Because unlike apache on unix, IIS has a built-in facility to let "webs" and "subwebs" take on different user priviledges.. giving not only a sort of "run-as" functionality to web apps easily, but also leveraging the NT security model for isolation between separate websites and apps on the same webserver.
To do this with apache, well, you're talking about extensions and helpers that break parts of apache and are security risks in their own right... "suexec" comes to mind... and apache still needs to run as root to let any of these work. Furthermore, does suexec work with php ? mod_perl ?.. or is it only a cgi-bin wrapper (i.e. killing apaches performance as a dynamic content server)
Fwiw, there may be better solutions than the old suexec on apache by now...
it is possible that via perhaps Impersonation, IIS could run as non-system and still have separate users and app protection etc, but thats tricky to program. There may be other reasons for IIS to run as system; what i've written is just a possibility.
its meant to be a hi perf filesystem, from the start.
I mentioned this in another post, but SGI claimed internally to have it sustaining 2gb/sec of _write_ performance across a suitably large number of spindles.
Also, one thing i dont see people mentioning is XFS's support for GRIO (guarnateed rate I/O). No linux filesystem has that, and the linux kernel plumbing to support it i think is SGI contributed (if its on xfs for linux yet, i can't recall).
The idea of grio is an app says ahead of time "i need this much disk performance - figure it out", and the OS will say "yes, i can hook you up" or "sorry, throw more money at the problem".
Well, thats not _entirely_ true:) There was one absolutley devastating patch in the IRIX 6.2 time frame where 6.2 boot media couldn't boot machines that had the XFS patch applied to it.
That sucked:)
But i agree with you in general: XFS rocks. We were one of the first XFS customers on irix 5.3, and it didn't rock quite as much back then, but by the time irix 6.2 shipped it was pretty fantastic:)
I remember reading a post in comp.sys.sgi.{something} from one of the SGI guys... to the effect of "we have XFS doing sustained write performance of 2gb / second here in the lab"
Infact, getting the whole page and doing an md5 sum, and then comparing it to a stored value in a mysql database is exactly how mine works. This patent can go fuck itself, thank you very much:)
I dont remember if I actually coded the sum/compare part, becuase by the time i got to that part, i was sick of the idea anyhow. But the bookmarks db and all its entries are live on my machine at home, and i use it for storing and retriving bookmarks from anywhere i happen to be using a computer.
A patent for this is ridiculous. I am fucking tired of people patenting totally naive and obvious approaches to trivial problems.
I beleive the reason it was not done this way in the first place is so you could do date math.
I may want to add a negative time increment to the current time to calculate some past date. Adding a signed to an unsigned doesn't always work so well:)
Changing time_t is not a transparent change. Might as well make it 64bit unsigned, and take the migration penalty once, across the board, as opposed to randomly, on some apps, after you thought they were working for a few months of production use.
Re:How do you figure point the third?
on
Indrema No More
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· Score: 2
I'm not disagreeing with you, but:
Where was sony before playstation 1 ?:)
Anyway, back to Xbox vs PS2..
Lets look at a few quick advantages..
Sony: the incumbant, japanese, lots of announced franchise titles (some exclusive)
Microsoft: 10x the market cap of sony, half of sony's net worth available as _cash on hand_., extremely persistant, some of the best developer tools anywhere, 100% "we love developers" targeted console
Personally, i think the Xbox will do ok. Probably wont dethrone PS2, but i think it will do ok. There will be some nice games for it. Many hardcore gamers will end up with both PS2 and Xbox just for the PS2 exclusive titles. But xbox will sell, and sell enough so that MS can justify making an Xbox2, and perhaps later on an Xbox3.
With rare few exceptions, by the time MS gets to version 3 of something, the competition is fucked.
If you had access to some of the.NET "bluesky" videos presented at the PDC when.NET and VS.NET was more or less unveiled, you might think that this interview is practically a narration of one of the many examples of the "scenarios with a.NET connected world"
XML works for this precisely because it is so semantically laden (bloated:). The glue to say "i'll explain my data if you explain yours" is one way to let you build "agents" easily.
Utilizing.NET is one way to realize scenarios like this. There are others, if you dont happen to like MS:) However, chances are,.NET will be involved at some point. I would envision something along the following: It looks like SOAP/XML is set to be the shoulders that this stuff builds on. XML-RPC might be a relevant competitor, but chances are, SOAP vs XML-RPC will end up like "." and "alternic"..i.e. theres the standard and theres the alternative, and they sort of interoperate, but all the big money will be on only one of them.
fwiw, i think "the web" was supposed to be more "user friendly" from the start.. UAs wouldn't ever display URLs to the user.. the user would use key words or "Whats Related" to navigate and the URLs would be stricly a protocol thing..just like no one in their right mind reads their email by manually constructing IMAP URLS (imap://blah.com/blasdf/23erxd/1234)
Getting computers talking to each other openly and intelligently is an obvious next step to get to the utopia of computers that actually help you manage your life as opposed to help you ruin it:)
Re:Couldn't compete with MS...
on
Indrema No More
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· Score: 2
Open source programmers may put out some damn fine quality code, but they can't hype to save their lives.
Oh, i donno about that. The linux hype machine is effective enough that:
people think linux is stable
people think linux is scalable
people think linux is the best UNIX ever
people think linux is "Ready for the desktop"
people think Microsoft steals linux and GPL code on a regular basis
people think that somehow a console running linux should be an advantage compared to every other console on the market
... and so on. yet in fact, none of these are true at all! i guess i should really run a sed 's/people/some people/' on my list...but you get the idea:)
Anyhow, if thats not some fantastically effective hype, i dont know what is!
I dont buy for a minute that the SR 71 only goes mach 3. What a bunch of crap:) The X-15 (rocket plane) went Mach 6 back in the 50-60s. The MiG-25 FoxBat (similar to F15) does mach 2.5+ (probably more like mach 3). The F-15 does mach 2+. The 16 does mach 2+ on a single engine.
You're telling me the SR-71 only beats these run of the mill jet aircraft by a few hundred miles per hour ?
Bullshit:)
If you buy the discovery channel folklore about the SR-71 (i do:) then it doesn't add up. Pilots wear _spacesuits_. The thing has an operating altitude of 100,000+ feet. Pilots heat their pre-packaged meals by putting the pouch against the cockpit glass. The thing uses special exotic motors and special exotic fuel. (i think its called JP7. Its not flammable. You can apparently fling lit matches into it and they go out. etc etc)
The plane stretches a significant length during flight from heat expansion. its panels and seams are made to expand so much during flight that it _leaks fuel_ when its cold and on the ground. It takes it _several states_ to make a banked turn when flying over the US.
All this bullshit for a couple hundred extra MPH ?
You hit on chinas big problem breifly: it has no money.
None at all. Some overwhelming majority of china is in poverty. The majority of china is agrarian.
Later you say that its "unlikely" for china to launch a sea attack against the US ? They can't launch a sea attack against taiwan!! China has been holding its cards forever w.r.t. taiwan because they know there is a good chance of them giving it their all and not succeeding. Then how do they look ? If china can't even handle taiwan, then chinas legitimacy as anything more than a big farm goes out the door immediately.
At the same time, they can't afford to _not_ make a lot of noise towards taiwan.. else they seem powerless.
China has the military capability to make life in taiwan really shitty for a while, but not to launch a full scale successful amphibious assault. amphibious assult needs lots and lots of people (chinas got that), lots and lots of special equipment (china probably doesn't ahve that). Taiwan is by default in the strong position. _Especially_ since taiwan is _made_ of money and can buy all the national defense they want!!
There is absolutely no capacity for china to launch a relevant assault against the US. The only risk is a long range nuclear strike, and even then, the biggest fear is that they've figured out the technology stolen from US labs and how to use it on their aging fleet of sovet-era military hardware.
as far as your interesting thought excercize...
only a few of the "asian tigers" have been able to successfully turn from agrarian poverty stricken societies into relevant economies. S korea, taiwan, and perhaps malaysia. S korea was able to do so with debt financed capital and controlling governments. Taiwan was able to do so with precisely controlled elections and intelligent fiscal policy. Malaysia was able to do so iirc with its lucky supply of relevant natural resources.
If you look at china on the otherhand, historically the largest scale national works projects have been water control. The national mobilization of the people to a specific aim you see in other (smaller) asian nations has not really been acheived in china to any other aim besides keeping millinos of people from dying from yearly flooding. The way you farm today is largely unchanged from the way you farmed 4000 years ago.
Additionally, in S Korea, taiwan, and malaysia you've got governments who's only real means towards legitimacy was a cocktail of economic growth and psuedo government tranquility. Apart from mongol rule (who were shortly assimilated into chinese culture anyway) and breif british colonialism, china has been a soverign nation for thousands of years. The current regime does not seem to have evolved out of the "we must suppress the people to remain legitimate" fallacy that in effect stifles all societal progress. Only with careful use of policing the poeple offset by measurable GDP gains have the other asian nations been able to grow GDP and bridge into modern society.
Until the majority of chinas labor force isn't concentrated on feeding chinas labor force, dont expect much from china in terms of international power.
Re:I'm worried about this. It could be a disaster.
on
Microchips That Evolve
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· Score: 3
Actually if you read the longer article posted a few days back about this guy, you'll see he hopes to _improve_ reliability. How ?
With GAs. If you make the "environment unfriendly", then the result of your evoultionary process should be a very survivable chip. simulated biological evolutinon of fault tolerant and healing systems. Afterall, the human body is one of the most advanced healing system in modern medicine.
If this sounds way too blue sky, its easier to get a little more specific. Why not pick some "fault" scenarios to model, then introduce those as conditions during the evolutionary process. For instance, if you want to develop a chip that could survive internal/external cache errors (are you listening, Sun ?:), you could
create a cache section which emits errors at some random rate/interval, and watch what the chip does to work around it. It might build another cache.
The important thing in doing this though (as the researcher found out) is varying your conditions a _lot_. When he first ran this on a single FPGA, the design that eventually evolved would only work on that specific chip (not that specific model, the specific physical sample he evolved it on!), at a specific temperature, with a specific host program, power supply, etc.. i.e. it over specified itself and could not function in other environments.
For his later experiments he started using multiple examples of the same part number, but from different foundries. He also adjusted environmental conditions somewhat. The hope was to create a more "survivable/versatile" design.
I think you've got it the other way around. Sun's market cap is 50billion.
MS has 28billion in _cash_
MS could buy Sun today, if they wanted to (and there wasn't a DOJ:)
MS could buy _yahoo_ with cash and not even notice (yahoo: 8billion)
Lets say every single man, woman, and child in america sues MS for 100 dollars. Whats the US population, 300 million ? 300 * 100 = 30000 million = 30 billion. MS could cover everything with 1 cash payment. Granted, they wouldn't do it this way, and it would suck for them, but there probably wont be a $100 award given to every man, woman, and child in the US either.
Linux is not "#1" in platform-variety. Many linux ports are half assed or unusable.
Your microsoft paranoia is a bit unfounded. Why would microsoft give a damn if you wanted to run linux on your computer ? It's your computer - not theirs. If linux is what you want to use, by all means, go for it. They'd rather sell you windows, but if you dont want to buy it, they can't make you*
*A long time ago it was difficult to get a cheap name brand computer without paying "the windows tax". even this is no longer the case. But it was never _impossible_.
None of them change that fact that the _design_ is broken. No amount of great implementation can fix a broken _design_.
sudo isn't even relevant for what i was referring to - daemon processes (although you seem to acknowledge that).
As long as the only granularity is "god" or "shit", programs that are useful will need to run as "god", and they'll cause system-wide compromises unless they're written by security experts, have limited functionality, are designed with security as the primary concern, and the developers and administrators happen to get lucky.
Unix has a terrible security model. You need to be root to do anything moderately useful, and if you're root, then you're able to fuck the system.
This gives us the current unix security fiasco - sendmail ahs never been a secure product, apache cgi, no one seems to make a secure ftpd, no one makes a secure bind, etc etc..
It's all ridiculous. If priviledges were granted/deny'd based on some finer granularity - perhaps at the syscall level, and in a way where programs/conditions authentticated themselves to the security policy, then these problems could be avoided.
For instance, rewrite the kernel and libc so that bind on a privledged port (80) succeeds for a non-root user, so long as the process is "apache", has a trusted md5 sum, was started by a user in group wheel, lives in directory/usr/local/bin/httpd, etc etc.
Then apache doesn't need to run as root even for a _little_ bit of the time.
Also, NT has "su". Look at "runas".
You're right though. Being non-admin on NT sucks, for now. Thats being worked on pretty actively.
With few exceptions, Microsoft employees are told to stay as far away from OSS as possible, especially the GPL. To Microsoft, the possible benefits of including GPLd code in an MS product are not even neutrino sized compared to the universe of fucked they'd be if the very-grey GPL was somehow interpreted to mean that they had to give up their IP on a royalty free basis.
IIRC, To do anything with OSS/GPL code, you need VP level approval, and it has to be okay'd by the legal team (theres an "OSS issues" team within the MS legal group)
In fact, microsoft employees aren't supposed to contribute to completely unrelated OSS/GPL projects at home either.
Unlike the average slashdot weenie, there are lawyers at MS who sit down and think about what the GPL and other OSS license mean under different contexts all day long. They are aware of what the GPL says and how ambiguous it is and they're (rightfully) scared shitless of in any possible dimension being construed as in violation.
At any rate, the places where GPL'd code in an MS product make sense are few and far between. If you can think of any peice of GPL'd software that is shipping "secretly" in an MS product, i'd be curious to hear about it. Frankly, theres not much thats GPL'd thats "best of breed" software, or where there is, its not something MS has any (current) interest in shipping. For example, someone once posted here about how win2k had stolen the scheduler from the linux kernel.
Amusing, to say the least. I trust I wont have to make a list of why "theres no fucking way".
Which platform(s) ha{s,ve} the game(s) you want most.
You will buy th{at,ose} platform(s)
Personally, i've got a Dreamcast, but only because I won it at a programming contest. I like the DC, and im sad to see it go, but it hardly matters since i've got a ton of fantastic games for it (Sega GT, F355 chall, Tony hawk 1 and 2, etc..)
So when im trying to decide what i'll get next, i have to look at what games i like...
Currently, i dont have a PS2, because not a single damn game out of 29 launch titles looked worth a damn. Too bad. However, im looking forward to GT3, MGS2, and ZOE. When those 3 are out, I'll probably buy a PS2.
On the X-box.. on paper, and in demos, its fantastic. Its got ethernet built right in (i dont ever want another console with a modem stuck in it.. ridiculous!) But, i need to see a sim-racing game, i need to see something _like_ MGS2...show me something i want to play, and i'll buy it. So far, the Metropolis Street Racer "update" looks pretty good, but im speculating that i'll want something a bit more focused on realistic driving physics. Also, carmack has said Doom3 is coming to xbox. Given that xbox is more powerful than a GF3, and probably wont cost $600, xbox may be the cheapest (best?) way to play the next id title:)
Finally, theres Nintendo. I liked the sniper rifle out of golden eye. That was about it for N64. Zelda was visually pleasing and all, and so was the mario game, but i never got into either of them. If nintendo is smart they'll try and bring back some of their best 8-bit franchises... i'd love to see a game cube castlevania game.. and of course there will be at least 2 zelda games on game cube.. there will of course also be a mario game.. and it looks pretty certain that there will be a new metroid game!... so i'll probably need a game cube as well:)
If i can afford all 3 machines, i'll get em all. If not, i'll have to figure out which games i can live without.
One thing people forget about the GF3 vs the Xbox - they wont be the same chip. They're _similar_, but the GF3 cards you'll be able to buy still wont be as powerful as the XBox GPU - the XBox GPU will be more like a modified NV20 core with a couple of extra pipelines at different spots.. iirc it was 2 pixel shaders and 2 vertex shaders or something silly like that...
So, even if the indrema has a 750mhz cpu, on paper the Xbox is still a stronger platform (in situations where the GPU's extra pipes help)
Also, the Xbox has developers and financial backing. I think its a neat idea, but don't hold your breath for Indrema:)
How did this get modded up ? DVD Video is absolutely MPEG! There is no fucking chance that DVDs are storing uncompressed video!
Come the fuck on. Consider a 512 x 384 pixel screen, at _256_ colors (1 byte/pixel).
Consider 12 frames per second (24 interlaced fields/sec). Consider a 1 hour movie (3600 seconds).
What do we get:
512 x 384 x 12 x 3600 = 8,493,465,600 bytes
Now. DVD has better resolution, more than 256 colors, i think it stores full frames, and most DVDs are longer than 1 hour. the 8GB number is already big enough to need a dual sided or dual layer DVD... and has no audio, no menu, no extra features, no extra audio tracks. So how the _fuck_ do you think DVD is uncompressed video ?
My Pioneer DVD player gives me the MPEG bitrate of the movie im watching. Dont tell me its uncompressed video.
the onion article on Mir... something about "Mir conducts 'how to scare the living shit out of astronauts' research" in reference to the decaying life support systems and leaks and such
W2k is not based on mach, and the rumours that its stability lessened significantly when win32 and others were allowed to run in kernel mode are unfounded when considered more carefully.
Give the book "Inside Windows 2000" a read sometime.. but basically, i'll paraphrase
"Is Windows 2000 Less Stable with Win32 USER and GDI in Kernel Mode ?
...the reason the impact on system stability has been minimal is that prior to windows NT 4 (and this si still true today), a bug (such as an access violation) in the usermode Win32 subsystem process (csrss.exe) resulted in a system crash. This crash occures because the parent process of Csrss (the session manager, smss) does a wait operation on the process handle to csrss, and if the wait ever returns, smss crashes the system, because the win32 subsystem process was (and still is) a vital process to the running of the system....
there is one additional danger that did not exist prior to moving the windowing and graphics system into kernel mode.. because this body of code is now running in kernel mode, a bug (such as the use of a bad pointer) could result in corrupting kernel mode protected data structures..prior to nt4 such references would ahve caused an access violation because kernel mode pages aren't writable from user mode, but a system crash would ahve then resulted, as described earlier.. with the code now in kernel mode, a bad pointer ref that caused a write op to some kernel mode page might not immediately cause a crash, but if it corrupted some data, a crash would likely result soon after..
.. another area of impact can come from moving the graphics drivers into kernel mode.. previously some portions ran in csrss, and others in kernel mode.. now the entire driver runs in kernel mode..
... finally, running the windowing system and graphics drivers in kernel mode is not _fundamentally_ risky... many other device drivers (network cards, hard disk drives) have always run in kernel mode on every version of NT, with a high degree of reliability.."
his little analysis goes on an on.. talking about the scheduling impact on smp and non-SMP boxes about these moves, and many other cool issues..incase you cant tell i think anyone that uses w2k at all should have this book.. its pretty sweet (and comes with a cd full of neat make-NT-stink-less tools like a self-hosted kernel debugger, etc..)
its "Inside Microsoft Windows 2000", by Davide Solomon and Mark Russinovich...
Slashdot Mirror
Because unlike apache on unix, IIS has a built-in facility to let "webs" and "subwebs" take on different user priviledges.. giving not only a sort of "run-as" functionality to web apps easily, but also leveraging the NT security model for isolation between separate websites and apps on the same webserver.
To do this with apache, well, you're talking about extensions and helpers that break parts of apache and are security risks in their own right... "suexec" comes to mind... and apache still needs to run as root to let any of these work. Furthermore, does suexec work with php ? mod_perl ?.. or is it only a cgi-bin wrapper (i.e. killing apaches performance as a dynamic content server)
Fwiw, there may be better solutions than the old suexec on apache by now...
it is possible that via perhaps Impersonation, IIS could run as non-system and still have separate users and app protection etc, but thats tricky to program. There may be other reasons for IIS to run as system; what i've written is just a possibility.
its meant to be a hi perf filesystem, from the start.
I mentioned this in another post, but SGI claimed internally to have it sustaining 2gb/sec of _write_ performance across a suitably large number of spindles.
Also, one thing i dont see people mentioning is XFS's support for GRIO (guarnateed rate I/O). No linux filesystem has that, and the linux kernel plumbing to support it i think is SGI contributed (if its on xfs for linux yet, i can't recall).
The idea of grio is an app says ahead of time "i need this much disk performance - figure it out", and the OS will say "yes, i can hook you up" or "sorry, throw more money at the problem".
Well, thats not _entirely_ true :) There was one absolutley devastating patch in the IRIX 6.2 time frame where 6.2 boot media couldn't boot machines that had the XFS patch applied to it.
:)
:)
:)
That sucked
But i agree with you in general: XFS rocks. We were one of the first XFS customers on irix 5.3, and it didn't rock quite as much back then, but by the time irix 6.2 shipped it was pretty fantastic
I remember reading a post in comp.sys.sgi.{something} from one of the SGI guys... to the effect of "we have XFS doing sustained write performance of 2gb / second here in the lab"
That rules.
Step 1: Collect RIAA Lawyers and executives
Step 2: Dress them in football and cheerleader uniforms
Step 3: Round up all the kids that wrote "me too" geek persecution stories for Jon Katz's book
Step 4: Lock them all in a small room with lots of video walls.
Step 5: Pipe footage of DOOM and ROBOCOP onto said video walls for a few hours
Step 6: Toss in the handguns and run
I have.
:)
Infact, getting the whole page and doing an md5 sum, and then comparing it to a stored value in a mysql database is exactly how mine works. This patent can go fuck itself, thank you very much
I dont remember if I actually coded the sum/compare part, becuase by the time i got to that part, i was sick of the idea anyhow. But the bookmarks db and all its entries are live on my machine at home, and i use it for storing and retriving bookmarks from anywhere i happen to be using a computer.
A patent for this is ridiculous. I am fucking tired of people patenting totally naive and obvious approaches to trivial problems.
I beleive the reason it was not done this way in the first place is so you could do date math.
:)
I may want to add a negative time increment to the current time to calculate some past date. Adding a signed to an unsigned doesn't always work so well
Changing time_t is not a transparent change. Might as well make it 64bit unsigned, and take the migration penalty once, across the board, as opposed to randomly, on some apps, after you thought they were working for a few months of production use.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but:
:)
Where was sony before playstation 1 ?
Anyway, back to Xbox vs PS2..
Lets look at a few quick advantages..
Sony: the incumbant, japanese, lots of announced franchise titles (some exclusive)
Microsoft: 10x the market cap of sony, half of sony's net worth available as _cash on hand_., extremely persistant, some of the best developer tools anywhere, 100% "we love developers" targeted console
Personally, i think the Xbox will do ok. Probably wont dethrone PS2, but i think it will do ok. There will be some nice games for it. Many hardcore gamers will end up with both PS2 and Xbox just for the PS2 exclusive titles. But xbox will sell, and sell enough so that MS can justify making an Xbox2, and perhaps later on an Xbox3.
With rare few exceptions, by the time MS gets to version 3 of something, the competition is fucked.
What .NET is about.
.NET "bluesky" videos presented at the PDC when .NET and VS.NET was more or less unveiled, you might think that this interview is practically a narration of one of the many examples of the "scenarios with a .NET connected world"
:). The glue to say "i'll explain my data if you explain yours" is one way to let you build "agents" easily.
.NET is one way to realize scenarios like this. There are others, if you dont happen to like MS :) However, chances are, .NET will be involved at some point. I would envision something along the following: It looks like SOAP/XML is set to be the shoulders that this stuff builds on. XML-RPC might be a relevant competitor, but chances are, SOAP vs XML-RPC will end up like "." and "alternic"..i.e. theres the standard and theres the alternative, and they sort of interoperate, but all the big money will be on only one of them.
:)
If you had access to some of the
XML works for this precisely because it is so semantically laden (bloated
Utilizing
fwiw, i think "the web" was supposed to be more "user friendly" from the start.. UAs wouldn't ever display URLs to the user.. the user would use key words or "Whats Related" to navigate and the URLs would be stricly a protocol thing..just like no one in their right mind reads their email by manually constructing IMAP URLS (imap://blah.com/blasdf/23erxd/1234)
Getting computers talking to each other openly and intelligently is an obvious next step to get to the utopia of computers that actually help you manage your life as opposed to help you ruin it
Oh, i donno about that. The linux hype machine is effective enough that:
Anyhow, if thats not some fantastically effective hype, i dont know what is!
Bravo.
:)
However, if standard jetfuel is a kerosene derivative, then flinging matches into it is illadvised
To nitpick _you_ some..
:) The X-15 (rocket plane) went Mach 6 back in the 50-60s. The MiG-25 FoxBat (similar to F15) does mach 2.5+ (probably more like mach 3). The F-15 does mach 2+. The 16 does mach 2+ on a single engine.
:)
:) then it doesn't add up. Pilots wear _spacesuits_. The thing has an operating altitude of 100,000+ feet. Pilots heat their pre-packaged meals by putting the pouch against the cockpit glass. The thing uses special exotic motors and special exotic fuel. (i think its called JP7. Its not flammable. You can apparently fling lit matches into it and they go out. etc etc)
:)
I dont buy for a minute that the SR 71 only goes mach 3. What a bunch of crap
You're telling me the SR-71 only beats these run of the mill jet aircraft by a few hundred miles per hour ?
Bullshit
If you buy the discovery channel folklore about the SR-71 (i do
The plane stretches a significant length during flight from heat expansion. its panels and seams are made to expand so much during flight that it _leaks fuel_ when its cold and on the ground. It takes it _several states_ to make a banked turn when flying over the US.
All this bullshit for a couple hundred extra MPH ?
I dont think so
You hit on chinas big problem breifly: it has no money.
None at all. Some overwhelming majority of china is in poverty. The majority of china is agrarian.
Later you say that its "unlikely" for china to launch a sea attack against the US ? They can't launch a sea attack against taiwan!! China has been holding its cards forever w.r.t. taiwan because they know there is a good chance of them giving it their all and not succeeding. Then how do they look ? If china can't even handle taiwan, then chinas legitimacy as anything more than a big farm goes out the door immediately.
At the same time, they can't afford to _not_ make a lot of noise towards taiwan.. else they seem powerless.
China has the military capability to make life in taiwan really shitty for a while, but not to launch a full scale successful amphibious assault. amphibious assult needs lots and lots of people (chinas got that), lots and lots of special equipment (china probably doesn't ahve that). Taiwan is by default in the strong position. _Especially_ since taiwan is _made_ of money and can buy all the national defense they want!!
There is absolutely no capacity for china to launch a relevant assault against the US. The only risk is a long range nuclear strike, and even then, the biggest fear is that they've figured out the technology stolen from US labs and how to use it on their aging fleet of sovet-era military hardware.
as far as your interesting thought excercize...
only a few of the "asian tigers" have been able to successfully turn from agrarian poverty stricken societies into relevant economies. S korea, taiwan, and perhaps malaysia. S korea was able to do so with debt financed capital and controlling governments. Taiwan was able to do so with precisely controlled elections and intelligent fiscal policy. Malaysia was able to do so iirc with its lucky supply of relevant natural resources.
If you look at china on the otherhand, historically the largest scale national works projects have been water control. The national mobilization of the people to a specific aim you see in other (smaller) asian nations has not really been acheived in china to any other aim besides keeping millinos of people from dying from yearly flooding. The way you farm today is largely unchanged from the way you farmed 4000 years ago.
Additionally, in S Korea, taiwan, and malaysia you've got governments who's only real means towards legitimacy was a cocktail of economic growth and psuedo government tranquility. Apart from mongol rule (who were shortly assimilated into chinese culture anyway) and breif british colonialism, china has been a soverign nation for thousands of years. The current regime does not seem to have evolved out of the "we must suppress the people to remain legitimate" fallacy that in effect stifles all societal progress. Only with careful use of policing the poeple offset by measurable GDP gains have the other asian nations been able to grow GDP and bridge into modern society.
Until the majority of chinas labor force isn't concentrated on feeding chinas labor force, dont expect much from china in terms of international power.
Actually if you read the longer article posted a few days back about this guy, you'll see he hopes to _improve_ reliability. How ?
:), you could
With GAs. If you make the "environment unfriendly", then the result of your evoultionary process should be a very survivable chip. simulated biological evolutinon of fault tolerant and healing systems. Afterall, the human body is one of the most advanced healing system in modern medicine.
If this sounds way too blue sky, its easier to get a little more specific. Why not pick some "fault" scenarios to model, then introduce those as conditions during the evolutionary process. For instance, if you want to develop a chip that could survive internal/external cache errors (are you listening, Sun ?
create a cache section which emits errors at some random rate/interval, and watch what the chip does to work around it. It might build another cache.
The important thing in doing this though (as the researcher found out) is varying your conditions a _lot_. When he first ran this on a single FPGA, the design that eventually evolved would only work on that specific chip (not that specific model, the specific physical sample he evolved it on!), at a specific temperature, with a specific host program, power supply, etc.. i.e. it over specified itself and could not function in other environments.
For his later experiments he started using multiple examples of the same part number, but from different foundries. He also adjusted environmental conditions somewhat. The hope was to create a more "survivable/versatile" design.
Fascinating stuff, IMO.
I think you've got it the other way around. Sun's market cap is 50billion.
:)
MS has 28billion in _cash_
MS could buy Sun today, if they wanted to (and there wasn't a DOJ
MS could buy _yahoo_ with cash and not even notice (yahoo: 8billion)
Lets say every single man, woman, and child in america sues MS for 100 dollars. Whats the US population, 300 million ? 300 * 100 = 30000 million = 30 billion. MS could cover everything with 1 cash payment. Granted, they wouldn't do it this way, and it would suck for them, but there probably wont be a $100 award given to every man, woman, and child in the US either.
No other OS runs on lots of platforms ?
:)
I'm sure you're familiar with NetBSD
Linux is not "#1" in platform-variety. Many linux ports are half assed or unusable.
Your microsoft paranoia is a bit unfounded. Why would microsoft give a damn if you wanted to run linux on your computer ? It's your computer - not theirs. If linux is what you want to use, by all means, go for it. They'd rather sell you windows, but if you dont want to buy it, they can't make you*
*A long time ago it was difficult to get a cheap name brand computer without paying "the windows tax". even this is no longer the case. But it was never _impossible_.
I'm quite aware of all of those "solutions".
None of them change that fact that the _design_ is broken. No amount of great implementation can fix a broken _design_.
sudo isn't even relevant for what i was referring to - daemon processes (although you seem to acknowledge that).
As long as the only granularity is "god" or "shit", programs that are useful will need to run as "god", and they'll cause system-wide compromises unless they're written by security experts, have limited functionality, are designed with security as the primary concern, and the developers and administrators happen to get lucky.
Like I said, the design is broken.
I hope you don't mean to imply that he is unknowledgable about Linux and UNIX in general.
Remember OpenNT ? Softway Systems ? The re-implementation of the NT posix subsystem to let you run and develop unix/x11R5 apps natively on NT ?
Same guy.
Unix has a terrible security model. You need to be root to do anything moderately useful, and if you're root, then you're able to fuck the system.
/usr/local/bin/httpd, etc etc.
This gives us the current unix security fiasco - sendmail ahs never been a secure product, apache cgi, no one seems to make a secure ftpd, no one makes a secure bind, etc etc..
It's all ridiculous. If priviledges were granted/deny'd based on some finer granularity - perhaps at the syscall level, and in a way where programs/conditions authentticated themselves to the security policy, then these problems could be avoided.
For instance, rewrite the kernel and libc so that bind on a privledged port (80) succeeds for a non-root user, so long as the process is "apache", has a trusted md5 sum, was started by a user in group wheel, lives in directory
Then apache doesn't need to run as root even for a _little_ bit of the time.
Also, NT has "su". Look at "runas".
You're right though. Being non-admin on NT sucks, for now. Thats being worked on pretty actively.
With few exceptions, Microsoft employees are told to stay as far away from OSS as possible, especially the GPL. To Microsoft, the possible benefits of including GPLd code in an MS product are not even neutrino sized compared to the universe of fucked they'd be if the very-grey GPL was somehow interpreted to mean that they had to give up their IP on a royalty free basis.
IIRC, To do anything with OSS/GPL code, you need VP level approval, and it has to be okay'd by the legal team (theres an "OSS issues" team within the MS legal group)
In fact, microsoft employees aren't supposed to contribute to completely unrelated OSS/GPL projects at home either.
Unlike the average slashdot weenie, there are lawyers at MS who sit down and think about what the GPL and other OSS license mean under different contexts all day long. They are aware of what the GPL says and how ambiguous it is and they're (rightfully) scared shitless of in any possible dimension being construed as in violation.
At any rate, the places where GPL'd code in an MS product make sense are few and far between. If you can think of any peice of GPL'd software that is shipping "secretly" in an MS product, i'd be curious to hear about it. Frankly, theres not much thats GPL'd thats "best of breed" software, or where there is, its not something MS has any (current) interest in shipping. For example, someone once posted here about how win2k had stolen the scheduler from the linux kernel.
Amusing, to say the least. I trust I wont have to make a list of why "theres no fucking way".
Xbox has HDTV output. (1920x1xxx something).
:)
For games that chose to use it, they'll look pretty nice, even compared to a computer
in many ways, xbox is _the_ console for home theater geeks... HDTV output.. built in ethernet, ac-3 digital audio output..
Which platform(s) ha{s,ve} the game(s) you want most.
:)
:)
You will buy th{at,ose} platform(s)
Personally, i've got a Dreamcast, but only because I won it at a programming contest. I like the DC, and im sad to see it go, but it hardly matters since i've got a ton of fantastic games for it (Sega GT, F355 chall, Tony hawk 1 and 2, etc..)
So when im trying to decide what i'll get next, i have to look at what games i like...
Currently, i dont have a PS2, because not a single damn game out of 29 launch titles looked worth a damn. Too bad. However, im looking forward to GT3, MGS2, and ZOE. When those 3 are out, I'll probably buy a PS2.
On the X-box.. on paper, and in demos, its fantastic. Its got ethernet built right in (i dont ever want another console with a modem stuck in it.. ridiculous!) But, i need to see a sim-racing game, i need to see something _like_ MGS2...show me something i want to play, and i'll buy it. So far, the Metropolis Street Racer "update" looks pretty good, but im speculating that i'll want something a bit more focused on realistic driving physics. Also, carmack has said Doom3 is coming to xbox. Given that xbox is more powerful than a GF3, and probably wont cost $600, xbox may be the cheapest (best?) way to play the next id title
Finally, theres Nintendo. I liked the sniper rifle out of golden eye. That was about it for N64. Zelda was visually pleasing and all, and so was the mario game, but i never got into either of them. If nintendo is smart they'll try and bring back some of their best 8-bit franchises... i'd love to see a game cube castlevania game.. and of course there will be at least 2 zelda games on game cube.. there will of course also be a mario game.. and it looks pretty certain that there will be a new metroid game!... so i'll probably need a game cube as well
If i can afford all 3 machines, i'll get em all. If not, i'll have to figure out which games i can live without.
One thing people forget about the GF3 vs the Xbox - they wont be the same chip. They're _similar_, but the GF3 cards you'll be able to buy still wont be as powerful as the XBox GPU - the XBox GPU will be more like a modified NV20 core with a couple of extra pipelines at different spots.. iirc it was 2 pixel shaders and 2 vertex shaders or something silly like that...
:)
So, even if the indrema has a 750mhz cpu, on paper the Xbox is still a stronger platform (in situations where the GPU's extra pipes help)
Also, the Xbox has developers and financial backing. I think its a neat idea, but don't hold your breath for Indrema
How did this get modded up ? DVD Video is absolutely MPEG! There is no fucking chance that DVDs are storing uncompressed video!
Come the fuck on. Consider a 512 x 384 pixel screen, at _256_ colors (1 byte/pixel).
Consider 12 frames per second (24 interlaced fields/sec). Consider a 1 hour movie (3600 seconds).
What do we get:
512 x 384 x 12 x 3600 = 8,493,465,600 bytes
Now. DVD has better resolution, more than 256 colors, i think it stores full frames, and most DVDs are longer than 1 hour. the 8GB number is already big enough to need a dual sided or dual layer DVD... and has no audio, no menu, no extra features, no extra audio tracks. So how the _fuck_ do you think DVD is uncompressed video ?
My Pioneer DVD player gives me the MPEG bitrate of the movie im watching. Dont tell me its uncompressed video.
the onion article on Mir... something about "Mir conducts 'how to scare the living shit out of astronauts' research" in reference to the decaying life support systems and leaks and such
W2k is not based on mach, and the rumours that its stability lessened significantly when win32 and others were allowed to run in kernel mode are unfounded when considered more carefully.
Give the book "Inside Windows 2000" a read sometime.. but basically, i'll paraphrase
"Is Windows 2000 Less Stable with Win32 USER and GDI in Kernel Mode ?
...the reason the impact on system stability has been minimal is that prior to windows NT 4 (and this si still true today), a bug (such as an access violation) in the usermode Win32 subsystem process (csrss.exe) resulted in a system crash. This crash occures because the parent process of Csrss (the session manager, smss) does a wait operation on the process handle to csrss, and if the wait ever returns, smss crashes the system, because the win32 subsystem process was (and still is) a vital process to the running of the system....
there is one additional danger that did not exist prior to moving the windowing and graphics system into kernel mode.. because this body of code is now running in kernel mode, a bug (such as the use of a bad pointer) could result in corrupting kernel mode protected data structures..prior to nt4 such references would ahve caused an access violation because kernel mode pages aren't writable from user mode, but a system crash would ahve then resulted, as described earlier.. with the code now in kernel mode, a bad pointer ref that caused a write op to some kernel mode page might not immediately cause a crash, but if it corrupted some data, a crash would likely result soon after..
.. another area of impact can come from moving the graphics drivers into kernel mode.. previously some portions ran in csrss, and others in kernel mode.. now the entire driver runs in kernel mode..
... finally, running the windowing system and graphics drivers in kernel mode is not _fundamentally_ risky... many other device drivers (network cards, hard disk drives) have always run in kernel mode on every version of NT, with a high degree of reliability.."
his little analysis goes on an on.. talking about the scheduling impact on smp and non-SMP boxes about these moves, and many other cool issues..incase you cant tell i think anyone that uses w2k at all should have this book.. its pretty sweet (and comes with a cd full of neat make-NT-stink-less tools like a self-hosted kernel debugger, etc..)
its "Inside Microsoft Windows 2000", by Davide Solomon and Mark Russinovich...