The Mac Mini only has one video output port and no space for expansion cards so it can't drive two monitors. While Apple nominally only allow "screen spanning" on their higher end machines you can in fact tweak most of their models to do this using the Screen Spanning Doctor to change the PROM settings. I've used this successfully on my G4 iMac and I've seen it used on the current G5 iMac hardware. The same code also works on many of the iBook laptops.
>Black & Green 75% cocoa, if it means anything to anyone.
I'm guessing that it means Green and Blacks chocolate. G&B make some of the best organic chocolate around in my opinion. I wonder however if they did extensive scientific testing before they settled on the relatively high cocoa content 75% stuff. I think I should apply for research funding to look into this in more detail:-)
This seems to serve the same purpose as the AirPort Express for the business traveller except that it has a separate power supply (unless you want to tether yourself to it with a USB cable). The fact that the power supply is not built in seems to me to limit its utility quite a lot. Given it costs 80% as much as the AirPort and also lacks the printer sharing (and non-sequitur music streaming) I have a hard time seeing this being a commercial success.
How long before some manufacturer claims that modding the games controller violates their rights over the copyrighted design and issues a cease and desist? I'm guessing it will only take a few days!
The article says "To do this, they use an array of small speakers, sometimes as many as 300 or 400. A complicated algorithm works out exactly what the sound waves all through a room would be...". This sounds very like the phased array speaker technology that 1 Limited have been using from some years to deliver true surround sound from a flat panel speaker.
I look forward to having an AirPort Express to try this with, not so much to play music directly as to have a chance to reverse engineer the broadcast protocol. Apple don't seem to have published much about the protocol to be used to send music from a Mac to the Express but I can imagine that lots of people are looking forward to buying a number of the AirPort Express hardware units for distributing audio and there is almost certainly another set of people who want to know how to use iTunes 4.6 to stream audio to other computers.
Press and hold on your mouse might not do anything but it does on mine, and has done for years. It brings up the context menu on the Mac without you having to use the ctrl key. Not only has this been the case on the Mac for many years but I seem to recall it worked last time I used a Xerox Star system (which was a very long time ago indeed).
...for instance, revenues down from $28.9B in FY2000 to an expected $8.9B in FY2004, and headcount dropping from 157K to 32.5K over that time.
To see the glass half full for a moment, consider these numbers. The revenue per employee is up from $184K to $274K, about a 50% rise. Given the salaries and other indirect employment costs are a very large part of the overheads in a company the size of Lucent, and that Lucent lost many of those employees by selling off divisions rather than through lay-offs, this seems like a sign of fairly good management.
Taking the opportunity for a moment to troll, flame bait and be an annoying Apple user, I think it's worth commenting how piss-poor the P4's LinPack performance is. The AppleXserve G5 gets 4.5 Gigaflops out of each of it's two 2GHz G5 processor when running HPC Linpack, as opposed to the 3.4GHx P4 "Extreme Edition" which peaks at just 1.3 Gigaflops. Anyone looking to do serious scientific calculations rather than just playing Quake should not be using Intel hardware these days; it just doesn't keep up with the PPC G5 for floating point.
"While Apple's sales of $6.2 billion last fiscal year were nearly unchanged from 1999, profits plummeted 90 percent to $69 million, from $601 million four years ago..."
Does anyone else here think that a tech company managing to deliver the same level of turnover, albeit at a reduced margin, as they did at the top of the dot.com bubble is bad going? Most vendors' turnovers dropped at the end of the boom and have been working their way back up since.
It'll make the mugger's lives easier
on
RFID Casino Chips
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
If all the casino chips have microchips inside them then the pick-pockets and muggers along the strip will be able to tell from a distance who has chips in their pockets and be able to home in on them! You can stand by the exit of the casino with a pocket RFID reader and when your PDA lets you know someone just walked by with $10,000 in chips in their pocket you can signal to your heavies down the street!
I have to say thank-you for finding that, although of course now you've wasted the afternoon I just spent building a shellcode to exploit the bug:-) (With a 520 byte argument the return address is at 479 bytes through the argument!)
A couple of things are worth noting about this bug. Firstly, it appears that the utiliy gets run by some other setuid process so the program didn't need to be setuid in the first place (looking at the files/System/Library/Filesystems/*/*.util this is the only one that is setuid). This is fortunate because of the seond observation, which is that a cursory inspection reveals that other of these programs are also vulnerable (ufs.util needs a rather longer string but gives a segmentation fault with ufs.fs/ufs.util -p `perl -e "print 'A'x6750;"`).
It might be useful if someone were to trawl through the other related utilities to see if there are any more unchecked string copies. I didn't find he source to all these utilities but the msdos_util seems to have some unchecked sprintf() calls. While these are probably not security critical because hopefully the root process that calls them can't be fooled into passing bad arguments it's still indicative of a lack of care in programming.
The technology for this is provided by Icomera. There are some more data about what their technology does, though not really much about how it works. Their speciality seems to be "Seamless Handover" between the different types of network connection.
My school bought operating systems every 3 years... My senior year I had a brand new Microsoft Operating System (exactly as buggy as the old one) and all the others were 3 years old... Windows editions were completely out of date (because they were poorly written... should be something that doesn't go out of date)
With computers there exist ways of having new resources for all classes, but you'll never be able to access the only fine formats ever again.
I wonder how long it will be before one is obliged to produce ID in order to buy one of these things. Many law enforcement agencies object to cell phones that are not tied to an identifiable individual because it makes it much harder to get an order for tapping the phone.
Just switching to AuthType Digest is not sufficient. You'll need to set AuthDigestFile and the format of this file is different to the standard AuthFile format so you need to use the htdigest program instead of the htpasswd tool to create and manage the user names and passwords.
I use digest authentication for all my DAV access from the Mac and it works just fine. Of course it would still be better if Apple got their act together and made use of the SSL support that's already in their toolkits.
As a frequent traveller the biggest benefit for me from this release is the proper support for time zones.
You need to tick a box in the preferences panel to enable it but once on you get to specify the time zone as well as the time of the meeting (it defaults to the zone set for the clock). The display presents the time of the meeting in the view time zone, which also defaults to the zone for the clock. Dinner next Tuesday in Boston is showing up for me as 1AM on Wednesday because I still have my clock set for here in the UK. It now also seems to properly support timed events that span more than one day.
I sent in a feature request for exactly this six months ago. I'm sure that I was not the only one but it's gratifying to see that they listen to their customers:-)
When I first read the subject line I thought it was going to be related to RFC 1149 "A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers", which can be used to send your email using an archaic form of postal service (although not really snail mail I guess).
It is worth noting that at least HotMail already put the IP address of the client web browser into the mail headers. I had the misfortune to need to trace a mentally ill relative a year or two ago who had gone missing. He had sent email to his parents but the police said that despite the missing person report they could do nothing. Fifteen minutes with Sam Spade and a map of London revealed that two mails were sent from an internet cafe and a public library in North London just a couple of blocks away from the house of someone the family knew.
My house here in Cambridge, England, is fairly modern (built circa 1865). A great many of the university buildings are much older. Interestingly, the colleges here take a very long term view to building new property; while most modern buildings only have a design life of 50 years or so they target 200 years as their standard. I guess if you've been around as an institution for 500 years already you have a different outlook on what a "long term" investment is than most corporations. Anyway, as a result many of the larger architects firms here in Cambridge have the expertise that you need. As it happens the "short answer" has already been given in a previous post; use a lot of stone.
I still think that Alien Fish Exchange represents a much superior virtual space for playing with fish than the MIT one! The graphics are much cuter too!
This seems to be an isanely cool bit of code! If they add support for AppleScript then it would be even better (and a potential Clicker beater). My only problem is that while it works wonderfully at the Mac end it crashed my Ericsson T68 (needing the battery to be pulled to reset it) after I went in and out of the Accessories->Romeo menu a number of times in succession:-(
As I mentioned in my earlier reply I think that you might be in breach in other ways to do with the product branding, although of course these are easier for you to fix.
The License agreement concerned, the "iTunes SDK Agreement" is available upon request from Apple. I got a copy last year when I was thinking about writing a plug-in to drive the Rio Car mpeg player. It runs to eight pages and for the most part seems to be concerned with protecting the iTunes brand by ensuring that all plug-ins comply style, internationalisation and branding requirements.
I'm not sure if I'm at liberty to post the license itself (from a copyright standpoint) and anyway it's a PDF, but looking through the terms it seems to me that iCommune is in breach in a number of fairly minor ways. There's no end user license "that is at least as protective of Apple's rights as [the iTunes SDK Agreement] is". The iCommune web site does not show "Mac OS compatible" logos or iTunes logos, as it is required to do. The iCommune code does not appear to display the required iTunes compatibility blurb. On top of this, I do not know if the original application for the SDK stated that it was to be used for a network based plug-in but the license requires you to specify the "device" for which you are writing a driver.
All in all the current iCommune site is in clear breach of the agreement and Apple have every right to ask for the software to be taken down at least until the breaches are rectified.
Slashdot Mirror
The Mac Mini only has one video output port and no space for expansion cards so it can't drive two monitors. While Apple nominally only allow "screen spanning" on their higher end machines you can in fact tweak most of their models to do this using the Screen Spanning Doctor to change the PROM settings. I've used this successfully on my G4 iMac and I've seen it used on the current G5 iMac hardware. The same code also works on many of the iBook laptops.
>Black & Green 75% cocoa, if it means anything to anyone.
:-)
I'm guessing that it means Green and Blacks chocolate. G&B make some of the best organic chocolate around in my opinion. I wonder however if they did extensive scientific testing before they settled on the relatively high cocoa content 75% stuff. I think I should apply for research funding to look into this in more detail
This seems to serve the same purpose as the AirPort Express for the business traveller except that it has a separate power supply (unless you want to tether yourself to it with a USB cable). The fact that the power supply is not built in seems to me to limit its utility quite a lot. Given it costs 80% as much as the AirPort and also lacks the printer sharing (and non-sequitur music streaming) I have a hard time seeing this being a commercial success.
How long before some manufacturer claims that modding the games controller violates their rights over the copyrighted design and issues a cease and desist? I'm guessing it will only take a few days!
The article says "To do this, they use an array of small speakers, sometimes as many as 300 or 400. A complicated algorithm works out exactly what the sound waves all through a room would be...". This sounds very like the phased array speaker technology that 1 Limited have been using from some years to deliver true surround sound from a flat panel speaker.
I look forward to having an AirPort Express to try this with, not so much to play music directly as to have a chance to reverse engineer the broadcast protocol. Apple don't seem to have published much about the protocol to be used to send music from a Mac to the Express but I can imagine that lots of people are looking forward to buying a number of the AirPort Express hardware units for distributing audio and there is almost certainly another set of people who want to know how to use iTunes 4.6 to stream audio to other computers.
... is that if you try to order one you find that they are not shipping until July :-(
Press and hold on your mouse might not do anything but it does on mine, and has done for years. It brings up the context menu on the Mac without you having to use the ctrl key. Not only has this been the case on the Mac for many years but I seem to recall it worked last time I used a Xerox Star system (which was a very long time ago indeed).
To see the glass half full for a moment, consider these numbers. The revenue per employee is up from $184K to $274K, about a 50% rise. Given the salaries and other indirect employment costs are a very large part of the overheads in a company the size of Lucent, and that Lucent lost many of those employees by selling off divisions rather than through lay-offs, this seems like a sign of fairly good management.
Taking the opportunity for a moment to troll, flame bait and be an annoying Apple user, I think it's worth commenting how piss-poor the P4's LinPack performance is. The Apple Xserve G5 gets 4.5 Gigaflops out of each of it's two 2GHz G5 processor when running HPC Linpack, as opposed to the 3.4GHx P4 "Extreme Edition" which peaks at just 1.3 Gigaflops. Anyone looking to do serious scientific calculations rather than just playing Quake should not be using Intel hardware these days; it just doesn't keep up with the PPC G5 for floating point.
"While Apple's sales of $6.2 billion last fiscal year were nearly unchanged from 1999, profits plummeted 90 percent to $69 million, from $601 million four years ago..."
Does anyone else here think that a tech company managing to deliver the same level of turnover, albeit at a reduced margin, as they did at the top of the dot.com bubble is bad going? Most vendors' turnovers dropped at the end of the boom and have been working their way back up since.
If all the casino chips have microchips inside them then the pick-pockets and muggers along the strip will be able to tell from a distance who has chips in their pockets and be able to home in on them! You can stand by the exit of the casino with a pocket RFID reader and when your PDA lets you know someone just walked by with $10,000 in chips in their pocket you can signal to your heavies down the street!
I have to say thank-you for finding that, although of course now you've wasted the afternoon I just spent building a shellcode to exploit the bug :-) (With a 520 byte argument the return address is at 479 bytes through the argument!)
/System/Library/Filesystems/*/*.util this is the only one that is setuid). This is fortunate because of the seond observation, which is that a cursory inspection reveals that other of these programs are also vulnerable (ufs.util needs a rather longer string but gives a segmentation fault with ufs.fs/ufs.util -p `perl -e "print 'A'x6750;"`).
A couple of things are worth noting about this bug. Firstly, it appears that the utiliy gets run by some other setuid process so the program didn't need to be setuid in the first place (looking at the files
It might be useful if someone were to trawl through the other related utilities to see if there are any more unchecked string copies. I didn't find he source to all these utilities but the msdos_util seems to have some unchecked sprintf() calls. While these are probably not security critical because hopefully the root process that calls them can't be fooled into passing bad arguments it's still indicative of a lack of care in programming.
The technology for this is provided by Icomera. There are some more data about what their technology does, though not really much about how it works. Their speciality seems to be "Seamless Handover" between the different types of network connection.
schools should be spending money on today...
My school bought operating systems every 3 years... My senior year I had a brand new Microsoft Operating System (exactly as buggy as the old one) and all the others were 3 years old... Windows editions were completely out of date (because they were poorly written... should be something that doesn't go out of date)
With computers there exist ways of having new resources for all classes, but you'll never be able to access the only fine formats ever again.
I wonder how long it will be before one is obliged to produce ID in order to buy one of these things. Many law enforcement agencies object to cell phones that are not tied to an identifiable individual because it makes it much harder to get an order for tapping the phone.
Just switching to AuthType Digest is not sufficient. You'll need to set AuthDigestFile and the format of this file is different to the standard AuthFile format so you need to use the htdigest program instead of the htpasswd tool to create and manage the user names and passwords.
I use digest authentication for all my DAV access from the Mac and it works just fine. Of course it would still be better if Apple got their act together and made use of the SSL support that's already in their toolkits.
As a frequent traveller the biggest benefit for me from this release is the proper support for time zones.
:-)
You need to tick a box in the preferences panel to enable it but once on you get to specify the time zone as well as the time of the meeting (it defaults to the zone set for the clock). The display presents the time of the meeting in the view time zone, which also defaults to the zone for the clock. Dinner next Tuesday in Boston is showing up for me as 1AM on Wednesday because I still have my clock set for here in the UK. It now also seems to properly support timed events that span more than one day.
I sent in a feature request for exactly this six months ago. I'm sure that I was not the only one but it's gratifying to see that they listen to their customers
When I first read the subject line I thought it was going to be related to RFC 1149 "A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers", which can be used to send your email using an archaic form of postal service (although not really snail mail I guess).
It is worth noting that at least HotMail already put the IP address of the client web browser into the mail headers. I had the misfortune to need to trace a mentally ill relative a year or two ago who had gone missing. He had sent email to his parents but the police said that despite the missing person report they could do nothing. Fifteen minutes with Sam Spade and a map of London revealed that two mails were sent from an internet cafe and a public library in North London just a couple of blocks away from the house of someone the family knew.
My house here in Cambridge, England, is fairly modern (built circa 1865). A great many of the university buildings are much older. Interestingly, the colleges here take a very long term view to building new property; while most modern buildings only have a design life of 50 years or so they target 200 years as their standard. I guess if you've been around as an institution for 500 years already you have a different outlook on what a "long term" investment is than most corporations. Anyway, as a result many of the larger architects firms here in Cambridge have the expertise that you need. As it happens the "short answer" has already been given in a previous post; use a lot of stone.
I still think that Alien Fish Exchange represents a much superior virtual space for playing with fish than the MIT one! The graphics are much cuter too!
This seems to be an isanely cool bit of code! If they add support for AppleScript then it would be even better (and a potential Clicker beater). My only problem is that while it works wonderfully at the Mac end it crashed my Ericsson T68 (needing the battery to be pulled to reset it) after I went in and out of the Accessories->Romeo menu a number of times in succession :-(
As I mentioned in my earlier reply I think that you might be in breach in other ways to do with the product branding, although of course these are easier for you to fix.
The License agreement concerned, the "iTunes SDK Agreement" is available upon request from Apple. I got a copy last year when I was thinking about writing a plug-in to drive the Rio Car mpeg player. It runs to eight pages and for the most part seems to be concerned with protecting the iTunes brand by ensuring that all plug-ins comply style, internationalisation and branding requirements.
I'm not sure if I'm at liberty to post the license itself (from a copyright standpoint) and anyway it's a PDF, but looking through the terms it seems to me that iCommune is in breach in a number of fairly minor ways. There's no end user license "that is at least as protective of Apple's rights as [the iTunes SDK Agreement] is". The iCommune web site does not show "Mac OS compatible" logos or iTunes logos, as it is required to do. The iCommune code does not appear to display the required iTunes compatibility blurb. On top of this, I do not know if the original application for the SDK stated that it was to be used for a network based plug-in but the license requires you to specify the "device" for which you are writing a driver.
All in all the current iCommune site is in clear breach of the agreement and Apple have every right to ask for the software to be taken down at least until the breaches are rectified.