jcl

Eh? It's a harmless question. It's not like he asked for a Playskool My First Wormâ„¢ kit or something. Well, I can't comment on how it affects other people's computing experience, but as an it's rather important to me that I know about these things so I can avoid introducing security issues into my own programs. The techniques are also sometimes interesting or valuable in their own right. Since petabeata apparently has some interest in, or at least knowledge of, programming, I assumed that it was similarly a matter of professional (or rather, amateur ) curiosity.

Heh. You'll learn soon enough Just bits of code checking for various conditions. For example, you could check for EOF on cin with cin.eof() or for errors with cin.fail() which I think covers conversion errors and so should address the problem non-numbers in the input (i.e., put a fail() check in after you read in the number to make sure it was in fact a number). May as well, you'll need it sooner or later. The effect of the code from the perspective of the user is similar. The system() function invokes the operating system's command interpreter (cmd.exe, I assume) and passes the argum

Sigh. The only hands-on experience I have with anything terribly interesting in this field is with stack-smashing, and I'm having trouble thinking of how to explain that to someone who isn't already familiar with the problem. The most popular introduction seems to be the old Phrack article but IMO it's not that great. *ponder* Edited by Moderator: disabled Link, programming code is shown on website.

Adding to what others have said, you should also check for errors on cin. I entered EOF (end-of-file) to terminate the program (the normal Unix approach) and it collapsed into a infinite loop. The same loop, in fact, that you noticed when you enter a non-number. You could also replace system("PAUSE"); with char c; cin >> c; which should have the same effect but is more portable and faster. It appears that it is indeed a combination of debug code and static linkage. Looks like it's roughly 1MiB of symbols (mostly debugging symbols, I assume) and 200KiB of library code. The executab

Dynamically linked executables are the norm on most modern (non-embedded) systems. Static linkage is often reserved for programs that really need to be able to function in the absense of libraries, and occasionally for performance-critical programs.

There are still a lot of PCs that don't have gobs of memory. Or rather, they do have gobs of memory, but not enough. Anything that discourages people from treating memory as an infinite resource is fine by me. (I'm still angry that I can't get anything to run in less than 12KiB under Linux/IA-32. Darn you paged memory!)

You could try Bochs or QEMU.

Nah, that's just what the OpenBSD weenies want you to think. Just smile and nod until they go away. Hey, I've been here almost every day. I've just been quiet. There's no one to argue with here and that doesn't leave me with much to say

You can do either. If you want reinstall Windows you should be able to just pop in an install or restore disc and let it do its thing. The Windows installer should reformat the partition(s) automatically if they're damaged. If you want to format it for Linux, just ask. The procedure is a teensy bit involved, and I'm a lazy, so I'm not going to write it up if I don't have to. It might be a good idea to make sure it isn't a hardware failure before messing around with it too much. Do happen to know if the drive has SMART support?

Heh. Not so much these days, probably not until DragonFly matures. Actually I've been looking to get away from 'nix entirely but there aren't many alternatives. FreeBSD and NetBSD are probably about as secure as Linux, OpenBSD is more secure than all three, and SELinux is almost certainly more secure than OpenBSD. It would be interesting to see how the more liberal (or more conservative -- whatever) Linux and BSD developers could take advantage of the Trusted Computing infrastructure. IIRC IBM is using Linux in their TC research. (Hmm. I just noticed that RMS conflates TC and DRM, as do

Thanks for the link. Your article outlines many of the reasons why I run Linux. The article is an also example of why I keep running away from Linux I'm not really prepared to take advice about Trusted Computing from someone who thinks that security is immoral.

Kinda weird. G4TTV.com went down a few hours ago. The database server dropped off first, followed a few minutes later by both web servers (or the web server with two addresses -- whatever). The network seems to be fine: Cogent isn't reporting any problems and I still get good responses from their LA PoP and 204.6.150.242. (Ooh, this is neat.) Whatever is happening, it looks like it's local to G4TTV. Edit G4TTV.com is up.

Same here. The trace passes through our upstream (which is acting a bit weird this week, but not too bad) and then Portland to San Jose on Verio and San Jose to LA on Cogent/PSI. If there's a problem it must be on one of those two, probably the latter.

Indeed. The TechTV boards were often glacial and not infrequently frozen solid. If anything G4TTV is more reliable; more prone to slowdown, perhaps, but less prone to complete outages.

Time zone information, presumably used by Java's various time and date classes.

I too was there when it was TechTV. And ZDTV. In fact, I've been using the same account since May 20th 1999.

Linux of a recent vintage would be a bit a heavy for that hardware. Best bet for an operating system would be something from the same period. Linux 2.0-based distros, older version of BSD, older versions of OS/2, most forms of DOS (MS-DOS, PC-DOS, DR-DOS, FreeDOS), Win3.1 or maybe Win95. Some of the free embedded systems -- RTEMS, eCos, the embedded Linuces -- would work as well but probably wouldn't be very interesting (people seem to like applications and user-interfaces for some reason :-).

MDK 10 should be pretty much the same as MDK 9.1 under the hood. Unfortunately the one big difference is kernel version, which might make the modem a bit tricky. The procedure will probably be about the same, but there could be some differences. (There is a small possibility that it won't work at all, but I doubt that's the case.) On the bright side, audio support is better, so it might be easier to set up the sound card. Edit Scratch the first bit, if the modem is an 536EP here's the MDK 10 driver. The installation instructions are in the readme on that page.

AFAIK Lindows provides financial support to various projects. I've seen WINE, Mozilla, and Reiser4 mentioned specifically. Ah, here.

Oh thanks, now my joke doesn't make any sense.

Who runs Outlook on Linux?

Gentoo would be entertaining. I wonder how long it would take to install from stage1?

Heh, PC World's trolling. Last time people went nuts about this Google tried (and mostly failed) to explain that it's a beta and the final version will be more cautious. It sounds like they've already added options to control the indexing in obvious places (obvious enough for him to find, anyway).

Hmm. AFAICT it's not really all that different from Mandrake. The parts of Mandrake that would give you grief on that hardware (e.g., KDE) are all there. But I don't know much about it. Ask and you shall receive. It probably wouldn't be any better than Mandrake either. Maybe a bit worse.

For animations I would use the GIMP (or whatever) to create the frames as separate images and then use ImageMagick to produce the animation like so. Not the easiest way to do it, but not the most difficult either.