I wonder how he got everything to fit as more and more space was sold and if it was a manual process? It must have been like playing Tetris on expert mode.
Edit: looks like the million dollar homepage is probably a bit more complicated than 2d knapsack, somewhat like tetris.
Another edit: looks like the only non-rectangular space sold on the million dollar homepage was the last space (as specified in the top linked article). So perhaps 2d knapsack is appropriate. It's late here.
The way it worked was that as you bought, you could select the region that you wanted. You would be charged based on the number of pixels in the region.
I actually have seen the server that it was on. The hosting company provided free hosting to it for several years (at least 8 IIRC). I think that at some point the server died and Alex Tew decided to move elsewhere.
At one point, he had the million dollar pixel lotto which was the same idea except at two dollars per pixel and one person who clicked on one of the pixels would get half the money that came in.
So it was like buying tickets online? if multiple people were interested in the same region, the one which payment went through first got the region? However, this must still have been chaotic once the interest started to rise as space would seem empty until the payment was confirmed, and others would try to buy in the meantime. I guess you would also just have to make a rough estimate on the design of your banner and just buy the space, no time to design it first.
After some research I'm now able to provide an answer to my own question.
The canvas was partitoned into blocks of 10x10 pixels that was white until sold. You would make a payment for X number of blocks through 2Checkout or PayPal. After transferring the money, you would send an e-mail to Alex Tew with the image, coordinates of wanted blocks, URL and TITLE/ALT text. He would then confirm the payment and upload your banner within 48 hours.
So the entire operation was manual with orders placed by e-mail.
> Debian is already one of the few distributions that goes out of its way to provide support for non-systemd init systems.
How does this manifest itself in practice? I don't want to use systemd in Debian 9, what has been done so I can easily change to another init like runit?
In practice it's not possible because of so many (unecessary) dependencies on systemd.
It means that you can install sysvinit or any sysvinit-compatible init, and all daemon packages still provide init scripts, as painful as that is. And Debian still supports installing systemd-shim instead of systemd, so you can have a desktop system with a non-systemd init and it'll still function.
> In practice it's not possible because of so many (unecessary) dependencies on systemd.
Such as? As far as I can tell, almost nothing depends on systemd. A handful of things depend on libpam-systemd (for session management), which functions with systemd-shim.
As I understand it, much of that work goes into removing any trace of even innocuous things like libsystemd, which is used by applications that want to support systemd if available. All the necessary work to support a non-systemd init is already in Debian, making Devuan fairly pointless in practice.
This works great on servers and lightweight desktops. As others have noted, if you want GNOME you also need to install systemd-shim. I have no experience with this, but I have no reason to doubt that it works.
I'm running openRC on all my systems and the problem is usually dependencies. As an example, both Brasero and K3b depends on something that depends on systemd. I can understand if a program uses the systemd library but these need systemd as pid 1 because reasons.
Congratulations. The return of Firefox branding makes me feel nostalgic. I remember using Firefox 1.04 on Debian in the early 00's. This was in the golden age of Firefox, when every new release was an improvement and it was a lean non-bloated alternative to other browsers.
In the past Debian was considered to be one of the most stable Linux distributions available. Stability and quality was a priority above anything else. However, around 2014 something changed when systemd was forced into Debian in a way that would never have happened before the new generation of developers took over the project.
Maybe this is just something we have to get used to, young developers seems to value ease above quality and stability, this also explains the current flood of Electron apps.
Half of the technical committee chose systemd. None of them are new comers. The casting vote in favor of systemd was done by Bdale who is a Debian developer since the very beginning.
systemd was just a symptom. Multiple developers that had been working on Debian for many years, left the project in that period for various of reasons.
I did run an older version of binwalk on the firmware image, but it was unable to unpack anything and only printed false positives. I have now tried the newest version and it's able to unpack everything and display a lot of information. The PE modules in UEFI seems to be signed as these signatures are found many times:
Certificate in DER format (x509 v3)
SHA256 hash constants, little endian
Very interesting to dig around in the firmware, I even found the boot splash image. Definitely a time sink, but fun.
Good points. I must admit that I have not contacted Gigabyte as my experience with such large companies tells me that I will only get elevated blood pressure and absolutely no usable answer.
My main concern is not if the BIOS is secure, I'm very sure it's full of security vulnerabilities like most other software I use, but I have decided to trust Gigabyte like I have decided to trust the developers who build the Linux distro I'm using in that they are not malicious and trying to steal my information. The packages in my Linux distro are signed, so I can verify that they have not been modified since they left the developers machine, but I can't do the same thing with the BIOS update and that's what makes me uncomfortable.
In 1998 I installed the NetBus server on computers in the computerlab at my school. I would then run the NetBus client on a computer in a secluded corner, and watch the reaction from people while I messed with their computer. The best reactions I got from randomly opening and closing the CD-tray. Good times.
We did the exact same thing! This one time, me and my group of similarly nerdy friends sat in a different room and opened all of the CD-trays in the computer lab during a computer class. The teacher came running to the room we sat in, and we were so sure we had been caught. But no, she started explaining that all the computers were acting up horribly, and that we were the only ones who could help her. She didn't know how right she was :)
So we helped her naturally, undoing our own work and uninstalling NetBus. I'm not sure she ever figured out it was us, though.
They DID figure out who was spamming "net send" messages to certain people. A kind of war had started, where people would compete in sending the most net sends to each other, forcing the other side to click "OK" on a message box. It got sort of nuclear once we discovered batch scripts and for loops.
I had a friend sometime around then who did a similar thing at his small office. They would play Age of Empires after work and he would use it to cheat and see where on the map everyone was. He was smart enough to remove it before anyone knew
For a system to be affected, both chipset and CPU have to support vPro. For example, a PC with Core i7-7700 CPU and H270 chipset is not affected because only the CPU has support for vPro, but a PC with Core i7-7700 CPU and Q270 chipset is affected because both CPU and chipset have support for vPro.
This is a post[0] from one of the project leaders:
However, I think we all agree we want the Thunderbird replacement to be a desktop client (plus other platforms like mobile), and based on web technologies, most importantly written in JavaScript.
But the title has now been changed and that is fine with me.
