Thanks, I thought I understood the part about it printing its source, but, couldn't figure out how that would make a virus. Actually, I still don't, but, I suppose in your second case there, where it's outputting a binary, so long as it can find a way to get that binary executed, it should do it that way.
Sounds like in the end you still have to figure out a way to get it to be able to actually run in both systems to start with though. No need to place an external program and run that then, right? Do I misunderstand?
Oh well, all I can say is I'll be a tad more careful with my linux system as well in the future, just in case. Windows I'm already pretty carefully. Actually, the only virus I've ever had that I've actually had troubles getting rid of was TaiPan.something (can't recall the numbers.) It's an old dos virus that infects things, especially TSRs, and it seems like the only danger is the infected programs cease to run even in dos (locks up the system when you run one.) It was tenacious though. For years I found it on so many of my backups even after I finally no longer really used dos anymore. Even then it only affected a few minor programs I didn't use much. In all this time, I've managed to avoid having any real viruses just by being sensible. You download a random binary off the internet, well, AV scan it. Better yet, use common sense on just what binaries you're downloading. DON'T click that ad that says free chia pet on your computer, and if you do, hit cancel instead of open when it gives you a binary. All I know is my worst virus was an old dos thing that infected a few files while my sister who downloads all sorts of crap and who's computer I have to regularly wipe out hundreds of spyware on has had one that wiped out vital system files making windows become unbootable and, I couldn't ever track it down well enough to get windows properly repaired either. In the end, her system required a reinstall.
Too bad I didn't have then what I have now. ClamAV running on a live linux boot CD. Of course, on a NTFS filesystem all I can do is find out which files have to be deleted or whatever or at least get the uninfected files off to a backup.
I think that alternately, if you are using NTFS, you can change the file permissions much like you would do in linux, which more commonly uses this sort of method (eg install something as administrator to locations users have no direct access to normally. Take a look at Mandriva's security sometime, it won't even let you get a directory listing for many common locations.) The linux solution is usually done by the installer, however, if not done by the installer or you are manually installing, you would go to that directory you just installed to and set appropriate user permissions. In Windows I think it would be similar (I'll be honest with you, I'm taking a serious security risk here and using FAT32 because I can't stand not being able to access and change my files from outside of windows. This means I have only moderate experience working with NTFS with a small partition primarily just there for those > 4GiB files.) Right click the folder (as admin) and select properties. Click the security tab, then the add button. Add the users group, or perhaps even just specific users and give them permissions to read, execute, and list (I'm not sure about some of the others like special permissions.) You may have to provide write as well, though a well designed game should really just be writing to a specific folder so you could just put write permissions on the specific folder. I believe when you hit ok it should ask if you wish to apply recursively, and in this one case you will most likely want to do so.
I think this should do it. I haven't tested since I'm one of those evil users too lazy to actually use a user account instead of admin in windows and dealing with the hassle of poorly written software has just driven me insane until I gave up.
Until you find out that the cat your dog just tried to bite was actually a bobcat.
R.I.P. poor little dog.
In other words, they are being a little too confident that there are no viruses that can affect a *nix system. It's not impossible. It's rare and hard to do (which is no small part of why it's so rare) but, such things exist. Then again, that's where this article comes in, right? It's an example of one idea hoping to do this.
1 would be neat. I'd love to see that in a non-malicious thing. Actually, a single binary executable on multiple operating systems could consolidate several things quite a bit. For example, encryption/decryption, compression/decompression, and other somewhat simplistic utilities which run in a console. It would make it easier for the companies to distribute and easier for the user to keep track of their files when using it on multiple operating systems (I know I use rar for Windows and Linux both quite commonly.)
On #2. I don't know how reliable buffer overflows would be anymore though. I know a lot of systems are still running old processors, and Intel took a little while to implement their own DEP system (I think I have read that they did) but now they have it too. Today you're going to have a lot of systems still in trouble, but, given just a short while -- at the rate things are going right now, this means by the time a real virus using this method hits the wild -- hardware DEP may not be a terribly uncommon thing.
On 3, I'm a little unclear from that. Can you explain quine a little better for me? Wikipedia is an amazing source of information, but, sometimes they get a little too deep.
I noticed too that they didn't have much actual info in either link. Well, if it's a publicity stunt, good. It's a GOOD publicity stunt. Get people more aware of the dangers of viruses even on *nix systems which far too many people assume to be automatically safe.
Ok. *Pulls out a mallet* Any bets on how many tries it will take to crack? ^_^
Ok, jokes aside for a moment. I don't know how serious these things actually are, but, if you look back a bit you can find some interesting articles on Slashdot about quantum computing, some of which actually look promising. One of which supposedly is just about ready for production (albiet not actually so much using the whole basis of quantum physics as it's just technically quantum in that it referrs to using a fundamental particle -- a single atom -- for processing by changing and observing this atom. Anyway, I don't understand the exact how of it, but, supposedly there are just a few types of processing which this thing's more unique logic methods (no longer 0 or 1, but, 0, 1, 0 and 1, or neither -- don't ask me how because I still don't fully understand that either.) Supposedly cracking encryptions which today could take hundreds of years with current gen processors (even overclocked with liquid cooling) could be done in a matter of hours, maybe even minutes on these. Raising the size of the actual encryption may not be enough to stop this either since those processors are scaling this sort of calculation linearly versus the standard silicon processor scaling exponentially on the processing time needed. IMO a new form of encryption is needed to stop both I guess, but, don't ask me how.
You're right. Just, as a word of warning, there is one possible problem. Some of those Windows systems infected could be on a lan given more priveledges locally than the actual internet. Of course, it all depends on what priveledges they really have and how spreadable it is, so it's still a lot less likely that the linux systems will get infected since it would be very hard to spread this way and would require that priveledges which should probalby not be given be so (but then this does happen, especially if you aren't that well versed in linux but want to learn like myself, so my windows system behind my linux firewall may have too much access for all I'm sure of, though I think not.) Nonetheless, despite this fact, it's still harder to infect the linux system by far.
Hmm, that deserves an informative mod IMO. Yeah, I suppose you're right. You can distribute a single binary instead of multiple binaries to infect multiple systems.
I'd always wondered about virii versus viruses. Actually, I'm not even the one who assumes virii and nothing so complicated as because of Latin roots, just, I read in some book or something that virii was the correct plural. Clearly they were mistaken because what you say makes perfect sense.
I understood that. No, you're basically saying the thing I am. Is it really a truly "ambidexterious" virus if it relies on OS specific code for handling things like the actual file modification? It doesn't just get bigger with each new os, it gets massively more complex. Not just the code itself, getting it to actually WORK in each system bypassing securities. What I don't see here is in what way it is any different whatsoever from simply writing two virii, one for each os. That's less messy and easier to maintain anyway.
I don't know, I suppose if you just target linux and windows it might not be so bad, but, I definitely won't call this anything more than just a proof of concept.
No, the OS was an as yet uncreated ALTIMIT OS (gee, I wonder if there was some kind of joke going on with the naming system here? Hmm...) Seriously though, it's just a story.
Oh yeah, speaking of ALTIMIT OS, it's supposed to come out next year according to the story. Get your fingers crossed, it's the one OS more stable than linux and it's good enough to replace linux, windows, mac osx, everything. ^_^
If that were true, the Win3.1 system is almost as vulnerable as any Win9x system. I don't think the article said it was specific to NT? It may be that it is, but, I'm guessing that it doesn't do anything high level enough to actually need to be specific to NT over 9x. I think you can't just compile it for Win9x and it run in Win3.1, but, I know you were supposed to be able to run 32-bit applications in Win3.1 (you may have needed an extra thing installed, I don't remember for certain, but, I remember I did once run something 32-bit in Win3.1 I think mainly for testing (it didn't even need that much memory anyway, so no big deal at the time. I think I had 16MB of ram at the time in fact.)
BTW, he was joking about Win3.1. I don't think anyone seriously uses that anymore. Heck, I tried it a little while back for nostalgia's sake, but, even the nostalgia factor didn't keep it installed on the system for more than a couple of days or so.
I'm kind of curious how it works. You can't just take, say, C++ and simply write the exact same code and it will work in both Windows and Linux. Some of the basics like cout do, but, once you start getting a little more complicated and try to modify files, then it gets tricky. I'm guessing we aren't talking about a Java type thing (supposedly Java has securities in place, though I've never directly tested them -- I do know that it can delete or modify a file though.) They mentioned ELF and Win32 executable binaries, so if it's Java, then that's just a frontend obviously. They wouldn't call it an ambidexterious virus if specific code were written for each OS though, right? The only single thing I can think of is maybe make a system call and run "del so-and-so" which in linux's case would rely on an alias being in place to actually run rm.
Could anyone who knows more programming than I do (which, btw, isn't so hard so feel free to hop in here) give me just an idea of how this is even possible?
You know, suddenly I'm reminded of.hack. In it, one amazingly powerful virus was able to wipe out almost all major operating systems with the exception of the single one, and that one was neither windows nor linux. Ok, it's just a story, but, do you suppose some nut wants to see if they can make this come true in their own way?
The tabs do not use iexplore.exe, but, they use internet explorer via calls and such. In other words, you're still stuck with internet explorer's ups and downs (not quite sure what ups there are.)
As an Opera user who has had to deal with braindead sites for quite a while, I'd say that the issue of being required to use IE is just about gone. There's only one thing left that forces me to use Firefox these days, and that's a very very poorly written school site (WebCT.) How there can be such a big professional product so poorly designed that it can't work correctly in a 100% standards compliant browser is beyond me. (Actually, after I get past a really braindead login that tells me there is an internal server error if it sees that my browser is Opera, the only thing that doesn't work at least partially is the tests, which won't save your answers on the server so nothing happens when you click save and you can never complete the test except by opening another browser.) Using Opera, I have found that the very rare sites it won't work with, Firefox will, so I'd say that the other way around applies. For those people who just kind of almost hold a grudge against Opera, just use Firefox as your primary browser, and on the rare occasions it fails, load up Opera and you're set.
BTW, tabbed browsing was mentioned earlier. Tabbed browsing is practically disabled in Firefox and even once you enable it it doesn't work very well (you have to load up about three extentions to get it working the way tabbed browsing shoult) and while in Opera it is no longer disabled by default due to the fact that the majority of their users like it, it can still be disabled with three to four clicks of the mouse. Tools->Preferences->(General Tab if it's not selected already->)Use Tabbed Browsing. I don't understand why anyone would hold tabbed browsing against browsers that so easily disable it (one of which practically starts out with it disabled.)
Only thing I'm really in any disagreement at all about is the popularity of the PowerPC processors today (not even a year ago, but, specifically today.)
It sounds like you're advocating the oft-mentioned point that games are the main thing that will benefit. Well, this is true, but, there are some business or non-gaming oriented things where people will see the differences as well, and these shouldn't be discounted either. Firstly, we're going to need those things like MMX I guess. MS is determined that one day Windows will be prettier than a nice sunset across the ocean scene complete with enough bubbles and other such crap that definitely wastes CPU power (gee, wouldn't you be so surprised to hear that I disable the XP theme service on my system?) They already promise even worse with Vista. Actually, frankly linux is following basically the same sort of course since it's trying to compete directly with Windows, and with less hardware support for video (especially for us poor ATi users -- I've just completely given up on trying to get the ATi proprietary drivers set up to where they work right, it's too much for us more amateur types) it probably actually relies more on the CPU overall for processing that interface right now.
Besides useless waste on GUIs so average joe farmer can feel more relaxed while outlook is quitely rebooting his computer without warning, there are some more legitimate uses that will see the benefits. For example, servers can do more CPU limited things, such as a web server adding compression support (individually zip compressions streams are practically off the scale of a modern processor, but, when you add hundreds if not thousands of requests, databases, and other such things all going at once, it adds up.) Not to mention tasks that are even more CPU limited than gaming like encoding or video processing. I can safely say that I've seen more of a hit on my processor as far as heat and power consumption as well as how background processes start to act -- again, single core -- when I fire up the latest anime encode with my ffdshow set to resize to 1440x1080 for my CRT with denoising added for good measure. Whereas games haven't really pushed things nearly so hard most of the time. But, it's not a surprise to hear this, right? I mean, I have a real video card, an X850XT-PE and I've actually seen less benefit from overclocking my CPU in games than I did in ffdshow. In fact, on my old mobile barton I saw this more firsthand where setting my memory asynchronous (and this was on a nforce 2 system, so that caused a latency war the likes of which causes games to jerk like insane) so my CPU could overclock even further benefitted ffdshow, but, lowering the CPU down to meet the memory left games running smoothly even though the CPU was no longer running so well. In truth, I honestly believe gamers actually aren't seeing the benefits they assume they'll get by running to buy a X2 4800+ or whatever considering that I really don't think any games have been CPU limited on my San Diego (let's call it 4100+ when factoring in the overclock.) I certainly have been pleased at how much faster encoding things goes (especially now that I have a small portable DVD player so I like to encode some of my old backups into low-res DVDs and fit half a season onto one DVD-R for watching as long as I have time for when away. Those encodes run slightly faster than realtime, and for MPEG2 that's rather decent, though it's obviously nothing compared to what those lucky people with the S939 Opterons that can hit 3.2+GHz probably would get.) Actually, I tend to upgrade my CPU more for the benefits on my anime watching than for gaming even though I play games as much as I watch anime. Now that I've hit a point where ffdshow can manage all I want in realtime and I can encode at speeds I'm still not used to I don't even want a X2 yet, nor the competing Intel dual cores. However, if I were to pick one, it would definitley be the AMDs due to that L2 thing. I really doubt the shared memory gets taken advantage of a lot in the long run.
You misunderstand me. I mean major processors fully relying on this sort of method such as the PowerPC. Of the things you mentioned, only the Cell is actually a truly modern thing (which, btw, I hear is basically a PowerPC style chip.) Instructions like MMX are definitely useful, but, does the processor rely on them almost exclusively? You see, the almost pure SIMD processors run far slower and rely on getting a lot of stuff done at once while the x86 architecure we're so used to runs blazing fast and gets by only doing a few things at once and sometimes even dragging down to just one thing at a time. Each system has its ups and downs really, and I don't really know why the SIMD focused processors seemed to be getting less popular lately in the non-mobile/embedded fields.
PS. Decoding many video formats like DivX, if I recall correctly, doesn't actually get to take advantage of CPU optimizations very much. Oh, I'm sure there's a little, but, generally speaking, decoding video is going to be more a matter of just raw processing. Oh well, I don't have any benchmarks handy, though I can point out that I have personally played some relatively high resolution DivX files on a Pentium 2 running at 166, 233, and 266MHz (I just underclocked to 166 for support for old dos games that crash on a too fast system, so when I remembered I'd switch to 266MHz for things like video watching. 233 was it's stock speed, so I tested that first. And yes, I have an unlocked P2 chip even though it wasn't "hacked" to be unlocked.) P2 definitely lacks SSE2. Supposedly GeeXboX can play DVDs on a 400MHz Pentium 2 in fact, all without SSE2 (since I have only the 266MHz P2 and a 500MHz P3, I can't directly verify this, but, I can say that user posts in the forums would seem to support this.)
Actually, if you want to see something interesting, take a look at the geexbox requirements yourself. Note that for the Macintosh they say only a G3 is actually required (albiet a strong recommendation for a G4.) I haven't exactly searched terribly extensively, but, I see that they have Macintosh G3s running at 266MHz with a 66MHz bus (same as that P2 come to think of it.) Yet that thing is supposed to be able to manage DVD playback (albiet probably with occasional skips) when the P2 stuttered like crazy. No, I don't deny for a second that they have advantages when properly used.
I'm not really talking about direct access to the cache or anything like that. Just better design of the code so that it it splits more things to begin with. With OOOE this isn't absolutely necessary (though it can't hurt to try to write it concentrating on writing code that you can be relatively positive will do well in OOOE) but with multithreading it does, admitedly, become necessary. While you can't directly control what the chip will be doing, you can control what you are sending to it to begin with so that it will be doing things more efficiently than if you just sent it a poorly written set of commands. Unfortunately, the biggest problem here is that so many want the compilers to do it for them, but, it's not really the compiler's job to make your code better. If they won't get more serious about it, then I suppose OOOE is better in the long run, but, I do honestly believe they will. I mean, heck, even people like nVidia are doing so and that's not even going to be affected nearly so much as, say video processing for example.
Actually, if you think about it, programmers are kind of suffering from job loss due to outsourcing. Should programming suddenly beging to require a bit more expertise, it might buy some more time for the CS field before it becomes like some things such as the textile industry to Mexico. (Mind you, there are ups to every down with outsourcing, so it's not positive except from the point of view of the programmers who like their jobs, but, otherwise it's really more of a shift than a positive or negative change.)
Oh well, in the end, these are just educated guesses. Theories if you prefer. We won't know anything for certain until they come out with a serious product as directly oriented towards this as the article implies (rather than the more minor OOOE used in the past.) By then we should be able to get benchmarks and see for ourselves where the truth lies.
PS. Intel is making certain processors of a RISC type of nature like the ARM based processors, which is what my old Toshiba PocketPC does. Actually, for a 400MHz XScale processor, it may not be the most blazing fast thing I've ever used, but, I'd say it runs normal enough tasks pretty well. Anyway, my point is, they know OOOE pretty well, so they do have a good head start here.
Hmm, if nothing else, this is kind of where the Cell concept comes in. Is it not supposed to actually dedicate one of the cores specifically to the control of the others? Sounds like a good idea to me. Anyway, what I'm thinking (and I've touched base on this in another thread) is that with multicore being pushed so hard these days programmers might buckle down and actually program better. See, OOOE probably requires the chip to do most of the breaking up. I mean, if you break up the code first-hand, why do you need the chip to have a smart way to do it for you? But, if you think about it, modern things such as games could be designed a little better where they split things up more into threads. Yes, scheduling and such do indeed get tricky, and that's a problem that will have to be gotten used to, but, then this is why few designers actually make their own engine. Conceivably you can split up just about anything. Put AI in one thread, physics processing in another, sound in yet another, split graphics up a bit (even with hardware acceleration some CPU processing is required for these, though I might add that nVidia has already begun to run with the idea of splitting up graphics stuff and have multithreading support in their drivers already, albiet a little buggy I think.) I've already mentioned in a seperate post that Intel thinks they can come up with a 10 core processor in the not so far future. That leaves quite a bit of leeway for the game doesn't it? Heck, even just the idea of four sounds like it would be a world of difference compared to two to me once you start to be able to move the overhead a little further away. Ok, the programming is not easy for a moment and will make life for the actual engine designers unpleasant for a while, but, then you can't tell me that various things haven't already done this in the past and that at least some of those hurdles haven't already been passed sucessfully? It really looks like people are getting serious about the idea of multithreading since multicore is less troublesome than SMP and AMD and Intel are both pushing it. I honestly believe programmers will buckle down and start optomizing their code a bit more.
I don't know what you're talking about with the harddrive transfer thing though. The CPU isn't a limit when transferring files unless you're using some kind of weird program that has to compress the data first, then transfer, but, that only makes sense on a network. Your friend's external drive would have to compress on its end, not yours. And the only compression algorithm I remember reading about any time recently being actually symmetric was Monkey's Audio while things like a file transfer would probably be gzip at most even assuming the protocol did allow it. No, the harddrive has been the slowest critical component of a computer since the early days and that still remains true, especially with USB and it's inconsistand speeds, but, even firewire can only manage so much with sustained transfers. I would accept an argument that explorer is a peice of crap, but, the fact is that I do a lot of transfers from partition to partition on my single internal harddrive (which really hurts since it has to keep jerking back and forth so its max speed at doing this is probably overall less than half of its max speed from harddrive to harddrive.) My single core processor doesn't stutter when I do this. Oh, sure, if I run something that needs to get a file off the harddrive, that program will freeze up, the harddrive will flare up even more and that light will stop blinking and become sustained for a moment (in other words, there is little doubt the CPU isn't the limiting factor here.) However, all the parts that end up running from memory run smoothly despite the transfer. Hmm, or does the USB bus use interrupts maybe? I suppose it could force the CPU to stop for a moment? Oh well, my fastest devices are little thumb drives like a cruzer micro, so I haven't managed a USB 2.0 transfer fast enough to stagger my single core cpu. Mind you, I'm not a
I just thought it should be stated for the record. Moore's law isn't a definite fact that cannot be disproven. It has been working so well up to now and will for a while yet that it is rather easy to seriously call it a law, but, we shouldn't forget that, in the end, there are physical limitations. I don't know how much longer we have until we reach them though. It could be five years, it could be twenty. It is there though and eventually we will hit that point to where transistors will get no smaller no matter what kind of technology you throw at it. At that point, a new method must be put into place to continue growth. This is why I personally like reading Slashdot so much for articles on things like quantum computing and the like. Those may be pipe dreams perhaps, but, the point is, they are alternate methods that may have hope someday of becoming truly powerful and useful. Perhaps the eventual sucessor to the current system will arise soon? Let's keep an eye out for it with open minds though.
Anyway, I do understand a bit about how it all works. OOOE has amazing potential, but, in the end the fact remains that you can only optomize things so much. The idea there is actually to kind of break up instructions in such a way that you can actually kind of multi-thread a task not originally designed for multi-tasking. A neat idea I must say, with definite potential. However, honestly, in the end the fact remains that you will run into a lot of instructions that it can't figure out how to break up or which actually can't be broken up to begin with. If they continue to run with this technology, they will improve upon both situations, but, in the end, the nature of machine instructions leads me to believe that this idea may not take them far to be brutally honest.
Let's not forget that one of the biggest competitors in the processors that focus on SIMD is kind of fading now. Apple is going to x86 architechure with all their might (and I must say I'm impressed at how smoothly they are switching -- it's actually exciting most Apple fans rather than upsetting them) and I think I read they no longer will even be producing anything with PowerPC style chips, which I suppose isn't good for the people who make them (maybe they wanted to move on to something else annyway?) At this point it's looking like it's more and more just the mobile devices who benefit from this style of chip, which is primarily just due to the fact that between their lack of need for higher speeds and overall design to use what they have efficiently, they use very little power and do what they do well in a segment like that.
Multi-threading, however, is a viable solution today and in the future as well. It just makes sense really. You start to run into the limitations as to how fast the processor is going to run, how many transistors you can squeeze on there at once, power and heat limitations, etc, however, if you stop at those limits and simply add more processors handling things, you don't really have to design the code all THAT well to take advantage of it and keep the growth continuing in it's own way. I can definitely see multicore having a promising future with a lot of potential for growth because even when you hit size limitations for a single core you can still squeeze more in there. Plus, I wonder if multicore couldn't work in a multi-processor setup? If it can't today, won't it in a future? Who knows, there are limits on how far you can go with multi-core, but, those limits are further away than single core by far and I really feel like they are more promising than relying on smart execution on a single core running around the same speed. In the end, a well designed program will be splitting up instructions on a SMP/multicore system much like the OOOE will try to do. While the OOOE may be somewhat better at poorly designed programs (ignoring for a moment the advantages that multithreading provides to a multitasking os since even on a minimal setup a bunch of other stuff is running in the background) overa
Well, first of all, I'll go ahead and state for the record that I'm athiest. I believe that evolution is essentially proven and must be considered to be true until significant proof is brought to show that all the data we've seen over so many years is somehow wrong in a way that doesn't really look possible.
Nonetheless, I respect people's right's to beliefs and look at it from a more objective point of view when I can. In argument for the sake of religion, my mother who is not athiest has actually made a good point. The Bible isn't actually that specific about many things when you look at it. For example, she says that though the Bible says God took those seven days to create the Earth (well, 6 excluding the rest) it does not actually say that those were sequential days, and, as my addition to her little thought on this subject, it also does not say that time as perceived by this God could not perhaps differ compared to that of ourselves. After all, to a deity who has been around at least since the beginning of the uni/multiverse if not longer (and I sometimes wonder, if there is a God, how and where did God begin) couldn't it be a few million or even billion years between each so called day? Maybe (S)He/It/Null dedicated each of these severely long (by our standards) days to the careful development of the specific parts of the process? I've sort of followed the same logical reasoning behind her rather decent point and, if you think about it, rather a lot of religion could indeed still accept much of the science. Let's say evolution is true AND there is a God for just a moment. God is supposed to be omniscient (well, if you are omnipotent with no limitations, omniscience is easy stuff.) If you know everything, is it not rather easy to set in motion a chain of events that will independantly handle themselves in a way that ultimately reaches a goal you desired? I admit I don't read the Bible, but, does it say anywhere that God personally hand guided the whole process from the beginning to the end rather than just simply the beginning? If you think about it, if you know everything, then you can know the exact right moment to perhaps shift say a single atom just a little to set what you wish to happen into motion however long that may take.
IMO, if you ever want a theological versus scientific discussion, you must take the high road and be as objective as is possible. You can't prove that there is no ultimate being capable of having set things in motion from the very beginning in a way which could cause a desired goal to be reached in some future. I'm not saying this is true, only that science would have us accept that this is one of the possibilities, albiet one which seems scientifically unlikely. Rather than simply saying "nope, there is no God, you're wrong" just say "well, you have a good point, but, right now we can find no definitive proof in favor of God, however, we do find consistant proof that things such as evolution exist whether by intelligent design or no." I personally may not believe in God, but, I know we must accept that people do.
That said, back to the original post for a moment. This is not a theological or scientific discussion. As someone said earlier, it is a sociological discussion. The study of the effects of a particular belief on a part of society does not require the proof that the belief itself is true or false, or that the opposing belief (if it truly even is opposing necessarily) be prove or disprove either.
Well, you're kind of mistaken. Firstly, people WON'T stop that blinking (remember, we're talking about a majority, not just us slashdotters with more technical knowledge, and I see more blinking than non-blinking.) They don't understand how to set up the clock and despite the convenience of having a timed recording, they don't WANT to. Oh, and you have to factor out the newer VCRs that set themselves (albiet usually set to the wrong timezone or ignoring the correct DST setting.) Similarly, you'd be surprised how many just let the mileage pile up when the sticker says it's past time to get that oil change. I can't speak for the refridgerator though I've had the impression that people don't since they often are keeping things too cool with ice forming. The closing of the door and filling of the gas (and similarly the plugging in the VCR) are all more immediate quick solutions to obvious immediate problems, but, the light blinking, the milage going way over that sticker, and the refridgerator forming a few icecycles in the back are all quite common things to find.
The first inclination is to think "oh, I just invested very heavily into this expensive machine, well, I darned well had best get it working and take care of it then." This is, in fact, wrong. The natural human inclination is incorrect here. In fact, what you should do is constantly reevaluate. Is it a more efficient and perhaps cheaper overall solution to go ahead and buy a new car, or is it better to keep repairing your clunker that takes about 10 tries to start on the days it feels like starting at all? Should you maybe give up on that old super-hq VCR you spent oodles of money on that looses its settings if you so much as look at it funny and get a TiVo which phones in and gets the info online? Should you trade your refridgerator with the door that leaks forcing you to raise the temperature so high that you know icycles form in the back just to keep it from keeping the food at the front too warm for maybe one of those nice new GE or whatever fridges promising amazingly efficient usage of power, easy use doors, and even a little special drawer just for keeping fresh foods extra fresh for longer? Heck, it's natural to want to hold on to your bad investment and try to make it work -- and heck, sometimes you can actually make it truly shine and come out better than the others for some particular task or other. Nonetheless, the smart thing to do is sell that bad investment if you can, dump it if you can't and get the nice efficient new thing that can outdo the old.
Unfortunately, the natural reaction wins out most of the time even in the business world where people know better. Kind of a human factor sort of thing here to deal with.
PS. Why is it that maybe 1/100 of the VCRs out there uses the absolutely ancient technology of storing data on memory backed up by a batery with a clock run similarly, yet, computers have been doing this since the 80s if not sooner? And in this day you can make it even easier by using, say 1 kilobyte of flash memory (because, if you think about it, all the VCR settings combined take very very little memory total) and not even have to back it up via battery. So you need a less powerful battery to keep it from loosing its settings if the power blinks for such a short period of time that my computer's PSU manages to smooth it out and keep the PC from rebooting (I can't afford a UPS powerful enough to handle my system.) Bah, I have to finish getting my HTPC up and able to record, you need a DVR not a VCR these days.
The problem with that is that you are actually using IE, which defeats the purpose of using Firefox. In other words, you're still exposed to most of the bugs, the instability, and you are going from one browser that takes rather a lot of memory to one that assumes you don't need to actually be running any other programs while browsing the web AND takes up rather a lot of memory in addition to that. You might be safe from bugs like that address bar one (I'd verify this if I were you, it may still respond to such a command) but, you won't be immune to the far more numerous internal problems with the browser itself rather than the interface.
My father is similar. He has built systems for each of us in the past until I knew enough to build my own. He got a computer engineer degree way back when and started out at least playing around with home systems like those little atari PC-type things that used basic. Later on DOS and such with tools such as Lotus for obvious reasons.
Despite having spent more than a decade and a half on systems, even starting out before mice were even conceived of, he is not a completely mouse oriented person who doesn't know even simple keyboard shortcuts like CTRL+S. He works extensively with MS products like.NET, was the first to switch to NT among us (I had hardware issues for the longest time even with Win2K and liked 98SE better since it was more suitable to gaming/etc) and he hasn't even so much as dabbled in some live linux distro where you almost can't screw up (at least, so long as you don't do some moron stunt like dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda or something... But, lol, you deserve what you get then.) This is a computer engineer user who had to start out knowing how to design curcuits and even build his own PC and having to write stuff like machine code. He WILL NOT consider alternatives to IE, Outlook, and other such tools. To my knowledge he has never even attempted another. I constantly tell him how great Opera is (and now that it's 100% free with no ads there's not any excuse not to at least try it anymore) and that Firefox with it's extentions is pretty neat as well, but, he won't even try them.
If we can't convert people like him, how in the heck are we going to convert people like Mr Average Joe Farmer who doesn't have the vaguest idea how to actually install another browser? They don't want to be bothered with having to do such things.
I have managed to convert my grandmother to Opera though. I had my aunt, but, a while back there was trouble with a really important site and she ended up using IE. I can't seem to get her back now that Opera is compatible with even most of IE's proprietary crap and can fool braindead servers into thinking it is IE so they won't refuse to work anymore. I think I've managed to almost force my mother to switch to Firefox because there were problems with IE (surprise surprise.) I'm working as hard as I can, but, when I step into the computer labs at my school, I see some of the people there using IE, I still can't convert my dad, and, among those people who know even less about things like web browsers I haven't managed to reach anyone but my grandmother.
Someone needs to run an ad campaign for Opera or something. Actually, come to think of it, my first thought was that the opensource Mozilla wouldn't have enough money for marketing, but, then again, considering how much they just donated to a good cause I wonder about that. Right now they rely a bit more than I like on word of mouth (well, ok, Opera is well known in the mobile segment, so many mobile users who enjoy having a browser that runs about as smoothly as you're going to get on a mobile device would be aware of the PC browser perhaps.) Then again, I guess the question is, can you get Average Joe to understand and care that IE is secretly installing backdoors on their system and sending all of their credit card info to some thirteen year old in New Jersey with too much free time? So far they just don't understand and keep on using it.
Re:heh... don't trust Gmail
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Gmail vs Pine
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I'd like to add to this note about e-mails not really being deleted when you hit delete that, in fact, the same applies to Pine/etc on your local system. If the government came after you and subpoenad (sp?) your harddrive, they can see up to the last ten deletions worth of data (probably not quite that much, but, I'm betting you don't end up overwriting the old deletions that often.) Again, like so many keep trying to say, if you are that worried about security, stop using an inherantly unsecure unecrypted and very ancient messaging service! E-mail wasn't DESIGNED for sensitive stuff, it was designed to help businesses coordinate (there was practically no such thing as a home user when they created the standards and such, and home user on the internet was inconceivable.)
Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive
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Gmail vs Pine
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That's not to mention the fact that sometimes you can't actually get to a USB port without pulling out the system and everything, and if they are running a really old system with Windows 98 or something, then you can't just simply plug it in, you require special software, so you'll have to be carrying a driver disc or something too. A few systems can boot from USB (flash drives can be set up with ZIP geometry to fool even more BIOSes into actually working,) but, the smarter people put a password on the BIOS, and you can't go around opening up systems to reset their BIOS... If you have a big problem with such systems, you'll probably be happier running up to a best buy or some other such place and buying a pocket DVD-RW (1.4 hypeGB.) You'll only be able to write to it at home most of the time, but, otherwise, a large number of systems will work. Of course, there are also pocket CD-RWs, but, you're looking at 210MiB there for the same sized disc.
Anyway, most of the systems I would have access to have USB ports right in the open and Windows XP, so I'm set with my little Cruzer Micro on my keychain. I carry a copy of my internet browser configured to use %temp% for temporary files on my flash drive. Then I can just fire it up and connect to gmail/etc. Cookies are stored on the flashdrive, so I don't even have to worry about login information security and such. I do also carry a copy of PuTTY, though I wasn't aware of this "PortaPuTTY" which might maybe handle settings better (I've had to set up a batch file which loads a registry file just before running PuTTY, then loads a registry file set to remove the entries after. I'm not storing any passwords or anything anyway, so no big deal.)
The survey did bring up three issues which should be addressed by the embedded linux community, whether those issues are misconceptions or actual problems. 1) Incompatibility with software, applications, and drivers. 2) Performance or real time capability. And 3) support."
The points are somewhat valid. I've used a few embedded style solutions such as GeeXboX.
Firstly, they rely on being minimalistic first and foremost. This means removal of unnecessary things which could use up more space and resources such as X.org for many of them. They remove a lot of things not absolutely required for the product. To that end, the first point, incompatibility applies. A lot of other software will fail to function correctly or even perhaps to run at all. Usually the saved resources are worth it, but, it does make it a LOT harder to integrate major changes such as using a new program for some part or other. This encourages the reuse of already in place stuff. For example, for the sake of maintaining the current setup, interface, software, etc, GeeXboX is using mplayer for TV rather than some of the other more popular utilities such as MythTV and one that I thought looked pretty promising to replace a lot of GeeXboX's functionality, FreeVO.
Well, my first point kind of brushes on the second point made above on performance. In fact, #2 is way off base with a real embedded linux solution. Due to the minimalistic nature of the systems, they actually perform BETTER at what they were made to do. It's only things they were not where they will do worse. For example, GeeXboX's official requirements are listed as:
* x86 Pentium-Class CPU or above (P2-400 should be quite enough) or Macintosh G3 (G4 highly recommended)
* a VESA 2.0 compliant graphics card (for x86 PC only).
* an ALSA compatible sound card.
* at least 64 MB of RAM
* CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive
* Motherboard which supports booting on CD-ROM (should be ok for everyone;-)
* Keyboard, Joystick or Remote Controller, using a Lirc-compatible IR (InfraRed) receiver (check http://www.lirc.org/ to build yours), e.g. Miro PcTV's one or ATI Remote Wonder.
In fact, those little $100 laptops should be able to boot GeeXboX and play current gen DVDs... And easier things like MPEG4 (DivX, XviD, etc) need less. I have played 640x480 mid to somewhat high bitrate encodes smoothly on a Pentium 2 running at 233MHz (though I did overclock to 266MHz after initial tests for better results on some slightly higher bitrate things.) No, performance is not an issue.
To address number three, support is kind of both ways. First of all, most of these projects have bustling communities where users can help each other and on a few occasions the devs themselves will actually help (GeeXboX is a good example of one like this.) On the other hand, since support is 100% unofficial, a more unusual problem can result in few to no responses forgotten in the back pages of the forums with no solutions. Simpler problems often result in a tired canned response because they are sick of having to answer the same question over and over and aren't exactly being paid to do so. Some projects lack the huge communities and dev interaction and you end up with far more unanswered questions and unsolved problems. Also, if you want a new feature or whatever, the answer sometimes painfully enough ends up being told that if you want so-and-so, you should do it yourself. Since the person asking usually lacks the technical expertise to actually do this (hence the request thread rather than a "I've started adding so-and-so to the distro and need feedback" style thread.) Then again, some requests are admitedly ridiculous or against the goals of the project such as the people requesting X in GeeXboX, or, for an example of ridiculous, one person actually asked for a Gamecube
Re:weird perspective for a conflict... and wrong!
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Sun's Open Source DRM
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We is those of us who don't want to be sued for more money than we have. Personally, I'd end up on the streets without any food and sure as heck without any DVDs to watch, so you can just condone away in plain sight on a very popular news site, but, leave me out of it.
Yeah, uhm, you're splitting hairs now. Ok, I admit I've always hated it being called stealing and especially pirating since pirates are violent and both them and a thief leave the victim without whatever they took while copying only means you just didn't pay for it. You can contest my poor choice of wording there in referring to it as stealing, however, you cannot contest the fact that the law considers it about as illegal as stealing if perhaps not literally the same thing. Split hairs all you like, meanwhile the government is very slowly moving passing lovely little laws amending the term "fair use" to say only "User may insert product into fully endorsed and licensed player sold by the same content designer, user may do nothing else whatsoever with said product." Hopefully people like the EFF can stop this, but, in the meantime I for one am not going to run around shouting out for people to feel free to download just as much as they darned well please without using anonymous networks or anything. Sheesh, why don't you just write a letter to the RIAA/MPAA (or whatever they're going by now) telling them your IP address (be sure to use a dynamic DNS service if it's dynamic so they can find you more easily) your usual hours, your favorite sites, and etc. They'll find them eventually. Maybe you don't live in the US? Some of us do and have to deal with US laws and the consequences if we get caught breaking them. Do you know I have to pay about $170 in a fine for "improper passing" while driving? That's for changing lanes too quickly. Frankly, I just don't want to deal with any laws on anything bigger than that at this point where they claim you've cost them millions and such in damages.
I didn't comment on your thought of producing it yourself because I didn't think it needed one. It's fine to argue that many of the great films were low or even no budget, but, on the other hand far far more of them that people have loved including many true classics have budgets in the range of millions if not billions. If you have that kind of cash, then how about instead spending it in support of people like the EFF instead of making some stupid little CG thing on your computer?
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks, I thought I understood the part about it printing its source, but, couldn't figure out how that would make a virus. Actually, I still don't, but, I suppose in your second case there, where it's outputting a binary, so long as it can find a way to get that binary executed, it should do it that way.
Sounds like in the end you still have to figure out a way to get it to be able to actually run in both systems to start with though. No need to place an external program and run that then, right? Do I misunderstand?
Oh well, all I can say is I'll be a tad more careful with my linux system as well in the future, just in case. Windows I'm already pretty carefully. Actually, the only virus I've ever had that I've actually had troubles getting rid of was TaiPan.something (can't recall the numbers.) It's an old dos virus that infects things, especially TSRs, and it seems like the only danger is the infected programs cease to run even in dos (locks up the system when you run one.) It was tenacious though. For years I found it on so many of my backups even after I finally no longer really used dos anymore. Even then it only affected a few minor programs I didn't use much. In all this time, I've managed to avoid having any real viruses just by being sensible. You download a random binary off the internet, well, AV scan it. Better yet, use common sense on just what binaries you're downloading. DON'T click that ad that says free chia pet on your computer, and if you do, hit cancel instead of open when it gives you a binary. All I know is my worst virus was an old dos thing that infected a few files while my sister who downloads all sorts of crap and who's computer I have to regularly wipe out hundreds of spyware on has had one that wiped out vital system files making windows become unbootable and, I couldn't ever track it down well enough to get windows properly repaired either. In the end, her system required a reinstall.
Too bad I didn't have then what I have now. ClamAV running on a live linux boot CD. Of course, on a NTFS filesystem all I can do is find out which files have to be deleted or whatever or at least get the uninfected files off to a backup.
I think that alternately, if you are using NTFS, you can change the file permissions much like you would do in linux, which more commonly uses this sort of method (eg install something as administrator to locations users have no direct access to normally. Take a look at Mandriva's security sometime, it won't even let you get a directory listing for many common locations.) The linux solution is usually done by the installer, however, if not done by the installer or you are manually installing, you would go to that directory you just installed to and set appropriate user permissions. In Windows I think it would be similar (I'll be honest with you, I'm taking a serious security risk here and using FAT32 because I can't stand not being able to access and change my files from outside of windows. This means I have only moderate experience working with NTFS with a small partition primarily just there for those > 4GiB files.) Right click the folder (as admin) and select properties. Click the security tab, then the add button. Add the users group, or perhaps even just specific users and give them permissions to read, execute, and list (I'm not sure about some of the others like special permissions.) You may have to provide write as well, though a well designed game should really just be writing to a specific folder so you could just put write permissions on the specific folder. I believe when you hit ok it should ask if you wish to apply recursively, and in this one case you will most likely want to do so.
I think this should do it. I haven't tested since I'm one of those evil users too lazy to actually use a user account instead of admin in windows and dealing with the hassle of poorly written software has just driven me insane until I gave up.
Until you find out that the cat your dog just tried to bite was actually a bobcat.
R.I.P. poor little dog.
In other words, they are being a little too confident that there are no viruses that can affect a *nix system. It's not impossible. It's rare and hard to do (which is no small part of why it's so rare) but, such things exist. Then again, that's where this article comes in, right? It's an example of one idea hoping to do this.
1 would be neat. I'd love to see that in a non-malicious thing. Actually, a single binary executable on multiple operating systems could consolidate several things quite a bit. For example, encryption/decryption, compression/decompression, and other somewhat simplistic utilities which run in a console. It would make it easier for the companies to distribute and easier for the user to keep track of their files when using it on multiple operating systems (I know I use rar for Windows and Linux both quite commonly.)
On #2. I don't know how reliable buffer overflows would be anymore though. I know a lot of systems are still running old processors, and Intel took a little while to implement their own DEP system (I think I have read that they did) but now they have it too. Today you're going to have a lot of systems still in trouble, but, given just a short while -- at the rate things are going right now, this means by the time a real virus using this method hits the wild -- hardware DEP may not be a terribly uncommon thing.
On 3, I'm a little unclear from that. Can you explain quine a little better for me? Wikipedia is an amazing source of information, but, sometimes they get a little too deep.
I noticed too that they didn't have much actual info in either link. Well, if it's a publicity stunt, good. It's a GOOD publicity stunt. Get people more aware of the dangers of viruses even on *nix systems which far too many people assume to be automatically safe.
Ok. *Pulls out a mallet* Any bets on how many tries it will take to crack? ^_^
Ok, jokes aside for a moment. I don't know how serious these things actually are, but, if you look back a bit you can find some interesting articles on Slashdot about quantum computing, some of which actually look promising. One of which supposedly is just about ready for production (albiet not actually so much using the whole basis of quantum physics as it's just technically quantum in that it referrs to using a fundamental particle -- a single atom -- for processing by changing and observing this atom. Anyway, I don't understand the exact how of it, but, supposedly there are just a few types of processing which this thing's more unique logic methods (no longer 0 or 1, but, 0, 1, 0 and 1, or neither -- don't ask me how because I still don't fully understand that either.) Supposedly cracking encryptions which today could take hundreds of years with current gen processors (even overclocked with liquid cooling) could be done in a matter of hours, maybe even minutes on these. Raising the size of the actual encryption may not be enough to stop this either since those processors are scaling this sort of calculation linearly versus the standard silicon processor scaling exponentially on the processing time needed. IMO a new form of encryption is needed to stop both I guess, but, don't ask me how.
You're right. Just, as a word of warning, there is one possible problem. Some of those Windows systems infected could be on a lan given more priveledges locally than the actual internet. Of course, it all depends on what priveledges they really have and how spreadable it is, so it's still a lot less likely that the linux systems will get infected since it would be very hard to spread this way and would require that priveledges which should probalby not be given be so (but then this does happen, especially if you aren't that well versed in linux but want to learn like myself, so my windows system behind my linux firewall may have too much access for all I'm sure of, though I think not.) Nonetheless, despite this fact, it's still harder to infect the linux system by far.
Hmm, that deserves an informative mod IMO. Yeah, I suppose you're right. You can distribute a single binary instead of multiple binaries to infect multiple systems.
I'd always wondered about virii versus viruses. Actually, I'm not even the one who assumes virii and nothing so complicated as because of Latin roots, just, I read in some book or something that virii was the correct plural. Clearly they were mistaken because what you say makes perfect sense.
I understood that. No, you're basically saying the thing I am. Is it really a truly "ambidexterious" virus if it relies on OS specific code for handling things like the actual file modification? It doesn't just get bigger with each new os, it gets massively more complex. Not just the code itself, getting it to actually WORK in each system bypassing securities. What I don't see here is in what way it is any different whatsoever from simply writing two virii, one for each os. That's less messy and easier to maintain anyway.
I don't know, I suppose if you just target linux and windows it might not be so bad, but, I definitely won't call this anything more than just a proof of concept.
No, the OS was an as yet uncreated ALTIMIT OS (gee, I wonder if there was some kind of joke going on with the naming system here? Hmm...) Seriously though, it's just a story.
Oh yeah, speaking of ALTIMIT OS, it's supposed to come out next year according to the story. Get your fingers crossed, it's the one OS more stable than linux and it's good enough to replace linux, windows, mac osx, everything. ^_^
If that were true, the Win3.1 system is almost as vulnerable as any Win9x system. I don't think the article said it was specific to NT? It may be that it is, but, I'm guessing that it doesn't do anything high level enough to actually need to be specific to NT over 9x. I think you can't just compile it for Win9x and it run in Win3.1, but, I know you were supposed to be able to run 32-bit applications in Win3.1 (you may have needed an extra thing installed, I don't remember for certain, but, I remember I did once run something 32-bit in Win3.1 I think mainly for testing (it didn't even need that much memory anyway, so no big deal at the time. I think I had 16MB of ram at the time in fact.)
BTW, he was joking about Win3.1. I don't think anyone seriously uses that anymore. Heck, I tried it a little while back for nostalgia's sake, but, even the nostalgia factor didn't keep it installed on the system for more than a couple of days or so.
I'm kind of curious how it works. You can't just take, say, C++ and simply write the exact same code and it will work in both Windows and Linux. Some of the basics like cout do, but, once you start getting a little more complicated and try to modify files, then it gets tricky. I'm guessing we aren't talking about a Java type thing (supposedly Java has securities in place, though I've never directly tested them -- I do know that it can delete or modify a file though.) They mentioned ELF and Win32 executable binaries, so if it's Java, then that's just a frontend obviously. They wouldn't call it an ambidexterious virus if specific code were written for each OS though, right? The only single thing I can think of is maybe make a system call and run "del so-and-so" which in linux's case would rely on an alias being in place to actually run rm.
.hack. In it, one amazingly powerful virus was able to wipe out almost all major operating systems with the exception of the single one, and that one was neither windows nor linux. Ok, it's just a story, but, do you suppose some nut wants to see if they can make this come true in their own way?
Could anyone who knows more programming than I do (which, btw, isn't so hard so feel free to hop in here) give me just an idea of how this is even possible?
You know, suddenly I'm reminded of
The tabs do not use iexplore.exe, but, they use internet explorer via calls and such. In other words, you're still stuck with internet explorer's ups and downs (not quite sure what ups there are.)
As an Opera user who has had to deal with braindead sites for quite a while, I'd say that the issue of being required to use IE is just about gone. There's only one thing left that forces me to use Firefox these days, and that's a very very poorly written school site (WebCT.) How there can be such a big professional product so poorly designed that it can't work correctly in a 100% standards compliant browser is beyond me. (Actually, after I get past a really braindead login that tells me there is an internal server error if it sees that my browser is Opera, the only thing that doesn't work at least partially is the tests, which won't save your answers on the server so nothing happens when you click save and you can never complete the test except by opening another browser.) Using Opera, I have found that the very rare sites it won't work with, Firefox will, so I'd say that the other way around applies. For those people who just kind of almost hold a grudge against Opera, just use Firefox as your primary browser, and on the rare occasions it fails, load up Opera and you're set.
BTW, tabbed browsing was mentioned earlier. Tabbed browsing is practically disabled in Firefox and even once you enable it it doesn't work very well (you have to load up about three extentions to get it working the way tabbed browsing shoult) and while in Opera it is no longer disabled by default due to the fact that the majority of their users like it, it can still be disabled with three to four clicks of the mouse. Tools->Preferences->(General Tab if it's not selected already->)Use Tabbed Browsing. I don't understand why anyone would hold tabbed browsing against browsers that so easily disable it (one of which practically starts out with it disabled.)
Only thing I'm really in any disagreement at all about is the popularity of the PowerPC processors today (not even a year ago, but, specifically today.)
It sounds like you're advocating the oft-mentioned point that games are the main thing that will benefit. Well, this is true, but, there are some business or non-gaming oriented things where people will see the differences as well, and these shouldn't be discounted either. Firstly, we're going to need those things like MMX I guess. MS is determined that one day Windows will be prettier than a nice sunset across the ocean scene complete with enough bubbles and other such crap that definitely wastes CPU power (gee, wouldn't you be so surprised to hear that I disable the XP theme service on my system?) They already promise even worse with Vista. Actually, frankly linux is following basically the same sort of course since it's trying to compete directly with Windows, and with less hardware support for video (especially for us poor ATi users -- I've just completely given up on trying to get the ATi proprietary drivers set up to where they work right, it's too much for us more amateur types) it probably actually relies more on the CPU overall for processing that interface right now.
Besides useless waste on GUIs so average joe farmer can feel more relaxed while outlook is quitely rebooting his computer without warning, there are some more legitimate uses that will see the benefits. For example, servers can do more CPU limited things, such as a web server adding compression support (individually zip compressions streams are practically off the scale of a modern processor, but, when you add hundreds if not thousands of requests, databases, and other such things all going at once, it adds up.) Not to mention tasks that are even more CPU limited than gaming like encoding or video processing. I can safely say that I've seen more of a hit on my processor as far as heat and power consumption as well as how background processes start to act -- again, single core -- when I fire up the latest anime encode with my ffdshow set to resize to 1440x1080 for my CRT with denoising added for good measure. Whereas games haven't really pushed things nearly so hard most of the time. But, it's not a surprise to hear this, right? I mean, I have a real video card, an X850XT-PE and I've actually seen less benefit from overclocking my CPU in games than I did in ffdshow. In fact, on my old mobile barton I saw this more firsthand where setting my memory asynchronous (and this was on a nforce 2 system, so that caused a latency war the likes of which causes games to jerk like insane) so my CPU could overclock even further benefitted ffdshow, but, lowering the CPU down to meet the memory left games running smoothly even though the CPU was no longer running so well. In truth, I honestly believe gamers actually aren't seeing the benefits they assume they'll get by running to buy a X2 4800+ or whatever considering that I really don't think any games have been CPU limited on my San Diego (let's call it 4100+ when factoring in the overclock.) I certainly have been pleased at how much faster encoding things goes (especially now that I have a small portable DVD player so I like to encode some of my old backups into low-res DVDs and fit half a season onto one DVD-R for watching as long as I have time for when away. Those encodes run slightly faster than realtime, and for MPEG2 that's rather decent, though it's obviously nothing compared to what those lucky people with the S939 Opterons that can hit 3.2+GHz probably would get.) Actually, I tend to upgrade my CPU more for the benefits on my anime watching than for gaming even though I play games as much as I watch anime. Now that I've hit a point where ffdshow can manage all I want in realtime and I can encode at speeds I'm still not used to I don't even want a X2 yet, nor the competing Intel dual cores. However, if I were to pick one, it would definitley be the AMDs due to that L2 thing. I really doubt the shared memory gets taken advantage of a lot in the long run.
You misunderstand me. I mean major processors fully relying on this sort of method such as the PowerPC. Of the things you mentioned, only the Cell is actually a truly modern thing (which, btw, I hear is basically a PowerPC style chip.) Instructions like MMX are definitely useful, but, does the processor rely on them almost exclusively? You see, the almost pure SIMD processors run far slower and rely on getting a lot of stuff done at once while the x86 architecure we're so used to runs blazing fast and gets by only doing a few things at once and sometimes even dragging down to just one thing at a time. Each system has its ups and downs really, and I don't really know why the SIMD focused processors seemed to be getting less popular lately in the non-mobile/embedded fields.
PS. Decoding many video formats like DivX, if I recall correctly, doesn't actually get to take advantage of CPU optimizations very much. Oh, I'm sure there's a little, but, generally speaking, decoding video is going to be more a matter of just raw processing. Oh well, I don't have any benchmarks handy, though I can point out that I have personally played some relatively high resolution DivX files on a Pentium 2 running at 166, 233, and 266MHz (I just underclocked to 166 for support for old dos games that crash on a too fast system, so when I remembered I'd switch to 266MHz for things like video watching. 233 was it's stock speed, so I tested that first. And yes, I have an unlocked P2 chip even though it wasn't "hacked" to be unlocked.) P2 definitely lacks SSE2. Supposedly GeeXboX can play DVDs on a 400MHz Pentium 2 in fact, all without SSE2 (since I have only the 266MHz P2 and a 500MHz P3, I can't directly verify this, but, I can say that user posts in the forums would seem to support this.)
Actually, if you want to see something interesting, take a look at the geexbox requirements yourself. Note that for the Macintosh they say only a G3 is actually required (albiet a strong recommendation for a G4.) I haven't exactly searched terribly extensively, but, I see that they have Macintosh G3s running at 266MHz with a 66MHz bus (same as that P2 come to think of it.) Yet that thing is supposed to be able to manage DVD playback (albiet probably with occasional skips) when the P2 stuttered like crazy. No, I don't deny for a second that they have advantages when properly used.
I'm not really talking about direct access to the cache or anything like that. Just better design of the code so that it it splits more things to begin with. With OOOE this isn't absolutely necessary (though it can't hurt to try to write it concentrating on writing code that you can be relatively positive will do well in OOOE) but with multithreading it does, admitedly, become necessary. While you can't directly control what the chip will be doing, you can control what you are sending to it to begin with so that it will be doing things more efficiently than if you just sent it a poorly written set of commands. Unfortunately, the biggest problem here is that so many want the compilers to do it for them, but, it's not really the compiler's job to make your code better. If they won't get more serious about it, then I suppose OOOE is better in the long run, but, I do honestly believe they will. I mean, heck, even people like nVidia are doing so and that's not even going to be affected nearly so much as, say video processing for example.
Actually, if you think about it, programmers are kind of suffering from job loss due to outsourcing. Should programming suddenly beging to require a bit more expertise, it might buy some more time for the CS field before it becomes like some things such as the textile industry to Mexico. (Mind you, there are ups to every down with outsourcing, so it's not positive except from the point of view of the programmers who like their jobs, but, otherwise it's really more of a shift than a positive or negative change.)
Oh well, in the end, these are just educated guesses. Theories if you prefer. We won't know anything for certain until they come out with a serious product as directly oriented towards this as the article implies (rather than the more minor OOOE used in the past.) By then we should be able to get benchmarks and see for ourselves where the truth lies.
PS. Intel is making certain processors of a RISC type of nature like the ARM based processors, which is what my old Toshiba PocketPC does. Actually, for a 400MHz XScale processor, it may not be the most blazing fast thing I've ever used, but, I'd say it runs normal enough tasks pretty well. Anyway, my point is, they know OOOE pretty well, so they do have a good head start here.
Hmm, if nothing else, this is kind of where the Cell concept comes in. Is it not supposed to actually dedicate one of the cores specifically to the control of the others? Sounds like a good idea to me. Anyway, what I'm thinking (and I've touched base on this in another thread) is that with multicore being pushed so hard these days programmers might buckle down and actually program better. See, OOOE probably requires the chip to do most of the breaking up. I mean, if you break up the code first-hand, why do you need the chip to have a smart way to do it for you? But, if you think about it, modern things such as games could be designed a little better where they split things up more into threads. Yes, scheduling and such do indeed get tricky, and that's a problem that will have to be gotten used to, but, then this is why few designers actually make their own engine. Conceivably you can split up just about anything. Put AI in one thread, physics processing in another, sound in yet another, split graphics up a bit (even with hardware acceleration some CPU processing is required for these, though I might add that nVidia has already begun to run with the idea of splitting up graphics stuff and have multithreading support in their drivers already, albiet a little buggy I think.) I've already mentioned in a seperate post that Intel thinks they can come up with a 10 core processor in the not so far future. That leaves quite a bit of leeway for the game doesn't it? Heck, even just the idea of four sounds like it would be a world of difference compared to two to me once you start to be able to move the overhead a little further away. Ok, the programming is not easy for a moment and will make life for the actual engine designers unpleasant for a while, but, then you can't tell me that various things haven't already done this in the past and that at least some of those hurdles haven't already been passed sucessfully? It really looks like people are getting serious about the idea of multithreading since multicore is less troublesome than SMP and AMD and Intel are both pushing it. I honestly believe programmers will buckle down and start optomizing their code a bit more.
I don't know what you're talking about with the harddrive transfer thing though. The CPU isn't a limit when transferring files unless you're using some kind of weird program that has to compress the data first, then transfer, but, that only makes sense on a network. Your friend's external drive would have to compress on its end, not yours. And the only compression algorithm I remember reading about any time recently being actually symmetric was Monkey's Audio while things like a file transfer would probably be gzip at most even assuming the protocol did allow it. No, the harddrive has been the slowest critical component of a computer since the early days and that still remains true, especially with USB and it's inconsistand speeds, but, even firewire can only manage so much with sustained transfers. I would accept an argument that explorer is a peice of crap, but, the fact is that I do a lot of transfers from partition to partition on my single internal harddrive (which really hurts since it has to keep jerking back and forth so its max speed at doing this is probably overall less than half of its max speed from harddrive to harddrive.) My single core processor doesn't stutter when I do this. Oh, sure, if I run something that needs to get a file off the harddrive, that program will freeze up, the harddrive will flare up even more and that light will stop blinking and become sustained for a moment (in other words, there is little doubt the CPU isn't the limiting factor here.) However, all the parts that end up running from memory run smoothly despite the transfer. Hmm, or does the USB bus use interrupts maybe? I suppose it could force the CPU to stop for a moment? Oh well, my fastest devices are little thumb drives like a cruzer micro, so I haven't managed a USB 2.0 transfer fast enough to stagger my single core cpu. Mind you, I'm not a
I just thought it should be stated for the record. Moore's law isn't a definite fact that cannot be disproven. It has been working so well up to now and will for a while yet that it is rather easy to seriously call it a law, but, we shouldn't forget that, in the end, there are physical limitations. I don't know how much longer we have until we reach them though. It could be five years, it could be twenty. It is there though and eventually we will hit that point to where transistors will get no smaller no matter what kind of technology you throw at it. At that point, a new method must be put into place to continue growth. This is why I personally like reading Slashdot so much for articles on things like quantum computing and the like. Those may be pipe dreams perhaps, but, the point is, they are alternate methods that may have hope someday of becoming truly powerful and useful. Perhaps the eventual sucessor to the current system will arise soon? Let's keep an eye out for it with open minds though.
Anyway, I do understand a bit about how it all works. OOOE has amazing potential, but, in the end the fact remains that you can only optomize things so much. The idea there is actually to kind of break up instructions in such a way that you can actually kind of multi-thread a task not originally designed for multi-tasking. A neat idea I must say, with definite potential. However, honestly, in the end the fact remains that you will run into a lot of instructions that it can't figure out how to break up or which actually can't be broken up to begin with. If they continue to run with this technology, they will improve upon both situations, but, in the end, the nature of machine instructions leads me to believe that this idea may not take them far to be brutally honest.
Let's not forget that one of the biggest competitors in the processors that focus on SIMD is kind of fading now. Apple is going to x86 architechure with all their might (and I must say I'm impressed at how smoothly they are switching -- it's actually exciting most Apple fans rather than upsetting them) and I think I read they no longer will even be producing anything with PowerPC style chips, which I suppose isn't good for the people who make them (maybe they wanted to move on to something else annyway?) At this point it's looking like it's more and more just the mobile devices who benefit from this style of chip, which is primarily just due to the fact that between their lack of need for higher speeds and overall design to use what they have efficiently, they use very little power and do what they do well in a segment like that.
Multi-threading, however, is a viable solution today and in the future as well. It just makes sense really. You start to run into the limitations as to how fast the processor is going to run, how many transistors you can squeeze on there at once, power and heat limitations, etc, however, if you stop at those limits and simply add more processors handling things, you don't really have to design the code all THAT well to take advantage of it and keep the growth continuing in it's own way. I can definitely see multicore having a promising future with a lot of potential for growth because even when you hit size limitations for a single core you can still squeeze more in there. Plus, I wonder if multicore couldn't work in a multi-processor setup? If it can't today, won't it in a future? Who knows, there are limits on how far you can go with multi-core, but, those limits are further away than single core by far and I really feel like they are more promising than relying on smart execution on a single core running around the same speed. In the end, a well designed program will be splitting up instructions on a SMP/multicore system much like the OOOE will try to do. While the OOOE may be somewhat better at poorly designed programs (ignoring for a moment the advantages that multithreading provides to a multitasking os since even on a minimal setup a bunch of other stuff is running in the background) overa
Well, first of all, I'll go ahead and state for the record that I'm athiest. I believe that evolution is essentially proven and must be considered to be true until significant proof is brought to show that all the data we've seen over so many years is somehow wrong in a way that doesn't really look possible.
Nonetheless, I respect people's right's to beliefs and look at it from a more objective point of view when I can. In argument for the sake of religion, my mother who is not athiest has actually made a good point. The Bible isn't actually that specific about many things when you look at it. For example, she says that though the Bible says God took those seven days to create the Earth (well, 6 excluding the rest) it does not actually say that those were sequential days, and, as my addition to her little thought on this subject, it also does not say that time as perceived by this God could not perhaps differ compared to that of ourselves. After all, to a deity who has been around at least since the beginning of the uni/multiverse if not longer (and I sometimes wonder, if there is a God, how and where did God begin) couldn't it be a few million or even billion years between each so called day? Maybe (S)He/It/Null dedicated each of these severely long (by our standards) days to the careful development of the specific parts of the process? I've sort of followed the same logical reasoning behind her rather decent point and, if you think about it, rather a lot of religion could indeed still accept much of the science. Let's say evolution is true AND there is a God for just a moment. God is supposed to be omniscient (well, if you are omnipotent with no limitations, omniscience is easy stuff.) If you know everything, is it not rather easy to set in motion a chain of events that will independantly handle themselves in a way that ultimately reaches a goal you desired? I admit I don't read the Bible, but, does it say anywhere that God personally hand guided the whole process from the beginning to the end rather than just simply the beginning? If you think about it, if you know everything, then you can know the exact right moment to perhaps shift say a single atom just a little to set what you wish to happen into motion however long that may take.
IMO, if you ever want a theological versus scientific discussion, you must take the high road and be as objective as is possible. You can't prove that there is no ultimate being capable of having set things in motion from the very beginning in a way which could cause a desired goal to be reached in some future. I'm not saying this is true, only that science would have us accept that this is one of the possibilities, albiet one which seems scientifically unlikely. Rather than simply saying "nope, there is no God, you're wrong" just say "well, you have a good point, but, right now we can find no definitive proof in favor of God, however, we do find consistant proof that things such as evolution exist whether by intelligent design or no." I personally may not believe in God, but, I know we must accept that people do.
That said, back to the original post for a moment. This is not a theological or scientific discussion. As someone said earlier, it is a sociological discussion. The study of the effects of a particular belief on a part of society does not require the proof that the belief itself is true or false, or that the opposing belief (if it truly even is opposing necessarily) be prove or disprove either.
Well, you're kind of mistaken. Firstly, people WON'T stop that blinking (remember, we're talking about a majority, not just us slashdotters with more technical knowledge, and I see more blinking than non-blinking.) They don't understand how to set up the clock and despite the convenience of having a timed recording, they don't WANT to. Oh, and you have to factor out the newer VCRs that set themselves (albiet usually set to the wrong timezone or ignoring the correct DST setting.) Similarly, you'd be surprised how many just let the mileage pile up when the sticker says it's past time to get that oil change. I can't speak for the refridgerator though I've had the impression that people don't since they often are keeping things too cool with ice forming. The closing of the door and filling of the gas (and similarly the plugging in the VCR) are all more immediate quick solutions to obvious immediate problems, but, the light blinking, the milage going way over that sticker, and the refridgerator forming a few icecycles in the back are all quite common things to find.
The first inclination is to think "oh, I just invested very heavily into this expensive machine, well, I darned well had best get it working and take care of it then." This is, in fact, wrong. The natural human inclination is incorrect here. In fact, what you should do is constantly reevaluate. Is it a more efficient and perhaps cheaper overall solution to go ahead and buy a new car, or is it better to keep repairing your clunker that takes about 10 tries to start on the days it feels like starting at all? Should you maybe give up on that old super-hq VCR you spent oodles of money on that looses its settings if you so much as look at it funny and get a TiVo which phones in and gets the info online? Should you trade your refridgerator with the door that leaks forcing you to raise the temperature so high that you know icycles form in the back just to keep it from keeping the food at the front too warm for maybe one of those nice new GE or whatever fridges promising amazingly efficient usage of power, easy use doors, and even a little special drawer just for keeping fresh foods extra fresh for longer? Heck, it's natural to want to hold on to your bad investment and try to make it work -- and heck, sometimes you can actually make it truly shine and come out better than the others for some particular task or other. Nonetheless, the smart thing to do is sell that bad investment if you can, dump it if you can't and get the nice efficient new thing that can outdo the old.
Unfortunately, the natural reaction wins out most of the time even in the business world where people know better. Kind of a human factor sort of thing here to deal with.
PS. Why is it that maybe 1/100 of the VCRs out there uses the absolutely ancient technology of storing data on memory backed up by a batery with a clock run similarly, yet, computers have been doing this since the 80s if not sooner? And in this day you can make it even easier by using, say 1 kilobyte of flash memory (because, if you think about it, all the VCR settings combined take very very little memory total) and not even have to back it up via battery. So you need a less powerful battery to keep it from loosing its settings if the power blinks for such a short period of time that my computer's PSU manages to smooth it out and keep the PC from rebooting (I can't afford a UPS powerful enough to handle my system.) Bah, I have to finish getting my HTPC up and able to record, you need a DVR not a VCR these days.
The problem with that is that you are actually using IE, which defeats the purpose of using Firefox. In other words, you're still exposed to most of the bugs, the instability, and you are going from one browser that takes rather a lot of memory to one that assumes you don't need to actually be running any other programs while browsing the web AND takes up rather a lot of memory in addition to that. You might be safe from bugs like that address bar one (I'd verify this if I were you, it may still respond to such a command) but, you won't be immune to the far more numerous internal problems with the browser itself rather than the interface.
My father is similar. He has built systems for each of us in the past until I knew enough to build my own. He got a computer engineer degree way back when and started out at least playing around with home systems like those little atari PC-type things that used basic. Later on DOS and such with tools such as Lotus for obvious reasons.
.NET, was the first to switch to NT among us (I had hardware issues for the longest time even with Win2K and liked 98SE better since it was more suitable to gaming/etc) and he hasn't even so much as dabbled in some live linux distro where you almost can't screw up (at least, so long as you don't do some moron stunt like dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda or something... But, lol, you deserve what you get then.) This is a computer engineer user who had to start out knowing how to design curcuits and even build his own PC and having to write stuff like machine code. He WILL NOT consider alternatives to IE, Outlook, and other such tools. To my knowledge he has never even attempted another. I constantly tell him how great Opera is (and now that it's 100% free with no ads there's not any excuse not to at least try it anymore) and that Firefox with it's extentions is pretty neat as well, but, he won't even try them.
Despite having spent more than a decade and a half on systems, even starting out before mice were even conceived of, he is not a completely mouse oriented person who doesn't know even simple keyboard shortcuts like CTRL+S. He works extensively with MS products like
If we can't convert people like him, how in the heck are we going to convert people like Mr Average Joe Farmer who doesn't have the vaguest idea how to actually install another browser? They don't want to be bothered with having to do such things.
I have managed to convert my grandmother to Opera though. I had my aunt, but, a while back there was trouble with a really important site and she ended up using IE. I can't seem to get her back now that Opera is compatible with even most of IE's proprietary crap and can fool braindead servers into thinking it is IE so they won't refuse to work anymore. I think I've managed to almost force my mother to switch to Firefox because there were problems with IE (surprise surprise.) I'm working as hard as I can, but, when I step into the computer labs at my school, I see some of the people there using IE, I still can't convert my dad, and, among those people who know even less about things like web browsers I haven't managed to reach anyone but my grandmother.
Someone needs to run an ad campaign for Opera or something. Actually, come to think of it, my first thought was that the opensource Mozilla wouldn't have enough money for marketing, but, then again, considering how much they just donated to a good cause I wonder about that. Right now they rely a bit more than I like on word of mouth (well, ok, Opera is well known in the mobile segment, so many mobile users who enjoy having a browser that runs about as smoothly as you're going to get on a mobile device would be aware of the PC browser perhaps.) Then again, I guess the question is, can you get Average Joe to understand and care that IE is secretly installing backdoors on their system and sending all of their credit card info to some thirteen year old in New Jersey with too much free time? So far they just don't understand and keep on using it.
I'd like to add to this note about e-mails not really being deleted when you hit delete that, in fact, the same applies to Pine/etc on your local system. If the government came after you and subpoenad (sp?) your harddrive, they can see up to the last ten deletions worth of data (probably not quite that much, but, I'm betting you don't end up overwriting the old deletions that often.) Again, like so many keep trying to say, if you are that worried about security, stop using an inherantly unsecure unecrypted and very ancient messaging service! E-mail wasn't DESIGNED for sensitive stuff, it was designed to help businesses coordinate (there was practically no such thing as a home user when they created the standards and such, and home user on the internet was inconceivable.)
That's not to mention the fact that sometimes you can't actually get to a USB port without pulling out the system and everything, and if they are running a really old system with Windows 98 or something, then you can't just simply plug it in, you require special software, so you'll have to be carrying a driver disc or something too. A few systems can boot from USB (flash drives can be set up with ZIP geometry to fool even more BIOSes into actually working,) but, the smarter people put a password on the BIOS, and you can't go around opening up systems to reset their BIOS... If you have a big problem with such systems, you'll probably be happier running up to a best buy or some other such place and buying a pocket DVD-RW (1.4 hypeGB.) You'll only be able to write to it at home most of the time, but, otherwise, a large number of systems will work. Of course, there are also pocket CD-RWs, but, you're looking at 210MiB there for the same sized disc.
Anyway, most of the systems I would have access to have USB ports right in the open and Windows XP, so I'm set with my little Cruzer Micro on my keychain. I carry a copy of my internet browser configured to use %temp% for temporary files on my flash drive. Then I can just fire it up and connect to gmail/etc. Cookies are stored on the flashdrive, so I don't even have to worry about login information security and such. I do also carry a copy of PuTTY, though I wasn't aware of this "PortaPuTTY" which might maybe handle settings better (I've had to set up a batch file which loads a registry file just before running PuTTY, then loads a registry file set to remove the entries after. I'm not storing any passwords or anything anyway, so no big deal.)
The survey did bring up three issues which should be addressed by the embedded linux community, whether those issues are misconceptions or actual problems. 1) Incompatibility with software, applications, and drivers. 2) Performance or real time capability. And 3) support."
;-)
The points are somewhat valid. I've used a few embedded style solutions such as GeeXboX.
Firstly, they rely on being minimalistic first and foremost. This means removal of unnecessary things which could use up more space and resources such as X.org for many of them. They remove a lot of things not absolutely required for the product. To that end, the first point, incompatibility applies. A lot of other software will fail to function correctly or even perhaps to run at all. Usually the saved resources are worth it, but, it does make it a LOT harder to integrate major changes such as using a new program for some part or other. This encourages the reuse of already in place stuff. For example, for the sake of maintaining the current setup, interface, software, etc, GeeXboX is using mplayer for TV rather than some of the other more popular utilities such as MythTV and one that I thought looked pretty promising to replace a lot of GeeXboX's functionality, FreeVO.
Well, my first point kind of brushes on the second point made above on performance. In fact, #2 is way off base with a real embedded linux solution. Due to the minimalistic nature of the systems, they actually perform BETTER at what they were made to do. It's only things they were not where they will do worse. For example, GeeXboX's official requirements are listed as:
* x86 Pentium-Class CPU or above (P2-400 should be quite enough) or Macintosh G3 (G4 highly recommended)
* a VESA 2.0 compliant graphics card (for x86 PC only).
* an ALSA compatible sound card.
* at least 64 MB of RAM
* CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive
* Motherboard which supports booting on CD-ROM (should be ok for everyone
* Keyboard, Joystick or Remote Controller, using a Lirc-compatible IR (InfraRed) receiver (check http://www.lirc.org/ to build yours), e.g. Miro PcTV's one or ATI Remote Wonder.
In fact, those little $100 laptops should be able to boot GeeXboX and play current gen DVDs... And easier things like MPEG4 (DivX, XviD, etc) need less. I have played 640x480 mid to somewhat high bitrate encodes smoothly on a Pentium 2 running at 233MHz (though I did overclock to 266MHz after initial tests for better results on some slightly higher bitrate things.) No, performance is not an issue.
To address number three, support is kind of both ways. First of all, most of these projects have bustling communities where users can help each other and on a few occasions the devs themselves will actually help (GeeXboX is a good example of one like this.) On the other hand, since support is 100% unofficial, a more unusual problem can result in few to no responses forgotten in the back pages of the forums with no solutions. Simpler problems often result in a tired canned response because they are sick of having to answer the same question over and over and aren't exactly being paid to do so. Some projects lack the huge communities and dev interaction and you end up with far more unanswered questions and unsolved problems. Also, if you want a new feature or whatever, the answer sometimes painfully enough ends up being told that if you want so-and-so, you should do it yourself. Since the person asking usually lacks the technical expertise to actually do this (hence the request thread rather than a "I've started adding so-and-so to the distro and need feedback" style thread.) Then again, some requests are admitedly ridiculous or against the goals of the project such as the people requesting X in GeeXboX, or, for an example of ridiculous, one person actually asked for a Gamecube
We is those of us who don't want to be sued for more money than we have. Personally, I'd end up on the streets without any food and sure as heck without any DVDs to watch, so you can just condone away in plain sight on a very popular news site, but, leave me out of it.
Yeah, uhm, you're splitting hairs now. Ok, I admit I've always hated it being called stealing and especially pirating since pirates are violent and both them and a thief leave the victim without whatever they took while copying only means you just didn't pay for it. You can contest my poor choice of wording there in referring to it as stealing, however, you cannot contest the fact that the law considers it about as illegal as stealing if perhaps not literally the same thing. Split hairs all you like, meanwhile the government is very slowly moving passing lovely little laws amending the term "fair use" to say only "User may insert product into fully endorsed and licensed player sold by the same content designer, user may do nothing else whatsoever with said product." Hopefully people like the EFF can stop this, but, in the meantime I for one am not going to run around shouting out for people to feel free to download just as much as they darned well please without using anonymous networks or anything. Sheesh, why don't you just write a letter to the RIAA/MPAA (or whatever they're going by now) telling them your IP address (be sure to use a dynamic DNS service if it's dynamic so they can find you more easily) your usual hours, your favorite sites, and etc. They'll find them eventually. Maybe you don't live in the US? Some of us do and have to deal with US laws and the consequences if we get caught breaking them. Do you know I have to pay about $170 in a fine for "improper passing" while driving? That's for changing lanes too quickly. Frankly, I just don't want to deal with any laws on anything bigger than that at this point where they claim you've cost them millions and such in damages.
I didn't comment on your thought of producing it yourself because I didn't think it needed one. It's fine to argue that many of the great films were low or even no budget, but, on the other hand far far more of them that people have loved including many true classics have budgets in the range of millions if not billions. If you have that kind of cash, then how about instead spending it in support of people like the EFF instead of making some stupid little CG thing on your computer?