Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Blender, Pictures, Servitude
Is your Blender still under warranty? Myriad writes: "NaN, the publishers of the free cross-platform 3D modeling and rendering package Blender, may not be as dead as was previously reported here on Slashdot. While Blender remains unavailable for download, some of the websites functionality has returned along with the notice "NaN is currently undergoing a re-organization of the company...and are working to restore wider operations as soon as possible." Hopefully they will manage to bring back Blender!"
"I only read Computerra for the pictures." Natalie Shahova writes: "As the translator of Just for Fun, I had to contact Linus by email in order to clarify some issues. This way we got virtually acquainted, and Linus agreed to give me an interview. Its Russian version was published in Computerra on March 26, but the original is - as you might guess - in English. As far as I know, Linus Torvalds has never given an interview to a Russian journalist before. Knowing from Just for Fun that Linus is tired of questions about Linux and open source, I chose some other subjects that interest me as a professional translator: languages, emigration, fiction, etc." A fun interview, with some amusing pictures, too (only in the Russian version). Thanks, Natalie!
Wasn't Windows NT 'More UNIX than UNIX'? thelizman writes: "C|Net is reporting that the joint Microsoft and Unisys website attacking Unix has been experiencing problems all day. Now, normally I would venture an evil laugh, but in light of yesterdays revelation here on /. about the site being FreeBSD powered, could this merely reinforce Microsoft's point? Not likely, since it was quickly switched over to IIS running on Windows 2000, and that's when the problem seems to have started."
What time is it when an elephant dances on your computer? Tom Veil writes: "Minor editorial changes have been made on the article "When Elephants Dance" (referenced earlier by Slashdot). The most interesting change adds one more step to the solution, suggesting that the DMCA must be repealed. A comment is also made as to how fair use is already protected, and thus 'there is no need for additional action in this area.'"
And thanks for flying Air Canada -- Have a nice day. steveha writes: "Linux Journal has more on cyborg Steve Mann's troubles with Air Canada. Over $100,000 in equipment damage, and possible... brain damage?!? Not good."
Can we be really sure that they are really running IIS on Win* now? They could be a bunch of 31337 h4x0rz running IIS over Wine. I bet Bill would be upset if he found out that was what was really going on...
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
the site still allows you to download the /bin/ls program, which indicates it is running *nix or bsd (on an improperly configured server).
Someone pointed this out in a previous discussion on the matter.
It doesn't seem as though his 'brain damage' was exactly what we think of. The first thing that pops into my head is ratardation and the lack of ability to think. It seems, however, that the abilities were more related to his brain being able to control his body. For example, if you damaged part of your brain you would no longer be able to see, or move your arm, or feel your pinky toe. It appears that the brain damage was more realted to his ability to interact with his devices, most specifically the vision items, then his ability to formulate thought.
Either way, AirCanada really fucked this guy over. What they did was simply wrong, and they deserve what they get, and then some. This is some fucked up shit, and though the part about the knives is fairly irrelevant, it does throw their safety procedure excuse out the window.
Microsoft putting up an Anti-Unix site is like going to Sturgis on your Vespa Scooter, poking a Hell's Angel in the chest, and saying, "Hey, Fatass! My Vespa totally kicks ass over your American-Made pile of crap."
Second:
Exactly how much crap did Steve Mann have embedded in him? Come on, did he have a wire going into the center of his brain, or what? I'm certainly not a fan of 'go to the airport - forfeit your rights', but last time I checked his site (before Air Canaduh), he just had some VR gear and some wireless network thing. Not a pacemaker or anything. (Idea: send Dick Cheney to Canada via Air Canada)
As you wish: (Modified for Lameness)
root:~$ nmap -O -P0 wehavethewayout.com
Starting nmap V. 2.54BETA30 ( www.insecure.org/nmap/ )
Interesting ports on www.wehavethewayout.com (130.94.214.143):
(The 1158 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: filtered or closed)
Port State Service
21/tcp open ftp
25/tcp open smtp
80/tcp open http
110/tcp open pop-3
443/tcp open https
1433/tcp open ms-sql-s
2105/tcp open eklogin
3306/tcp open mysql
5900/tcp open vnc
Remote OS guesses: FreeBSD 2.2.1 - 4.1, Windows Me or Windows 2000 RC1 through final release
Nmap run completed -- 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 155 seconds
root:~$
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
1. Unisys and MS start a $25+ mil PR campaign against Unix and set up a web site as a part of this wehavethewayout.com.
2. The website is running on Apache and FreeBSD and the campaign receives criticism.
3. Next day they move the hosting of the above to MS' domain and the server's IP address changes and software seems to be Win2k/IIS 5.
4. In no time after this move, the Win2k server gets cracked and started serving an empty HTML page and then getting 403 errors, campaign gets more bad PR.
Just a curious question. How in the hell are they spending this $25+ mil that has so far not gotten any positive coverage and only generated bad PR? Funny that the FreeBSD site seems to be still up and running at http://198.63.57.204/
Regardless of what wehavethewayout.com is running, that webserver has probably had a hell of a day. Besides being slashdotted, I would speculate that hundreds of curious slashdotters have portscanned, banner-scanned, and run all sorts of scripts against this server. No wonder it's offline right now. :)
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
the english one:
I don't think I have any special messages at all. I think the only "message" in my book was the tongue-in-cheek "Party on, Dude!"
and here is the russian one:
I definitely don't want to give a message to anybody. The most important thing in my book is its cool ending: "Let's rock, pal?"
this is just one of many examples.
A small info: i am a native russian speaker although i live in germany since 1993.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
See the previous article re. Prof. Mann for testimony from myself and other students who have worked with him.
As far as any of us have been able to tell, he has absolutely no medical requirement for any of his equipment, or any actual physical or psychological dependence on his equipment. He has been observed working fine without it on several occasions.
This is a publicity stunt, plain and simple. Prof. Mann has an agenda to push and is pushing it as hard as he can.
The only way he could be damaged is if his VR stuff caused some kind of permanent change to his brain by replacing part of its normal function, sort of like (imagine) if you lived in a weightless environment for long enough, you might lose your ability to walk in normal gravity. That change of course would be a very slow, gradual process that came from wearing the electronics for years.
The electronics are bound to fail sooner or later. If they were really causing some physical change in him, then if they ran for a few more years before failing, the change would have progressed that much further and the damage would have been worse. So if removing the stuff caused damage, it's good that he found out about it now while the effects aren't as bad.
But I agree with the Linuxjournal comment from the guy claiming to be a doctor, saying Mann is probably just looking for an excuse to sue. If that VR removal really caused brain damage, two things should happen:
The site is mirrored at
www.pleabargainingisthewayout.com
and
www.whe
Speaking of sleepytime, Bill has asked me to say
"Will the last person to leave wecantfindthewayout.com please shut off the lights?"
Thank You.
Johnny Quest has two Daddies.
Why should this guy have to go through any trouble at all? He wasn't wearing anything that could be construed as a bomb or a weapon of any kind.
Unless he's changed it very recently, his gear looks like a fanny pack filled with gutted computer parts, with misc. cables going out to various peripherals, many with visible PCBs and so forth.
He may have cleaned it up a bit, but take this and add a reasonable-sized battery, and you have a rig that looks a lot like your "ACME Personal Bomb" from any action movie from the past decade or two.
Add to this the fact that Prof. Mann is a bit on the eccentric side and that he would very likely have gotten pushy with the guards when they challenged him (trust me on this one), and what you have is a recipe for a really bad day (and a really golden publicity opportunity, which was probably the plan).
Steve Mann could see perfectly well with no glasses of any kind when I met him. Sounds like a stunt to promote his book. Perhaps he should lean to unplug his toys for a while and learn to enjoy not being on a electronic leash.
Just because he is a mad visionary doesn't mean we need to tolerate his stupidity. He can't be the one deciding when he should or should not be following the rules the rest of us have to follow. He basically chopped up a laptop in such a way as to make it wearable. If the pieces are hiding in various parts of his clothing then that is his problem not that of the security staff. In fact his home made jury-rigged devices are likely far more dangerous in terms of radio interference than a laptop that follows standards.
His mind may operate at a visionary level but that doesn't excuse the fact that he is lying about being handicapped and that he knew perfectly well that his gear should be treated as a laptop. Guess he wants to re-define society in his image. Fine line between being a visionary and being insane.
What? I will not remove my 'Wearable Gun' it is attached to my heart monitoring device! I'm handicapped, as I suffer from a fear complex. I need the cold blue steel against my chest in order to feel comfortable and have self-esteem.
I can understand how removal of Mann's equipment would cause him something of a form of "brain damage". What we all tend to forget is how long Mann has been doing this sort of thing - his first rig (IIRC) was a TV attached to an Apple IIe back in the 80's!!!
His latest rigs are much more compact - others here have noted the research done using special glasses that flipped the image - in those researches the volunteers got used to it, but when they were taken away, they were "disoriented" again (if I have it right, the brain starts to reinterpret everything normally, but take away the special glasses, and the user sees things wrong, until the brain readjusts - someone posted that some of the volunteers NEVER readjusted, which is scary).
Furthermore, you have to realise that Mann's devices were a form of brain/memory augmentation - he literally had a system where he could look at locations/faces and "tag" them with reminders, so that he didn't have to remember names/places/items - he could just look at them again, and if he had tagged them before, the tag would appear - in true augmented reality "magic". Anything from names to reminders about events ("milk on sale", etc).
So, without the system, one could effectively say he had lost a portion of his memory (and he has been doing this so long, almost two decades now, that one could say his augmentation is normal for him - he seems to be truely a walking experiment). While I am sure some of his antics are publicity stunt type material, I don't really think this was the case here. It would be more akin to someone who had chopped their arm off intentionally to use a "bionic" replacement (custom designed, of course), but had it taken away because it could be a "bomb"...
As far as the comment about Mann's system being "wires and pc boards" and looking like it could be a bomb - the last version I remember Mann working on (and supposedly had a prototype of) was contained in the "lining" of a large suit sport coat, with the boards spread out among the coat's inner surface, maybe a bit of kit in a fanny pack (batteries likely), and a very small vision/camera system (can't remember the company that was developing it, but it looked like an ordinary set of glasses, with a very small prism mounted on one lens, with the projection system mounted on the earpiece of the frame projecting in from the side) - the whole thing was mostly "invisible". I suppose the camera and such made for a slightly more visible system, but I don't think (if this was the system he was wearing at the time) that it would be a "shocking" looking system. Of course, I could be wrong, and he might have been testing out something more recent...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
So they're migrating all their mainframe customers to Win2k running on their very expensive up-to-32-way Wintel 'mainframe' (caugh).
me: So there are no plans for Linux then?
them: No. We don't think it scales and besides Unix is proprietary.
me: www.osdl.org has it on a 16cpu (4x4) NUMA and it appears to scale just fine.
them: We don't know. Nearly everyone we talk to asks us what our Linux plan is and we just tell them "senior management has decided we'll run Windows."
So I finished with the FreeBSD server stuff and they went 'oh yeah, we got some internal mail on that stuff'.
Unisys is just being their normal closed, proprietary self. They make zillions doing this by being kissy-face with governments all over. I hope this round bites them squarely since Windows does not make an enterprise O/S no matter how much wishful thinking is done on Bill's or Unisys's part.
-- Multics