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Domain: halcyon.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to halcyon.com.
Comments · 63
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Just like ActiveX was supposed to be.
Silverlight is not meant for the World Wide Web. Rather, it is, like many other Microsoft products (...) for the corporate intranet.
So basically this is just like when they took ActiveX, which was designed as an application interface programming toolset (and a very good one) and shoe-horned it into their web browser as an "alternative" to Java. One must then wonder how much "enhanced and superior functionality" has been left enabled that should not have been there in the first place. Lack of proper planning with ActiveX led to wonderful things like unauthorized bank account transfers, viruses and worms, and people's computers spontaneously turning off when they visited websites that used it. -
Narcissistic Personality Disorder Is...
a disease:
See Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) :
How to Recognize a Narcissist
at this URL
http://www.halcyon.com/jmashmun/npd/index.html
We all have to deal with difficult people. Some days we can be pretty difficult ourselves. Recognizing the difference between normal difficulties and personality disorders can be crucial to decisions about entering new relationships and continuing existing relationships.
The material on Narcissistic Personality Disorder that is published for lay readers is not very informative, even though most people have had to cope with a narcissist at one time or another. If you were raised by a narcissistic parent, then you've been taught that the narcissist is always right and you're the one who's wrong. A lifetime of such mistreatment typically instills lack of confidence in your own judgment, along with habitual shame at never getting it right or being good enough to deserve the air that you breathe. The children of narcissists may not have realized that the quirks and oddities of their impossible-to-please parents are not in any way unique or special but are in fact the symptoms of a personality disorder.
The information on the Web is very repetitive and amounts to little more than the diagnostic criteria from DSM-IV. Clinical descriptions of Narcissistic Personality Disorder don't describe the things that are most shocking and puzzling in everyday interaction with narcissists.
This material is offered for comfort and solace to people who've had bad (or merely weird) experiences with narcissists. If you're looking for ammunition to attack someone, please look elsewhere. If you're looking for a diagnosis, you'll need to consult a psychiatrist. If you're looking for help with your term paper, go here.I've written entirely from my own experience and personal interest; I'm not a therapist or counselor, have no relevant credentials, and can't refer you to lawyers.
-- Joanna Ashmun
"The study of human nature may be thought of as an art with many tools at its disposal, an art closely related to all the other arts, and relevant to them all. In literature and poetry, particularly, this is especially significant. Its primary aim must be to broaden our knowledge of human beings, that is to say, it must enable us all to become better, fuller, and finer people." -- Alfred Adler -
New Microsoft Windows mascot suggestion.
Here's my suggestion for a new Microsoft Windows mascot. She's old enough to be public domain, she's tanned, she's rested, she's ready, and she's all patched to hell. All the better that Redmond is located in the vicinity of America's "Emerald City". Please, pay no attention to the borg behind the curtain.
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Barney Made Me Do It
Hey! I remember that story... the sequels were pretty bad, though.
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Re:I must have missed something
The Wizard of Oz as a "populist allegorical indictment of the gold standard" is also an urban legend:
http://www.halcyon.com/piglet/Populism.htm -
See the Exploder saga - from 1996!Yes, all of Slashdot is right - this is old news.
In 1996, Fred McLain realized there were security problems with ActiveX, and wrote an demonstration ActiveX control called Exploder. Exploder will shut down Windows - not do permanent damage, but of course the point was if he could do that he could do anything.
He then went to Verisign and got a certificate and signed the control, to prove the point that code signing doesn't guarantee the control is safe. There was a blaze of publicity at the time, and Verisign threatened to sue him if he didn't take the control off his web page. In the end he took down the signed control. The unsigned one is still there for your edification and enjoyment.
The whole sorry story can be found here.
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Blow the dust off this one
Apparently, Mr. Hook is unfamiliar with the infamous Internet Exploder.
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Fixed Link
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Quantian articleI own the quantian.org domain. The following is from my article on the Quantian Distribution. Here is a brief run down of links, programs, and other goodies in Quantian.
- R, including several add-on packages (such as tseries, RODBC, coda, mcmcpack, gtkdevice, rgtk, rquantlib, qtl, dbi, rmysql), out-of-the box support for the powerful ESS modes for XEmacs as well as the Ggobi visualisation program;
- A complete teTeX, TeX, and LaTeX setup for scientific publishing, along with TeXmacs and LyX for wysiwyg editing;
- Perl and Python with loads of add-ons, plus ruby, tcl, Lua, and Scientific and Numeric Python;
- The Emacs and Vim editors, as well as Gnumeric, kate, Koffice, jed, joe, nedit and zile;
- Octave, with add-on packages octave-forge, octave-sp, octave-epstk, and matwrap;
- Computer-algebra systems Maxima, Pari/GP, GAP, GiNaC and YaCaS;
- the QuantLib quantitative finance library including its Python interface;
- GSL, the Gnu Scientific Library (GSL) including example binaries;
- The GNU compiler suite comprising gcc, g77, g++ compilers;
- the OpenDX, Plotmtv, and Mayavi data visualisation systems;
- it includes apcalc,aribas,autoclass,
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I tried to warn you all when I wrote exploder
Gosh, back in 1996 I wrote an ActiveX control trying to warn everyone that this was a bad, bad idea. Embedding native code on a web page is plain stupid. Maybe it's time to open source the code for this thing so it can be brought up to date now that everyone is interested again? Last time I opened my mouth about this Cornelius Willis (platform director at M$) called me "...clearly not an author that anyone can trust" and I ended up spending $600 on lawyers to fend off their proxy attack via Verisign. Anyone else willing to take up the cause? Mike Doyle has been pretty clear about his intent on this, he intends to deny MS the patent and allow other browsers to keep on rolling. His intent? To allow the web to return to it's original platform agnostic experience. Not a bad thing given that 95% of the (IMHO) foolish public is running IE these days. Since most web sites only support IE and Netscrape 4.7 (gack!) isn't this a good thing?
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I tried to warn you all when I wrote exploder
Gosh, back in 1996 I wrote an ActiveX control trying to warn everyone that this was a bad, bad idea. Embedding native code on a web page is plain stupid. Maybe it's time to open source the code for this thing so it can be brought up to date now that everyone is interested again? Last time I opened my mouth about this Cornelius Willis (platform director at M$) called me "...clearly not an author that anyone can trust" and I ended up spending $600 on lawyers to fend off their proxy attack via Verisign. Anyone else willing to take up the cause? Mike Doyle has been pretty clear about his intent on this, he intends to deny MS the patent and allow other browsers to keep on rolling. His intent? To allow the web to return to it's original platform agnostic experience. Not a bad thing given that 95% of the (IMHO) foolish public is running IE these days. Since most web sites only support IE and Netscrape 4.7 (gack!) isn't this a good thing?
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Re:It might catch onIf I am informed correctly, similar laws have been in effect for the longest time regarding phone solicitors: You can ask them to put you on a no-call list, and if they ever call you again, you can go to a small-claims court and collect $500 (see e.g. this site for some basic info).
But have these laws stopped telemarketers? No, because the public at large doesn't know or doesn't care about them. The few people agressive enough to sue them for $100 will not even make a small dent in the budget of a big spam-producing company. But the upside is: those of us who are willing to take them to court can have an easy source of extra income!
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This Place is Not a Place of Honor
This guy found the link! In addition to the Salon article, it also has a link to the government report (summary-complete pdf which is also well worth reading.
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Re:Nevada Nuke License Plates
I think a Mr. Yuk symbol, skull and crossbones, and a trefoil would make a nice, apropos Nevada plate.
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Re:About the "Former Microsoft Employee" bit..
Gates didn't write DOS.
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Where are the links?
The maddening thing about that article is that it contained no useful links. Typical Salon sloppy journalism.
A (dull) report on warning signs at a New mexico facility is here.
The Archaeology Magazine article (more of a blurb) is here.
Excerpts from "Expert Judgement on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant"
A design exhibition of warning markers.
-adso
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Re:Ancient Civs
> What if they [future civs] stumble across the Yucca Mountain dump?
This is getting slightly off-topic, but the nuclear industry has been researching how to warn future civilisations 10000 years later about nuclear waste.
There's some excerpts from a report here that are surprisingly interesting reading.
Amongst other things, the report discusses using earthworks and markers to try and convey an impression of danger and inhospitability - but, importantly, without making the waste repository look like it might contain anything valuable. After all, it did not take long for grave-robbers to break into the pyramids, curse or no curse...
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Re:If global warming was real...Where are you going to store these things for 10,000 years?
We should store it at this place, but my god, it might be expensive!!! We'd probably be better off just not using so much energy!
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Keeping people away from Rx waste in 10000 years
People have already thought of this.
WIPP Exhibit: Message to 12,000 A.D.
This goes through all of the technicalities of signposting things so that people in the future will stay away from them or be aware of dangers into the future.. even if they can't understand English.
There are a lot of diagrams there.. most of the ideas revolve around using imposing spikes.. or 'universal' pictures, such as that of someone dying. -
Re:Manual length and Macs vs. PC
This reminds me of an old Mac story.
The situation was that Guy Kawasaki (an Apple "evangelist" at the time) challenged some PC folks to a "bake off," to determine which system made some tasks easier.
When the day came, Kawasaki sent out a 10-year-old to go head-to-head with the PC geek.
The full details of the story are at http://www.halcyon.com/kegill/mac/win95/faceoff.ht ml
Maybe we should have a new challenge where a Linux geek and a 10-year-old compete to see who can set up a compute cluster the fastest. -
Marking the SiteAnother question is how do you keep the site marked, and perceived as dangerous, for 10K years? What message will last through whatever potential societal chaos/collapse/evolution is a'comin?
There was a design competition about this - my favorite is the Landscape of Thorns.
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Elf Sternberg's Journal Entries stories
A guy named Elf Sternberg wrote a bunch of stories, called the "Journal Entries". I really think his vision of the future is useful. When we have true AI, I suspect that we will use it in our society in similar ways to how his characters use AI, for example.
His stories are primarily sex stories, with some science fiction in the background. However, I found most of them more interesting for the SF than for the sex.
In these stories, AI computer people are valued members of society. There is an etiquette of not asking computers to do things you could easily do yourself, but it isn't rude to ask computers to remind you of appointments and such. Some of the tech is interesting, such as the powered armor made of "StarkCloth"; I have recently read that something like StarkCloth might be possible within a few years, but I doubt Elf knew that when he made it up. Also, some of the descriptions of what it is like to be immortal through advanced medical technology, and what happens if only some people have it and others don't, are worth reading. And for that matter, what it's like living in a society where there are "stepping disks" (straight out of Larry Niven) everywhere; people walk everywhere, and don't use vehicles other than just for fun.
The broad outline of the story arc is that an entity called Fawn appeared one day to a guy named Ken Shardik; she told Shardik that she had nearly unlimited powers, and she was willing to do things for him. He chose to create a ringworld (he named it "Pendor") and populate it with life. Fawn created a pocket universe, and the ringworld Pendor spent several billion years evolving creatures. Using the time-travel abilities of Fawn, they went back to the time of Rome and rescued a being called Oenone, who the Romans considered a goddess. Oenone used her powers to help along the evolution of life on Pendor. Once all was ready, Shardik used equipment provided by Fawn to produce intelligent people of various races: human, centaur, cat-human, wolf-human, skunk-human, etc. Finally, after a few decades, the ringworld's pocket universe collapsed and the ringworld and its star appeared in the same universe as Earth, and only a few light-years away. Fawn then left, and the stories after that don't have any Fawn deus-ex-machina, but are more straight SF.
Because these are mostly sex stories, every story has explicit sexual activity: straight, gay, S&M, etc. etc. If you don't like such things, stay away. My personal favorite stories, as stories and as SF, are the two "Travellogue" series. You might want to start with those if you think you are not sure you want to read these.
The stories appear sporadically on USENET, but you can read them from Elf's web site:
http://www.halcyon.com/elf/journals
Naturally this page is down right now!
http://at.nifty.org/nifty/journal-entries/ -
Re:Underground Railroad used cloth symbols
Oh, you mean like the Hanky Codes!
:-) -
Re:Nuclear Waste
Sign me up too! I'd take 2 if they would give me one of those creepy experimental scultures they may use to mark waste sites. Check this link for a neat discussion of that.
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This has been done already - by experts
And done well:
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Re:Nuclear tombstone: the warning function
Is this what you saw?
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This is already done
The FBI has a unit that already does this. Additionally, a company called Advanced Solutions LLC provides such services. The technology was also used in 1991 to convict Jim Mitchell of killing Artie Mitchell of voluntary manslaughter. (The Mitchell brothers revolutionized the pr0n world by creating the movie Behind the Green Door
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<yawn> Give it a restCrackers, hackers. Whatever. Get over it.
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Re:Hmmm, familiar conversation
A big part of the Microsoft bashing came from the lack of security inherent in the scheme. In particular:
1) ActiveX stuff could do whatever it wanted with your machine
2) The digitally signed stuff was a joke at the time. All you had to do was submit a credit card and address, and they'd give you a signature.
3) When someone pointed this out to Microsoft and eventually the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the response from Microsoft was "The security would be too hard to fix, and we'd like you to meet the Verisign legal team."
Go see Fred McLain's story at http://www.halcyon.com/mclain/ActiveX/welcome.html .
Somehow, I feel like I should expect to meet the Verisign legal team soon. From what I've heard, Verisign has become more careful about the signatures. And as we've all heard, Microsoft still thinks fixing security holes is too hard to be worth the effort (to be worthwhile for their shareholders, of course, since they are publicly held).
-Paul Komarek -
Not so newThis is nothing new.
TeamOn.com has had an encrypted secure mail function for years now.
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Re:Pocket Quicken and othersThese are in no particular order, and many are repeats from earlier in the discussion. I went through much of Palmgear when I first got my Visor Deluxe and thought the enclosed list of companies made some pretty cool products.
- http://www.OliveTree.com Bible-In-Pocket
- http://www.landware.com
- http://www.infinitysw.com
- http://www.standalone.com
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http://www.halcyon.com/ipscone/apcalc/overview.ht
m l - http://snafu.de/~tjawer/tjhome.htm
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http://home.earthlink.net/~davidzimm/dizzysoft.ht
m l - http://www.evolutionary.net/
- http://www.arslexis.com
- http://www.pocketsensei.com
- http://www.orbworks.com/
- http://www.netplus.freeserve.co.uk
- http://www.mobilegeographics.com/
- http://pdabusiness.com
- http://216.91.254.26/palm/
- http://www.tealpoint.com
- http://www.note-smart.com
- http://www.iSilo.com
- http://palmdepot.dir.bg
- http://www.mobilegeographics.com/
- http://www.ellams.force9.co.uk
- http://members.xoom.com/PPilot/
- http://www.beiks.com
- http://www.tobelstudio.com/
- http://cnr-oxy.cnr.pmf.hr/~kdekanic
- http://www.ecamm.com
- http://www.fortunecity.com/underworld/rpg/22/
- http://www.mti-mimir.com
- http://www.micoks.net/~dbennett
- http://aws.com/
- http://www.cityinyourpalm.com
- http://zerodefect.net/danreed
- http://www.dogpatch.org/etext.html
- http://palm.dahm.com
- http://www.firepad.com
- http://www.vindigo.com
- http://www.innogear.com
- http://www.cue.net
- http://www.avantgo.com
- http://www.hz.com
- http://www.geodiscovery.com
- http://www.laridian.com
- http://www.eyemodule.com
- http://www.atelier.tm/palm/scc.html
- http://www.tealpoint.com
- http://www.purepalm.com
- http://www.pdatoolbox.com
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Getting my media fix
MP3 players are all the rage, but everyone seems to be overlooking one major flaw: flash memory is really expensive. 64 MB of songs just isn't enough, even for a bus ride to work. What you need is a format that is cheaper than flash, but just as portable and durable.
Independent-minded techies will want to take a good, long look at getting their hands on MiniDisc hardware. Tiny, durable, long battery life, and $2.50 for 74 min. of nearly indestructible, rewritable, random-access storage is hard to beat. The sound quality on recent units is really CD-quality, considerably better than 128Kbps MP3. 12 hour battery life is nothing to sneeze at, either.
Portable recorder units like the Sony MZ-R90 can be had for around $320, while a player like the E60 or E75 is around $200. Pick up a home deck to go with a player-only model, and you're set. Minidisco and Planet MiniDisc are good sources of equipment and discs.
If you're in the Playstation-2-on-eBay price range, then the Ghibli ga Ippai, or Full of Ghibli, laserdisc boxed set is what you need. All of Studio Ghibli's wonderful films (except Princess Mononoke, which it predates) are collected in one box, with high-quality laserdisc transfers. No subtitles, though; you'll have to print out translated scripts unless your Japanese is really good. A new set would have cost Y98000, or about $1000. Unfortunately, it is now out of print, so you will have to either a) check eBay daily or b) get friends in Japan to scour the dusty back shelves of anime shops. Good luck. (Selling one?)
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Re:New doubleclick trick?Something to do with the IFRAME tag...
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Re:They are doing what Napster asked...I'd much rather take the time and send $10 to the band directly, than have them get thier $1 from the record company for the cd I bought.
So can you please tell us how many times you have sent off $10 to bands directly?
Yeah, I thought so...
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Because apples are not orangeswhat if you're a Prodigy member with a name, circle of friends, credit card info, etc in your account. now lets say that someone somehow steals your account, has access to your credit card info, says damaging things to your circle of contacts, makes threatening emails to people, and all in your name. Shouldn't the ISP, in this case Prodigy, be held liable due to gross negligence in protecting the security of their network?
The case was not about negligence. The case was whether or not Prodigy has a responsibility to control the content over which it has little or no control. Presumbaly if they were grossly negligent, as in your example, then this ruling would not apply.
example 2:
all that damn spam mail... now I'm getting tons and tons of spam mail from legit servers such as excite.com and yahoo.com and hotmail.com... it's going to a mailbox that I don't often use, but same principle applies. Shouldn't these ISP's and large companies be responsible for the information being sent through their network?Check the Terms of Service. If you don't like 'em, vote with your feet. Take responsibility for yourself.
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Re:Yes, a kookThe difference between GNU/Linux and Linux is the same one as between saying free as in "free speech" instead of free as in "free beer"
Here is is 16 years later, and still trying to explain what free means. Seems to me that if you go that long and still have to explain that free really means free but not free, then it is time to pack it in.
RMS is a talented coder. Wish he would do more of it and leave the political B.S. alone.
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My company went through this
We just went through this at my company, StockCharts.com, with an established internet venture fund.
Their base valuation was based on the number of page views per month, X 20 to 50 cents.
Then they applied a multiplier from 2x to 10x, based on their view of our future marketability. A concrete list of subscribers or members was a big plus, in their eyes.
But you can see there's a lot of room for play here.
Anita of Anita's BOD and Anita's LOL
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"Nothing valued is here."
You're thinking of the long-discussed issue of how to label nuclear waste which may be toxic for thousands of years (ignoring that deposits of poisonous elements are toxic forever, such as the arsenic in Bangladesh water wells which were created as a safe alternative to surface water with germs). Sandia actually had some possible messages created: Expert Judgement on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant
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A couple interesting things...A couple interesting things here...
First, in the article, those "fine print software agreements" were discussed...the legal validity of such have been under question for a while now. Due to various legal details, those "click Next to continue installing" agreements are considered by many to be too automatic and do not require enough action on the agreeing party to be legally binding...
Second, I was amused that GoHip.com considers what they do a Browser Enhancement.
Third, ActiveX ever since it's first incarnation has been horribly gigantic a gaping security hole. Anyone even remotely self-respecting computer security-savvy individual would never dream of having ActiveX enabled on their computer. Unfortunately, the average Joe might not know this...hopefully, they will be educated in time.
Here's one (of many) place I definitely like Java a whole lot better...Fourth, in the end, this really isn't that big of a deal, as it was relatively benign. Hopefully, however, it will educate people as to the dangers of ActiveX, in general. I think David Kroll said it best: "I think it's pretty tacky what they did". Although he and Finjin did get it wrong when they said: "this is the first time a company has used ActiveX to alter personal information on someone's computer." Just see the ActiveX Exploder link mentioned above! I think they'd be more accurate in saying this is the first time it's been done purposefully and on a large scale by a corporation.
Fifth, this reveals an interesting problem with "signing" such programs with things like Verisign. That signature doesn't really mean as much as most people think that is does, as Verisign said: "Verisign spokesman Gray Chapman confirmed that GoHip is certified by Verisign, but stressed that his company was not in the business of passing judgment on the business practice of its client."
Sixth, GoHip.com sounds horribly sketchy. No phone numbers, bouncing e-mail addresses...is anyone surprised?...But finally, I have to admit to being horribly amused at the final quote by one of the "infected" GoHip.com visitors: "I compliment GoHip for a fine marketing effort as I certainly know who they are. I hate them, but I know who they are". In the end, capitalism seems to be all that matters again...
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Some related ideas
Elf Sternberg, an long-time personality on Usenet, anticipated some of the growing problems with it and has put this proposal on his web site for a distributed solution. It is worth reading, especially in light of the idea for a Slashdot/NNTP gateway.
This article may be copied and distributed under the terms of the OpenContent License (OPL) Version 1.0, July 14, 1998. -
Re-using the Ringworld?
I don't see why not. Elf Sternberg did it.
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Have you ever taken a Guiness can apart?
I love those little nitrogen widgets they put in them. It is nitrogen that makes the 'small bubbles' required for the creamy head and the downward flow (as the article points out, the bubbles must be less than than 0.05 mm for this).
But the widgets themselves are a truly cool piece of engineering. They hold the nitrogen under pressure until the can is opened and then inject the gas into the beer through a hole so small it almost has to have been drilled by a laser.
The first time I took a Guiness can apart was documented by my girlfriend on her Web Journal. We did some interesting web searchs for more information on the thing. Turns out the widget is patented, and only one of several versions of the same (all of which are patented). Apparently there was a fairly significant research effort by competing companies to re-create the correct creamy foam on canned stout.
I think I speak for all of us when I say "Thanks! It was money well spent!"
Jack
