform other duties as necessary.
If possible, she should be skilled in x86 assembly language, to help me update l33t_Ripper to work while the rootkit is installed.
Doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
no, READ the ROADMAP. I'm sick of reading posts like this.
human social interaction v 1.0 will be in Geek 2.1.0.4.5. Not 2.0.
people like you who can't be bothered to make any effort installing CVS (make SURE you use cvs-unstable-12-Mar-2006-0435am or later or your machine WILL be DESTROYED. DO NOT POST HERE COMPLAINING IF THIS HAPPENS!!!) and setting up a local CVS branch and pulling the latest unstable-tainted roadmap aren't worth talking to.
A few minutes Googling would tell that you COM+ and DCOM and back compatible versions of COM with new features, and that OLE is a dead end technology built out of COM.
And you can write Windows applications without knowing much about any of them
.
The only lasting influence of COM is in DirectX based programming, since DirectX is COM based, but the latest DirectX versions hide most of the COMmunism of the API.
Except you can easily write a Win32 binary that works on any Win32 os from Windows 95 to Vista.
Hell with a bit of work, you can make it use the features on later OS's too. Each new OS adds a few functions, but you can always add code that uses GetProcAddress and LoadLibrary to use them if they are present or use the old version if they are not. Not that you really need to, most of the new functions are for stupid eye candy anyway.
So it's misleading to describe each of the Win32 based OS's as a new API.
I thought of this episode (Atlantis actually)
i a.html
http://www.gateworld.net/atlantis/s2/202.shtml
or this one.
http://www.gateworld.net/sg1/s4/420.shtml
Both of them 'hide' to avoid being clobbered when the system is restored from backup. Or this one, which is more a trojan than a virus
http://www.gateworld.net/sg1/s4/412.shtml
Don't get me wrong, part of the charm of the series is that they use sci fi cliches but have a character comment on this.
My favourite, on The Sentinel ( http://www.gateworld.net/sg1/s5/520.shtml ) was when the bad guys attack a planet, and a booming Mysterons style voice threatens annhilation unless the planet capitulates whilst bombarding the planet. A character, played by the excellent Henry Gibson says
"What's that terrible voice? Where are the meteors coming from"
To which Jack says
"It's a Goa'uld ship in orbit. With really big speakers"
Or this
http://www.tv.com/point-of-view/episode/7368/triv
where the 'evil' Teal'c has a goatee, in a Star Trek reference.
Jack: (to Carter2) For all we know, you could be her evil twin. But, then we'd be dealing with cliches, and you know how I feel about those. Or, rather, you don't.
Which is pretty damn funny in context.
Yeah, I just read this as "Google announces they will hire a Chief Marketing Officer"
Bet their shares will go up when they do to.
Bah, my crazy ex would have chopped the body up with a hacksaw, or dissolved it in acid or something.
Ah, happy days. Every time I drive over that bridge over the water I get all nostalgic. They just don't make psychos like her anymore. Frozen bodies in the freezer is as good as it gets these days.
If it were me, I'd mention one of the Stargate episodes that borrowed the Donaldson plot device, rather than admit to reading Donaldson. This is dangerous, since admitting that Stargate borrows plots will not go down well with an rabid SG1 fans who have mod points. I'd point out that it's my favourite TV series since firefly got cancelled by the FASCIST SUITS at Fox.
Or "Welcome to Microsoft Starship. You have 0 days to activate. Please enter your activation code now. If you have an illegal copy, your account may be charged when you call the subspace activation hotline". This has the added advantage of a mod friendly comparison between M$ and an extortionist.
Yup, I'd go for the M$ WinBLOWS bashing.
Researcher 1: How's the experiment going? ... ... er it... can't tell what the machines are up to. ...
Researcher 2: Welll look at this post it made on slashdot.
R1: slashdot?
R2: It's some kind of primitive attempt at a HiveMind.
R1: But you said it was human.
R2: Yes.
R1: But humans never had a HiveMind. That's why peaceful coexistance with them was impossible. That's what I learnt at the temple.
R2: No, but they had something called the Internet and Websites. They were a very simple invention that allowed you to see posts from all over the world, but only from people who completely shared your prejudices. But I was joking, it's nothing at all like the HiveMind. Far inferior obviously.
R1: Wait, but in the post how does it know about our computer. I thought it only knew about stuff in the simulation.
R2: No _it's_ computer. In the simulation.
R1: So it's worried that the simulated computer might be misleading it somehow?
R2: Of course, look at what it wrote about "CDs and Bioses". It thinks it can trust them because they can only be written once.
R2: The simulation is running in the early 21st century. It drives to work in automobile, powered by gasoline bought from other humans the Middle East, where he actually tells machines what to do.
R1: Wow, and he
R2: No, it just thinks they are unreliable, and other humans are interfering with them. Just like real, living humans did at that time. Even stranger, they think the vast amount of communications from the embryonic HiveMind is due to things called 'spam' and 'p2p' sent by other humans. He thinks Bill Gates is a human trying to make money, too. They all do.
R1: In some ways, it's a shame we don't have any real humans to check the simulation against. It's hard to believe none of them guessed what was really happening.
R2:
Not really. Consider graphics cards.
5 uga.zip
UGA is a replacement for int 10 and the VGA registers. It gives you GetMode, SetMode and Blt. It's only used for bootup and blue screens in Windows, just like int 10 and VGA access is used at the moment.
When Windows is running, it uses a custom driver for perforemance and flexibility, so it can access the acceleration hardware which is not part of EFI.
ftp://download.intel.com/technology/efi/docs/EFI9
It's the same for the other EFI drivers - this is all for preboot and crashdump, not for when the system is working properly. IIRC, once the kernel starts, it calls into EFI to terminate most of the services.
So, for graphics you could use it as an OS independant driver, much in the way you can use the int 10 Vesa linear framebuffer on PCs now. But it's no substitute for a real native accelerated driver.
Hmm, 'pendantic'. Utter genius.
We really need a +1 Troll mod category.
With a bit of luck, temperatures in the billions of degrees will turn out to have important engineering uses and the people that make scientific instruments will have to do a painful rework of their old assembly code to cope with the 2^32 Degree Problem, like some of us had to do for Y2K.
The Sci / Tech market doesn't seem so cushy now, does it?
Can't you figure out the compiler flags and build it on a faster box. Or get a low end dual core AMD motherboard for a couple of hundred bucks and replace the P3 board, so even the stock binaries running blazingly fast.
I do wish Mr Coward would find other people to argue with. Flaming one's own posts always looks solipsistic to me. Perhaps he's just lonely though.
Ahem, Mr Coward, I consider you a ninny of the lowest sort.
No the number of posters is growing very quickly, but the number posting new information grows very slowly. So they get gradually drowned out by the ever rising tide of cliches, plagiarism, tedious restatements of conventional wisdom with no original additions and total batshit bugfuck crazy gibberish.
/. regularly and find it a hard concept.
I can't believe you could read
I'm working on a random web page generator.
If you pay me money, I won't release it.
Yup this is worrying stuff
1 -laser-aircraft_x.htm
http://en.xiando.org/Current_events
* The amount of Chemtrail attacks worldwide is increasing.
Is this why people point lasers at aircraft? Do they think the contrails are part of some kind of mind control scheme.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-01-1
* Al-Qaeda is getting dull. More fake terrorism is inevitably required maintain the completely tyrannic (still secret) world government, so a new big threat for the "TV watcher" will likely emerge soon.
Or maybe al-Qaeda will actually attack us again.
* It is still possible to free yourself of fear and choose to live in a love and harmony.
That's good to know.
* Television still makes you as stupid as the people on it.
But Battlestar Galactica is cool. You should watch it, it's about a liberal democracy under attack by a murderous enemy and the stresses that attack places on it.