No offense but why is this a 5 it's answered in the FAQ.
"3.5. Why Java? Java is one of the most cross-platform languages currently available. There are free Java implementations available such as Kaffe. We will ensure that Freenet is always compatible with these versions even if Sun attempts to make it more difficult for free Java implementations to keep up with their proprietary versions. Java has excellent network support. Java is easier to debug than other languages such as C++. This lets us get on with the business of implementing Freenet quickly and reliably!"
First if anyone is interested in learning about game development there are a ton of ways to do so thanks to the net. If you are intersted in first person 3D development check out G-Sector here http://www.freegamesweb.com/gsector/ a complete functioning open source 3d multiplayer game. Or hell the quake source for that matter thanks JC!
Personally I want to create a graphical MUD that is open sourced . Kind of an open sourced diablo style game with full editors to allow you to add in monsters quests subquests and your own landmass.
To that end a recent release by Eidos called Revenant was supposed to have multiplayer coop and ship with the editor. I saw this and thought cool I can create game worlds for me and my friends to romp through. I thought it would be kinda like the dungeon designs I used to do on graph paper for me and my buds in the D&D days except these would be graphical and truly interactive. The graphics in the game are tre nice so I rushed out and bought it. I gotta say I have never been so pissed about a game before. In order to ship before Xmas and in order to release before Diablo 2. Eidos shipped and incomplete product. The coop multiplayer they promised that had me so jazzed isn't even in the fscking game! And certainly no mention of that on the Revenant web site either. They have multiplayer deathmatch but who the fsck in their right mind wants to play an isometric quake? It really sucks because the game shows some real inovation in many respects like the combat system and at times it begs to be loved but its just not quite finished. Another case of the marketing dept. screwing things up good. Because with the rep the game now has it is unlikely it will ever live up to it's potential. I am still really pissed can you tell?
I served four years in the USN as an operations specialist. And at one point was responsible for tracking a very active air picture in the Persian Gulf. The area is known as the aluminum cloud due to the high volume of aircraft flying in a very small area. We were briefed about the Vincennes tragedy upon entering the theatre of operations. As I understood it and this is probably the most reliable information on the subject you will get. The tragedy was not necessarily the fault of the captain of the USS Vincennes. The tragedy was caused by several factors not the least of which being that the Iranians fly there military aircraft out of their civilian airports. In other words they don't have air force bases per se. Every civilian airport may share it runways with military aircraft. So you may have two aircraft taking off in a short period of time one an Iranian F-14 and one an Airbus. A Navy Operations Specialist can tell the difference based on which modes of IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) the plane is squawking. A civilian plane squawks two modes of IFF one that reports its altitude (mode charley I believe) and one that reports its flight number (mode one if I remember correctly) (in most cases). NATO aircraft like the F-14s we gave to the Shah can squawk up to two more modes 3 and 4. Mode 4 is US only and encrypted this is how we tell they are US. Mode 3 is NATO for interoperating with our allies. Now you have two planes coming off the runway one squawking modes 1 and Charley and one squawking modes 1,3 and Charley. You know the one squawking 3 is an F-14. By the way air warfare happens so fast these days that a computer does the actual tracking with a human operator double-checking it. A human is pretty much incapable of manually tracking the complex air picture over the gulf. So with these aircraft coming off the same runway it's a simple matter for the computer to mix up their IFF squawks as the two contacts radar blips separate. One of the tools you use in the gulf to keep things straight is a superimposed map of the civilian air corridors over your radar display. The planes in those corridors are usually civilian and not a threat. What we had in this case was a plane that looked like it was squawking a military code (due to computer human error) heading straight for the Vincennes in a fairly volatile environment (remember the USS Stark that got split in half by an Iraqi Exocet). It was also not any where near a civilian air corridor. And did not respond to three separate warnings on several different international frequencies. The captain of the Vincennes in this case was following the rules of engagement for the gulf when he pulled the trigger. They really thought they were in danger he had to make a decision. And something like this would never have happened had the Iranians not had a propensity for hit and run attacks on American ships in the gulf at the time. And also not have been flying F-14s out of a civilian airport. Even today if this where to happen again it might result in the same outcome. It perhaps shows a weakness in Military ID technology. Things like Doppler shift ID might improve this a bit in the future or may have already (I have been out of this line of work for a while now things change). Anyway that's how it went down.
If I was faced with this problem . I would simply enforce strong passwords on the host. I would say at minimum three character sets of the four available upper case alpha, lower case alpha, numeric, and punctuation. I would not preassign passwords. I would enable password lockout for more than 5 failures. I would log multiple failures perhaps even send a page or email on 5 failures. I would require passwords be changed every three months. And would not allow repeating the previous 5 passwords. With these steps taken your password scheme would probably not be your weak link. The thing I would worry about at that point would be the security of the bastion host. In other words which bug in which daemon or protocol is going to allow someone to root the box. Faced with the afformentioned password scheme the cracker will look for an easier way in. It's kinda like if faced with a reputable proxy firewall a cracker wont attack the firewall. They will simply use a war dialer to get into your network via dialup. Any way thats just my opinion.
I think all the anti M$ sentiment is out of hand and the DOJ FoF is a very bad precedent. You guys really want to see government regulation of a major software company. I think thats NUTS. Pournelle is right about alot in his article. About the fact that most of the competition shot them selves in the feet and legs and THEIR remedy is to breakup M$. There has been huge advancements in the PC software arena throughout the history of the PC. All of it because there is was and is competition. You guys are being very hypocritical saying M$ is a monopoly and they have NO competition and at the same time saying that Linux is the best ever OS and the one true thing and NT and Win 98 suck etc.. so on and so forth. You can't have it both ways. Either Linux IS a good OS and IS competition for NT and Win98 and M$ is not a monopoly or Linux IS a no count OS and IS only for nerds that prefer the Unix command line and M$ is a monopoly oh and the iMac and Be don't exist either. And Apple didn't sell like 1 million iMacs last year right? I used to run an Amiga they were in fact competition for M$ in many ways. I LOVED my Amiga. But the fact is they went under due to management ineptitude period. Not because M$ was big and mean and took their lunch money. I believe the year they tanked they sold 900,000 machines. That was more than Compaq in the same year. And they went bankrupt how the f*ck do you explain that except management ineptitude. And all of my old Amiga friends are still running around blaming there woes on M$. That's just stupid they should blame the jackass Iranian that managed Amiga into the ground. Similar situation with IBM and OS/2. Pournelle is right about IBM being bigger than M$ at the time. If they REALLY wanted to they could have competed and won the desktop. They didn't and don't care about the desktop. Someone in this thread said IBM is a very different company today. perhaps in some ways but not many. The fact is they still make their money selling MainFrames, AS400s, and RS600s. Not PCs the PC market has always been chump change to them. In fact they recently ditched retail PC sales but believe me they are not hurting as a result. They screwed up on a pretty fair playing field with OS/2. I mean if you left the inovation part up to IBM, Novell, and Netscape you wouldn't have all the cool features that are default in PC OSes today like built in networking (This seems so obvious now but it wasn't so 10 years ago), built in SMP, built in security, clustering etc.. IBM would be selling you a stripped down copy of OS/2 with no SMP you could then buy a seperate NOS from Novell or buy IBM Lan Server (YUCK), Then by an expensive SMP addon or perhaps a whole differnt version of OS/2 and Novell then pay 40 bucks for a copy of Netscape. And an aditional fee for Trupet Winsock or something similar. Do you realize that they are saying M$ inovated too much! Thats insane! They included too much with the OS hurting the smaller companies like Netscape f*ck Netsape they should have looked for a merger with IBM so IBM could bundle Navigator with OS/2 and compete with Windows. But let's not forget IBM didn't and doesn't give a crap about OS/2 and the desktop or bundling Navigator. They DID have their chance THEY BLEW IT. Now will have some bullshit regulatory committee (deparment of bendoverMS) telling them the MINIMUM they can charge for new technologies and products that they would have otherwise integrated with the OS. This is what you guys want? Its feakin insanity. I say compete with M$ in the marketplace of ideas an win IT CAN BE DONE. Or shut up about it. If they are a monopoly and hurt consumers as a result. Then consumers will look for alternatives and thats where Open Source comes in. It is that simple we don't need the Department of software bundling to even things out. More Government involvement and regulation rarely solves anything. It usually has quite the opposite effect if any.
Many people have commented that they are unimpressed by this preview of the GeForce. I think this was a real gamble by Nvidia. This is not just another high speed pixel pushing video card. Alot of games like Halflife are not fill rate limited so much as CPU geometry limited. They took a leap here and are offering the ability to take Transform and ligting (Geometry)away from the cpu (pissing of Intel) freeing it up for animation and special effects. And putting it on a specialized piece of hardware that cranks it out much faster allowing more detail in a rendered scene. It wont be obvious at first but developers ARE going to take advntage of this they are jazzed about this development. It's the technology that wil take the PC to the Playstation 2 level. Higher fill rates will only let you increase the reslolution and color depth on your game if the CPU is still handling geometry your stuck with the level of detail you have had in the past because you will be CPU constrained. Dont get me wrong higher fill rates are a good thing. I think you will see this cards fill rates increase over time. It's an extremely complex chip 22 million transistors. So it's clock rates are lower starting out. Can you say GeForce 256 Ultra in about six months.
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No offense but why is this a 5 it's answered in the FAQ.
"3.5. Why Java? Java is one of the most cross-platform languages currently available. There are free Java implementations available such as Kaffe. We will ensure that Freenet is always compatible with these versions even if Sun attempts to make it more difficult for free Java implementations to keep up with their proprietary versions. Java has excellent network support. Java is easier to debug than other languages such as C++. This lets us get on with the business of implementing Freenet quickly and reliably!"
Two Things
First if anyone is interested in learning about game development there are a ton of ways to do so thanks to the net. If you are intersted in first person 3D development check out G-Sector here http://www.freegamesweb.com/gsector/ a complete functioning open source 3d multiplayer game. Or hell the quake source for that matter thanks JC!
Personally I want to create a graphical MUD that is open sourced . Kind of an open sourced diablo style game with full editors to allow you to add in monsters quests subquests and your own landmass.
To that end a recent release by Eidos called Revenant was supposed to have multiplayer coop and ship with the editor. I saw this and thought cool I can create game worlds for me and my friends to romp through. I thought it would be kinda like the dungeon designs I used to do on graph paper for me and my buds in the D&D days except these would be graphical and truly interactive. The graphics in the game are tre nice so I rushed out and bought it. I gotta say I have never been so pissed about a game before. In order to ship before Xmas and in order to release before Diablo 2. Eidos shipped and incomplete product. The coop multiplayer they promised that had me so jazzed isn't even in the fscking game! And certainly no mention of that on the Revenant web site either. They have multiplayer deathmatch but who the fsck in their right mind wants to play an isometric quake? It really sucks because the game shows some real inovation in many respects like the combat system and at times it begs to be loved but its just not quite finished. Another case of the marketing dept. screwing things up good. Because with the rep the game now has it is unlikely it will ever live up to it's potential. I am still really pissed can you tell?
I served four years in the USN as an operations specialist. And at one point was responsible for tracking a very active air picture in the Persian Gulf. The area is known as the aluminum cloud due to the high volume of aircraft flying in a very small area. We were briefed about the Vincennes tragedy upon entering the theatre of operations. As I understood it and this is probably the most reliable information on the subject you will get. The tragedy was not necessarily the fault of the captain of the USS Vincennes. The tragedy was caused by several factors not the least of which being that the Iranians fly there military aircraft out of their civilian airports. In other words they don't have air force bases per se. Every civilian airport may share it runways with military aircraft. So you may have two aircraft taking off in a short period of time one an Iranian F-14 and one an Airbus. A Navy Operations Specialist can tell the difference based on which modes of IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) the plane is squawking. A civilian plane squawks two modes of IFF one that reports its altitude (mode charley I believe) and one that reports its flight number (mode one if I remember correctly) (in most cases). NATO aircraft like the F-14s we gave to the Shah can squawk up to two more modes 3 and 4. Mode 4 is US only and encrypted this is how we tell they are US. Mode 3 is NATO for interoperating with our allies. Now you have two planes coming off the runway one squawking modes 1 and Charley and one squawking modes 1,3 and Charley. You know the one squawking 3 is an F-14. By the way air warfare happens so fast these days that a computer does the actual tracking with a human operator double-checking it. A human is pretty much incapable of manually tracking the complex air picture over the gulf. So with these aircraft coming off the same runway it's a simple matter for the computer to mix up their IFF squawks as the two contacts radar blips separate. One of the tools you use in the gulf to keep things straight is a superimposed map of the civilian air corridors over your radar display. The planes in those corridors are usually civilian and not a threat. What we had in this case was a plane that looked like it was squawking a military code (due to computer human error) heading straight for the Vincennes in a fairly volatile environment (remember the USS Stark that got split in half by an Iraqi Exocet). It was also not any where near a civilian air corridor. And did not respond to three separate warnings on several different international frequencies. The captain of the Vincennes in this case was following the rules of engagement for the gulf when he pulled the trigger. They really thought they were in danger he had to make a decision. And something like this would never have happened had the Iranians not had a propensity for hit and run attacks on American ships in the gulf at the time. And also not have been flying F-14s out of a civilian airport. Even today if this where to happen again it might result in the same outcome. It perhaps shows a weakness in Military ID technology. Things like Doppler shift ID might improve this a bit in the future or may have already (I have been out of this line of work for a while now things change). Anyway that's how it went down.
If I was faced with this problem . I would simply enforce strong passwords on the host. I would say at minimum three character sets of the four available upper case alpha, lower case alpha, numeric, and punctuation. I would not preassign passwords. I would enable password lockout for more than 5 failures. I would log multiple failures perhaps even send a page or email on 5 failures. I would require passwords be changed every three months. And would not allow repeating the previous 5 passwords. With these steps taken your password scheme would probably not be your weak link. The thing I would worry about at that point would be the security of the bastion host. In other words which bug in which daemon or protocol is going to allow someone to root the box. Faced with the afformentioned password scheme the cracker will look for an easier way in. It's kinda like if faced with a reputable proxy firewall a cracker wont attack the firewall. They will simply use a war dialer to get into your network via dialup. Any way thats just my opinion.
I think all the anti M$ sentiment is out of hand and the DOJ FoF is a very bad precedent. You guys really want to see government regulation of a major software company. I think thats NUTS. Pournelle is right about alot in his article. About the fact that most of the competition shot them selves in the feet and legs and THEIR remedy is to breakup M$. There has been huge advancements in the PC software arena throughout the history of the PC. All of it because there is was and is competition. You guys are being very hypocritical saying M$ is a monopoly and they have NO competition and at the same time saying that Linux is the best ever OS and the one true thing and NT and Win 98 suck etc.. so on and so forth. You can't have it both ways. Either Linux IS a good OS and IS competition for NT and Win98 and M$ is not a monopoly or Linux IS a no count OS and IS only for nerds that prefer the Unix command line and M$ is a monopoly oh and the iMac and Be don't exist either. And Apple didn't sell like 1 million iMacs last year right? I used to run an Amiga they were in fact competition for M$ in many ways. I LOVED my Amiga. But the fact is they went under due to management ineptitude period. Not because M$ was big and mean and took their lunch money. I believe the year they tanked they sold 900,000 machines. That was more than Compaq in the same year. And they went bankrupt how the f*ck do you explain that except management ineptitude. And all of my old Amiga friends are still running around blaming there woes on M$. That's just stupid they should blame the jackass Iranian that managed Amiga into the ground. Similar situation with IBM and OS/2. Pournelle is right about IBM being bigger than M$ at the time. If they REALLY wanted to they could have competed and won the desktop. They didn't and don't care about the desktop. Someone in this thread said IBM is a very different company today. perhaps in some ways but not many. The fact is they still make their money selling MainFrames, AS400s, and RS600s. Not PCs the PC market has always been chump change to them. In fact they recently ditched retail PC sales but believe me they are not hurting as a result. They screwed up on a pretty fair playing field with OS/2. I mean if you left the inovation part up to IBM, Novell, and Netscape you wouldn't have all the cool features that are default in PC OSes today like built in networking (This seems so obvious now but it wasn't so 10 years ago), built in SMP, built in security, clustering etc.. IBM would be selling you a stripped down copy of OS/2 with no SMP you could then buy a seperate NOS from Novell or buy IBM Lan Server (YUCK), Then by an expensive SMP addon or perhaps a whole differnt version of OS/2 and Novell then pay 40 bucks for a copy of Netscape. And an aditional fee for Trupet Winsock or something similar. Do you realize that they are saying M$ inovated too much! Thats insane! They included too much with the OS hurting the smaller companies like Netscape f*ck Netsape they should have looked for a merger with IBM so IBM could bundle Navigator with OS/2 and compete with Windows. But let's not forget IBM didn't and doesn't give a crap about OS/2 and the desktop or bundling Navigator. They DID have their chance THEY BLEW IT. Now will have some bullshit regulatory committee (deparment of bendoverMS) telling them the MINIMUM they can charge for new technologies and products that they would have otherwise integrated with the OS. This is what you guys want? Its feakin insanity. I say compete with M$ in the marketplace of ideas an win IT CAN BE DONE. Or shut up about it. If they are a monopoly and hurt consumers as a result. Then consumers will look for alternatives and thats where Open Source comes in. It is that simple we don't need the Department of software bundling to even things out. More Government involvement and regulation rarely solves anything. It usually has quite the opposite effect if any.
Many people have commented that they are unimpressed by this preview of the GeForce. I think this was a real gamble by Nvidia. This is not just another high speed pixel pushing video card. Alot of games like Halflife are not fill rate limited so much as CPU geometry limited. They took a leap here and are offering the ability to take Transform and ligting (Geometry)away from the cpu (pissing of Intel) freeing it up for animation and special effects. And putting it on a specialized piece of hardware that cranks it out much faster allowing more detail in a rendered scene. It wont be obvious at first but developers ARE going to take advntage of this they are jazzed about this development. It's the technology that wil take the PC to the Playstation 2 level. Higher fill rates will only let you increase the reslolution and color depth on your game if the CPU is still handling geometry your stuck with the level of detail you have had in the past because you will be CPU constrained. Dont get me wrong higher fill rates are a good thing. I think you will see this cards fill rates increase over time. It's an extremely complex chip 22 million transistors. So it's clock rates are lower starting out. Can you say GeForce 256 Ultra in about six months.