Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Cats, Snaps, Pixels, Diagrams
LWCE, from our "compulsive recording" files.
marcmerlin writes: "I have just finished my full report on Linuxworld
expo summer 2000 which features, just like my previous
Linux Event reports
and reports, hundreds of pictures and a virtual visit of the expo, with a full
report of all the keynotes, conferences, tutorials and parties I attended
I'm sure you'll agree the wait was worth it :-)"
Thanks, Marc! Hey, he should charge an admission price for this one. This is perhaps the most comprehensive coverage of LWCE I've see yet, and if you're considering going this is a great way to whet your appetite for the next one.
Don't be alarmed, but we're going to have to give you a cat scan. MP3Car writes "The Dudes over at MP3Car have decoded the protocol used by the CueCat which you can get for free at Radio Shack. they have a Web page where you can scan in any barcode and it will tell you the number. Very neat and hightech space age hack. CueCat HACK"
A free package of Slashdot goodies to the first person who can make my Visor into a CueCat basestation so I can scan random items at the grocery. Note: As of 23:55 GMT, a search for "Radio Shack CueCat" at Google yields a grand total of zero (0) matches. Updated: 3:15 GMT 26th August by timothy: An unnamed correspondent writes:
"This comes straight from linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org:
'Hello all,
I picked up my free CueCat reader at RadioShack the other day, so I
wrote a small driver for it based on Andrew Stellman's perl script. It's
available at :
ftp://oss.lineo.com/drivers/cuecat- 0.0.1.tar.gz
Have fun :)'"
"First, there were the dinosaurs ... " If you enjoyed the visual map of Unix history that CmdrTaco posted the other day, here's your chance to spread a little joy in the world in return. As if Unix weren't enough to cover all by itself ;)
Auckerman writes "It seems someone wants to put all standards and platforms for the entire history of computing on one graph. Pretty ambitious, if you ask me. Though, it would be nice if someone began recording these relationships before they are permanently lost forever."
Heck, I'd like to see this even if it covered only a history of video games!
Q: Will you visit my apartment? A: Yes. Speaking of collaborative knowledge systems, GutterBunny writes: "This week's I Cringley talks about Chris McKinstry's latest project - the Mindpixel Digital Mind Modeling Project. It's a pretty cool idea. Take about 900 million mindpixels (basic nuggets of truth about the human condition), throw them into a neural net, then let the neural net think out the next 100 million mindpixels. The article goes on to talk about how McKinstry's going to make money from it and some of the ideas behind it."
If the therapy was scuccessful, you may recall the fascinating interview that Chris gave to Slashdot a little while ago. Looks like some of the questions that people had then about Mindpixel(s) will be answered by reality.
It was too tempting not to do it... so I registered and added my mindpixel: "Is registration is the first step towards confiscation?" Tee hee! :-)
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
Ah! It responded, FALSE. Stupid MindPixels.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
:-)
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Except all I need is a pickpocket and a photocopier to break into your system. Maybe just a good camera and photoshop.
password protected systems can include things like panic passwords - special password you give out when someone has a gun to your head, that works, but sets off alarms, destroys or encrypts sensitive data, etc.
Carrying around the code to get into something is just silly.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
For those who are interested, it appears that the :Cat uses a modified base-64 encoding (not the MIME one!) and a little bit of XOR too. Check the decode() routine for details.
Taral
WARN_(accel)("msg null; should hang here to be win compatible\n");
-- WINE source code
1. Shares in Mindpixel for helping define an artificial intelligence? To me, that's like saying, "I'll pay you $1000 to sexually satisfy Angelina Jolie on an ongoing basis. Is that enough?"
2. He's coming out with a book, "Hacking Consciousness". The other day I claimed money was being hauled violently out of my wallet by the book then reccomended. With this edition, I forsee only one way of paying my bills next month: there is now enough of a vaccuum generated within my wallet by the outflow that I might be able to harness some zero-point energy via the Casimir effect.
3. I'm going to be very interested to see if the thing develops a sense of humour, and whether it is conventional or not. I mean, some of those mindpixels have to be things like "Denis Leary makes a lot of people laugh", plus "Denis Leary said X". (Not necessarily those pixels, but some similar stream of pixels surely exists.) Can you imagine it being fed random pieces of data, and suddenly spouting back, "It would be funny if a strong wind pushed Bill Clinton over a cliff. He would have been blown to his death."
How much intelligence would it need? Jerry Seinfeld manages it, after all. ;)
-TBHiX-
You mean where it says "Custom Manufacturered for DigitalConvergence.com in China by RadioShack A Division of Tandy Corporation, Fort Worth TX 76102" on the back of mine, that's just a typo? weird.
of 23:55GMT, a search for "Radio Shack CueCat" at google yields a grand total of zero (0) matches.
Ever since the initial "You've got questions we've got answers" ad campaign, RadioShack has been all one word. And it takes Google a month to update its indexes anyway.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
It'd be trivial for anyone to crack a system like that.
Although, it would be useful as a secondary means of identification. Say you go up to a terminal, type in your username, scan in your id card, and enter your password.
Or what would be really cool, if you had a linux box set up somewhere with some custom written software, and two scanners outside and inside your front door. When someone wants to get in, they hafta use a standard lock and key PLUS they swipe their card (which unlocks an electronic lock). Thus you can keep logs of who goes in/out of your house.
I've always wanted to do that, ever since a few years ago when I went to work at an IT company that had ALL it's rooms locked with keycard security. I visited the admins one day and they had a nifty map of everyone's daily activities. Muhahaha.
They still missed the fact that UNIX was originally written by OOG_THE_CAVEMAN
in about 120,000,000 bc. Evidence of this is the primatively structured attempts
at natural language through such grunts and gutteral sounds as "grep", "awk",
and "sed". "ls" and friends, while having theoretically unpronouncable natures,
seem to stem from the language of Cthulhu himself, after He and His Spawn
filtered down from deep space in 119,999,998 bc to create the Human race as a
joke.
In regards to a previous topic, research has shown that the first operating
system was, in fact, OOG_THE_CAVEMAN; they beat the hell out of him with large,
blunt objects until he became the hardware abstraction layer between the rock
(the "processor") and the neanderthal ("user"). Thusly, the abacus was born in
119,999,999 bc.
I've already mentioned it here, but you can visit our website to CueCAT scan your CD's and DVD's. (Includes track listings, reviews, and cover images.)
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Even better, Pierre-Phillipe Coupard of Lineo Inc. has written a driver for the CueCat that captures the escape sequences, decodes the data, and echoes it in human-readable format to /dev/cuecat (which you obviously have to create)
This is a good thing(tm) because the escape sequence is alt-F10, which makes it a real pain to try and use the cuecat from a linux console (unless you have a useable vt on tty9)
It's early code, so there's obviously work to be done, but I've tried it and it does work pretty well for v.0.0.1
See the freshmeat appindex record at http://freshmeat.net/projects/cuecat/
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
http://www.new-sharon.me.us/upc.html
http://docwhat.gerf.org/software/per l/catscan/
Other ideas... tie it into CDDB and/or Amazon to catalog all your CDs and books based on UPC/ISBN numbers?
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