You *can* do any damn thing with OpenWRT. I should have said "I haven't run into a stock, consumer-grade router that...". Mea culpa.
My 5-year-old SMC2804 router has that capability.
Any combination of ports in and/or out, udp and/or tcp can be blocked or allowed for any IP on the local net. Each such rule can be permanent or valid just for particular times by combining with a schedule rule (specify days & times on a daily or weekly cycle). I don't recall the maximum number of rules offhand, but it's probably 32.
For instance, I have disallowed all internet traffic for the printer and for our local server. They are not allowed to send packets to internet ("nothing can call home"), and are not allowed to receive any incoming packets (so the printer does not get accused of naughty P2P things). I also made a time-based rule to cut off port 80 (and a few others) at specific times on my daughter's PC when she was neglecting other responsibilities. She got the point that she can use internet as much as she wants, provided homework, tidying-up, and suchlike get done. The tactic worked, and the rule was dropped within a day.
"Unlimited connections on static IPs. No download or upload limits. No port blocking, no packet shaping, no transparent web caches, no "fair usage" policy, no logging, no Phorm, no ad-serving, no small print. Rolling 1 month contract. No lock in period. Direct Engineer Support 24 hours a day, every day. Good, not cheap. £60/month"
I'm with you on that, except I get unthrottled uncapped internet for 55euro per month. That's for fiber to the house with an 8-port optical switch: 20Mbps down, 2Mbps up (I could get 100/10 Mbps for an extra 20euro). The 20Mbps is a sustained speed, which holds for a whole DVD ISO download. Actually, the throttling to 20Mbps seems to be a bit upstream from us, as I already get 40-45Mbps accessing local sites in the town. The bundle also includes a load of IP TV channels and a decoder, as well as some kind of IP telephony which we don't use.
Aside from Shakespeare, most students dread reading stuff born before the printing press.
I think you meant copyright, not printing press.
And most students don't even like Shakespeare very much either.
The typical high school curriculum actually avoids those Shakespeare plays which would grab the students' attention. One such is The Taming of the Shrew, which is politically incorrect in almost every way. It's also filled with sexual innuendo which is blatant even to a modern reader (Petruccio: What, with my tongue in your tail? Come, Kate, I'll be the gentleman for you.).
Show your students the BBC production of The Taming of the Shrew (the 1980s version, with John Cleese as Petruccio) and they'll quickly become Shakespeare fans.
Before those of us here who love to download copyright films and music at no cost start cheering these men on who challenge the RIAA, let's remember that Lessig doesn't want to abolish copyright, but simply restore short terms.
Shortening the term of copyright is a sensible and fair objective. I still fail to see why copyright should have a longer term than a patent (20 years maximum).
He is not our ally in ensuring we can get whatever media we want whenever we want for no cost.
Follow that path, and the production of good media will drop in quantity, while the majority of new media will be of even lower quality than today - think of user-generated content on youtube, for instance.
So, if I shoot in raw mode, and then postprocess in software to get a jpeg, the demosaicing signature should merely identify the software, right?
Yes, they're just fingering the in-camera raw conversion to jpeg. Using external conversion changes the game.
There are comparisons of demosaicing algorithms used on the same raw image at several places on the net, such as http://www.rawtherapee.com/RAW_Compare/. The software can make a huge difference, especially regarding moire and related artefacts. Most of the raw converters default to a much too aggressive approach for small scale features, in my opinion. As a result they often create chromatic moire in the JPEG, and accentuate the problem further by sharpening (to hide the softness of typical cheap lenses). This is clearly seen in the examples at the linked site.
Identical detectors on different cameras usually differ in the optical antialias filter used, which can affect their susceptibility to moire on sharpening. This may leave some residual information to allow the camera to be identified even with external conversion of the raw image. It would first be necessary to identify the demosaicing algorithm/software, so identifying the camera just from residual artefacts from the antialias filter would not be easy.
Of course, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the distortion uniquely identifies the lens used...
Raw processing packages such as Bibble Pro also include a database of distortion characteristics for many lenses, including zoom lenses across their zoom range. Optionally, the image processing can compensate for the distortion for any recognized lens. Of course, the removal of distortion may leave a signature, which will perhaps allow both the lens and the software to be identified. This would not be a trivial task, of course, since "identical" lenses differ in their optical characteristics, and probably none exactly matches its nominal profile.
You both probably studied how to solve certain simple PDEs in simple geometries (like the heat, wave, and Poisson equations). At a graduate level one normally learns how to prove existence and uniqueness of solutions to PDEs, how smooth those solutions are (i.e. how many derivatives do the solutions possess), and how to define weak forms of PDEs for which non-classical solutions exist (solutions that are not necessarily even continuous). Then there is the whole area of non-linear equations which is a very active research topic... (See the Navier-Stokes Equations.)
Clearly graduate level approaches to PDEs differ from undergrad approaches.
However, the topics you suggested as grad level were mostly introduced to us at undergrad level (year 3 of 4 year course) in Chemical Engineering, and that was 30 years ago. Yes, we studied existence, uniqueness, and smoothness of PDE solutions. We also studied the diffusion/heat equation with moving boundaries (diffusion with reaction), and coupled instances of the diffusion equation (interphase transfer).
The Navier-Stokes equations were introduced, but not studied until graduate level. I think that generic numerical solvers are used nowadays for simple NS problems (they were PhD stuff in those days), but analytic underpinnings are reserved for grad school.
Turns out you can't read the charge without erasing it.
That's true for CCD and CMOS type detectors, but not true for CID detectors. CID detectors were designed for repeated reading without destroying the charge. In fact, the signal in any pixel can be read out repeatedly while accumulating photoelectrons without interrupting the exposure.
Alas, although silicon-based and employing the same photovoltaic principles as CCD or CMOS, CID requires more complicated chip construction and remains expensive. Indeed, it has been "tomorrow's technology" for a couple of decades already. However, they are used in some scientific and forensic imaging devices, where extremely high dynamic range must be recorded.
$400k to convince one government contractor seems like a lot to fork out.
Ballmer's Microsoft only offers $400k? No wonder things are going downhill at Microsoft. Didn't Bill Gates claim that $640k would be enough? And that was about 20 years ago, so the equivalent would be about $4G today.
Anything involving deception is improper, and your second example is certainly illegal.
Improper is not illegal.
Strawman. Both of your examples were improper; the second of them is illegal.
Ethics? You're talking about ethics when the company's goal is to steal another company's idea and rush it to patent before they can?
Not stealing, deducing from publicly available information. This may seem sleazy, but it is allowed, and even encouraged by the patent laws. Patents exist to encourage disclosure of inventions by granting a period of legally sanctioned excusivity in return. Patents explicitly discourage keeping inventions secret, since a competitor who subsequently makes the same invention can patent it and deny its use to the original inventor who kept it secret.
You posited using public information.
Extremely ineffective, especially for things a company is actively keeping secret.
You have obviously never worked in real R&D. With good people, a remarkable amount can be deduced from public information. Monitor published patent applications, stay aware of new product offerings, keep abreast of technical publications, and above all use your head.
I suggest the tried-and-true method of getting someone drunk or getting a mole on the inside.
You claim my suggested methods are wrong, ignoring the fact that stealing such information is wrong in the first place. You claim one of my suggestions is illegal, when it's not.
You bring ethics into it when you obviously don't understand corporate ethics. Everything is ethical if you don't get caught. When you do get caught, point to your patsy as you fire him, and point to your ethics policy as you issue an apology.
Please don't use the words "ethics" or "ethical" when you clearly mean "lacking ethics" or "unethical". Large corporations do not usually conform to the stereotypes you see in Hollywood movies.
Information acquired in some of the ways you suggested would expose the company to legal countermeasures and would handicap any effort to patent the results. A person who advocated such methods would not be trusted - they might be susceptible to corruption themselves. Somehow, I'm not surprised that you are not allowed near R&D.
Depends what you mean by inexpensive. The bulk blocks are about the same price from lego.com as they are in department stores. For example, the standard 2 by 4 brick costs SEK 1.17 at your link, which is about EUR0.20 or $0.25 each. That's not exactly cheap.
On a related note, we wanted to order some kits from lego.com, only to discover that they refused to sell them to us based on our country of residence. The kits we wanted were made in Denmark, and available in the UK, but apparently not for sale to Finland. So even the items on offer vary by country, which is both inexplicable and foolish.
The ol' "Let me buy you a beer" and the "Hi, I'm looking for an intern position at your company!" tricks are generally more effective.
Maybe you can buy a competitor's R&D person a drink at a conference, but you have to be up-front about your own affiliation before asking any leading questions. Anything involving deception is improper, and your second example is certainly illegal.
There have been strict rules forbidding such methods wherever I have worked. These are large companies (I won't name them, but at least one is a household name), and the rules were enforced. Noncompliance with an ethics directive means automatic dismissal possibly with penalties.
The methods of figuring out trade secrets are almost always illegal, and can be sued over.
Not if only public information is used. This includes material in brochures, public performance specifications, and so forth.
These stratagies are common in R&D in many industries. You map the patent landscape, paying attention to your own portfolio of patents, products, and technologies and to the portfolios of your competitors. Your own product/technology roadmap is known, those of your competitors can be conjectured (with variations). Any future intersection which is patentable is a prime target area.
...I would think that the very act of finding "prior art" (the very fact they found an invention) as described in this system would invalidate any patent attempt of the trade-secret...
Not if the prior art was secret - only public information counts.
One of the main objective of the patent system is to encourage publication of inventions through patents. This both protect the inventor's economic interest for a limited time, and makes it riskier to keep inventions secret.
So, the headlines blare "WPA is cracked!!!!", but the researchers themselves say they haven't cracked the keys used to encrypt the data and all they have is a "starting point".
Although, if you really have data you're concerned about keeping safe, you should (a) use a wired network, (b) use IPSEC, or (c) both.
We built a new house last year. It's got dual runs of cat6 from the technical room to the office, living room, kitchen, library, and bedrooms. Our router only supports 100Mbit, but it will be upgraded eventually when the fiber service is upgraded (ISP service maxes out at 100Mbit right now, but the 8 port switch supports 1Gbit per port).
Several of our network devices support wireless (even the printer and headless server), but it's disabled on all of them. All of our devices are on the cat6 cables and have fixed IP addresses, including laptops which we bring home from work.
Just for fun, the router has its wireless enabled, and is configured so wireless clients are given IP addresses in an address range which is only allowed access to other IP addresses in the same pool (no access to wired IP range or to internet). So if anyone hacks the WPA, they can only access others who have also hacked the WPA...
... the arms and legs at least sprout 5 fingers and toes.
Not necessarily true for all tetrapods (mammals, birds, dinosaurs, lizards, amphibians, etc.). Some digits are lost or greatly reduced on limbs of some species. Occasionally, a six-fingered mutant is born.
The earliest tetrapods commonly had from four to eight digits on their fore-limbs and hind-limbs. This corresponded to the ancestral lobe structure of their immediate fishy predecessors. This settled out when the five-digited tetrapods turned out to be most successful.
There are many gender-ambiguous forenames, not just Pat. Some examples include Lee, Fran (Francis or Frances), and Les (Leslie or Lesley). And then there are names with different gender associations in different cultures. Examples include Vivian (girl in US, boy in UK) and Carol (girl in UK/US, boy in Nordic).
BTW, there are also names which have fallen out of favour due to changes in other associations. One example is Gabriel/Gabrielle which used to be a common name in Ireland for boys or girls, until its contraction "Gay" was appropriated for other purposes. Similarly, Richard is more likely to be truncated to Rich than to Dick nowadays.
On a funny level, I'm curious what you think is a useful application on windows 3.1 that we magically somehow don't have an equivalent of. What do you have in mind?
Don't know about "useful", but my younger daughter likes the Magic School Bus games which are from the Windows 3.1 era. They don't run under wine, since they have wierd attitudes towards video hardware (they fail in different ways, some install but screw up on running, others don't install).
These ancient games are the only reason we keep a venerable P3 which dual boots to Win2K. Its other purpose in life is running Stepmania under Xubuntu with a couple of dance pads...
Are there any decent equivalents of the Magic School Bus educational games nowadays?
At 1Mbyte per sec, its 250000 seconds worth, or about 30 days worth. If you could sustain 1Mbyte per sec that's not a bad rate.
1MByte/sec is a mediocre rate today, and is definitely a bad rate for planning the future.
My fiber connection at home sustains 5MByte/sec (40Mbit/sec) for connections within my ISP and 2.5MByte/sec (20Mbit/sec) for connections elsewhere. These speeds are achieved consistently when accessing sites which themselves have good connections, but many sites either have poor ceonnections or throttle their services or are behind bottlenecked routes.
My ISP will upgrade the service to 12.5MByte/sec (100Mbit/sec) for a few euro more per month. I'll get the upgrade sooner or later, when it's worthwhile to do so == fewer bottlenecks in routes outside Finland.
BTW, there are no bandwidth caps here, and the local ISP has a couple of 10Gbit/sec switches for upstream.
Slashdot Mirror
You *can* do any damn thing with OpenWRT. I should have said "I haven't run into a stock, consumer-grade router that...". Mea culpa.
My 5-year-old SMC2804 router has that capability.
Any combination of ports in and/or out, udp and/or tcp can be blocked or allowed for any IP on the local net. Each such rule can be permanent or valid just for particular times by combining with a schedule rule (specify days & times on a daily or weekly cycle). I don't recall the maximum number of rules offhand, but it's probably 32.
For instance, I have disallowed all internet traffic for the printer and for our local server. They are not allowed to send packets to internet ("nothing can call home"), and are not allowed to receive any incoming packets (so the printer does not get accused of naughty P2P things). I also made a time-based rule to cut off port 80 (and a few others) at specific times on my daughter's PC when she was neglecting other responsibilities. She got the point that she can use internet as much as she wants, provided homework, tidying-up, and suchlike get done. The tactic worked, and the rule was dropped within a day.
"Unlimited connections on static IPs. No download or upload limits. No port blocking, no packet shaping, no transparent web caches, no "fair usage" policy, no logging, no Phorm, no ad-serving, no small print. Rolling 1 month contract. No lock in period. Direct Engineer Support 24 hours a day, every day. Good, not cheap. £60 /month"
I'm with you on that, except I get unthrottled uncapped internet for 55euro per month. That's for fiber to the house with an 8-port optical switch: 20Mbps down, 2Mbps up (I could get 100/10 Mbps for an extra 20euro). The 20Mbps is a sustained speed, which holds for a whole DVD ISO download. Actually, the throttling to 20Mbps seems to be a bit upstream from us, as I already get 40-45Mbps accessing local sites in the town. The bundle also includes a load of IP TV channels and a decoder, as well as some kind of IP telephony which we don't use.
Now a "7 Course Meal and you are out" sounds a much more French rule to have.
How about "three bottles of wine and you're out cold under the table". A good Sydney Syrup will do it to anyone...
Aside from Shakespeare, most students dread reading stuff born before the printing press.
I think you meant copyright, not printing press.
And most students don't even like Shakespeare very much either.
The typical high school curriculum actually avoids those Shakespeare plays which would grab the students' attention. One such is The Taming of the Shrew, which is politically incorrect in almost every way. It's also filled with sexual innuendo which is blatant even to a modern reader (Petruccio: What, with my tongue in your tail? Come, Kate, I'll be the gentleman for you.).
Show your students the BBC production of The Taming of the Shrew (the 1980s version, with John Cleese as Petruccio) and they'll quickly become Shakespeare fans.
Before those of us here who love to download copyright films and music at no cost start cheering these men on who challenge the RIAA, let's remember that Lessig doesn't want to abolish copyright, but simply restore short terms.
Shortening the term of copyright is a sensible and fair objective. I still fail to see why copyright should have a longer term than a patent (20 years maximum).
He is not our ally in ensuring we can get whatever media we want whenever we want for no cost.
Follow that path, and the production of good media will drop in quantity, while the majority of new media will be of even lower quality than today - think of user-generated content on youtube, for instance.
"Silent" is a relative term, but the presumption is one that has noise levels approaching that of an automobile.
Modern jets are already as quiet as that. Just listen to the average moron driving around with the automobile's mega stereo sound system cranked up.
Before we talk about computers, let's talk about ourselves. Do humans have souls?
I don't the answer is clear, and I personally lean towards saying that we don't.
Do chimanzees or dolphins or octopuses? What about slugs or crabs?
The answer seems clear enough. Nothing has a "soul" in the sense used by religious dogma. Not humans, not gorillas, not lizards, not machines.
So, if I shoot in raw mode, and then postprocess in software to get a jpeg, the demosaicing signature should merely identify the software, right?
Yes, they're just fingering the in-camera raw conversion to jpeg. Using external conversion changes the game.
There are comparisons of demosaicing algorithms used on the same raw image at several places on the net, such as http://www.rawtherapee.com/RAW_Compare/. The software can make a huge difference, especially regarding moire and related artefacts. Most of the raw converters default to a much too aggressive approach for small scale features, in my opinion. As a result they often create chromatic moire in the JPEG, and accentuate the problem further by sharpening (to hide the softness of typical cheap lenses). This is clearly seen in the examples at the linked site.
Identical detectors on different cameras usually differ in the optical antialias filter used, which can affect their susceptibility to moire on sharpening. This may leave some residual information to allow the camera to be identified even with external conversion of the raw image. It would first be necessary to identify the demosaicing algorithm/software, so identifying the camera just from residual artefacts from the antialias filter would not be easy.
Of course, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the distortion uniquely identifies the lens used...
Raw processing packages such as Bibble Pro also include a database of distortion characteristics for many lenses, including zoom lenses across their zoom range. Optionally, the image processing can compensate for the distortion for any recognized lens. Of course, the removal of distortion may leave a signature, which will perhaps allow both the lens and the software to be identified. This would not be a trivial task, of course, since "identical" lenses differ in their optical characteristics, and probably none exactly matches its nominal profile.
After all, both Windows and OS X allow users to share files across a network. Hmm ... French equivalent of the RIAA versus Microsoft. Who to root for?
Finally, I understand the allure of Mutually Assured Destruction...
You both probably studied how to solve certain simple PDEs in simple geometries (like the heat, wave, and Poisson equations). At a graduate level one normally learns how to prove existence and uniqueness of solutions to PDEs, how smooth those solutions are (i.e. how many derivatives do the solutions possess), and how to define weak forms of PDEs for which non-classical solutions exist (solutions that are not necessarily even continuous). Then there is the whole area of non-linear equations which is a very active research topic... (See the Navier-Stokes Equations.)
Clearly graduate level approaches to PDEs differ from undergrad approaches.
However, the topics you suggested as grad level were mostly introduced to us at undergrad level (year 3 of 4 year course) in Chemical Engineering, and that was 30 years ago. Yes, we studied existence, uniqueness, and smoothness of PDE solutions. We also studied the diffusion/heat equation with moving boundaries (diffusion with reaction), and coupled instances of the diffusion equation (interphase transfer).
The Navier-Stokes equations were introduced, but not studied until graduate level. I think that generic numerical solvers are used nowadays for simple NS problems (they were PhD stuff in those days), but analytic underpinnings are reserved for grad school.
Too bad there isn't any market demand for guys who masturbate :-(
Apparently there is - just look at Gladwell!
Turns out you can't read the charge without erasing it.
That's true for CCD and CMOS type detectors, but not true for CID detectors. CID detectors were designed for repeated reading without destroying the charge. In fact, the signal in any pixel can be read out repeatedly while accumulating photoelectrons without interrupting the exposure.
Alas, although silicon-based and employing the same photovoltaic principles as CCD or CMOS, CID requires more complicated chip construction and remains expensive. Indeed, it has been "tomorrow's technology" for a couple of decades already. However, they are used in some scientific and forensic imaging devices, where extremely high dynamic range must be recorded.
$400k to convince one government contractor seems like a lot to fork out.
Ballmer's Microsoft only offers $400k? No wonder things are going downhill at Microsoft. Didn't Bill Gates claim that $640k would be enough? And that was about 20 years ago, so the equivalent would be about $4G today.
Anything involving deception is improper, and your second example is certainly illegal.
Improper is not illegal.
Strawman. Both of your examples were improper; the second of them is illegal.
Ethics? You're talking about ethics when the company's goal is to steal another company's idea and rush it to patent before they can?
Not stealing, deducing from publicly available information. This may seem sleazy, but it is allowed, and even encouraged by the patent laws. Patents exist to encourage disclosure of inventions by granting a period of legally sanctioned excusivity in return. Patents explicitly discourage keeping inventions secret, since a competitor who subsequently makes the same invention can patent it and deny its use to the original inventor who kept it secret.
You posited using public information. Extremely ineffective, especially for things a company is actively keeping secret.
You have obviously never worked in real R&D. With good people, a remarkable amount can be deduced from public information. Monitor published patent applications, stay aware of new product offerings, keep abreast of technical publications, and above all use your head.
I suggest the tried-and-true method of getting someone drunk or getting a mole on the inside. You claim my suggested methods are wrong, ignoring the fact that stealing such information is wrong in the first place. You claim one of my suggestions is illegal, when it's not. You bring ethics into it when you obviously don't understand corporate ethics. Everything is ethical if you don't get caught. When you do get caught, point to your patsy as you fire him, and point to your ethics policy as you issue an apology.
Please don't use the words "ethics" or "ethical" when you clearly mean "lacking ethics" or "unethical". Large corporations do not usually conform to the stereotypes you see in Hollywood movies.
Information acquired in some of the ways you suggested would expose the company to legal countermeasures and would handicap any effort to patent the results. A person who advocated such methods would not be trusted - they might be susceptible to corruption themselves. Somehow, I'm not surprised that you are not allowed near R&D.
If true, hopefully this will open doors for people interested in inexpensive bulk purchase of bricks of specific sizes and colors.
I thought you could already do that.
Depends what you mean by inexpensive. The bulk blocks are about the same price from lego.com as they are in department stores. For example, the standard 2 by 4 brick costs SEK 1.17 at your link, which is about EUR0.20 or $0.25 each. That's not exactly cheap.
On a related note, we wanted to order some kits from lego.com, only to discover that they refused to sell them to us based on our country of residence. The kits we wanted were made in Denmark, and available in the UK, but apparently not for sale to Finland. So even the items on offer vary by country, which is both inexplicable and foolish.
Yeah, but those aren't very effective.
The ol' "Let me buy you a beer" and the "Hi, I'm looking for an intern position at your company!" tricks are generally more effective.
Maybe you can buy a competitor's R&D person a drink at a conference, but you have to be up-front about your own affiliation before asking any leading questions. Anything involving deception is improper, and your second example is certainly illegal.
There have been strict rules forbidding such methods wherever I have worked. These are large companies (I won't name them, but at least one is a household name), and the rules were enforced. Noncompliance with an ethics directive means automatic dismissal possibly with penalties.
The methods of figuring out trade secrets are almost always illegal, and can be sued over.
Not if only public information is used. This includes material in brochures, public performance specifications, and so forth.
These stratagies are common in R&D in many industries. You map the patent landscape, paying attention to your own portfolio of patents, products, and technologies and to the portfolios of your competitors. Your own product/technology roadmap is known, those of your competitors can be conjectured (with variations). Any future intersection which is patentable is a prime target area.
...I would think that the very act of finding "prior art" (the very fact they found an invention) as described in this system would invalidate any patent attempt of the trade-secret...
Not if the prior art was secret - only public information counts.
One of the main objective of the patent system is to encourage publication of inventions through patents. This both protect the inventor's economic interest for a limited time, and makes it riskier to keep inventions secret.
So, the headlines blare "WPA is cracked!!!!", but the researchers themselves say they haven't cracked the keys used to encrypt the data and all they have is a "starting point".
Not cracked, just barely scratched a little.
Although, if you really have data you're concerned about keeping safe, you should (a) use a wired network, (b) use IPSEC, or (c) both.
We built a new house last year. It's got dual runs of cat6 from the technical room to the office, living room, kitchen, library, and bedrooms. Our router only supports 100Mbit, but it will be upgraded eventually when the fiber service is upgraded (ISP service maxes out at 100Mbit right now, but the 8 port switch supports 1Gbit per port).
Several of our network devices support wireless (even the printer and headless server), but it's disabled on all of them. All of our devices are on the cat6 cables and have fixed IP addresses, including laptops which we bring home from work.
Just for fun, the router has its wireless enabled, and is configured so wireless clients are given IP addresses in an address range which is only allowed access to other IP addresses in the same pool (no access to wired IP range or to internet). So if anyone hacks the WPA, they can only access others who have also hacked the WPA...
... the arms and legs at least sprout 5 fingers and toes.
Not necessarily true for all tetrapods (mammals, birds, dinosaurs, lizards, amphibians, etc.). Some digits are lost or greatly reduced on limbs of some species. Occasionally, a six-fingered mutant is born.
The earliest tetrapods commonly had from four to eight digits on their fore-limbs and hind-limbs. This corresponded to the ancestral lobe structure of their immediate fishy predecessors. This settled out when the five-digited tetrapods turned out to be most successful.
I just wish people would stop drinking from either coolaid.
Kool-Aid is all that's on offer, and it's compulsory.
There are many gender-ambiguous forenames, not just Pat. Some examples include Lee, Fran (Francis or Frances), and Les (Leslie or Lesley). And then there are names with different gender associations in different cultures. Examples include Vivian (girl in US, boy in UK) and Carol (girl in UK/US, boy in Nordic).
BTW, there are also names which have fallen out of favour due to changes in other associations. One example is Gabriel/Gabrielle which used to be a common name in Ireland for boys or girls, until its contraction "Gay" was appropriated for other purposes. Similarly, Richard is more likely to be truncated to Rich than to Dick nowadays.
On a funny level, I'm curious what you think is a useful application on windows 3.1 that we magically somehow don't have an equivalent of. What do you have in mind?
Don't know about "useful", but my younger daughter likes the Magic School Bus games which are from the Windows 3.1 era. They don't run under wine, since they have wierd attitudes towards video hardware (they fail in different ways, some install but screw up on running, others don't install).
These ancient games are the only reason we keep a venerable P3 which dual boots to Win2K. Its other purpose in life is running Stepmania under Xubuntu with a couple of dance pads...
Are there any decent equivalents of the Magic School Bus educational games nowadays?
At 1Mbyte per sec, its 250000 seconds worth, or about 30 days worth. If you could sustain 1Mbyte per sec that's not a bad rate.
1MByte/sec is a mediocre rate today, and is definitely a bad rate for planning the future.
My fiber connection at home sustains 5MByte/sec (40Mbit/sec) for connections within my ISP and 2.5MByte/sec (20Mbit/sec) for connections elsewhere. These speeds are achieved consistently when accessing sites which themselves have good connections, but many sites either have poor ceonnections or throttle their services or are behind bottlenecked routes.
My ISP will upgrade the service to 12.5MByte/sec (100Mbit/sec) for a few euro more per month. I'll get the upgrade sooner or later, when it's worthwhile to do so == fewer bottlenecks in routes outside Finland.
BTW, there are no bandwidth caps here, and the local ISP has a couple of 10Gbit/sec switches for upstream.