not true. in a lecture at university a couple of years back the lecturer said something was about 2 billion, I asked if he meant UK or american billion. "doesn't everyone use american billion?" he asked.
I said that I didn't and perhaps 75% of the class agreed with me. the guy promised to be more clear next time.
Personally I always read a billion as a million million unless I expressly know it's american.
I think it's more like we can keep 7 "things" in 2nd level cache at a time. so a 7 digit number might be one thing to remember and the spelling of a complex name being another etc.
it's not that difficult to remember long arb strings if you try. about 7 years ago I was reading a copy of amiga format in a newsagent and it had a populous 2 level code in it, wihch was an arb string of about 40 alphanumeric characters (I think, correct me if I am wrong here). it took me a couple of minutes to memorise that and when I got home a few hours later i keyed it in and it worked.
> For the 2-character first names, we'll let the
> Chinese keep their own names and give the nonsense
> names like "stinky fjord" or "rabbit bowl" to
> people who don't know the difference.
it's funny. due to the fact that I was living outside the UK (I'm a brit) when I was sixteen I was never automatically given a national insurance number. upon my return I went to the DSS to ask for one and they told me not to bother until i actually got a job at which point they would issue one to me. the interesting thing was that they told me that only they, and they alone *need* my national insurance number. no-one else does.
over the course of the next several years of being at university and what have you it was surprising how many places asked for my nat insurance number. I told them they they didn't need it and indeed I didn't have one. they looked awful confused and it took them a while to determine that I was correct and then they didn't quite know what to do.
> 00 No copy restrictions
> 10 Copy can be copied one more time
> 11 Prohibit copying
yes, and what does almost every consumer recorder default to for unknown music, 10. in fatc on most you cannot change this, so if I release a cd of my favourite bathtime gurgles with th intent of it being copied far and wide, this system will prevent me from doing that. umm.. excuse me, it's my copyright and I can decide if or if not wanna put it in the public domain or not.
> The law is there and it is there for you to respect.
well, obeying laws is equivalent to obeying commands from a superior and the european court of human rights decided that you cannot use that as an excuse with respect to laws you feel you should not follow.
this was decided in the nazi war crimes trials where officers where claiming as a defence thatthey were oly following orders. that may have been the case but they should have refused and were therefore punished anyway.
well, I suppose that while old skool steganography will be killed off by lossy compression, newer, more advanced stuff will claim to work like the dvda's watermark's. ie they will survive compression and all sorts of digital messing about. the problem being a) a more obvious impact on the image/sound and b) you'll need a bigger file to hide less data in as a transport to hide data with forward error correction will have a much higher overhead.
hmm.. perhaps thats why nasa's jpl site has all those *huge* tiff's?:)
well, only lossy compression chuck's data. if you used gzip to compress an executable file then it had better come out the other end looking identical or someone will be annoyed. now if someone mp3'd that audio then fair enough. but you shouldn't generalise that all audio compression is lossy.
well.. if the junk is properly stenographed so you can retreive that junk (although penny lane isn't junk, good song:) then you can use the lyrics and the knowledge of stenographic technique to restore the picture to it's former state, at which point you can run the stenography detecter again and get the real secret...
of course it gets more cunning when the data you remove stenagraphically is itself an image with stenographed data on it, and that data is...
and eschelon has a machine do do all this but completely missed your bombing plans which were the subject of the picture itself and not the stenographed data itself... hiding the wood in the tree's as it were.
I'd say there is obvious precedant for that statement. stenography has moved from being invisible ink, through acrostic literature[0] to the current practise of embedding data into images or sound files. I'd say that if you graphed it it would imply that we have a lot more ways to go.
the very history of this planet (or at least of the humans on it) says that we have a tendancy to work out more and more complex ways of getting past these restrictions (I hate to get all dr malcolm on you "live will find a way").
as with many things (virii, firewall's, weaponry, speed guns, etc), it's a race between those who seek to subvert the system and those who seek to enforce the system. one is always playing catchup to the other and is unlikely to come to an end until we all have brain slugs attached. we're cunning buggers us humans.
dave
[0] - if you write acrostically then you embed a message in your text by using the first letters of each word or sentance or whatever to spell out your secret[1].
[1] - go read godel, escher and bach, has a section on it, good stuff.
it's funny, but owning a zeppelin is one of my life goals. always has been since I saw the hindenberg. I saw zeppelin's website over a year ago, and at one point I even emailed them and asked how much. the reply was about 4.5 million pounds.
I'll get there eventually...
it is expensive because it's a low demand item. lets face it, the hindenburg put a lot of people off even though we now know what the cause was. actually a fair amount of evidence points to the fact that zeppelin knew what the cause was bare weeks after the crash but kept it a secret.
I mean 19 people at $200 dollars each, they'll need to sell a lot of tickets to recoup the price, let alone the maintenance.
that aside modern planes are a lot bigger and more reliable now than they were back in the 40's. now there is very little market for them except in specialised circumstances. heavy lifting of bulky items, high luxery etc.
I mean while they are faster than you'd think (80mph) they aren't nearly as fast as planes, they aren't as tolerant of bad weather, they are huge, hard to park and only take a relatively small number of people for their size. they are high maintenance, helium is very expensive, and the US has a monopoly on it. hydrogen is just as good but people are too scared of it.
while i still really want one, I doubt it will ever become a common sight.
define "reasonable period". this is muc of the problem in modern IP law. IMHO that resaonably period should be maybe 3 years? 5 at a push for patents and copyright.
the way I work with this is that it depends to what the punctuation refers. if the quoted section is a question then the question mark should be within the quote.
now the one that freaks me out is punctuation in regards to brackets.
"I went to the shops (the ones by the beach)." is correct to me
"I went to the shops (the ones by the beach.)" is correct according to english grammar I believe. however I have to go with the former which logically seems correct.
dave
Re:Why subscribe to software in the future...
on
Windows in 2020
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I think of it like this.
Windows (M$ products in general) rae like fruit flies (or any insect). only lasts a day but there are so many of them, with new ones all the time.
the *nix's are more like bigger creatures. they last for ages but there aren't nearly as many of them.
not the best analogy but hey, what do you expect for 7 seconds of thought?
well, if you want mail sent directly to your machine via smtp, ie have your machine as a full internet mailhost etc then you'll need to have MX records pointing towards you.
I suppose you could receive mail for modem-1004.ca.arbdslco.com if they would do dns changes for you ubt it's much nicer to have mail for fred@fredscome.com sent directly to you machine surely?
okay, there are other ways to do it but hey, we're geeks, we wanna do things properly:)
THe way I see it, if the GPL is ruled unenforcable that would make it highly likely that most of the other software licences would be unenforcable as well. it would be a huge precedent and might make life (in a computer software sense) very interesting for a while
well, all the machines were SGI's as I recall, so it would be IRIX (a real unix(tm) so lex was right). the 3d park overview would be custom app software but I seem to recall there was a section with a screen full of 3d buttons and when pressed the flipped over and flew towards the screen providing the next set of buttons.
thats a menuing system given away with irix, I've got it on my indigo2 except they have all sorts of demo programs listed there.
hang on, I thought tha one doesn't buy cd's but a licence to listen to a cd. the theif might have stolen the physical media but he did not steal your right to listen to the music. you have the licence even though you can't prove it.
this is a weird point. you have no proof that you own a cd but morally at least (and maybe legally) you still have the right to listen and should be able to get yourself a copy by whatever means you can.
oh come on, of course they knew that there were breaking copyright law. they miht not have thought about it much, but they knew it was technically wrong. they just knew that they were extremely unlikely (or never if they were less technically minded:) to get caught.
ethics? yeah, it's down near sussex isn't it?
dave
(who knowingly pirates mp3's in all knowledge that if I don't own a licence to listen then it is wrong. however, I'm not gonna buy a whole dexy's midnight runners album just cos I like come on eileen:)
Slashdot Mirror
not true. in a lecture at university a couple of years back the lecturer said something was about 2 billion, I asked if he meant UK or american billion. "doesn't everyone use american billion?" he asked.
I said that I didn't and perhaps 75% of the class agreed with me. the guy promised to be more clear next time.
Personally I always read a billion as a million million unless I expressly know it's american.
dave
I think it's more like we can keep 7 "things" in 2nd level cache at a time. so a 7 digit number might be one thing to remember and the spelling of a complex name being another etc.
it's not that difficult to remember long arb strings if you try. about 7 years ago I was reading a copy of amiga format in a newsagent and it had a populous 2 level code in it, wihch was an arb string of about 40 alphanumeric characters (I think, correct me if I am wrong here). it took me a couple of minutes to memorise that and when I got home a few hours later i keyed it in and it worked.
dave
> For the 2-character first names, we'll let the
> Chinese keep their own names and give the nonsense
> names like "stinky fjord" or "rabbit bowl" to
> people who don't know the difference.
anyone else thinking of alien nation here?
dave
it's funny. due to the fact that I was living outside the UK (I'm a brit) when I was sixteen I was never automatically given a national insurance number. upon my return I went to the DSS to ask for one and they told me not to bother until i actually got a job at which point they would issue one to me. the interesting thing was that they told me that only they, and they alone *need* my national insurance number. no-one else does.
over the course of the next several years of being at university and what have you it was surprising how many places asked for my nat insurance number. I told them they they didn't need it and indeed I didn't have one. they looked awful confused and it took them a while to determine that I was correct and then they didn't quite know what to do.
dave
when you say "supports", you did of course mean "requires" didn't you :)
dave
you sure about that link tiger? all I got was some talk about the rise of buddism in america, exciting stuff let me tell you.
dave
PS. esc : w q doesn't save and quit the post you know...
> 00 No copy restrictions
> 10 Copy can be copied one more time
> 11 Prohibit copying
yes, and what does almost every consumer recorder default to for unknown music, 10. in fatc on most you cannot change this, so if I release a cd of my favourite bathtime gurgles with th intent of it being copied far and wide, this system will prevent me from doing that. umm.. excuse me, it's my copyright and I can decide if or if not wanna put it in the public domain or not.
revolution brothers
dave
> The law is there and it is there for you to respect.
well, obeying laws is equivalent to obeying commands from a superior and the european court of human rights decided that you cannot use that as an excuse with respect to laws you feel you should not follow.
this was decided in the nazi war crimes trials where officers where claiming as a defence thatthey were oly following orders. that may have been the case but they should have refused and were therefore punished anyway.
it's only a matter of scale
dave
well, I don't suppose they did it deliberately. I'm sure they'll fix it as soon as they can. there's always teething troubles with a new system.
dave
well, I suppose that while old skool steganography will be killed off by lossy compression, newer, more advanced stuff will claim to work like the dvda's watermark's. ie they will survive compression and all sorts of digital messing about. the problem being a) a more obvious impact on the image/sound and b) you'll need a bigger file to hide less data in as a transport to hide data with forward error correction will have a much higher overhead.
:)
hmm.. perhaps thats why nasa's jpl site has all those *huge* tiff's?
dave
well, only lossy compression chuck's data. if you used gzip to compress an executable file then it had better come out the other end looking identical or someone will be annoyed. now if someone mp3'd that audio then fair enough. but you shouldn't generalise that all audio compression is lossy.
dave
well.. if the junk is properly stenographed so you can retreive that junk (although penny lane isn't junk, good song :) then you can use the lyrics and the knowledge of stenographic technique to restore the picture to it's former state, at which point you can run the stenography detecter again and get the real secret...
of course it gets more cunning when the data you remove stenagraphically is itself an image with stenographed data on it, and that data is...
and eschelon has a machine do do all this but completely missed your bombing plans which were the subject of the picture itself and not the stenographed data itself... hiding the wood in the tree's as it were.
dave
I'd say there is obvious precedant for that statement. stenography has moved from being invisible ink, through acrostic literature[0] to the current practise of embedding data into images or sound files. I'd say that if you graphed it it would imply that we have a lot more ways to go.
the very history of this planet (or at least of the humans on it) says that we have a tendancy to work out more and more complex ways of getting past these restrictions (I hate to get all dr malcolm on you "live will find a way").
as with many things (virii, firewall's, weaponry, speed guns, etc), it's a race between those who seek to subvert the system and those who seek to enforce the system. one is always playing catchup to the other and is unlikely to come to an end until we all have brain slugs attached. we're cunning buggers us humans.
dave
[0] - if you write acrostically then you embed a message in your text by using the first letters of each word or sentance or whatever to spell out your secret[1].
[1] - go read godel, escher and bach, has a section on it, good stuff.
it's funny, but owning a zeppelin is one of my life goals. always has been since I saw the hindenberg. I saw zeppelin's website over a year ago, and at one point I even emailed them and asked how much. the reply was about 4.5 million pounds.
I'll get there eventually...
it is expensive because it's a low demand item. lets face it, the hindenburg put a lot of people off even though we now know what the cause was. actually a fair amount of evidence points to the fact that zeppelin knew what the cause was bare weeks after the crash but kept it a secret.
I mean 19 people at $200 dollars each, they'll need to sell a lot of tickets to recoup the price, let alone the maintenance.
that aside modern planes are a lot bigger and more reliable now than they were back in the 40's. now there is very little market for them except in specialised circumstances. heavy lifting of bulky items, high luxery etc.
I mean while they are faster than you'd think (80mph) they aren't nearly as fast as planes, they aren't as tolerant of bad weather, they are huge, hard to park and only take a relatively small number of people for their size. they are high maintenance, helium is very expensive, and the US has a monopoly on it. hydrogen is just as good but people are too scared of it.
while i still really want one, I doubt it will ever become a common sight.
dave
define "reasonable period". this is muc of the problem in modern IP law. IMHO that resaonably period should be maybe 3 years? 5 at a push for patents and copyright.
dave
the way I work with this is that it depends to what the punctuation refers. if the quoted section is a question then the question mark should be within the quote.
now the one that freaks me out is punctuation in regards to brackets.
"I went to the shops (the ones by the beach)." is correct to me
"I went to the shops (the ones by the beach.)" is correct according to english grammar I believe. however I have to go with the former which logically seems correct.
dave
I think of it like this.
Windows (M$ products in general) rae like fruit flies (or any insect). only lasts a day but there are so many of them, with new ones all the time.
the *nix's are more like bigger creatures. they last for ages but there aren't nearly as many of them.
not the best analogy but hey, what do you expect for 7 seconds of thought?
dave
well, if you want mail sent directly to your machine via smtp, ie have your machine as a full internet mailhost etc then you'll need to have MX records pointing towards you.
:)
I suppose you could receive mail for modem-1004.ca.arbdslco.com if they would do dns changes for you ubt it's much nicer to have mail for fred@fredscome.com sent directly to you machine surely?
okay, there are other ways to do it but hey, we're geeks, we wanna do things properly
dave
code red infect's IIS 4 and 5 which tends to be installed on NT4 server and w2k server boxen *by default I think).
so yes, NT 4 can be easily infected
dave
this only works if a) you have your own (sub)domain (not difficult) and b) you team up with a few friends to secondary MX for each other otherwise.
it's something I've been meaning to do but haven;t got round to yet... one day
dave
THe way I see it, if the GPL is ruled unenforcable that would make it highly likely that most of the other software licences would be unenforcable as well. it would be a huge precedent and might make life (in a computer software sense) very interesting for a while
dave
well, all the machines were SGI's as I recall, so it would be IRIX (a real unix(tm) so lex was right). the 3d park overview would be custom app software but I seem to recall there was a section with a screen full of 3d buttons and when pressed the flipped over and flew towards the screen providing the next set of buttons.
thats a menuing system given away with irix, I've got it on my indigo2 except they have all sorts of demo programs listed there.
cheers
dave
hang on, I thought tha one doesn't buy cd's but a licence to listen to a cd. the theif might have stolen the physical media but he did not steal your right to listen to the music. you have the licence even though you can't prove it.
this is a weird point. you have no proof that you own a cd but morally at least (and maybe legally) you still have the right to listen and should be able to get yourself a copy by whatever means you can.
dave
I think it was...
If you have three pepsi's and you drink one pepsi, how much more refreshed are you?
pepsi?
partial credit!
dave
oh come on, of course they knew that there were breaking copyright law. they miht not have thought about it much, but they knew it was technically wrong. they just knew that they were extremely unlikely (or never if they were less technically minded :) to get caught.
:)
ethics? yeah, it's down near sussex isn't it?
dave
(who knowingly pirates mp3's in all knowledge that if I don't own a licence to listen then it is wrong. however, I'm not gonna buy a whole dexy's midnight runners album just cos I like come on eileen