Yep, one of the things kicked off the war where the americans finally managed to stop being british was when the rule came in that in America a pint would be 16 ounces.. this meant of course that every brew taxed by the pint would result in more payments to England for every barrel produced. Quite understandably folks didnt like being given short weight by some foreign government so they changed governments and put their own in place instead. Funnily enough they then kept giving themselves the same short weight.... On the other hand, when folks from the western side of the Atlantic have accompanied me back to the eastern side on my occasional visits home they are pleasantly surprised by the fact that when you buy a pint of beer you get a 20oz glass:) # human firmware exploit # Word will insert into your optic buffer # without bounds checking
When taking on an organisation with more resources than you theres only really one way to win. Guerillas around the world have been doing it sending better-equipped and massively outnumbering armies packing, Corporations have been doing it to each other, individuals have been managing to stick it to city hall with the same technique. It all boils down to this...
"Yes, you can crush me eventually but you will have to work at it and in the process you are going to look very bad indeed. Theres also the horrible chance that one day you might wake up to find you've lost bigtime in one too many of these battles. Is it really worth it?"
Sony obviously no longer think it is worth it # human firmware exploit # Word will insert into your optic buffer # without bounds checking
Sprirituality is based on faith, science is based on logic, and they are two separate (but complimentary?) paradigms
Also, the two paradigms are not mutually exclusive but overlap, the one most useful in a given situation depending on the context. You cannot comfort a grieving relative with detailed knowledge of the molecular mechanisms contributing to Uncle Arthurs heart attack. In the past the majority of people turned to the clergy to ask "why? why him? and why now?" but today more and more of us have to be our own clergy, have to find our own place within the world and a method of making sense of the things within it. This explains the growing diversity in religious thought and the simultaneous growth in detailed knowledge of the forces that shape our universe. In my experience the people who are happiest are the ones who are comfortable in either paradigm and have enough mental discipline to avoid contaminating one style of thought with arguments from the other when they encounter areas of overlap. # human firmware exploit # Word will insert into your optic buffer # without bounds checking
lets look at it in a little more detail... What do they have to worry about in opening the source to Solaris....
Loss of revenue Nope - Solaris is so close to free-as-in-beer already that in any situation but a huge corporate installation it cannot be a significant revenue stream when compared to their hardware.
Support issues Here there IS a valid concern. If you call Sun support and tell them you're running Solaris version whatever they need to know exactly what you mean by that. It also works the same way if you're doing your own level 1 & 2 support with a little help from sunsolve. If its all open source then they lose that baseline so its reasonable to require that all mods are redistributed by them only - if they dont do this they are going to take a much bigger hit in the "poor support" area than they ever will by not sticking to the letter of open source.
Protection of IP Releasing the source makes cleanrooming their features more difficult so if anything its easier to protect your IP in an open source environment.
All in all I think they are getting as close to "true" open source as it is practical for them to get, and as such I applaud it. If open-source means organisations with a huge investment of time and effort cannot be reasonably practical and pragmatic about how they participate, then they just wont participate at all and I really dont think thats what we want at all. # human firmware exploit # Word will insert into your optic buffer # without bounds checking
Seriously.. The battle for "recognition" of linux or BSD or whatever flavour of unix you like isnt about winning over the geeks.. we all know what its good for and when we want those functions we use it. We also use other OSes when we need their functions too. The recognition that alternative OSes to the win* family need will come when the guys that need telling what linux is and why its different start paying attention. 140 or 40, it doesnt matter. These are the guys in suits who can either block, ignore or help deployment of these other OSes in business. # human firmware exploit # Word will insert into your optic buffer # without bounds checking
well I cant speak for what options are available to you, but the way I got into it was to be taught basic metalwork in school (along with basic carpentry - when old farts like me were in school the UK taught all boys the latter and included the former if the school had the facilities) then later in life, having kept up an interest I spent a lot of days pestering working smiths to give me a little time and teach me the basics of forge work. Along the way I learned my very rudimentary knowledge of the metallurgy of steel from these working guys - starting from "this stuff needs to be worked hotter than that" and going on to books to find out why.. along the way I learned that ancient blades are often much higher quality than could be readily explained by the technology of their time and that many serious researchers have spent time working out precisely what they did and how in order to achieve these results. From there it was a short step to getting seduced by the mystery and folklore that surrounds swordsmithing and I started researching it in earnest.
Having recently moved from one side of the Atlantic to the other that is where it currently has stopped, but only until such time as I have the space and time to set up a workshop again. I'm badly out of practice but setting up the workshop will fix that - somewhere to heat the metal, a good sized anvil, a decent hammer and time are all thats needed, once I have the place to start over. With just those basics you can make all the other tools you need (although I'll probably cheat and buy in the more awkward stuff) Even if I never do anything more useful with it than helping my neighbor fix his garden gate (fire-welding wrought iron.. yuck!) its still fun to do. # human firmware exploit # Word will insert into your optic buffer # without bounds checking
You may not like to hear this, Jon, but religion has nothing to do with science. As well as having a strong faith myself I'm also a scientist by training - a molecular biologist before I became a full-time unix geek and I can honestly say that in that field I met people of every faith that marvelled as they worked at the ever finer detail of [insert-relevant-deities-name-here]'s creation they were uncovering. This was equally true of the many dedicated scientists who were either agnostic or atheist, they just didnt choose to attach a divine name to it.
Much as I hate to criticise an honest belief it is my opinion that views such as yours, expressed in this manner are nothing more than a reiteration of the arguments whereby the established church strangled the development of medicine throughout the dark ages, characterising herbal cures as satanic sorcery, forbidding surgical research as heretical and on down a long list. - Even efforts towards a literate public were regarded as interference with the natural order of things.
Mayhap the first step towards the more enlightened society you so obviously yearn for is tolerance. May I gently remind you of certain teachings regarding the mote in your brothers eye and the beam in your own? # human firmware exploit # Word will insert into your optic buffer # without bounds checking
In the UK I recently had to deal with a similar situation - We were changing ISPs and we ran our own DNS servers so we had to get the registration updated with new server IPs. For the 2 domains I had registered there was no problem, but for one of them (registered way back by a couple of IT guys who hadnt worked there for over 5 years when I started!) we hit a brick wall.. Even though all 3 were registered to the same company, in order to change the 3rd one I had to get our CEO and company lawyer to send written confirmation (nothing electronic - they only accepted snailmail not email or fax) to the registrar that I was who I said I was and that they knew about this before they would update the registration info. It was a pain in the ass but overall I think it was a good thing. # human firmware exploit # Word will insert into your optic buffer # without bounds checking
Nuclear explosions are the least useful part of the research, the information does have other uses. Consider that in simulating the chain reaction in a nuclear event you are also probing the extremes of physical laws. Whilst I HATE nuclear arms and would never contribute to a defense project of any kind, because I dont wanna be part of that machine, I have to applaud basic research in any form.
Sure the press releases always quote the big atomic boom thing, its a good example to show Joe Q Public just how mind-buggeringly-awesomely-powerful this machine is. It just aint all its useful for. # human firmware exploit # Word will insert into your optic buffer # without bounds checking
As an amateur metalworker, interested in forging techniques and bladesmithing in general I'm watching this with great interest. I've often spent long periods with metallurgical analyses of both the traditional japanese swords and the pattern-welded european ancient blades. They have in common a multi-laminate structure, of steels of varying hardness, the core of the blade being softer than the edge and the martensite generated in the blades production being deliberately (although empirically) arranged to preserve a sharper, harder edge. This is, after all, why a good blade was often a pretty one too and where the true artistry of a master bladesmith (which I most definitely am NOT) shows.
Since I've contemplated experimenting with a hybrid technique myself I'm hoping that this project will at least give me some ideas. # human firmware exploit # Word will insert into your optic buffer # without bounds checking
Well, if the first trio was anything to go by the second of the three will suck but the third will wake up and get serious again..... # human firmware exploit # Word will insert into your optic buffer # without bounds checking
...is a recognition in law that when you purchase software it is a sale of goods and has all the protections attached to that. No more "we can revoke your license to use this at any time" any more than a record company can knock on your door and take away non-pirated legally acquired CDs. It would also remove the "yeah, its a bug - it will be fixed in the next release, which you'll have to pay for" response when a piece of software fails to function as intended - thats the sort of thing that requires a warranty they cant disclaim. It also sidesteps the free software issue, since that is publicly available and not for sale, you are not buying it and therefore aint getting any warranty. Of course IANAL etc etc but thats my 0.02. # human firmware exploit # Word will insert into your optic buffer # without bounds checking
Hmmm.. yes.. it does appear to validate clickwraps.. wonder if it can then also be used against spammers.. let me enforce the "You owe me $10 per message of unsolicited commercial email" banner I'm about to put on my SMTP port - Of course it wont apply there, its not going to display the banner to any human unless they are manually forging email with a telnet to port 25, but it was a nice thought and perhaps the only really good thing that might have come from this misguided law. # human firmware exploit # Word will insert into your optic buffer # without bounds checking
ftp in most browsers sucks. but then I expect that. I expect a browser to be good at http and at best mediocre at other protocols because it is, after all, a browser. If I want good ftp I'll go to a real ftp client - I've had more files arrive on my hd badly munged by browsers ftp than I care to count. The same site, the same file when pulled by a real ftp client arrived just fine.
WHY are we so obsessed with putting a www face on everything.. I look at routers configured by pointing a www browser at them, I see linuxconf with a www interface to system config, Theres www interfaces to 'doze terminal server out there that use your browser to spawn a window with a winNT desktop in it....
WHY ???? this is not what the www was designed for, it was made as a document publishing protocol and at that it excels - you want the benefits of other protocols, use other clients.
Just my 0.02 of course but I am getting so peeved at the mad rush to "web-enable" everything.. whats the problem guys, if it isnt on the www is it somehow not cyber-buzzword? # human firmware exploit # Word will insert into your optic buffer # without bounds checking
Fortunately the Jackass Penguin is not an endangered species. In fact the only penguin that appears on the current animals redlist is the yellow-eyed penguin, currently classified as "vulnerable" because of its recent decline in numbers.
This is of course where I give a shameless plug to some guys I used to work for.. The World Conservation Monitoring Centre maintains a huge reference data set of protected areas, endangered species and biodiversity resources. Dont go looking there for scare stories, and in fact its pretty dry and unemotional stuff but the information is solid and reliable. # human firmware exploit # Word will insert into your optic buffer # without bounds checking
Heh! Not with the proverbial 10 foot pole. Its not that I object to intelligent use of compression but if the disk "doublers" were anything to go by this is just going to be a performance hit and will break stuff. Yeah, yeah I know they are busily telling us it will be completely transparent, but do you really honestly believe that of a hardware solution any more than you believed the promises regarding disk compression? (OK, so maybe you DID believe the promises for disk compression but I bet that didnt last long after it got installed!)
We're all familiar with the scenario where a prog checks enough disk space is available for something critical and then crashes in a nasty heap when it finds out the hard way that the data didnt compress as well as the OS had assumed it would when assuring us there was enough space there... Compression in hardware could well be worse. Wonder what happens when you malloc() enough storage for your struct and then discover that although every check you can run says that there is sizeof(struct_t) space there you can only fit half your elements in there without stomping on somebody elses pointers? lets not go there.. I dont even want to think about coding on such a platform, much less trying to write a daemon that cant be buffer-overflowed... Hmmm. a whole new range of exploits.. pad the start of some input data with truly random garbage that wont compress well and bingo... what a naasty thought:) # human firmware exploit # Word will insert into your optic buffer # without bounds checking
I dont usually flame on/. but this is too much to bear! "Multimedia experience" yeah, right... Thanks but I want the content not the frills and fluffy bits that do nothing but get in the way. If I wanted impressive graphics and streaming audio I'd be heading to an entertainment site and expecting it, if I wanted information, so I can get my job done or updated drivers so I can make my hardware work better then I dont want all the flash and Real* crap. # human firmware exploit # Word will insert into your optic buffer # without bounds checking
There is, of course, one non-scientific obstacle to effective treatment for genetic disease. Whilst it is becoming ever more possible to detect and treat genetic defects on a somatic basis the net effect of this is to increase the percentage of the population that carries the gene in question. Germ-line genetic therapy will never be allowed to happen. The right wing condemn it as being man "meddling in Gods domain" the left wing paint a "brave new world" style apocalyptic vision based on institutional abuse of the technique. With todays techniques this leaves only pre-natal detection of genetic abnormality and guess what.. now we hit the abortion debate. So where can we go in the future? Probably gamete screening is possible but I predict the same problems with that as with germ-line therapy. Sad to say there is more FUD spread around on the subject of molecular genetics than has ever been generated in Redmond.... # human firmware exploit # Word will insert into your optic buffer # without bounds checking
All goods sold in the UK that are rated for VAT must have the VAT charged on the sale price - in the UK it isnt the consumers responsibility to pay the tax, its the vendors. They have to account for every item sold and pay HM Customs the VAT for that sale. No exceptions - every business with an annual turnover above a certain threshold has to do it and it is based on turnover not profits. Charities and other non-profits have to account for it too. The problem is that goods sold for export shouldnt be taxed as they are assumed to be taxed at the borders of their destination country.
Thats why theres a customs booth at all UK international airports where you can present the VAT receipts for your purchases whilst visiting the UK, fill in a form and claim the VAT back. Note that you're paying it along with the sale price but the vendor is collecting it for the Customs, thus it is the Customs that pay it back to you when you show 'em the item and say "look, I paid this much vat on this but its going abroad with me, back to where I live" I dont know how the system works with items ordered for overseas delivery but you might consider looking for a contact address for HM Customs and asking them - or perhaps the trade section at the nearest UK embassy or consulate. # human firmware exploit # Word will insert into your optic buffer # without bounds checking
Embrace and extend, jam our solution down so many throats it becomes the new Food(tm) standard...
This is precisely how they got bitten before and if they want to add yet more weight to all the arguments for something radical and painful happening to M$ then by all means let 'em do so. # human firmware exploit # Word will insert into your optic buffer # without bounds checking
Its an old old story... Very few folks get the idea that www pages are about their content not the flashy wrappings. A company I used to work for once hired a consultancy firm to develop a web-enabled metadatabase app that was tailored to their business - We had already evaluated the toolsets out there and come to the unwelcome conclusion that for our purposes the only real choice was one that produced apps for NT but that didnt matter too much because just linking to it from our main www servers (apache on solaris) would make the app work - We got the app, it worked and we started moving real data into it and testing. I pointed netscape at it and it died - turns out they'd given us an app that wouldnt work with anything but the latest and greatest version of IE. The IT team then had to convince management that this was a bad thing. Personally I think the only reason we succeeded was that the CEO had an older version of IE on his machine and it croaked there too. I made such a nuisance of myself beating on desks and pointing out that ANYTHING we put on the WWW had to be browser-neutral as far as possible that I almost got canned. We got our way eventually and the app got rewritten to work without the M$ extensions that the developers had assumed would be there but then everyone moaned that it wasnt as pretty as the first demo. They just didnt get it that a page that takes forever to load and then breaks isnt pretty either. # human firmware exploit # Word will insert into your optic buffer # without bounds checking
The government - ANY government, no matter where you may live - has a long track record of badly thought out policies on issues ranging from diplomatic relations to public health to intellectual property. Just about the only thing distinguishes an effective government from an ineffective one is how readily they learn from and fix their inevitable mistakes. Unfortunately the only indication that a government has that it has just made a mistake is the volume of protest, counterarguments and lost votes that result from the mistake.
This is where a government is no better off than the average slashdotter because they have an even worse signal:noise ratio to cope with than we do - Anyone with a "strong" viewpoint will generate so many flames when a regulation they object to is introduced that a politician often cant "hear" the more rational voices, the ones proposing intelligent solutions or compromises. There aint no moderation in politics so the offtopic gets dragged in as relevant (how many riders to otherwise useful bills have fouled things up in the last 12 months of american politics, for example.)
For so long as any government is trying to set policies on an issue those that are able to speak to that issue from a genuine position of experience and knowledge will be needed. I may not agree with ESR on every point but I sure as hell respect the fact that he is doing something useful by his open-source advocacy and more to the point it is something that I cannot do myself. Sure as individuals my opinion and his carry no greater theoretical weight on a national scale but the fact remains that he has earned his reputation as a knowledgable person in this field and therefore he is better placed in this role than I would be.
He cannot do it alone though, nobody could. How many of you have written to representatives regarding issues like the DMCA - I'm not talking about flaming "this legislation is a piece of crap!" letters, you all know as well as I do that those wont even get read. I'm talking about a rational statement of your disagreements with a bottom line of "If you support this measure I will not vote for you, irrespective of my party alleigance"
If they cant hear you, they cant represent you whether they want to or not - and even if they dont want to the prospect of losing an election is enough to force any career politician to take your views into account # human firmware exploit # Word will insert into your optic buffer # without bounds checking
Like sqlrob asked, please post a reference we can use in getting this through to folks.. This is the kind of awkward question that should be asked by our representatives when the debate comes around again if not before - and if they dont ask it, then we should be asking THEM why not when they come up for re-election! Corporations and PACs can buy publicity and spin, they cant buy our votes - the only way to ensure a politician represents us is to convince them that to do otherwise would be political suicide.... # human firmware exploit # Word will insert into your optic buffer # without bounds checking
You obviously have an opinion here, lets hear it.. Got an idea for how to protect the companies interests without being draconian? Great! so far the mass of online debate on the subject has been a little short on that subject.
If you think you got an idea that is neither "Give the big corporations all your money and they will take care of you" nor "What the f*ck, I can steal it so why pay for it" then post it where we can all read it.. Of course the extremists on BOTH sides will flame your ass hotter than a griddle and you'll probably spend the next decade getting your karma back above zero but thats/. for you..... # human firmware exploit # Word will insert into your optic buffer # without bounds checking
...it's not as easy to just pick two images, do a subtract, duplicate that, and then do a difference with your duplicate on a third.
Seems to me that your objection is that its not what you're used to. Fine. No Problem. I'm not arguing that you should use GIMP just because I do. Other posters have already answered how to do these things easily in GIMP so I think we can take it as a given that for a user experienced in the package concerned it is easy in either one. I've used both and I like both but the fact remains that for other reasons related to what I use my main workstation for it is usually running linux not windows - this means that I will look for a solution that runs on linux and for photoshop-like functionality the clear choice is GIMP. My opinion could change if Adobe ever release a linux-native version of photoshop but it would have to beat GIMP by a long way to overcome the cost advantage. By all means go ahead and use photoshop if you wish, its good but it just isnt the ideal solution for me. On my network its a different matter, I have no problem with any of my users choosing to use one or the other, and in that area at least they wont get "I dont support that program" out of me for either photoshop or the GIMP. # human firmware exploit # Word will insert into your optic buffer # without bounds checking
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, one of the things kicked off the war where the americans finally managed to stop being british was when the rule came in that in America a pint would be 16 ounces.. this meant of course that every brew taxed by the pint would result in more payments to England for every barrel produced. Quite understandably folks didnt like being given short weight by some foreign government so they changed governments and put their own in place instead. Funnily enough they then kept giving themselves the same short weight.... On the other hand, when folks from the western side of the Atlantic have accompanied me back to the eastern side on my occasional visits home they are pleasantly surprised by the fact that when you buy a pint of beer you get a 20oz glass :)
# human firmware exploit
# Word will insert into your optic buffer
# without bounds checking
When taking on an organisation with more resources than you theres only really one way to win. Guerillas around the world have been doing it sending better-equipped and massively outnumbering armies packing, Corporations have been doing it to each other, individuals have been managing to stick it to city hall with the same technique. It all boils down to this...
"Yes, you can crush me eventually but you will have to work at it and in the process you are going to look very bad indeed. Theres also the horrible chance that one day you might wake up to find you've lost bigtime in one too many of these battles. Is it really worth it?"
Sony obviously no longer think it is worth it
# human firmware exploit
# Word will insert into your optic buffer
# without bounds checking
Sprirituality is based on faith, science is based on logic, and they are two separate (but complimentary?) paradigms
Also, the two paradigms are not mutually exclusive but overlap, the one most useful in a given situation depending on the context. You cannot comfort a grieving relative with detailed knowledge of the molecular mechanisms contributing to Uncle Arthurs heart attack. In the past the majority of people turned to the clergy to ask "why? why him? and why now?" but today more and more of us have to be our own clergy, have to find our own place within the world and a method of making sense of the things within it. This explains the growing diversity in religious thought and the simultaneous growth in detailed knowledge of the forces that shape our universe. In my experience the people who are happiest are the ones who are comfortable in either paradigm and have enough mental discipline to avoid contaminating one style of thought with arguments from the other when they encounter areas of overlap.
# human firmware exploit
# Word will insert into your optic buffer
# without bounds checking
lets look at it in a little more detail... What do they have to worry about in opening the source to Solaris....
All in all I think they are getting as close to "true" open source as it is practical for them to get, and as such I applaud it. If open-source means organisations with a huge investment of time and effort cannot be reasonably practical and pragmatic about how they participate, then they just wont participate at all and I really dont think thats what we want at all.
# human firmware exploit
# Word will insert into your optic buffer
# without bounds checking
Seriously.. The battle for "recognition" of linux or BSD or whatever flavour of unix you like isnt about winning over the geeks.. we all know what its good for and when we want those functions we use it. We also use other OSes when we need their functions too. The recognition that alternative OSes to the win* family need will come when the guys that need telling what linux is and why its different start paying attention. 140 or 40, it doesnt matter. These are the guys in suits who can either block, ignore or help deployment of these other OSes in business.
# human firmware exploit
# Word will insert into your optic buffer
# without bounds checking
well I cant speak for what options are available to you, but the way I got into it was to be taught basic metalwork in school (along with basic carpentry - when old farts like me were in school the UK taught all boys the latter and included the former if the school had the facilities) then later in life, having kept up an interest I spent a lot of days pestering working smiths to give me a little time and teach me the basics of forge work. Along the way I learned my very rudimentary knowledge of the metallurgy of steel from these working guys - starting from "this stuff needs to be worked hotter than that" and going on to books to find out why.. along the way I learned that ancient blades are often much higher quality than could be readily explained by the technology of their time and that many serious researchers have spent time working out precisely what they did and how in order to achieve these results. From there it was a short step to getting seduced by the mystery and folklore that surrounds swordsmithing and I started researching it in earnest.
Having recently moved from one side of the Atlantic to the other that is where it currently has stopped, but only until such time as I have the space and time to set up a workshop again. I'm badly out of practice but setting up the workshop will fix that - somewhere to heat the metal, a good sized anvil, a decent hammer and time are all thats needed, once I have the place to start over. With just those basics you can make all the other tools you need (although I'll probably cheat and buy in the more awkward stuff) Even if I never do anything more useful with it than helping my neighbor fix his garden gate (fire-welding wrought iron.. yuck!) its still fun to do.
# human firmware exploit
# Word will insert into your optic buffer
# without bounds checking
You may not like to hear this, Jon, but religion has nothing to do with science. As well as having a strong faith myself I'm also a scientist by training - a molecular biologist before I became a full-time unix geek and I can honestly say that in that field I met people of every faith that marvelled as they worked at the ever finer detail of [insert-relevant-deities-name-here]'s creation they were uncovering. This was equally true of the many dedicated scientists who were either agnostic or atheist, they just didnt choose to attach a divine name to it.
Much as I hate to criticise an honest belief it is my opinion that views such as yours, expressed in this manner are nothing more than a reiteration of the arguments whereby the established church strangled the development of medicine throughout the dark ages, characterising herbal cures as satanic sorcery, forbidding surgical research as heretical and on down a long list. - Even efforts towards a literate public were regarded as interference with the natural order of things.
Mayhap the first step towards the more enlightened society you so obviously yearn for is tolerance. May I gently remind you of certain teachings regarding the mote in your brothers eye and the beam in your own?
# human firmware exploit
# Word will insert into your optic buffer
# without bounds checking
In the UK I recently had to deal with a similar situation - We were changing ISPs and we ran our own DNS servers so we had to get the registration updated with new server IPs. For the 2 domains I had registered there was no problem, but for one of them (registered way back by a couple of IT guys who hadnt worked there for over 5 years when I started!) we hit a brick wall.. Even though all 3 were registered to the same company, in order to change the 3rd one I had to get our CEO and company lawyer to send written confirmation (nothing electronic - they only accepted snailmail not email or fax) to the registrar that I was who I said I was and that they knew about this before they would update the registration info. It was a pain in the ass but overall I think it was a good thing.
# human firmware exploit
# Word will insert into your optic buffer
# without bounds checking
Nuclear explosions are the least useful part of the research, the information does have other uses. Consider that in simulating the chain reaction in a nuclear event you are also probing the extremes of physical laws. Whilst I HATE nuclear arms and would never contribute to a defense project of any kind, because I dont wanna be part of that machine, I have to applaud basic research in any form.
Sure the press releases always quote the big atomic boom thing, its a good example to show Joe Q Public just how mind-buggeringly-awesomely-powerful this machine is. It just aint all its useful for.
# human firmware exploit
# Word will insert into your optic buffer
# without bounds checking
As an amateur metalworker, interested in forging techniques and bladesmithing in general I'm watching this with great interest. I've often spent long periods with metallurgical analyses of both the traditional japanese swords and the pattern-welded european ancient blades. They have in common a multi-laminate structure, of steels of varying hardness, the core of the blade being softer than the edge and the martensite generated in the blades production being deliberately (although empirically) arranged to preserve a sharper, harder edge. This is, after all, why a good blade was often a pretty one too and where the true artistry of a master bladesmith (which I most definitely am NOT) shows.
Since I've contemplated experimenting with a hybrid technique myself I'm hoping that this project will at least give me some ideas.
# human firmware exploit
# Word will insert into your optic buffer
# without bounds checking
Well, if the first trio was anything to go by the second of the three will suck but the third will wake up and get serious again.....
# human firmware exploit
# Word will insert into your optic buffer
# without bounds checking
...is a recognition in law that when you purchase software it is a sale of goods and has all the protections attached to that. No more "we can revoke your license to use this at any time" any more than a record company can knock on your door and take away non-pirated legally acquired CDs. It would also remove the "yeah, its a bug - it will be fixed in the next release, which you'll have to pay for" response when a piece of software fails to function as intended - thats the sort of thing that requires a warranty they cant disclaim. It also sidesteps the free software issue, since that is publicly available and not for sale, you are not buying it and therefore aint getting any warranty. Of course IANAL etc etc but thats my 0.02.
# human firmware exploit
# Word will insert into your optic buffer
# without bounds checking
Hmmm.. yes.. it does appear to validate clickwraps.. wonder if it can then also be used against spammers.. let me enforce the "You owe me $10 per message of unsolicited commercial email" banner I'm about to put on my SMTP port - Of course it wont apply there, its not going to display the banner to any human unless they are manually forging email with a telnet to port 25, but it was a nice thought and perhaps the only really good thing that might have come from this misguided law.
# human firmware exploit
# Word will insert into your optic buffer
# without bounds checking
ftp in most browsers sucks. but then I expect that. I expect a browser to be good at http and at best mediocre at other protocols because it is, after all, a browser. If I want good ftp I'll go to a real ftp client - I've had more files arrive on my hd badly munged by browsers ftp than I care to count. The same site, the same file when pulled by a real ftp client arrived just fine.
WHY are we so obsessed with putting a www face on everything.. I look at routers configured by pointing a www browser at them, I see linuxconf with a www interface to system config, Theres www interfaces to 'doze terminal server out there that use your browser to spawn a window with a winNT desktop in it....
WHY ???? this is not what the www was designed for, it was made as a document publishing protocol and at that it excels - you want the benefits of other protocols, use other clients.
Just my 0.02 of course but I am getting so peeved at the mad rush to "web-enable" everything.. whats the problem guys, if it isnt on the www is it somehow not cyber-buzzword?
# human firmware exploit
# Word will insert into your optic buffer
# without bounds checking
Fortunately the Jackass Penguin is not an endangered species. In fact the only penguin that appears on the current animals redlist is the yellow-eyed penguin, currently classified as "vulnerable" because of its recent decline in numbers.
This is of course where I give a shameless plug to some guys I used to work for.. The World Conservation Monitoring Centre maintains a huge reference data set of protected areas, endangered species and biodiversity resources. Dont go looking there for scare stories, and in fact its pretty dry and unemotional stuff but the information is solid and reliable.
# human firmware exploit
# Word will insert into your optic buffer
# without bounds checking
Heh! Not with the proverbial 10 foot pole. Its not that I object to intelligent use of compression but if the disk "doublers" were anything to go by this is just going to be a performance hit and will break stuff. Yeah, yeah I know they are busily telling us it will be completely transparent, but do you really honestly believe that of a hardware solution any more than you believed the promises regarding disk compression? (OK, so maybe you DID believe the promises for disk compression but I bet that didnt last long after it got installed!)
We're all familiar with the scenario where a prog checks enough disk space is available for something critical and then crashes in a nasty heap when it finds out the hard way that the data didnt compress as well as the OS had assumed it would when assuring us there was enough space there... Compression in hardware could well be worse. Wonder what happens when you malloc() enough storage for your struct and then discover that although every check you can run says that there is sizeof(struct_t) space there you can only fit half your elements in there without stomping on somebody elses pointers? lets not go there.. I dont even want to think about coding on such a platform, much less trying to write a daemon that cant be buffer-overflowed... Hmmm. a whole new range of exploits.. pad the start of some input data with truly random garbage that wont compress well and bingo... what a naasty thought :)
# human firmware exploit
# Word will insert into your optic buffer
# without bounds checking
I dont usually flame on /. but this is too much to bear! "Multimedia experience" yeah, right... Thanks but I want the content not the frills and fluffy bits that do nothing but get in the way. If I wanted impressive graphics and streaming audio I'd be heading to an entertainment site and expecting it, if I wanted information, so I can get my job done or updated drivers so I can make my hardware work better then I dont want all the flash and Real* crap.
# human firmware exploit
# Word will insert into your optic buffer
# without bounds checking
There is, of course, one non-scientific obstacle to effective treatment for genetic disease. Whilst it is becoming ever more possible to detect and treat genetic defects on a somatic basis the net effect of this is to increase the percentage of the population that carries the gene in question. Germ-line genetic therapy will never be allowed to happen. The right wing condemn it as being man "meddling in Gods domain" the left wing paint a "brave new world" style apocalyptic vision based on institutional abuse of the technique. With todays techniques this leaves only pre-natal detection of genetic abnormality and guess what.. now we hit the abortion debate. So where can we go in the future? Probably gamete screening is possible but I predict the same problems with that as with germ-line therapy. Sad to say there is more FUD spread around on the subject of molecular genetics than has ever been generated in Redmond....
# human firmware exploit
# Word will insert into your optic buffer
# without bounds checking
All goods sold in the UK that are rated for VAT must have the VAT charged on the sale price - in the UK it isnt the consumers responsibility to pay the tax, its the vendors. They have to account for every item sold and pay HM Customs the VAT for that sale. No exceptions - every business with an annual turnover above a certain threshold has to do it and it is based on turnover not profits. Charities and other non-profits have to account for it too. The problem is that goods sold for export shouldnt be taxed as they are assumed to be taxed at the borders of their destination country.
Thats why theres a customs booth at all UK international airports where you can present the VAT receipts for your purchases whilst visiting the UK, fill in a form and claim the VAT back. Note that you're paying it along with the sale price but the vendor is collecting it for the Customs, thus it is the Customs that pay it back to you when you show 'em the item and say "look, I paid this much vat on this but its going abroad with me, back to where I live" I dont know how the system works with items ordered for overseas delivery but you might consider looking for a contact address for HM Customs and asking them - or perhaps the trade section at the nearest UK embassy or consulate.
# human firmware exploit
# Word will insert into your optic buffer
# without bounds checking
Embrace and extend, jam our solution down so many throats it becomes the new Food(tm) standard...
This is precisely how they got bitten before and if they want to add yet more weight to all the arguments for something radical and painful happening to M$ then by all means let 'em do so.
# human firmware exploit
# Word will insert into your optic buffer
# without bounds checking
Its an old old story... Very few folks get the idea that www pages are about their content not the flashy wrappings. A company I used to work for once hired a consultancy firm to develop a web-enabled metadatabase app that was tailored to their business - We had already evaluated the toolsets out there and come to the unwelcome conclusion that for our purposes the only real choice was one that produced apps for NT but that didnt matter too much because just linking to it from our main www servers (apache on solaris) would make the app work - We got the app, it worked and we started moving real data into it and testing. I pointed netscape at it and it died - turns out they'd given us an app that wouldnt work with anything but the latest and greatest version of IE. The IT team then had to convince management that this was a bad thing. Personally I think the only reason we succeeded was that the CEO had an older version of IE on his machine and it croaked there too. I made such a nuisance of myself beating on desks and pointing out that ANYTHING we put on the WWW had to be browser-neutral as far as possible that I almost got canned. We got our way eventually and the app got rewritten to work without the M$ extensions that the developers had assumed would be there but then everyone moaned that it wasnt as pretty as the first demo. They just didnt get it that a page that takes forever to load and then breaks isnt pretty either.
# human firmware exploit
# Word will insert into your optic buffer
# without bounds checking
The government - ANY government, no matter where you may live - has a long track record of badly thought out policies on issues ranging from diplomatic relations to public health to intellectual property. Just about the only thing distinguishes an effective government from an ineffective one is how readily they learn from and fix their inevitable mistakes. Unfortunately the only indication that a government has that it has just made a mistake is the volume of protest, counterarguments and lost votes that result from the mistake.
This is where a government is no better off than the average slashdotter because they have an even worse signal:noise ratio to cope with than we do - Anyone with a "strong" viewpoint will generate so many flames when a regulation they object to is introduced that a politician often cant "hear" the more rational voices, the ones proposing intelligent solutions or compromises. There aint no moderation in politics so the offtopic gets dragged in as relevant (how many riders to otherwise useful bills have fouled things up in the last 12 months of american politics, for example.)
For so long as any government is trying to set policies on an issue those that are able to speak to that issue from a genuine position of experience and knowledge will be needed. I may not agree with ESR on every point but I sure as hell respect the fact that he is doing something useful by his open-source advocacy and more to the point it is something that I cannot do myself. Sure as individuals my opinion and his carry no greater theoretical weight on a national scale but the fact remains that he has earned his reputation as a knowledgable person in this field and therefore he is better placed in this role than I would be.
He cannot do it alone though, nobody could. How many of you have written to representatives regarding issues like the DMCA - I'm not talking about flaming "this legislation is a piece of crap!" letters, you all know as well as I do that those wont even get read. I'm talking about a rational statement of your disagreements with a bottom line of "If you support this measure I will not vote for you, irrespective of my party alleigance"
If they cant hear you, they cant represent you whether they want to or not - and even if they dont want to the prospect of losing an election is enough to force any career politician to take your views into account
# human firmware exploit
# Word will insert into your optic buffer
# without bounds checking
Like sqlrob asked, please post a reference we can use in getting this through to folks.. This is the kind of awkward question that should be asked by our representatives when the debate comes around again if not before - and if they dont ask it, then we should be asking THEM why not when they come up for re-election! Corporations and PACs can buy publicity and spin, they cant buy our votes - the only way to ensure a politician represents us is to convince them that to do otherwise would be political suicide....
# human firmware exploit
# Word will insert into your optic buffer
# without bounds checking
You obviously have an opinion here, lets hear it.. Got an idea for how to protect the companies interests without being draconian? Great! so far the mass of online debate on the subject has been a little short on that subject.
If you think you got an idea that is neither "Give the big corporations all your money and they will take care of you" nor "What the f*ck, I can steal it so why pay for it" then post it where we can all read it.. Of course the extremists on BOTH sides will flame your ass hotter than a griddle and you'll probably spend the next decade getting your karma back above zero but thats /. for you.....
# human firmware exploit
# Word will insert into your optic buffer
# without bounds checking
Seems to me that your objection is that its not what you're used to. Fine. No Problem. I'm not arguing that you should use GIMP just because I do. Other posters have already answered how to do these things easily in GIMP so I think we can take it as a given that for a user experienced in the package concerned it is easy in either one. I've used both and I like both but the fact remains that for other reasons related to what I use my main workstation for it is usually running linux not windows - this means that I will look for a solution that runs on linux and for photoshop-like functionality the clear choice is GIMP. My opinion could change if Adobe ever release a linux-native version of photoshop but it would have to beat GIMP by a long way to overcome the cost advantage. By all means go ahead and use photoshop if you wish, its good but it just isnt the ideal solution for me. On my network its a different matter, I have no problem with any of my users choosing to use one or the other, and in that area at least they wont get "I dont support that program" out of me for either photoshop or the GIMP.
# human firmware exploit
# Word will insert into your optic buffer
# without bounds checking