Haroon the Hacker

Dear 2600:

A local bar owner I know uses UNIX and has a long beard and wears thick glasses. He is also very fat. When he gets drunk he talks about the good old days of Commodore bulletin boards and flat databases. Additionally, his bar is quite filthy. Therefore I believe he is a hacker.

I really need to become a hacker and this man is my only hope. My question is, how do I approach him about mentoring me? I keep showing up at his bar but he gets drunk and yells at me for loitering. Sometimes he falls asleep. One time I tried to show him a few tricks in Windows with TweakUI but he told me never to use his computer again. He even made fun of me for not knowing Linux and owning a Mac.

Thanks for any information you can give me about social engineering this guy!

Haroon the Hacker

Open Source Health Alert

June 12, 2007 8:37 PM

ATLANTA, GEORGIA — There are dangerous biological side effects of using alcohol and Open Source software.

By now the public is aware of Open Source's association with homosexuality and therefore with AIDS, male prostitution, and anal fissures, but today the CDC issued a health advisory about a new issue relevant to individuals involved in the Open Source community. After months of testing and retesting, a dangerous suspicion has been confirmed. The use of alcohol and Open Source software can cause human DNA to become unstable and mutate.

The hypothetical etiology works as follows: Open Source causes DNA to become unstable which accelerates and amplifies mutations in your body's cells.

When alcohol is introduced into into this already-degrading process, the effects grow by an entire order of magnitude. So for example, while a human male is expected to begin greying in his late twenties, lose muscle tone by his late thirties, and accumulate fat deposits by his mid-forties, simultaneous alcohol and Open Source increases the rate of these natural DNA degradation.

The graphic below displays an example of an alcohol/Open Source mutation, the victim of which is now barely recognizable as human. Sensitive readers may wish to look away, but the fact remains clear. If you value your health and the health of your children, do not drink alcohol and use Open Source software.

Eric S. Raymond, who drank Jägermeister and used Open Source software.

Do not mix Open Source and alcohol — the consequences can be devastating!

Mac OS X Gets Multi-Arch Right

Apple has beaten the world’s most popular desktop operating system and the world’s most popular Unixalike to the punch with multi-platform support. At Monday’s WWDC07 Apple, Inc. CEO Steve Jobs revealed that, when Leopard ships, it will install and run on every one of its supported architectures from one DVD without bothering the user. And the more featured your system is, the more features Leopard will automatically enable.

For example, a user can use the same DVD to install Mac OS X on a dual 533 MHz Power Mac G4, a 32-bit Core Solo Mac mini, a 64-bit Power Mac G5 Quad, and a 64-bit Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro. It even goes so far as to allow 64-bit apps without a 32-bit binary to run in 32-bit mode transparently, which is unprecedented thus far.

Windows, on the other hand, requires a different 32- or 64-bit version for each of its six flavors. So once you decide you want, say, Windows Professional Enterprise, you need to make sure it comes with 64-bit support. Otherwise, you’ll be stuck booting your chip in 32-bit mode. Apps must be written and released for 32- or 64-bit and can’t run otherwise. This limits users of older systems with Pentium III processors, for example, from running a 64-bit version of a popular game.

Linux eats dust in the race for 64-bit desktopedness too. With Ubuntu 7.05, the latest stable release, things have gotten simpler but still don’t stack up to Leopard. So while you can download one version of Ubuntu for both 32- and 64-bit x86, if you want to run 32-bit programs on a 64-bit system you have to download a compatibility layer, check library dependencies, and compile it yourself. 64-bit programs won’t work on a 32-bit arch, simply returning an error code and quitting.

That only counts for Intel and AMD, however. Other architectures supported by Linux, which number in the dozens and include 68k, ARM, Power, and SPARC among others, are one-at-a-time installs only and don’t have any compatibility between 32- and 64-bit versions. So a user installing Linux on a 32-bit SPARC system from Sun will have to purchase another completely different disc when he installs on Linux on his 64-bit UltraSPARC system even though both processors use the same instruction set.

At most, when counting Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server as two different "versions" of the operating system, you still have only to choose one and are then done with it. Each installs on all four architectures seamlessly and silently.

	Intel		PowerPC
	32-bit	64-bit	32-bit	64-bit
Mac OS X	✓	✓	✓	✓
Mac OS X Server	✓	✓	✓	✓

Windows comes to a total of twelves versions: 32- and 64-bit for each six editions. The number jumps to twenty-four when you consider that you must also choose whether to buy the retail or upgrade versions. This is simply too much work for most people whether they're doing personal use or IT.

Linux does little better, as above with the old download/compile scheme for legacy support. The kicker is that most other distributions of Linux don't even do that well. A user with Fedora Core 7 will still need to hunt down a different ISO for each and every nuance of processor, a real shame since Linux developers sit and scratch their heads over why Linux is still not ready for the desktop.

Come October, Mac OS X will serve everyone with one price, one version, one install: one vision of simple 64-bit desktop goodness.

Major QNX Upgrade to Rock Embedded World

QNX is about to take another quantum leap forward. Production on a new QNX kernel, dubbed "Axion," aka QNX 8, is wrapping up later this summer and will debut sometime early next year. And it's going to pack a wallop in the embedded industry.

"Technologies like 64-bit, VT, SSE, and multi-core have all become important in the market today," said Luc du Croix, senior kernel engineer with QNX Software Systems. "And it's important that QNX take advantage of each and every one of them."

We spoke with du Croix, who has been with QSS for over a decade in various roles, about the changes coming in the new operating system. For the last year, he and his team have been hard at work rewiring their kernel alongside Intel and AMD engineers so they can support new features as soon as possible.

"With this upgrade we're actually using different SSE operations to speed kernel performance." Heretofore, SSE was seen mostly as a multimedia booster, useful for games and Photoshop plugins. "Imagine using a single instruction to move up to one hundred and twenty-eight bits of message data."

Multiple cores are key too. QNX already supports multi-processing and has won awards for its efficient use of multiple processors. But massively multi-core processing (MMCP) is a little different. "SMP is like starting a fire with sticks. MMCP is like lobbing a Molotov cocktail out of the window of a speeding Ferrari and that's what we'd really like to be doing."

Another thing that's changing is processor caching. Back when Neutrino was released, 256k off-die cache was common. Today, 2 MB on-chip cache is the norm. "QNX Neutrino is tiny, 69k, and with all of the processor cache available today, we've rewritten the kernel to load and run entirely from cache."

Running from cache has some serious speed advantages. "QNX messaging is a whole order of magnitude faster when run from cache versus system memory," du Croix said. "It prevents QNX from having to access the system bus." QSS calls this feature FastCache.

When QNX does run in main memory, however, it will be able to access up to sixteen exabytes thanks to the 64-bit ground-up rewrite. "Thirty-two bits just wasn't enough," du Croix said. "Our customers want to run on AMD 64, Core 2, Power6, and they're all playing with 64-bits."

After the update is polished, it will be bundled with the latest version of the Eclipse development suite and offered as an upgrade to developers as QNXtreme, the successor to the current QNX 6.3-based Momentics. QSS will also include a whole new userland based on FreeBSD 6's, an idea left over from the scrapped Overfiend project.

Customers deploying production systems will have the option to upgrade when the time comes as Axion will be completely backward compatible with 32-bit platforms. Customers using QNX4, however, will likely want to contact their QSS rep for evaluation.