Sex, Drugs & Unix

(Linux) Drivers Wanted

You'll know that Linux has succeeded when Doc Johnson starts shipping drivers for its Hijoy-enabled USB dildo/vibrator. (Obviously NWS.)

iVibe, indeed. U Sexy Beast.

Also missing is the optional iVibe track for your favorite p0rn DVDs. I suggest that Dolby immediately issue a new ProLogic specification taylored to controling USB devices in-sync with the audio track.

Just a suggestion.
Jim on 07.31.05 @ 07:47 AM PST [link]

Corporate Communications 101

Jamie tells me that the boyz at Wayport have sent me another one of their lawyer letters, demanding that I sign some patent application that they've expanded to cover known prior art, and informing me that it is my duty to do so without any renumeration for my time spent reviewing the application, etc.

(I explained to them several weeks ago (when they FedEx'ed the first one), that I'm not in Hawaii, so if they think they're giving me notice, they have another thing coming. I did invite them to call my cell phone, and I would discuss the situation with them. They haven't callled.)

With that in-mind, I hereby assign the entire executive management group at Wayport this short lesson in corporate communications.

----

Dear Wayport,

Of course I'm perfectly willing to accomodate your request.

Let's set up a phone call with your lawyers asap - i'm sure we'll be able to work something out - how does that sound?

i look forward to working with you on this!

jim

:-)

Jim on 07.30.05 @ 12:14 AM PST [link]

New threats to corporate security

Got Bluetooth? I've now seen a WinXP machine infected by someone's mobile phone. This is scary because in the the phone could be dragged "behind" the firewall by an unsuspecting employee. This has been done as a proof of concept by a security company, though I can't say . You heard it here, first.

It gets worse.

The scariest tactic I've been told about goes like this; A visitor walks in carrying a Palm Pilot. as he walks by an HP Laserjet with an IR eyeball, he touches the Palm and it beams a executable payload into the Laserjet. The payload sits in the printer collecting passwords off the network interface. When the visitor walks back by after a few hours on his way out, he touches the Palm again and via IR it sucks the collected passwords out of the printer, afterwhich the payload erases itself, leaving no evidence tit was ever there, while the visitor harvested a boatload of credentials without ever touching the printer. This isn't just theory, there are live demos.

And the whole time, the printer was printing away like nothing was going on.

And its not just PCs. Michael Lynn, formerly of Internet Security Systems presented at Blackhat about the newest issue with Cisco's IOS. Lynn had to resign from ISS in order to give his presentation, starting off with, "I'm probably about to be sued to oblivion. (But) the worst thing is to keep this stuff secret."

Luckily, some of the biggest networks have other brands of hardware in critical locations....

Also at Blackhat today, a plug and play USB root kit. In a nutshell, plug this device into an otherwise locked system and it will automatically take control of the system.

Then there's this Day 0 issue with the x86.

Every finite real number, no matter how large, has a well-defined value for sin/cos. Ideally, the floating-point result returned for sin/cos would be the representable floating-point number closest to the mathematically defined result for the floating-point input. A floating-point library having this property is called correctly rounded, which is equivalent to saying the library has an error bound less than or equal to 1/2 an ulp (unit in the last place). For sin/cos, writing a correctly rounding implementation that runs at a reasonable speed is still something of a research problem so in practice platforms often use a library with a 1 ulp error bound instead, which means either of the floating-point numbers adjacent to the true result can be returned. This is the implementation criteria the Java Math library has to meet. The implementation challenge is that sin/cos are implemented using argument reduction whereby any input is mapped into a corresponding input in the [-pi/4, pi/4] range. Since the period of sin/cos is pi and pi is transcendental, this amounts to having to compute a remainder from the division by a transcendental number, which is non-obvious. A few years after the x87 was designed, people figured out how to do this division as if by an exact value of pi. Instead the x87 fsin/fcos use a particular approximation to pi, which effectively means the period of the function is changed, which can lead to large errors outside [-pi/4, pi/4]. For example the value of sine for the floating-point number Math.PI is around

1.2246467991473532E-16

while the computed value from fsin is

1.2246063538223773E-16

In other words, instead of getting the full 15-17 digit accuracy of double, the returned result is only correct to about 5 decimal digits. In terms of ulps, the error is about 1.64e11 ulps, over *ten billion* ulps. With some effort, I'm confident I could find results with the wrong sign, etc. There is a rationale which can justify this behavior; however, it was much more compelling before the argument reduction problem was solved.

This error has tragically become un-fixable because of the compatibility requirements from one generation to the next. The fix for this problem was figured out quite a long time ago. In the excellent paper The K5 transcendental functions by T. Lynch, A. Ahmed, M. Schulte, T. Callaway, and R. Tisdale a technique is described for doing argument reduction as if you had an infinitely precise value for pi. As far as I know, the K5 is the only x86 family CPU that did sin/cos accurately. AMD went back to being bit-for-bit compatibile with the old x87 behavior, assumably because too many applications broke. Oddly enough, this is fixed in Itanium.

I've never been a fan of "fast, but wrong" when "wrong" is roughly random().

Jim on 07.27.05 @ 10:24 PM PST [link]

It seems that Microsoft has let the other shoe drop

Now they want access to your computer:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2002402071_microsoft26.html

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/75511/microsoft-takes-advantage.html

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20050726.wxmicrosoft0726/BNStory/International/

http://informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=166402314

Apparently, you can get a free license if you turn in someone else who has given you a hot copy, or, if it was you doing the slap and wiggle with license keys, Microsoft will allow you to go legit for $99 to $149. This while MacOS 10.4.2 is $129 (retail), and Novel's "Linux Desktop 9 (Powered by SUSE)" is a mere $50, quantity one.

Can it come as any suprise that Microsoft rips $10 Billion per year out of the wallets of the customers who have already paid them?
Jim on 07.26.05 @ 11:54 PM PST [link]

Don't cross the beams

I'll bet this uses a phased array antenna.



More details here and here.
Jim on 07.23.05 @ 09:24 PM PST [link]

Free metro wireless (in Spokane)

Wind Wireless Inc. and Cutting Edge Communications Inc., both of Spokane, have teamed up to launch free wireless Internet service in the downtown area.

Wind’s chief technical officer, Bob Kirkpatrick, says the high-speed, wireless-fidelity, or Wi-Fi, service is available throughout Riverfront Park, and along downtown sections of Spokane Falls Boulevard, Main Street, Riverside Avenue, and part of First Avenue. He says it will be expanded to include the area along Sprague Avenue to Spokane Valley and the area along Division Street to just past NorthTown Mall by the end of the summer.

“The idea is to create a utility for wireless customers in commercial areas that’s absolutely free and doesn’t have limited connection speeds,” Kirkpatrick says.

[...]

link

What with OneEighty about to go dark, maybe Spokane will get to join the real world.
Jim on 07.14.05 @ 09:52 PM PST [link]

Spokane's Hot Zone provider melts down

This just in:

OneEighty Networks, the network provider for the Spokane Hot Zone, has just experienced complete melt down.

180's principal owner, Greg Green, (who runs around with a morphine pump implanted under his skin), has apparently driven the company to financial ruin, despite its low expenses and large customer base. I'm told that all of the top management, including Chad Skidmore, the brains of the network and the overall operation, have deserted.

Chad is pictured on the left and Greg on the right at http://www.go180.net/

OneEighty's Spokane operation is down from 12 employees to four and it is not clear to me how they are going to continue their current level of service. In my view, OneEighty Networks is either now on the chopping block, or soon will be, having already sold all of its Oregon operations and customers.

Jim on 07.14.05 @ 01:31 PM PST [link]

DramainthePhD

So Much
Drama in the PhD

by
Monzy


Download MP3
(2.2 MB)

Yo, MC Plus Plus, my rhymes are so phat,

I'm PSPACE-complete but I'll reduce you to 3-SAT.

My crew is so hard that we roll in NP,

And bitches dereference my pointer for free.

When I'm linear probing they're like, "Damn that's gigantic,"

I showed it to your mom and she used Hoare semantics.

She jumped like JNE
up onto my erection

And I picked up that ho like straight garbage collection.

("That's right, mark-and-sweep on these nuts, bitch.")



My lyrics get stolen by sucker MCs,

I gotta sign my rhymes with PGP;

But I keep on generatin' like a CFG

'Cause there's so much drama in the PhD.



What's wrong MC Plus Plus, am I making you nervous?

Even skanky fat hoes give you denial of service.

You'll probably go to jail before you write your dissertation

So prepare your asshole for some internal fragmentation;

Penetration, as they fill it up with jism,

It's too bad you aren't closed under homomorphism.

Your problem, Plus Plus, is that your typing isn't strict:

In ML my type is real
and your type is 'a dict.



I control my flow better than TCP,

I rep the west coast like Eazy-E,

You best not front if you can't pass the GRE,

'Cause there's so much drama in the PhD.



My flow is so intense that I will overflow your buffer,

Corrupt your stack pointer makin' all your data suffer.

I've got saturated edges but your flow is sparser,

Real gangstas sip on Yacc; instead you generate a parser.

While you're busy poppin' stacks I'll pop a cap in your skull,

While you smoke your crack pipe I'm gonna pipe you to
/dev/null.

I may not have a label but I rap like a star;

I'm an unsigned long int
and you're an 8-bit char.



Your mom circulates like a public key,

Servicing more requests than HTTP.

She keeps all her ports open like Windows ME,

Oh, there's so much drama in the PhD.



DWORD
to your moms, I came to drop bombs;

I've got more rhymes that San Jose's got dotcoms.

I rep the Farm like 50 reps Queens,

With more power than multitape Turing Machines.

Blowin' up the rap scene faster than factorial functions,

I'm dope like PNP transistors and I'll saturate your junctions.

By the time you've rhymed one line, I've already busted ten;

You rap in exponential time and I'm big-O of log(n).



I run gmake and gcc,

And I ain't never called malloc
without calling free.

I'll beat your ass until it's colored like a red-black tree

'Cause there's so much drama in the PhD.

 

© Typedef
Jam Records 2005

Jim on 07.13.05 @ 06:40 PM PST [link]

Distros suck

Don Marti writes:

Linux people are going to do their own client apps and tweaks anyway, and I want to update the software running on my machine through the package manager, not through a bunch of download sites—even if one of them is Google. Karsten Self has a good explanation of why the Package Manager is a good thing, toward the end of Spyware, Adware, Windows, GNU/Linux, and Software Culture.

Which is exactly whats wrong with Linux distributions, they all try to lock you into running binaries for which you don't have (but may be able to get) the source. All of them except gentoo, of course. Even debian makes you go around the normal mode of system software development, downloading a separate set of *source* packages, and using specialized *debian* tools. Bleah.

People, the *power* of unix is that you can (and should) compile from source, something that FreeBSD systems, and gentoo have kept, while the rest of the Unix/linux community wandered off in the direction of Microsoft.

Then there's this crapfest from Karsten, quoted in the above-referenced article:

I get the strong impression that both Apple and the various VARs tend to be extremely lax with security standards (ownership / permssions) concerning files with which users will have direct contact, to better accomodate Mac users' infamously low tolerance for frustration and for any need to know technical details. Thus, the vital distinction between system and user files tends to be blurry, in practice.

This is going to bite them, at some point. Of course, being Mac people, they probably won't notice the bite marks, except perhaps to decry their lack of anti-aliasing.

I get the strong impression that Karsen is full of crap. There are a solid ton of real Unix people riding herd on MacOS X these days, and this kind of thing won't fly any longer in the MacOS world than it will in linux-land.

Linux is a fine set of technology, useful for many things, and an interesting development model to boot, but these kind of elitist statements undermine linux's ability to progress. As a server, linux is about equal to FreeBSD. As a desktop, linux still runs a distant 3rd to both Windows and MacOS. In the embedded world, linux rocks.

Jim on 07.04.05 @ 01:42 AM PST [link]