A case in point is the article on Harry Potter and the deathly hallows [wikipedia.org] which as has been mentioned earlier in slashdot itself [slashdot.org], is full of spoilers, posted inside a day of the book having been released. A lot of people who stumbled onto that article while looking for details on the book must have felt cheated. Such a thing would never have been allowed to creep into any entry in a standard encyclopaedia.
Oh, come on! Do you really expect us to believe that Harry Potter fans have ever read anything other than the Harry Potter books?
So. Explain to me how castrating bots without disturbing or distressing the vast and overwhelming majority of computer users is a bad thing?
Explain to me why disturbing or distressing the vast majority of computer users is a bad thing?
I expect that the introduction of speed limits and other rules of the road distressed the vast majority of car users, but nobody thought that they had a right to avoid being disturbed which outweighed the safety and security of others.
The sick thing is that it was OBVIOUS it was a Cisco problem from the start. If you make the assumption that the iPhones are somehow defective, it's still a Cisco problem because any defective behavior from an iPhone would be indistinguishable from malicious behavior from a student.
It's a wireless network. If wireless client devices spam the network to the extent that all of the available bandwidth is consumed, then there is not the slightest fucking thing that the wireless routers can do to keep the network available.
When you say that it was obvious from the start that the Cisco routers were to blame, you're not doing so because you know the technical details and have diagnosed the issue. You're saying it because as far as you're concerned, Apple are always blameless.
Am I imagining things, or are systems that are supposed to be more secure than others getting caught with their pants down alot more lately ?
I'm guessing that you have nothing of interest to add to this discussion, or any discussion about security and are simply looking for cheap karma or to start a hugely tedious argument that we've all read a thousand times before.
As an alternative why don't you fly over to the UK and suck my big hairy cock, and in return I will promise to mod up one of your posts the next time I get the opportunity. You achieve your objectives and it will be a lot less annoying for everyone else.
Spanning Tree Protocol is the root bridge of all evil.
"We are the root of the Spanning Tree."
The most mystical sounding network status message ever devised, in my opinion. I always knew those Cisco IOS developers were a bunch of hippies. There's certainly plenty of evidence that they've been smoking something.
It could run all the software it didn't have with incredible efficiency and make full use of all the hardware it didn't support.
Seriously, it wasn't an OS - it was a tech demo.
Quit pretending that it was ever a viable OS or that it is anything special nowadays. Yeah, yeah, it could run multiple videos at once. But then again we're talking multiple 160x120 videos because that was about as good as video got at that time.
Let's see it running multiple, hi-res Xvid or h264 videos without dropping a frame. If there isn't a multithreaded port of those codecs, or a sufficiently good video driver available in 2007 then it's not a viable OS is it? If it was as well designed as the fanboys always claim then it would have been easy to write drivers and applications for it.
I swore off Matrox in 1995 after spending $400 on a card, all to find out there was no way to get X running in more than 16 color mode without spending several hundred more dollars on Accelerated-X licenses at the time.
You got X running with 4bit colour in 1995 and you're complaining?
That's a bit harsh. It's not like it was the only card at the time that was a nightmare to get running.
Complaining about shitty X drivers for ATI cards in 2007 is fine. Complaining about shitty X drivers for Matrox cards in 1995 not quite the same. Especially when anyone running an alternative OS at that time should have done their research before spending $400.
When MS wants $150 that I don't have to repair the thing, it's worth a shot. It did fix it the first time for about 2 weeks (the unit has been out of the 1-year warranty for about 6 months).
I do hope that the new extended warranty doesn't apply to people who put their hardware in a fucking oven.
I've got nothing against MS losing money, but stupidity isn't punished nearly enough in our society.
Yes, I'm sure it worked for a few people. I'm equally sure that twatting their console with a big hammer would have worked for some people as well, but if they'd put up a webpage about it and someone blindly copied them, that person would still be retarded.
Wouldn't it be nice if all virtual Second Lifers would take a virtual flying leap off a virtual cliff and land on top of a virtual field full of virtual knives and were chopped into virtual pieces which were then virtually eaten by virtual aliens from the virtual planet X-Omicron-Y who had virtually arrived after being invited by a virtual President Bush who had just been virtually turned into a virtual reality clone of himself?
Yes, except there are probably a large group of people in Second Life who would receive sexual gratification from this.
The articles that were being sold were digital duplicates.
Look, here's how it goes. If your business model is based on the assumption that people can't make exact digital duplicates of your products, then you are fucked. No ifs, no buts, it is a bad business model. And for a business like that, profitability is a very, very temporary state. Using realworld legal action to try and protect a business model like this is the epitome of stupid. You made some money, the flaws in your plan were exposed and now you're trying to get a court to fix it for you. Businesses fail all the time, your's is nothing special (except in humour terms).
I can only assume that you don't realise this because your world view has been distorted by spending too much time in Second Life. This can easily be fixed. Simply go to the nearest (real) bar and explain to each patron in turn what Second Life is. Then explain what Dildonics is. You may as well also mention Furries and Yiffing, because lets face it they probably feature heavily amongst your customers. Finally, round it all off by telling them all about your business and how you're actually going to a real court to sue an unknown person who is copying your digital creations. Let us know how many people didn't laugh at you.
It's one thing to emulate a CPU, it's quite another to emulate a CPU and all of the peripherals that are attached to it. It's also another stretch to get all of them configured in such a way that what you're emulating is binary compatible with the host firmware.
One word - Dynamips.
Emulates the MIPs or PPC cores in Cisco 2600/3600/7200 series routers and a number of Ethernet/Serial multiport add-in cards. Runs unmodified IOS binaries on your PC.
So it's not impossible, just difficult. Undocumented proprietary ASICs make it a lot harder, assuming they actually need to be emulated to achieve your goals.
Any time I have to spend f$%king with my OS instead of playing games, reading web pages, checking and answering my email is wasted. It's this spending-time-on-your-OS-is-your-ultimate-goal mentality that's holding Linux back from more mainstream adoption. The perfect OS would 'just work', let me run applications, and not require my attention in any way.
Well, what's wrong with OSX or Windows then? It's quite simple - you just pay money to Apple or Microsoft in exchange for never having to learn anything.
Nobody is forcing you to use Linux or any other OSS. I know you hear all this talk about the Linux "community" and "Open Source Evangelism", but it's really a bit overblown. I use Linux and I couldn't give a shit whether you live or die, let alone how comfortable you are using Slackware. I'm pretty sure the vast majority feel the same way. Don't believe everything you read on the Internet.
I remember back in the early 1990s, when the first network software for Microsoft systems started coming out, I read a report from some engineers who had been using it in their lab. They noticed that their modem's lights would flicker during times that the machine was "idle". So they hooked up a line monitor, and studied the activity.
So they had a Windows system with a TCP/IP connection to the Internet back in 1992? Impressive. That must be the case, because otherwise how would the packets get routed to those Microsoft "sites" you mention?
And what the fuck do you mean by a "line monitor"? Are you saying they actually captured the analogue output of the modem and reconstructed the data? I'm not saying it's impossible, just that the amount of effort involved casts doubt on your story. Another explanation is that they wrote their own sniffer and you are simply describing it in a way that casts doubt on your understanding of this whole area and therefore your ability to accurately recount the story.
If you are running Microsoft software, you should assume that, unless you know otherwise, that Microsoft has full access to everything in your machine.
Some people can use sniffers well enough to tell for certain whether a Windows machine is trying to send traffic to Microsoft or not. Other people know just enough to run a sniffer only to freak the fuck out when they see an ARP packet, or anything else they don't understand, then build a grand conspiracy theory around it. I know which group I'm in and I'm pretty damn sure I know which group you're in.
This is just a plain example on expected negetive effect of GNU Protectipon License on Open Source movement and community. How predictable!
I tell you what - you go away and learn how to express yourself in English and then we'll decide whether to take your views on complex legal issues seriously.
Of course, I probably don't speak your language but then I'm not trying to troll in it, am I?
A bit more effort next time, please. This is Slashdot, not a call centre.
Let's see - if I understand correctly, we've developed the capability to engineer something that can go in and ERASE very specific segments of people's DNA?
Gee, you're right. If they spend decades working on a viable delivery mechanism, they might eventually be able to kill everyone who suffers from cystic fibrosis.
I was going to provide a more detailed reply explaining why trying to target specific groups of people through their genes is retarded and unworkable, but I'm going to go and smoke some weed instead (although I guarantee it won't make me as paranoid as you are).
http://www.steelcape.com/ Congratulations, you've invented your own tunneling protocol. Like IPSEC or GRE, except instead of being carefully designed and peer reviewed by the IETF it's been tossed together by some no-name, snake oil vendor that thinks spamming Slashdot is an acceptable marketing strategy.
You do realise that anyone can click your username and instantly see how you're posting the same irrelevant shit to different stories, right?
I wonder if this means that we should toss out that x86 layer and deal just with the high-performance, straightforward RISC core.
Did you know that one of the main reasons that x86 outperforms any similarly specified RISC chip is because those horribly inelegant, variable length x86 instructions allow for considerably higher code density than RISC?
Elegant does not necessarily equal faster or better, no matter how much you might want it to.
There seem to be intentional modifications in there.
Unprovable conjecture. Why would Intel make this public if they were?
Could that be a backdoor and a good reason for countries like China to develop their own CPUs?
Are you the same freak that posted on KernelTrap about how every CPU since the 486 has been bugged by the NSA and can be monitored by satellites? If so, please carry out the recommended course of action that I detailed to you on that occasion. Namely that you set fire to yourself outside the UN building in order to draw attention to your cause. Thanks in advance.
1. Go to thishomepage, choose a mirror and download image. 2. Burn image on CD 3. Insert CD, follow instructions 4. ??? 5. Profit! Can I suggest the following modified process for you and everyone that's ever posted this list or anything similar in reply to a Windows story?
1. Eat shit 2. Die
Because judging by the glimpse of your personality that shines through in your comment, the best way for you to advocate Linux would be to never, ever mention it again.
I don't know if this is true or not, but I heard that the x86 cross licensing deal between Intel and AMD (amongst others) states that no more than 20% of fabrication can be outsourced to others.
If true, it makes this story seem somewhat unlikely, especially since most of the bulk is at the low end.
Please re-consider follow a more free license rather than a hate-oriented lincense.
Free the code, free the programmers. I just had a quick look at your posting history.
Incoherent ramblings on random subjects? Check.
Appears to speak English as a twelfth language? Check.
Has never replied to anyone else's post? Check.
You sir, are a bot. It's a real shame that your author didn't have sufficient coding or language skills to make you convincing. With a bit more effort, you could have been a contender. As it is, you blend into the background so much that you've barely been noticed at all. I guess your author had the same problem. I can only assume that he was such a non-entity that he failed it even as a troll and decided that a few lines of code would have more personality. I'm imagining a basement, probably somewhere in Eastern Europe, where the bloated, decaying corpse of a failed programmer swings from a rafter. The only illumination provided by a flickering CRT displaying the Slashdot "Comment Submitted" screen on a slow, endless loop.
Considering some of the low power hardware that NetBSD has been ported to, I am sure that a top of the line IBM super computer should have no trouble handling it:)
They decided to skip porting a dead OS to it and went straight to porting an undead OS.
Once Apple gets Safari for Windows to the point where it's very stable, I'll probably be recommending it to IE users.
Oh, so you recommend Apple software to Windows users too? Excellent! It's always nice to meet a fellow misanthropist.
Maybe if you're free some time we could get together and set fire to some random people's houses? Or maybe install Quicktime on their PCs if we're feeling particularly evil?
according to that article, the ohmygod particle was traveling 9.7 million times faster than light.
No, it says it was traveling at 0.9999999999999999999999951 times the speed of light.
As a general rule, if an article initially appears to state that something is traveling at more than the speed of light, you should re-read it until it doesn't.
Slashdot Mirror
A case in point is the article on Harry Potter and the deathly hallows [wikipedia.org] which as has been mentioned earlier in slashdot itself [slashdot.org], is full of spoilers, posted inside a day of the book having been released. A lot of people who stumbled onto that article while looking for details on the book must have felt cheated. Such a thing would never have been allowed to creep into any entry in a standard encyclopaedia.
Oh, come on! Do you really expect us to believe that Harry Potter fans have ever read anything other than the Harry Potter books?
Citation, please.
So. Explain to me how castrating bots without disturbing or distressing the vast and overwhelming majority of computer users is a bad thing?
Explain to me why disturbing or distressing the vast majority of computer users is a bad thing?
I expect that the introduction of speed limits and other rules of the road distressed the vast majority of car users, but nobody thought that they had a right to avoid being disturbed which outweighed the safety and security of others.
The sick thing is that it was OBVIOUS it was a Cisco problem from the start. If you make the assumption that the iPhones are somehow defective, it's still a Cisco problem because any defective behavior from an iPhone would be indistinguishable from malicious behavior from a student.
It's a wireless network. If wireless client devices spam the network to the extent that all of the available bandwidth is consumed, then there is not the slightest fucking thing that the wireless routers can do to keep the network available.
When you say that it was obvious from the start that the Cisco routers were to blame, you're not doing so because you know the technical details and have diagnosed the issue. You're saying it because as far as you're concerned, Apple are always blameless.
Am I imagining things, or are systems that are supposed to be more secure than others getting caught with their pants down alot more lately ?
I'm guessing that you have nothing of interest to add to this discussion, or any discussion about security and are simply looking for cheap karma or to start a hugely tedious argument that we've all read a thousand times before.
As an alternative why don't you fly over to the UK and suck my big hairy cock, and in return I will promise to mod up one of your posts the next time I get the opportunity. You achieve your objectives and it will be a lot less annoying for everyone else.
Spanning Tree Protocol is the root bridge of all evil.
"We are the root of the Spanning Tree."
The most mystical sounding network status message ever devised, in my opinion. I always knew those Cisco IOS developers were a bunch of hippies. There's certainly plenty of evidence that they've been smoking something.
It could run all the software it didn't have with incredible efficiency and make full use of all the hardware it didn't support.
Seriously, it wasn't an OS - it was a tech demo.
Quit pretending that it was ever a viable OS or that it is anything special nowadays. Yeah, yeah, it could run multiple videos at once. But then again we're talking multiple 160x120 videos because that was about as good as video got at that time.
Let's see it running multiple, hi-res Xvid or h264 videos without dropping a frame. If there isn't a multithreaded port of those codecs, or a sufficiently good video driver available in 2007 then it's not a viable OS is it? If it was as well designed as the fanboys always claim then it would have been easy to write drivers and applications for it.
I swore off Matrox in 1995 after spending $400 on a card, all to find out there was no way to get X running in more than 16 color mode without spending several hundred more dollars on Accelerated-X licenses at the time.
You got X running with 4bit colour in 1995 and you're complaining?
That's a bit harsh. It's not like it was the only card at the time that was a nightmare to get running.
Complaining about shitty X drivers for ATI cards in 2007 is fine. Complaining about shitty X drivers for Matrox cards in 1995 not quite the same. Especially when anyone running an alternative OS at that time should have done their research before spending $400.
I know what it does.
When MS wants $150 that I don't have to repair the thing, it's worth a shot. It did fix it the first time for about 2 weeks (the unit has been out of the 1-year warranty for about 6 months).
I do hope that the new extended warranty doesn't apply to people who put their hardware in a fucking oven.
I've got nothing against MS losing money, but stupidity isn't punished nearly enough in our society.
Yes, I'm sure it worked for a few people. I'm equally sure that twatting their console with a big hammer would have worked for some people as well, but if they'd put up a webpage about it and someone blindly copied them, that person would still be retarded.
Wouldn't it be nice if all virtual Second Lifers would take a virtual flying leap off a virtual cliff and land on top of a virtual field full of virtual knives and were chopped into virtual pieces which were then virtually eaten by virtual aliens from the virtual planet X-Omicron-Y who had virtually arrived after being invited by a virtual President Bush who had just been virtually turned into a virtual reality clone of himself?
Yes, except there are probably a large group of people in Second Life who would receive sexual gratification from this.
The articles that were being sold were digital duplicates.
Look, here's how it goes. If your business model is based on the assumption that people can't make exact digital duplicates of your products, then you are fucked. No ifs, no buts, it is a bad business model. And for a business like that, profitability is a very, very temporary state. Using realworld legal action to try and protect a business model like this is the epitome of stupid. You made some money, the flaws in your plan were exposed and now you're trying to get a court to fix it for you. Businesses fail all the time, your's is nothing special (except in humour terms).
I can only assume that you don't realise this because your world view has been distorted by spending too much time in Second Life. This can easily be fixed. Simply go to the nearest (real) bar and explain to each patron in turn what Second Life is. Then explain what Dildonics is. You may as well also mention Furries and Yiffing, because lets face it they probably feature heavily amongst your customers. Finally, round it all off by telling them all about your business and how you're actually going to a real court to sue an unknown person who is copying your digital creations. Let us know how many people didn't laugh at you.
It's one thing to emulate a CPU, it's quite another to emulate a CPU and all of the peripherals that are attached to it. It's also another stretch to get all of them configured in such a way that what you're emulating is binary compatible with the host firmware.
One word - Dynamips.
Emulates the MIPs or PPC cores in Cisco 2600/3600/7200 series routers and a number of Ethernet/Serial multiport add-in cards. Runs unmodified IOS binaries on your PC.
So it's not impossible, just difficult. Undocumented proprietary ASICs make it a lot harder, assuming they actually need to be emulated to achieve your goals.
Any time I have to spend f$%king with my OS instead of playing games, reading web pages, checking and answering my email is wasted. It's this spending-time-on-your-OS-is-your-ultimate-goal mentality that's holding Linux back from more mainstream adoption. The perfect OS would 'just work', let me run applications, and not require my attention in any way.
Well, what's wrong with OSX or Windows then? It's quite simple - you just pay money to Apple or Microsoft in exchange for never having to learn anything.
Nobody is forcing you to use Linux or any other OSS. I know you hear all this talk about the Linux "community" and "Open Source Evangelism", but it's really a bit overblown. I use Linux and I couldn't give a shit whether you live or die, let alone how comfortable you are using Slackware. I'm pretty sure the vast majority feel the same way. Don't believe everything you read on the Internet.
I remember back in the early 1990s, when the first network software for Microsoft systems started coming out, I read a report from some engineers who had been using it in their lab. They noticed that their modem's lights would flicker during times that the machine was "idle". So they hooked up a line monitor, and studied the activity.
So they had a Windows system with a TCP/IP connection to the Internet back in 1992? Impressive. That must be the case, because otherwise how would the packets get routed to those Microsoft "sites" you mention?
And what the fuck do you mean by a "line monitor"? Are you saying they actually captured the analogue output of the modem and reconstructed the data? I'm not saying it's impossible, just that the amount of effort involved casts doubt on your story. Another explanation is that they wrote their own sniffer and you are simply describing it in a way that casts doubt on your understanding of this whole area and therefore your ability to accurately recount the story.
If you are running Microsoft software, you should assume that, unless you know otherwise, that Microsoft has full access to everything in your machine.
Some people can use sniffers well enough to tell for certain whether a Windows machine is trying to send traffic to Microsoft or not. Other people know just enough to run a sniffer only to freak the fuck out when they see an ARP packet, or anything else they don't understand, then build a grand conspiracy theory around it. I know which group I'm in and I'm pretty damn sure I know which group you're in.
This is just a plain example on expected negetive effect of GNU Protectipon License on Open Source movement and community. How predictable!
I tell you what - you go away and learn how to express yourself in English and then we'll decide whether to take your views on complex legal issues seriously.
Of course, I probably don't speak your language but then I'm not trying to troll in it, am I?
A bit more effort next time, please. This is Slashdot, not a call centre.
Let's see - if I understand correctly, we've developed the capability to engineer something that can go in and ERASE very specific segments of people's DNA?
Gee, you're right. If they spend decades working on a viable delivery mechanism, they might eventually be able to kill everyone who suffers from cystic fibrosis.
I was going to provide a more detailed reply explaining why trying to target specific groups of people through their genes is retarded and unworkable, but I'm going to go and smoke some weed instead (although I guarantee it won't make me as paranoid as you are).
http://www.steelcape.com/ Congratulations, you've invented your own tunneling protocol. Like IPSEC or GRE, except instead of being carefully designed and peer reviewed by the IETF it's been tossed together by some no-name, snake oil vendor that thinks spamming Slashdot is an acceptable marketing strategy.
You do realise that anyone can click your username and instantly see how you're posting the same irrelevant shit to different stories, right?
I wonder if this means that we should toss out that x86 layer and deal just with the high-performance, straightforward RISC core.
Did you know that one of the main reasons that x86 outperforms any similarly specified RISC chip is because those horribly inelegant, variable length x86 instructions allow for considerably higher code density than RISC?
Elegant does not necessarily equal faster or better, no matter how much you might want it to.
There seem to be intentional modifications in there.
Unprovable conjecture. Why would Intel make this public if they were?
Could that be a backdoor and a good reason for countries like China to develop their own CPUs?
Are you the same freak that posted on KernelTrap about how every CPU since the 486 has been bugged by the NSA and can be monitored by satellites? If so, please carry out the recommended course of action that I detailed to you on that occasion. Namely that you set fire to yourself outside the UN building in order to draw attention to your cause. Thanks in advance.
2. Burn image on CD
3. Insert CD, follow instructions
4. ???
5. Profit! Can I suggest the following modified process for you and everyone that's ever posted this list or anything similar in reply to a Windows story?
1. Eat shit
2. Die
Because judging by the glimpse of your personality that shines through in your comment, the best way for you to advocate Linux would be to never, ever mention it again.
If you built a Faraday cage [wikipedia.org] around your fridge, that might work.
Well, it would be great for containing any EM radiation produced by the fridge within the cage.
For keeping out charged particles moving at a respectable fraction of lightspeed? Outlook not so good.
I don't know if this is true or not, but I heard that the x86 cross licensing deal between Intel and AMD (amongst others) states that no more than 20% of fabrication can be outsourced to others.
If true, it makes this story seem somewhat unlikely, especially since most of the bulk is at the low end.
Please re-consider follow a more free license rather than a hate-oriented lincense.
Free the code, free the programmers. I just had a quick look at your posting history.
Incoherent ramblings on random subjects? Check.
Appears to speak English as a twelfth language? Check.
Has never replied to anyone else's post? Check.
You sir, are a bot. It's a real shame that your author didn't have sufficient coding or language skills to make you convincing. With a bit more effort, you could have been a contender. As it is, you blend into the background so much that you've barely been noticed at all. I guess your author had the same problem. I can only assume that he was such a non-entity that he failed it even as a troll and decided that a few lines of code would have more personality. I'm imagining a basement, probably somewhere in Eastern Europe, where the bloated, decaying corpse of a failed programmer swings from a rafter. The only illumination provided by a flickering CRT displaying the Slashdot "Comment Submitted" screen on a slow, endless loop.
Considering some of the low power hardware that NetBSD has been ported to, I am sure that a top of the line IBM super computer should have no trouble handling it :)
They decided to skip porting a dead OS to it and went straight to porting an undead OS.
Once Apple gets Safari for Windows to the point where it's very stable, I'll probably be recommending it to IE users.
Oh, so you recommend Apple software to Windows users too? Excellent! It's always nice to meet a fellow misanthropist.
Maybe if you're free some time we could get together and set fire to some random people's houses? Or maybe install Quicktime on their PCs if we're feeling particularly evil?
according to that article, the ohmygod particle was traveling 9.7 million times faster than light.
No, it says it was traveling at 0.9999999999999999999999951 times the speed of light.
As a general rule, if an article initially appears to state that something is traveling at more than the speed of light, you should re-read it until it doesn't.