So basically an item is selected then xfered to a "pen server" with the unique ID of the pen that selected the item attached to the object. Then next time the pen interacts with a screen, the pen server gets polled and whatever resource is currently in there for that pen gets put up on screen.
Seems like a lot of extra infrastructure to me.
Why not just place a small memory card inside the pen? When the pen selects an object, that object is copied into the memory space of the pen.
Then you don't have to worry about servers or a wireless network infrastructure. You could use a simple bluetooth setup to communicate between pen and pda/laptop/or other device.
Plus you could have like a fixed-object or long-term object stored in the pen, such as a business card or other contact information.
The only hurdles would be providing power to the pen itself. It'd probably wind up about the size of a typical ball-point pen, rather than the slender size of today's typical styluses (styli?) for PDAs.
Certainly the static objects could be implemented using something similar to rfid where the object is hard-coded and the rfid signal is enough to retrieve the information.
Life-like images are not exactly new. We're quite use to them because they do get so life-like.
The problem is entirely in MOVEMENT of those life-like objects. Eyes twitch or blink the wrong way, certain areas skin on the face move too little or too much as the lips move. The gait, or posture of the walking figure just doesn't look right.
We're so use to seeing humans that we never pick up on these subtle things that we instantly recognize as "human".
When you're presenting an animated or toon-ish character, you're mind easily accepts it because you understand it's a parody of a real object.
When presented with life-like objects, you're mind is trying to accept them, not as parody, but as the real thing. This touches completely different areas of the brain. An area use to seeing ONLY humans. Now something that doesn't act human is trying to be passed off to this area of the brain. It instantly says "no ufcking way" and thus.. we get all those creepy feelings because we've got no idea how to react. Up until this point, we hadn't been subjected to non-human objects trying to be passed off as human. That area of the brain has no clue how to react.
* 'area of brain' is not meant as a physical area. i do not claim to be a brain-tologist. hah.
... I bet after that you start letting them pick less cryptic passwords.
This is why user education is huge if you ever want to implement a secure work environment. A lot of users are thinking about remote attacks in which access to their work area isn't possible. Others simply don't see or understand the need for passwords at all.
There's also other security aspects that just aren't thought about by the typical user, such as social engineering, or even giving out their passwords to someone they consider trustworthy, who might then not be so protective of that information.
Length and randomness go together and it should never be an either/or decision.
Plus it's difficult to factor in the domain of characters an attacker will use to brute force a password. Throwing in a puctuation mark on a relatively short password will be strong against any attackers who use only alphanumeric characters in their cracking scheme. But the first attacker who does include said punctuation will crack a short password relatively quickly.
L0phtcrack probably has the best approach in which a basic dictionary attack, then a hybrid attack by attaching numerals and punctuation on to the end of a dictionary word. Etc..
But really, if you're not using a dictionary word as your password, the chances of a brute force attack being successful are very low.
An attacker is going to get your password through other means such as keylogging or packet sniffing.
Passwords are really only one tiny piece to the whole security plan and I think it's too focused on. How about more on how to physically protect a machine, how to prevent keyloggers or packet sniffers. How about social engineering? That's one of the last topics (if at all) to be covered during discussions about security.
Once I leave the store, nobody will ever know what I bought (except Visa, my bank, and their business partners, and Walmart and their business partners, and whoever is behind me at the checkout, and the girl who checks me out, and the kid who bags it, and the old guy who checks my receipt, and the guys operating the 10,000 security cameras at the store).
Congratulations, you were able to enumerate those people who have access to information about your purchases.
But now, we have RFID. Now, I can walk around with a scanner in my pocket, point it at you while you're out walking about, and get all sorts of nifty information about what you have on your person.
That can then be used in numerous ways, from immediate social engineering (how could I know such things if I wasn't a member of the list you just enumerated?), to target advertisements.
Immagine a van driving down the street with giant screens or speakers. As they drive by you, you get scanned. They know you especially like that cotton underwear of yours and up on their screen, or over the speakers, blasts an advertisement, JUST FOR YOU, "Hey, underwear getting old? How about this new cotton blend that's BETTER than your pure cotton mix. Come on down to store X and buy brand Y today!"
Point is, with RFID tags, identifying who knows what information about you suddenly goes out the window. And the ease with which to find out information about you, who you are, just got a whole lot easier.
Why are you reinstalling your machine every month?
Perhaps every months was a slight exaggeration, but certainly more than twice a year is common for my windows partition.
Why?
There's a lot of reasons. Often it's related to an install that went bad and screwed up the DLLs on the system. Tracking down what system dlls are corrupted and finding replacements, ones that go with the latest patches so as to not leave your system open while it still reports the patch as being installed, can be more than a little difficult.
Some installs will try to integrate too much with the OS, replacing system DLLs with their own hacked versions to get the system working. Nero comes to mind. When trying to uninstall Nero, sometimes in improper ways, DLLs get left behind that start to really interact badly with other applications.
Another reason is to recover HD space. I don't allocate more than a couple gigs to my windows partition and upon installing and uninstalling applications, lots of leftover files start to pile up. You can clean out temp folders and your recycle bin all you want, but I'm talking about the files and folders left over because the automated uninstall process found files or versions of DLLs that it did not have in it's list of files to uninstall.
Drivers. Upgrading to the latest bus master IDE drivers or AGP drivers for your mobo can sometimes fry windows. Why worry about these if your machine works fine already? Well I keep XP around for games, and I need to squeeze everything I can out of my system. It's a sometimes overlooked part of the system, but agp and ide/scsi drivers can have HUGE impacts on system and gaming performance.
And of course, because I'm a masochist. But.. that's probably obvious by now.
If anyone has suggestions for alternatives, im open. But they have to be good! Im currently looking for a new.net IDE as sharpdevelop has a few bugs, and since its written in c#, i cant help fix em:(
Well.. if you're willing to spend the time to configure things up, Crimson Editor is tops in my book.
Crimson Editor Text Editor / IDE, supports color-coding source code and such. Very handy.
Mozilla FireFox is nice, but I need a decent mail app and I like Moz for that.
Media Player Classic Best. App. Ever. As long as you've got the codec installed, this handy thing will play the media files for you. This includes QuickTime, RealPlayer, and even Flash movies.
Nimo Codec Pack A compilation of video and audio codecs as well as stream switchers, extra directshow filters, and nifty bits. Rather than hunting down individual codecs for XviD, 3vix, OGG, etc... this pack does it all in one operation.
As you can see here CA was GIVEN these licenses as part of a settlement with Canopy Group, one of SCO's major investors. Canopy was looking to lighten the financial burden, and so they threw in the licenses like they were water.
I prefer to watch Miyazaki's movies in Japanese with English subtitles, rather than hearing voices which don't fit the characters, or lip-synch properly.
I agree with you in the sense that I like watching the with the original Japanese and English subtitles, but you've got to be kidding me on that lame lip-sync excuse.
Any decent anime that's been dubbed within the last 10 years has gone through some excruciating processes to get the English dialogue to sync with the lips. More so, I dare say, than the original Japanese dialogue would. There was an especially interesting situation with Neil Gaiman writing the English script for Mononoke. Some of the script had to be rewritten (by others) to get the voices to sync with the lips.
A few years ago I was given a VHS copy of Serial Experiements Lain vol2 which had been manufactured without subtitles for whatever reason. So it was an English box but only the Japanese audio track. I watched it anyway, having already seen the series, I figured it'd be interesting to actually watch, and not read. It became obvious very quickly how the Japanese dialogue did not sync with the lips.
I started turn subtitles off on a few other series I have on DVD and started noticing this was not unique to my copy of Lain.
I think a lot of English-speaking viewers have this misconcieved notion that an English dub won't lip-sync well whereas the Japanese version does. However, I don't think those who feel that way ever took the time to actually look at the lip syncing. They were probably too busy trying to read subtitles.
Perhaps a few years ago the voice acting on the majority of anime wasn't as good as the original Japanese track. Perhaps this is still true. Japanese voice actors do seem to get more emotion out of their voices, although there are certainly many bright spots in American dubs.
The English dub for Lain, I thought, was very well done. So much so that I actually prefer the American dub over the original Japanese. The same goes for Lodoss War. Cowboy Bebop, on the otherhand, I can't stand the English voice cast. I don't think anyone but Aoi Tada could ever do the voice of Ed. The same goes for Escaflwone, Akira, Nazca, etc...
Point is this: lip syncing isn't an issue, and to make it one is just a lame excuse to make up for having no reason at all to stick with Japanese dialogue other than simple personal preference. There's nothing wrong with that, btw, you don't need to make excuses for that.
Secondary point is this: English dubs can be pretty good* and you ought to give them a chance.
*Ignore the whole Gillian Anderson as Moro, the English director for Mononoke just totally missed on that one.
Of course we don't hear about exploits being developed until after the patch. Because before that moment, the vulnerability is going to be kept in the dark by those who do know about it so that they can make best use of it.
You're not going to see worms using unknown sploits because the developer woub essentially be giving away a tool that could be used for perhaps more nefarious purposes.
And furthermore, I wonder how people would know to notify MS about unknown an exploit that's been used to crack a system when such exploits either crash the system (which NT admins are very use to experiencing during NORMAL use and will ignore the crash) or are used in a covert manner, not warranting attention from NT admins in the first place.
If this is the kind of logic MS has behind it's security department, then MS is just doomed.
This kind of logic is just so incredibly flawed I can't even comprehend how an educated person could think that way. It's like say "well, whenever I go to sleep, the sun goes down, so if I don't go to sleep the sun will stay up".
Just absolutely ludicrous.
The (not so) recent mass breakdown of basic critical thinking skills among people in powerful positions around the United States just scares the crap out of me.
Has anyone implemented a system where a service would be stopped if the ports next to it were scanned?
Probably not a good idea. It'd be an easy way to DOS the server on port 1028. Just keep scanning and you effectively shut the server down from accepting any connections.
Perhaps in environments where a service can be shut down like that (small, very high security networks) that might be worth something.
wouldn't you expect them to just send out random knocks in the hopes of getting something?
Let's see, a default knock is 5 ports out of 65535, you've got 255^4 (roughly) IP addresses out there.
I think I'd rather play the lottery, you'd have far better odds.
It'd be a waste of time for a script kiddie to try and brute-knock one machine, let alone an entire network. Trying to randomly brute-knock the entire internet would be insanity.
Slashdot Mirror
feh. i can do both at the same time.
So basically an item is selected then xfered to a "pen server" with the unique ID of the pen that selected the item attached to the object. Then next time the pen interacts with a screen, the pen server gets polled and whatever resource is currently in there for that pen gets put up on screen.
Seems like a lot of extra infrastructure to me.
Why not just place a small memory card inside the pen? When the pen selects an object, that object is copied into the memory space of the pen.
Then you don't have to worry about servers or a wireless network infrastructure. You could use a simple bluetooth setup to communicate between pen and pda/laptop/or other device.
Plus you could have like a fixed-object or long-term object stored in the pen, such as a business card or other contact information.
The only hurdles would be providing power to the pen itself. It'd probably wind up about the size of a typical ball-point pen, rather than the slender size of today's typical styluses (styli?) for PDAs.
Certainly the static objects could be implemented using something similar to rfid where the object is hard-coded and the rfid signal is enough to retrieve the information.
Marf.
Paintings are a bad example.
Life-like images are not exactly new. We're quite use to them because they do get so life-like.
The problem is entirely in MOVEMENT of those life-like objects. Eyes twitch or blink the wrong way, certain areas skin on the face move too little or too much as the lips move. The gait, or posture of the walking figure just doesn't look right.
We're so use to seeing humans that we never pick up on these subtle things that we instantly recognize as "human".
When you're presenting an animated or toon-ish character, you're mind easily accepts it because you understand it's a parody of a real object.
When presented with life-like objects, you're mind is trying to accept them, not as parody, but as the real thing. This touches completely different areas of the brain. An area use to seeing ONLY humans. Now something that doesn't act human is trying to be passed off to this area of the brain. It instantly says "no ufcking way" and thus.. we get all those creepy feelings because we've got no idea how to react. Up until this point, we hadn't been subjected to non-human objects trying to be passed off as human. That area of the brain has no clue how to react.
* 'area of brain' is not meant as a physical area. i do not claim to be a brain-tologist. hah.
... I bet after that you start letting them pick less cryptic passwords.
This is why user education is huge if you ever want to implement a secure work environment. A lot of users are thinking about remote attacks in which access to their work area isn't possible. Others simply don't see or understand the need for passwords at all.
There's also other security aspects that just aren't thought about by the typical user, such as social engineering, or even giving out their passwords to someone they consider trustworthy, who might then not be so protective of that information.
It's training.
And users don't want to be trained.
So you'll have to force them into it somehow.
But training is key.
Length and randomness go together and it should never be an either/or decision.
Plus it's difficult to factor in the domain of characters an attacker will use to brute force a password. Throwing in a puctuation mark on a relatively short password will be strong against any attackers who use only alphanumeric characters in their cracking scheme. But the first attacker who does include said punctuation will crack a short password relatively quickly.
L0phtcrack probably has the best approach in which a basic dictionary attack, then a hybrid attack by attaching numerals and punctuation on to the end of a dictionary word. Etc..
But really, if you're not using a dictionary word as your password, the chances of a brute force attack being successful are very low.
An attacker is going to get your password through other means such as keylogging or packet sniffing.
Passwords are really only one tiny piece to the whole security plan and I think it's too focused on. How about more on how to physically protect a machine, how to prevent keyloggers or packet sniffers. How about social engineering? That's one of the last topics (if at all) to be covered during discussions about security.
Once I leave the store, nobody will ever know what I bought (except Visa, my bank, and their business partners, and Walmart and their business partners, and whoever is behind me at the checkout, and the girl who checks me out, and the kid who bags it, and the old guy who checks my receipt, and the guys operating the 10,000 security cameras at the store).
Congratulations, you were able to enumerate those people who have access to information about your purchases.
But now, we have RFID. Now, I can walk around with a scanner in my pocket, point it at you while you're out walking about, and get all sorts of nifty information about what you have on your person.
That can then be used in numerous ways, from immediate social engineering (how could I know such things if I wasn't a member of the list you just enumerated?), to target advertisements.
Immagine a van driving down the street with giant screens or speakers. As they drive by you, you get scanned. They know you especially like that cotton underwear of yours and up on their screen, or over the speakers, blasts an advertisement, JUST FOR YOU, "Hey, underwear getting old? How about this new cotton blend that's BETTER than your pure cotton mix. Come on down to store X and buy brand Y today!"
Point is, with RFID tags, identifying who knows what information about you suddenly goes out the window. And the ease with which to find out information about you, who you are, just got a whole lot easier.
Enjoy.
Why are you reinstalling your machine every month?
Perhaps every months was a slight exaggeration, but certainly more than twice a year is common for my windows partition.
Why?
There's a lot of reasons. Often it's related to an install that went bad and screwed up the DLLs on the system. Tracking down what system dlls are corrupted and finding replacements, ones that go with the latest patches so as to not leave your system open while it still reports the patch as being installed, can be more than a little difficult.
Some installs will try to integrate too much with the OS, replacing system DLLs with their own hacked versions to get the system working. Nero comes to mind. When trying to uninstall Nero, sometimes in improper ways, DLLs get left behind that start to really interact badly with other applications.
Another reason is to recover HD space. I don't allocate more than a couple gigs to my windows partition and upon installing and uninstalling applications, lots of leftover files start to pile up. You can clean out temp folders and your recycle bin all you want, but I'm talking about the files and folders left over because the automated uninstall process found files or versions of DLLs that it did not have in it's list of files to uninstall.
Drivers. Upgrading to the latest bus master IDE drivers or AGP drivers for your mobo can sometimes fry windows. Why worry about these if your machine works fine already? Well I keep XP around for games, and I need to squeeze everything I can out of my system. It's a sometimes overlooked part of the system, but agp and ide/scsi drivers can have HUGE impacts on system and gaming performance.
And of course, because I'm a masochist. But.. that's probably obvious by now.
If anyone has suggestions for alternatives, im open. But they have to be good! Im currently looking for a new .net IDE as sharpdevelop has a few bugs, and since its written in c#, i cant help fix em :(
Well.. if you're willing to spend the time to configure things up, Crimson Editor is tops in my book.
Just tossing out another free alternative
FilZip
I usually have both FilZip and 7-Zip installed as FilZip was missing a few of the more obscure compression methods that 7zip supports.
But FilZip has a much cleaner interface and it's what I recommend to anyone who asks.
Plus, it's free.
Besides what was stated in the news story, and what is grabbed on Windows Update...
Miranda
Lightweight ICQ/IM app with plugin support for IRC/Jabber/etc..
FilZip
Free zip, rar, etc... util
PuTTY
Best SSH client for windows, and it's free
WinSCP
SFTP/SCP Client, free
Crimson Editor
Text Editor / IDE, supports color-coding source code and such. Very handy.
Mozilla
FireFox is nice, but I need a decent mail app and I like Moz for that.
Media Player Classic
Best. App. Ever. As long as you've got the codec installed, this handy thing will play the media files for you. This includes QuickTime, RealPlayer, and even Flash movies.
Nimo Codec Pack
A compilation of video and audio codecs as well as stream switchers, extra directshow filters, and nifty bits. Rather than hunting down individual codecs for XviD, 3vix, OGG, etc... this pack does it all in one operation.
Looks like a Diebold ATM machine's software crashed and dumped out into Windows XP.
Oops.
There is something seriously wrong with your sense of 'cool'.
Robots aren't cool?! What are you, an American CEO?
Registration free link
I wish article authors would at least put up some effort to find and use reg-free links when possible.
As you can see here CA was GIVEN these licenses as part of a settlement with Canopy Group, one of SCO's major investors. Canopy was looking to lighten the financial burden, and so they threw in the licenses like they were water.
misspelling mispellings was on purpose. it's funny. laugh.
doh! i before e except after c.
/.
spellcheck.
it'd be nice to have an edit feature in
then i wouldn't look so lame with mispellings while trying to make my point
I prefer to watch Miyazaki's movies in Japanese with English subtitles, rather than hearing voices which don't fit the characters, or lip-synch properly.
I agree with you in the sense that I like watching the with the original Japanese and English subtitles, but you've got to be kidding me on that lame lip-sync excuse.
Any decent anime that's been dubbed within the last 10 years has gone through some excruciating processes to get the English dialogue to sync with the lips. More so, I dare say, than the original Japanese dialogue would. There was an especially interesting situation with Neil Gaiman writing the English script for Mononoke. Some of the script had to be rewritten (by others) to get the voices to sync with the lips.
A few years ago I was given a VHS copy of Serial Experiements Lain vol2 which had been manufactured without subtitles for whatever reason. So it was an English box but only the Japanese audio track. I watched it anyway, having already seen the series, I figured it'd be interesting to actually watch, and not read. It became obvious very quickly how the Japanese dialogue did not sync with the lips.
I started turn subtitles off on a few other series I have on DVD and started noticing this was not unique to my copy of Lain.
I think a lot of English-speaking viewers have this misconcieved notion that an English dub won't lip-sync well whereas the Japanese version does. However, I don't think those who feel that way ever took the time to actually look at the lip syncing. They were probably too busy trying to read subtitles.
Perhaps a few years ago the voice acting on the majority of anime wasn't as good as the original Japanese track. Perhaps this is still true. Japanese voice actors do seem to get more emotion out of their voices, although there are certainly many bright spots in American dubs.
The English dub for Lain, I thought, was very well done. So much so that I actually prefer the American dub over the original Japanese. The same goes for Lodoss War. Cowboy Bebop, on the otherhand, I can't stand the English voice cast. I don't think anyone but Aoi Tada could ever do the voice of Ed. The same goes for Escaflwone, Akira, Nazca, etc...
Point is this: lip syncing isn't an issue, and to make it one is just a lame excuse to make up for having no reason at all to stick with Japanese dialogue other than simple personal preference. There's nothing wrong with that, btw, you don't need to make excuses for that.
Secondary point is this: English dubs can be pretty good* and you ought to give them a chance.
*Ignore the whole Gillian Anderson as Moro, the English director for Mononoke just totally missed on that one.
Now my ghost in a jar doesn't have to read in the dark.
Of course we don't hear about exploits being developed until after the patch. Because before that moment, the vulnerability is going to be kept in the dark by those who do know about it so that they can make best use of it.
You're not going to see worms using unknown sploits because the developer woub essentially be giving away a tool that could be used for perhaps more nefarious purposes.
And furthermore, I wonder how people would know to notify MS about unknown an exploit that's been used to crack a system when such exploits either crash the system (which NT admins are very use to experiencing during NORMAL use and will ignore the crash) or are used in a covert manner, not warranting attention from NT admins in the first place.
If this is the kind of logic MS has behind it's security department, then MS is just doomed.
This kind of logic is just so incredibly flawed I can't even comprehend how an educated person could think that way. It's like say "well, whenever I go to sleep, the sun goes down, so if I don't go to sleep the sun will stay up".
Just absolutely ludicrous.
The (not so) recent mass breakdown of basic critical thinking skills among people in powerful positions around the United States just scares the crap out of me.
An excellent case how the world would be a better place if the letter L was removed from tne English language.
typical first-time nausicaa viewer.
she wears white pants. very similar to stretch pants. aerodynamics and all.
this patch has been available for over 8 months and they're just finding it now? sheesh!
Has anyone implemented a system where a service would be stopped if the ports next to it were scanned?
Probably not a good idea. It'd be an easy way to DOS the server on port 1028. Just keep scanning and you effectively shut the server down from accepting any connections.
Perhaps in environments where a service can be shut down like that (small, very high security networks) that might be worth something.
This is equivalent to to putting a password on access to the port.
This is much better. It's like trying to open a house with a key ring with every possible key on it.
Problem is, you can't see the house, so how do you know where to stick the key in the first place?
A knocking daemon is going to make an IP address appear dead. The attacker would get no response at all, not even a connection reset.
Then you even slow down the attacker because their machine waits for a response until the timeout hits.
wouldn't you expect them to just send out random knocks in the hopes of getting something?
Let's see, a default knock is 5 ports out of 65535, you've got 255^4 (roughly) IP addresses out there.
I think I'd rather play the lottery, you'd have far better odds.
It'd be a waste of time for a script kiddie to try and brute-knock one machine, let alone an entire network. Trying to randomly brute-knock the entire internet would be insanity.