Hrm, Solaris, AIX, SCO, Tru64, Ultrix, Irix... Xenix(heh), Apple UNIX(heh)
Well, the Mac OS X kernel is OSS (IIRC), but I'll give it to you. (And I'm a bit sceptical that Xenix counts (or counted, rather) as being a real Unix).
It first ran on a pdp11, or somthing like that and was a play on the name MULTIX, witch was a multi user OS (Unix was intended to be a single user OS, at the time).
Pretty good - it first ran on the PDP-7, but was moved to the PDP-11. And it was spelled Multics (maybe it was all caps, I can't remember). Also, Unix was never single user. It was just a pun. And from all reports, Multics was basically a single user OS too (it was designed to support hundreds or thousands of concurrent users, but never managed more than half a dozen without crashing).
Congratualations on winning the Unix trivia contest. You win... uh... [desperate thinking]... you win a free installation of FreeBSD. Just go to ftp.freebsd.org and download you prize.:)
What is up with this Linux-centric view of the world? I am sick to death of the short-sighted, open-source zealots with no sense of proporttion or knowledge of history.
I was going to say the same thing. Linux does not embody the whole of Unix (not even close!). I'll bet a lot of Linux users out there couldn't name 6 commercial Unix flavors. The first processor to run Unix? Where the very name Unix comes from?
Personally, I find this loss of perspective regarding Linux's position in the world of Unix very disturbing. Probably I'm making too much of this, but it really does bother me.
nobody is gonna email you with such a stupid anti-spam feature... like i'm gonna waste time removing letters or rot13'ing them... why don't you just use some free mail account you don't care about. when it's full of crap use another address.
LOL. Since you haven't decoded it, how do you know the address is ever real?:)
Of OSS in general (like the grant they gave to the GnuPG project a while back). I wonder if we'll start seeing that in the US as well (ie, instead of hiring someone to code a program, donate money to help provide a OSS version). That would be cool - tax breaks for US kernel hackers.:)
All these things (X-Box, Indrema, etc, etc), are pointless as far as I'm concerned. I have a pretty decent PC, and I'll probably buy another this fall. PCs are nice, and fun to use. However...
I also bought an N64 last fall for no other purpose than to play Zelda: The Ocarina of Time on it. Happily, the next Zelda will also be on N64, but if it weren't I'd buy whatever new thing it was running on. Basically what I'm saying here is that power doesn't matter (realisically N64 is _way underpowered compared to Playstation2, etc), its games games games - not how many (I really don't care), but what they are. In my case, if they're Zelda, though I'm sure others have other favorites. I've also bought some other games (MK4, Donkey Kong, Super Smash Brothers), but they were _not the reason I bought the N64 in the first place (ie, I would not have bought an N64 to play any of those games, but since I have an N64 I might as well have a few games around, right?)
If Sony bought the rights for Zelda from Nintendo (yeah friggin right), I'd go out and buy a Playstation2 (or whatever the new Zelda will be running on). I (personally) have totally no loyalty to Nintendo, but rather to the Zelda series (I wish Nintendo would do a Shadowrun for N64, though. I miss that game. Sigh)
Won't work. The Win2000 OS of the X-Box is on a ROM. Read the article here.
So when people find bugs that enable you to get remote control of a X-Box (c'mon, people find artibrary code expoits for NT4 all the time, I doubt Win2000 will be too much different, though I suppose the late ship date will give them some time), people can't upgrade. Maybe you're on a cable modem and you want to erase the games of everyone who uses an X-Box in your neighboorhood? OK. Or just put a script in cron that reboots them every 5 minutes.:)
But for parallel calculations wider is better. Do you know what the 64 in Nintendo 64 stands for? Yup, the CPU is 64-bit!
IIRC, it's a MIPS R4400, which is what you get in (old) SGI servers (like the horrible horrible machines they run here on campus). True, it's not a P-III or Athlon, but it is a general purpose CPU (unlike, say Dreamcast or Playstation).
It likely was the first secure public key algorithm, and the implications of that detail on the possibilities of encryption are hard to overstate.
Too bad GCHQ didn't release the algorithm when they discovered it (as they apparently didn't realize the true value of it at the time). Then prior art and all that (like it's stopped a large number of patents granted lately, like that year 2000 windowing thing, though). Certainly, PK changed the whole way crypto works... though I suppose you could classify DH as a public key algorithm (yes, it's key exchange but it's fairly easy to convert it to a public key algorithm, like ElGamal or one of the MTI protocols).
So yes, if anything in math or computers should be patentable (a debatable question to be sure) the RSA algorithm should be.
OK, I'll agree with you here (not that I think any software and/or mathematical patent is valid), but RSA is a monumental achievment.
Of course by the end of the lifetime of the patent, the ridiculousness of long patents in software is painfully obvious...:-(
Ouch, yes. It's really funny to think about more specific things (for instance, these memory patents [I knew I would be able to get this post ontopic eventually!]) will be soooooo old by the time they expire. I really think a 5 year limit on patents (along with a 15 or 20 year copyright limit) would be much more fair. Ah, well...
Stashing a secret message in a bunch of a DNA has a good chance of "they wouldn't look there", but if they *did* decide to look in the bunch of DNA, a message like "JUNE6_INVASION: NORMANDY" probably has different enough statistics from the rest of the DNA around it that it might stand out.
I'll admit that I know hardly anything about biology, but I'm pretty sure that DNA strings are very very very long. I wouldn't be suprised if a brute force search such as that you suggest is actually infeasible (similiar to "breaking" RSA by factoring the modulus, if you will).
Hmmmm... I wonder if it would be possible to encode messages so they looked like normal DNA? I'm not sure how many proteins there are (probably a lot) - might it be possible to design some sort of coorespondance between proteins, and, say, strings of 8 bits and use that? Of course, could the animal live long enough with screwy DNA for the recipient to get it?:)
Another favorite steganographic method of mine is to encode data into graphic images, for example, taking a bitmapped image and using a key to encode data onto each pixel, say by incrementing the red RGB value of each pixel by 1 where appropriate. It would be exceedingly difficult to detect that a message even contained data, let alone extracting it without the key.
Sadly, now that you've told me, I know how to get your messages.:) Also, if people have access to the original copy (ie, where you got it from) then you're in trouble. And, at least AFAIK, you'll have to keep an original around somewhere to "decrypt" your message, which is kind of a problem, I might think (note that I am not saying that all of stego is like that, just in this particular case). People might get curious - "why does he have 2 almost identical copies of the same picture?".
Windows, maybe Mac, if they put out an updatable flash BIOS.
Linux has had support for the G400 for quite some time - in fact Penguin Computing has been selling workstations with dual head G400s for quite a while now (nice machines).
Well, it's scary depending on how much experience you have. If you've taken Number Theory, Algebra (the college kind), or a cryptology class or two you can probably figure out the math given time. It involves a lot of coding theory, since the basic idea of a digital watermark it to encode some identifying information into the low bits of the graphic, along with a strong error correcting code which prevents it from being destroyed by the usual image manipulations (shrinking, streching, adjusting contrast, etc). There are also considerations for things like making sure that only a valid watermark is identified as such (that is, you should be able to examine a graphic [obviously not with your eyes, I mean with a program that does this sort of thing] and tell if it is watermarked or not, and if so what the watermark says). Ross Anderson has done some work on that, IIRC. His webpage is http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/.
As far as the whole batch processing thing goes, I really don't know. Presumably, given a program that watermarks a JPEG, it would be fairly easy to automate it with a Perl or shell script to do a whole directory tree.
If you leave the Desktop to winblowz, how will it be before MS makes that desktop work only with MS servers? (Actually, W2k w/ kerberos bastardized by MS may already have done that).
M$ isn't that crazy (famous last words, right?). I mean, OK, say Windows 20XX Desktop will only communicate with Windows 20XX Server. First off, people will reverse engineer and/or clone the interfaces (Samba, anyone?). And unless the place is already a M$ shop to start with, no one will go along with it. Windows 2000 may be OK, but it's limited to Intel hardware (I'll pick Sun or DEC stuff over Intel for a server anyday), and still doesn't scale anywhere near as good as, say, Solaris (maybe as good as Linux, I really don't know). But anyway, it's really not feasible to replace those big servers with Windows.
Note that I come from a very biased background - I'm a sysadmin at a mediumish sized college, and we have Solaris on the servers and public workstations, and people using everything on their desktops - MacOS 7/8, MacOS X, Linux, Solaris, Win95/98, WinNT, NeXT, and I'll bet at least a few BeOS and *BSD boxen as well. Standardizing on all Microsoft stuff is basically impossible (even if we wouldn't have to throw out millions of $$$ of Sun hardware b/c Windows can't run on it).
Solaris 8 ships with GCC. A Shell is an important part of your interaction with an OS. If you can't manage that yourself (writing your own aliases, as well as choosing your own shell), you shouldn't be wasting your time with Solaris.
Well, that's wonderful! When I have time, I'll go and upgrade all of the ~400 machines in the department to Solaris 8 and we can all celebrate. Anyway, the new commercial Sun compilers work pretty well and I'll stick with them on Solaris.
As far as the shells are concerned, I do choose my own damn shell, which is bash. That's it. No arguments. I just don't see why Sun feels it's really necessary to ship obviously outdated and obsolete tools with their system. And I'm annoyed that I had to suffer with csh up until I got bash all nice and cozily installed this afternoon.
In any case, I'm hardly "wasting my time with Solaris" - I get paid pretty decent money to admin these machines. I can think of at least a half-a-dozen OSes I would choose over Solaris for home use (easily: Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, BeOS, NT, 2000).
Gee, I'd better tell my financial services and telecommunications clients to put all their mission critical application development on hold while you make up your mind.
Your clients can do whatever the hell they like. If they want to run them on Solaris, fine. If instead Linux/*BSD, fine. NT, IRIX, or SCO, fine with me. Since they are not my clients, I really don't give a flying fuck.
Right, because these are integral parts of the operating system. I see.
No, ksh and csh are not integral parts of the OS (much less CDE, as I've gotten on quite fine without it for most of my Unix life, thank you). A SHELL is an integral part, and ksh and csh are, IMO, not very good choices for these particular itegral parts (when tcsh, bash, and zsh are far better). A C compiler is often considered an integral part of the OS - what would you think of a Linux distro that shipped gcc 1.0 as the system compiler? As far as I'm concerned, that's about equivalent.
My school uses exclusively Sun servers and all the admins I've talked to sing high praises of them. But I've been stuck working on our Sun Ultra5 worstations far too often, and they are TERRIBLE. Sooooo sloooooow. They're configured with 128M of RAM and, if I remember right, a 300 mHz sparc. My PII-350 with Linux and the same amount of RAM is much more responsive. Not to mention that they go down with alarming frequency, and they cost four times what I paid for my intel box around the same time period.
Yeah, the deptartment where I study (CS) and the one where I work (Physics) both run Suns, and I've had pretty much the same experience, except the Sun Enterprise 1 [formerly the NFS server] on my desk only has 96 megs of RAM.:( However, there are a pair of Ultra10s across the hall that I can pop over and use if I like, which run pretty well. And for big servers, at this point, Sun is still the way to go, despite the usual zealots (yes people, I run Linux at home too) who claim that anything can be done on i486 Beowulf clusters.
Now only if Solaris didn't suck so much... OK, it scales well and is pretty stable (I'm still undecided if Linux/*BSD is more stable), but it's a real pain at times. I mean, any OS that uses CDE and comes with csh and ksh as the shells just sucks (I just installed bash this afternoon).
Damn, it's a pain in the ass to get used to using a PC keyboard after using a Sun one all afternoon... oh, on the subject of hardware - Sun stuff may cost a lot but it is quality stuff. Before they were replaced last month, the CS department had a bunch of old SPARCStations (mostly SPARC5s, I think), which actually ran pretty well despite being who-knows-how-old (about as fast as a Pentium II-200 with 96 megs of RAM, if I was guessing for a PCish equivalence). And Ultra2s are fucking awesome... spec on at Sun's website sometime, you'll be amazed at how cool (and how insanely expensive) they are.
Does it run on *nix, Win32, MacOS...
on
SSH v. SRP
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When and only when nice graphical interfaces for Windows, MacOS, etc (ala TeraTerm SSH, SecureCRT, DataFellows SSH, etc) exist for SRP will it be possible for be possible for it to replace SSH: face it fellas, most clients are Windows boxes, and if the clients can't connect to the server securely because either clients don't exist for the OS or the users won't use them because the interfaces suck, who cares if it's secure? Also, SSH is, as far as system integration is concerned, very easy to do.
Templates come to mind but also such things as macros (eeeww).
Templates are actually much safer than things like the Java Containers, since you can enforce at compile time the types that can be contained within them. (Admittably I'm not too familiar with Java, and if you could explain further I would like to hear it).
Macros are there only for C compatiblity. Even Brian Kernighan doesn't like them:
"The reason [for using macros] is performance: a macro avoids the overhead of a function call. This argument was weak even when C was first defined, a time of slow machines and expensive function calls; today it is irrelevant. With modern machines and compilers, the drawbacks of function macros outweigh their benefits." - The Practice of Programming, by Kernighan and Pike.
I hate macros that do anything - conditional compilation I'm OK with (though it's way overused a lot of the time, IMHO). In a library I'm working on that currently has ~14000 lines, there are exactly 2 macros, both of which are only defined inside a single function.
I could go on for quite some time about all the little things that are wrong with C++, but as someone once said "If you don't like it, go invent your own language".:)
I don't think you would gain any benefit compiling the linux kernel with this since the kernel is in C not C++. So there is nothing to translate.
It still does the optimizations even if given straight C. However, the kernel uses a lot of gcc-dependant things, and I think it would be pretty hard to get the kernel to compile with KCC.
I like burritos, but only _cheap_ burritos >:) I used to be able to get this brand of freezer burritos in big long sacks- man, I miss those. Currently I'm occasionally buying another brand of cheap freezer burrito, but though the Cheap Burrito Flavor (tm) is still right, the new kind (Tina's Beef And Bean Green Chili) tends to have bits of bone in it, which is extremely nasty. I don't want it _that_ cheap thank you;P:) The other kind (Los Campanas?) had cheaper packaging, but never contained unwanted bits:)
Trust me, it's best to make them yourself. It's much cheaper, you know exactly what went into it, and you can make it to taste. I freaking love Mexican food, and while I go to Mexican restaurants once in a while (if you're in the Baltimore area check out Holy Frijoles - excellent tacos), doing it regularly, or buying them frozen, would bankrupt me. Also I like to cook a lot - I'd feel useless just nuking a frozen burrito for dinner. And I can't say I'm really into that Cheap Burrito Flavor (tm), LOL
I rarely put meat in Mexican food (though I'm making chicken tacos tonight - yum), so I've never had a problem with bone pieces. Yuck.:)
Yes, the GNU compiler -COULD- be improved, enormously. I think that a decent multi-pass compiler, with intelligent flag control, would be great. A multi-pass linker would be cool, too - I am fed up of errors due to putting library calls in the "wrong" order. It's quite capable of doing a once-through to search for symbols, and working out how to link from there.
My favorite is KAI C++. It runs on most Unices and also NT, and generates really really fast code. It compiles at about the same speed as gcc, but the resulting code can be 2-3x as fast as a new gcc (this is for mathematical ops since that's what KCC is optimized for). I suspect that even "normal" code could get significant speed increases, however. It's also one of the best compilers I've seen for ANSI/ISO compliance, about even with gcc 2.95.2 with updated libstdc++ packages.
The way that it works (by taking the C++, optimizing it and converting it to C, then handing it off to the system cc) helps the portability of KCC and ensures the code gets the benifit of system dependent optimizations. However, that means it has to use the system linker, which is too bad. I really don't like the GNU linker at all, it's such a pain in the arse.:)
I think the fact that there's just NOW coming to market a decent Chipset for the Athlon has hurt AMD quite a bit. I also think AMD should come out of the closet a bit and share what they know of why their Irontgate chipset isn't always compatible with AGP2x as it's spec'ed to be.
OTOH, Intel is having a MUCH harder time with the new boards (i820 and i840) - the number and seriousness of the errors on these things in crazy.
And combined with the disaster-in-the-making known as IA-64 (personally, I think it seems like a good idea on paper, but there are so many problems I don't think that anything good will come of it), and their production problems on high end Pentium III chips, Intel is not doing at all well.
By comparison, AMD is doing good. The Athlon is doing great and it seems that the architecture will hold up for quite some time (unlike Pentium IIIs, which IMHO are pretty much on their last legs as a viable design for new chips - hence Willamette and IA-64, neither of which will be here for at least 6-9 months). The chipset problems are a disadvantage, as is the lack of availability of SMP Athlon boards.
BTW, does anyone know if Athlons are being made with.18 micron processes (last I heard they were still at.25) and/or copper interconnects yet, and if not what the current planned dates are?
In other words, Windows 2000 is killing Linux now, so Slashdot has to post whatever it can find that makes Microsoft look bad.
WTF? You've been able to buy it for, what, 2 whole days now (release date was 2/17, right?). Realistically, how many people are going to replace their Linux and FreeBSD x86 servers with Windows 2000? That's a pretty massive risk, not to mention the enourmous amount of downtime and integrartion problems (a lot more than some companies - like ISPs, can handle, and more than any company wants to have). And of course Win2000 is not running on Alpha or UltraSPARC (to mention 2 popular server architechures), so if you've got any of those around, you'll SOL (not to mention PowerPC, HPPA, etc)
I suspect that that vast majority of people using Windows 2000 are going to be people upgrading from 95/98/NT. And in the single user area, you can still dual boot, y'know. Personally, I'm waiting for at least 6 months to see if major problems crop up, then I'll replace 98 with 2000, and play Windows games on an SMP machine (hopefully by then I will have a dedicated Linux box)
people install applications onto the os everyday! Does this mean there is some kind of link between the program being installed and the OS?
Certainly. After all, it's a hell of a lot easier to install something nasty on a 95/98 box than a Linux or *BSD box. It can be done but it can sometimes take a fair amount of effort (especially if the person is security concious and prevents floppy booting, booting into single mode without a password, etc)
It's a good thing that AMD is now kicking Intels butt, and will continue to do so for the forseeable future. Otherwise I might worry about this. Who cares what Intel does? Wintel is dead (ok, I'm probably jumping the gun there). Linux will continue to take over the market - first servers, and eventually (3-5 years) the desktop market as well (the exact timeframe is probably wrong, but I'm pretty sure it will happen sometime).
In any case, Intel has relied for a long time on the fact that Windows runs only on Intel (don't talk to me about those jokes NT/Alpha and NT/PowerPC), and that most people run Windows, ergo most people buy Intel hardware (this being before AMD made good stuff like the K6-3 and Athlons). Not only is AMD making better chips from a techie standpoint, but Intel can't even make enough of their high end chips to meed their demand. So the day is soon coming when AMD makes better Intel hardware than Intel itself (already here), and the major desktop and server OS (Linux) runs on many different architechtures (fairly near future). Goodbye Intel!:)
Slashdot Mirror
Hrm, Solaris, AIX, SCO, Tru64, Ultrix, Irix... Xenix(heh), Apple UNIX(heh)
:)
Well, the Mac OS X kernel is OSS (IIRC), but I'll give it to you. (And I'm a bit sceptical that Xenix counts (or counted, rather) as being a real Unix).
It first ran on a pdp11, or somthing like that and was a play on the name MULTIX, witch was a multi user OS (Unix was intended to be a single user OS, at the time).
Pretty good - it first ran on the PDP-7, but was moved to the PDP-11. And it was spelled Multics (maybe it was all caps, I can't remember). Also, Unix was never single user. It was just a pun. And from all reports, Multics was basically a single user OS too (it was designed to support hundreds or thousands of concurrent users, but never managed more than half a dozen without crashing).
Congratualations on winning the Unix trivia contest. You win... uh... [desperate thinking]... you win a free installation of FreeBSD. Just go to ftp.freebsd.org and download you prize.
What is up with this Linux-centric view of the world? I am sick to death of the short-sighted, open-source zealots with no sense of proporttion or knowledge of history.
I was going to say the same thing. Linux does not embody the whole of Unix (not even close!). I'll bet a lot of Linux users out there couldn't name 6 commercial Unix flavors. The first processor to run Unix? Where the very name Unix comes from?
Personally, I find this loss of perspective regarding Linux's position in the world of Unix very disturbing. Probably I'm making too much of this, but it really does bother me.
nobody is gonna email you with such a stupid anti-spam feature... like i'm gonna waste time removing letters or rot13'ing them... why don't you just use some free mail account you don't care about. when it's full of crap use another address.
:)
LOL. Since you haven't decoded it, how do you know the address is ever real?
Of OSS in general (like the grant they gave to the GnuPG project a while back). I wonder if we'll start seeing that in the US as well (ie, instead of hiring someone to code a program, donate money to help provide a OSS version). That would be cool - tax breaks for US kernel hackers. :)
All these things (X-Box, Indrema, etc, etc), are pointless as far as I'm concerned. I have a pretty decent PC, and I'll probably buy another this fall. PCs are nice, and fun to use. However...
I also bought an N64 last fall for no other purpose than to play Zelda: The Ocarina of Time on it. Happily, the next Zelda will also be on N64, but if it weren't I'd buy whatever new thing it was running on. Basically what I'm saying here is that power doesn't matter (realisically N64 is _way underpowered compared to Playstation2, etc), its games games games - not how many (I really don't care), but what they are. In my case, if they're Zelda, though I'm sure others have other favorites. I've also bought some other games (MK4, Donkey Kong, Super Smash Brothers), but they were _not the reason I bought the N64 in the first place (ie, I would not have bought an N64 to play any of those games, but since I have an N64 I might as well have a few games around, right?)
If Sony bought the rights for Zelda from Nintendo (yeah friggin right), I'd go out and buy a Playstation2 (or whatever the new Zelda will be running on). I (personally) have totally no loyalty to Nintendo, but rather to the Zelda series (I wish Nintendo would do a Shadowrun for N64, though. I miss that game. Sigh)
Won't work. The Win2000 OS of the X-Box is on a ROM. Read the article here.
:)
So when people find bugs that enable you to get remote control of a X-Box (c'mon, people find artibrary code expoits for NT4 all the time, I doubt Win2000 will be too much different, though I suppose the late ship date will give them some time), people can't upgrade. Maybe you're on a cable modem and you want to erase the games of everyone who uses an X-Box in your neighboorhood? OK. Or just put a script in cron that reboots them every 5 minutes.
But for parallel calculations wider is better. Do you know what the 64 in Nintendo 64 stands for? Yup, the CPU is 64-bit!
IIRC, it's a MIPS R4400, which is what you get in (old) SGI servers (like the horrible horrible machines they run here on campus). True, it's not a P-III or Athlon, but it is a general purpose CPU (unlike, say Dreamcast or Playstation).
It likely was the first secure public key algorithm, and the implications of that detail on the possibilities of encryption are hard to overstate.
:-(
Too bad GCHQ didn't release the algorithm when they discovered it (as they apparently didn't realize the true value of it at the time). Then prior art and all that (like it's stopped a large number of patents granted lately, like that year 2000 windowing thing, though). Certainly, PK changed the whole way crypto works... though I suppose you could classify DH as a public key algorithm (yes, it's key exchange but it's fairly easy to convert it to a public key algorithm, like ElGamal or one of the MTI protocols).
So yes, if anything in math or computers should be patentable (a debatable question to be sure) the RSA algorithm should be.
OK, I'll agree with you here (not that I think any software and/or mathematical patent is valid), but RSA is a monumental achievment.
Of course by the end of the lifetime of the patent, the ridiculousness of long patents in software is painfully obvious...
Ouch, yes. It's really funny to think about more specific things (for instance, these memory patents [I knew I would be able to get this post ontopic eventually!]) will be soooooo old by the time they expire. I really think a 5 year limit on patents (along with a 15 or 20 year copyright limit) would be much more fair. Ah, well...
Stashing a secret message in a bunch of a DNA has a good chance of "they wouldn't look there", but if they *did* decide to look in the bunch of DNA, a message like "JUNE6_INVASION: NORMANDY" probably has different enough statistics from the rest of the DNA around it that it might stand out.
:)
I'll admit that I know hardly anything about biology, but I'm pretty sure that DNA strings are very very very long. I wouldn't be suprised if a brute force search such as that you suggest is actually infeasible (similiar to "breaking" RSA by factoring the modulus, if you will).
Hmmmm... I wonder if it would be possible to encode messages so they looked like normal DNA? I'm not sure how many proteins there are (probably a lot) - might it be possible to design some sort of coorespondance between proteins, and, say, strings of 8 bits and use that? Of course, could the animal live long enough with screwy DNA for the recipient to get it?
Another favorite steganographic method of mine is to encode data into graphic images, for example, taking a bitmapped image and using a key to encode data onto each pixel, say by incrementing the red RGB value of each pixel by 1 where appropriate. It would be exceedingly difficult to detect that a message even contained data, let alone extracting it without the key.
:) Also, if people have access to the original copy (ie, where you got it from) then you're in trouble. And, at least AFAIK, you'll have to keep an original around somewhere to "decrypt" your message, which is kind of a problem, I might think (note that I am not saying that all of stego is like that, just in this particular case). People might get curious - "why does he have 2 almost identical copies of the same picture?".
Sadly, now that you've told me, I know how to get your messages.
Windows, maybe Mac, if they put out an updatable flash BIOS.
Linux has had support for the G400 for quite some time - in fact Penguin Computing has been selling workstations with dual head G400s for quite a while now (nice machines).
Well, it's scary depending on how much experience you have. If you've taken Number Theory, Algebra (the college kind), or a cryptology class or two you can probably figure out the math given time. It involves a lot of coding theory, since the basic idea of a digital watermark it to encode some identifying information into the low bits of the graphic, along with a strong error correcting code which prevents it from being destroyed by the usual image manipulations (shrinking, streching, adjusting contrast, etc). There are also considerations for things like making sure that only a valid watermark is identified as such (that is, you should be able to examine a graphic [obviously not with your eyes, I mean with a program that does this sort of thing] and tell if it is watermarked or not, and if so what the watermark says). Ross Anderson has done some work on that, IIRC. His webpage is http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/.
As far as the whole batch processing thing goes, I really don't know. Presumably, given a program that watermarks a JPEG, it would be fairly easy to automate it with a Perl or shell script to do a whole directory tree.
If you leave the Desktop to winblowz, how will it be before MS makes that desktop work only with MS servers? (Actually, W2k w/ kerberos bastardized by MS may already have done that).
M$ isn't that crazy (famous last words, right?). I mean, OK, say Windows 20XX Desktop will only communicate with Windows 20XX Server. First off, people will reverse engineer and/or clone the interfaces (Samba, anyone?). And unless the place is already a M$ shop to start with, no one will go along with it. Windows 2000 may be OK, but it's limited to Intel hardware (I'll pick Sun or DEC stuff over Intel for a server anyday), and still doesn't scale anywhere near as good as, say, Solaris (maybe as good as Linux, I really don't know). But anyway, it's really not feasible to replace those big servers with Windows.
Note that I come from a very biased background - I'm a sysadmin at a mediumish sized college, and we have Solaris on the servers and public workstations, and people using everything on their desktops - MacOS 7/8, MacOS X, Linux, Solaris, Win95/98, WinNT, NeXT, and I'll bet at least a few BeOS and *BSD boxen as well. Standardizing on all Microsoft stuff is basically impossible (even if we wouldn't have to throw out millions of $$$ of Sun hardware b/c Windows can't run on it).
Solaris 8 ships with GCC. A Shell is an important part of your interaction with an OS. If you can't manage that yourself (writing your own aliases, as well as choosing your own shell), you shouldn't be wasting your time with Solaris.
Well, that's wonderful! When I have time, I'll go and upgrade all of the ~400 machines in the department to Solaris 8 and we can all celebrate. Anyway, the new commercial Sun compilers work pretty well and I'll stick with them on Solaris.
As far as the shells are concerned, I do choose my own damn shell, which is bash. That's it. No arguments. I just don't see why Sun feels it's really necessary to ship obviously outdated and obsolete tools with their system. And I'm annoyed that I had to suffer with csh up until I got bash all nice and cozily installed this afternoon.
In any case, I'm hardly "wasting my time with Solaris" - I get paid pretty decent money to admin these machines. I can think of at least a half-a-dozen OSes I would choose over Solaris for home use (easily: Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, BeOS, NT, 2000).
Gee, I'd better tell my financial services and telecommunications clients to put all their mission critical application development on hold while you make up your mind.
Your clients can do whatever the hell they like. If they want to run them on Solaris, fine. If instead Linux/*BSD, fine. NT, IRIX, or SCO, fine with me. Since they are not my clients, I really don't give a flying fuck.
Right, because these are integral parts of the operating system. I see.
No, ksh and csh are not integral parts of the OS (much less CDE, as I've gotten on quite fine without it for most of my Unix life, thank you). A SHELL is an integral part, and ksh and csh are, IMO, not very good choices for these particular itegral parts (when tcsh, bash, and zsh are far better). A C compiler is often considered an integral part of the OS - what would you think of a Linux distro that shipped gcc 1.0 as the system compiler? As far as I'm concerned, that's about equivalent.
My school uses exclusively Sun servers and all the admins I've talked to sing high praises of them. But I've been stuck working on our Sun Ultra5 worstations far too often, and they are TERRIBLE. Sooooo sloooooow. They're configured with 128M of RAM and, if I remember right, a 300 mHz sparc. My PII-350 with Linux and the same amount of RAM is much more responsive. Not to mention that they go down with alarming frequency, and they cost four times what I paid for my intel box around the same time period.
:( However, there are a pair of Ultra10s across the hall that I can pop over and use if I like, which run pretty well. And for big servers, at this point, Sun is still the way to go, despite the usual zealots (yes people, I run Linux at home too) who claim that anything can be done on i486 Beowulf clusters.
Yeah, the deptartment where I study (CS) and the one where I work (Physics) both run Suns, and I've had pretty much the same experience, except the Sun Enterprise 1 [formerly the NFS server] on my desk only has 96 megs of RAM.
Now only if Solaris didn't suck so much... OK, it scales well and is pretty stable (I'm still undecided if Linux/*BSD is more stable), but it's a real pain at times. I mean, any OS that uses CDE and comes with csh and ksh as the shells just sucks (I just installed bash this afternoon).
Damn, it's a pain in the ass to get used to using a PC keyboard after using a Sun one all afternoon... oh, on the subject of hardware - Sun stuff may cost a lot but it is quality stuff. Before they were replaced last month, the CS department had a bunch of old SPARCStations (mostly SPARC5s, I think), which actually ran pretty well despite being who-knows-how-old (about as fast as a Pentium II-200 with 96 megs of RAM, if I was guessing for a PCish equivalence). And Ultra2s are fucking awesome... spec on at Sun's website sometime, you'll be amazed at how cool (and how insanely expensive) they are.
When and only when nice graphical interfaces for Windows, MacOS, etc (ala TeraTerm SSH, SecureCRT, DataFellows SSH, etc) exist for SRP will it be possible for be possible for it to replace SSH: face it fellas, most clients are Windows boxes, and if the clients can't connect to the server securely because either clients don't exist for the OS or the users won't use them because the interfaces suck, who cares if it's secure? Also, SSH is, as far as system integration is concerned, very easy to do.
Templates come to mind but also such things as macros (eeeww).
:)
Templates are actually much safer than things like the Java Containers, since you can enforce at compile time the types that can be contained within them. (Admittably I'm not too familiar with Java, and if you could explain further I would like to hear it).
Macros are there only for C compatiblity. Even Brian Kernighan doesn't like them:
"The reason [for using macros] is performance: a macro avoids the overhead of a function call. This argument was weak even when C was first defined, a time of slow machines and expensive function calls; today it is irrelevant. With modern machines and compilers, the drawbacks of function macros outweigh their benefits." - The Practice of Programming, by Kernighan and Pike.
I hate macros that do anything - conditional compilation I'm OK with (though it's way overused a lot of the time, IMHO). In a library I'm working on that currently has ~14000 lines, there are exactly 2 macros, both of which are only defined inside a single function.
I could go on for quite some time about all the little things that are wrong with C++, but as someone once said "If you don't like it, go invent your own language".
I don't think you would gain any benefit compiling the linux kernel with this since the kernel is in C not C++. So there is nothing to translate.
It still does the optimizations even if given straight C. However, the kernel uses a lot of gcc-dependant things, and I think it would be pretty hard to get the kernel to compile with KCC.
I like burritos, but only _cheap_ burritos >:) I used to be able to get this brand of freezer burritos in big long sacks- man, I miss those. Currently I'm occasionally buying another brand of cheap freezer burrito, but though the Cheap Burrito Flavor (tm) is still right, the new kind (Tina's Beef And Bean Green Chili) tends to have bits of bone in it, which is extremely nasty. I don't want it _that_ cheap thank you ;P :) The other kind (Los Campanas?) had cheaper packaging, but never contained unwanted bits :)
:)
Trust me, it's best to make them yourself. It's much cheaper, you know exactly what went into it, and you can make it to taste. I freaking love Mexican food, and while I go to Mexican restaurants once in a while (if you're in the Baltimore area check out Holy Frijoles - excellent tacos), doing it regularly, or buying them frozen, would bankrupt me. Also I like to cook a lot - I'd feel useless just nuking a frozen burrito for dinner. And I can't say I'm really into that Cheap Burrito Flavor (tm), LOL
I rarely put meat in Mexican food (though I'm making chicken tacos tonight - yum), so I've never had a problem with bone pieces. Yuck.
Yes, the GNU compiler -COULD- be improved, enormously. I think that a decent multi-pass compiler, with intelligent flag control, would be great. A multi-pass linker would be cool, too - I am fed up of errors due to putting library calls in the "wrong" order. It's quite capable of doing a once-through to search for symbols, and working out how to link from there.
:)
My favorite is KAI C++. It runs on most Unices and also NT, and generates really really fast code. It compiles at about the same speed as gcc, but the resulting code can be 2-3x as fast as a new gcc (this is for mathematical ops since that's what KCC is optimized for). I suspect that even "normal" code could get significant speed increases, however. It's also one of the best compilers I've seen for ANSI/ISO compliance, about even with gcc 2.95.2 with updated libstdc++ packages.
The way that it works (by taking the C++, optimizing it and converting it to C, then handing it off to the system cc) helps the portability of KCC and ensures the code gets the benifit of system dependent optimizations. However, that means it has to use the system linker, which is too bad. I really don't like the GNU linker at all, it's such a pain in the arse.
I think the fact that there's just NOW coming to market a decent Chipset for the Athlon has hurt AMD quite a bit. I also think AMD should come out of the closet a bit and share what they know of why their Irontgate chipset isn't always compatible with AGP2x as it's spec'ed to be.
.18 micron processes (last I heard they were still at .25) and/or copper interconnects yet, and if not what the current planned dates are?
OTOH, Intel is having a MUCH harder time with the new boards (i820 and i840) - the number and seriousness of the errors on these things in crazy.
And combined with the disaster-in-the-making known as IA-64 (personally, I think it seems like a good idea on paper, but there are so many problems I don't think that anything good will come of it), and their production problems on high end Pentium III chips, Intel is not doing at all well.
By comparison, AMD is doing good. The Athlon is doing great and it seems that the architecture will hold up for quite some time (unlike Pentium IIIs, which IMHO are pretty much on their last legs as a viable design for new chips - hence Willamette and IA-64, neither of which will be here for at least 6-9 months). The chipset problems are a disadvantage, as is the lack of availability of SMP Athlon boards.
BTW, does anyone know if Athlons are being made with
In other words, Windows 2000 is killing Linux now, so Slashdot has to post whatever it can find that makes Microsoft look bad.
WTF? You've been able to buy it for, what, 2 whole days now (release date was 2/17, right?). Realistically, how many people are going to replace their Linux and FreeBSD x86 servers with Windows 2000? That's a pretty massive risk, not to mention the enourmous amount of downtime and integrartion problems (a lot more than some companies - like ISPs, can handle, and more than any company wants to have). And of course Win2000 is not running on Alpha or UltraSPARC (to mention 2 popular server architechures), so if you've got any of those around, you'll SOL (not to mention PowerPC, HPPA, etc)
I suspect that that vast majority of people using Windows 2000 are going to be people upgrading from 95/98/NT. And in the single user area, you can still dual boot, y'know. Personally, I'm waiting for at least 6 months to see if major problems crop up, then I'll replace 98 with 2000, and play Windows games on an SMP machine (hopefully by then I will have a dedicated Linux box)
people install applications onto the os everyday! Does this mean there is some kind of link between the program being installed and the OS?
Certainly. After all, it's a hell of a lot easier to install something nasty on a 95/98 box than a Linux or *BSD box. It can be done but it can sometimes take a fair amount of effort (especially if the person is security concious and prevents floppy booting, booting into single mode without a password, etc)
It's a good thing that AMD is now kicking Intels butt, and will continue to do so for the forseeable future. Otherwise I might worry about this. Who cares what Intel does? Wintel is dead (ok, I'm probably jumping the gun there). Linux will continue to take over the market - first servers, and eventually (3-5 years) the desktop market as well (the exact timeframe is probably wrong, but I'm pretty sure it will happen sometime).
:)
In any case, Intel has relied for a long time on the fact that Windows runs only on Intel (don't talk to me about those jokes NT/Alpha and NT/PowerPC), and that most people run Windows, ergo most people buy Intel hardware (this being before AMD made good stuff like the K6-3 and Athlons). Not only is AMD making better chips from a techie standpoint, but Intel can't even make enough of their high end chips to meed their demand. So the day is soon coming when AMD makes better Intel hardware than Intel itself (already here), and the major desktop and server OS (Linux) runs on many different architechtures (fairly near future). Goodbye Intel!