Each update must be acknowledged and scheduled for installation by the user, although theoretically there might be a backdoor way for them to remotely install updates without user consent. If you ever go a Tesla Service Center you'll need to remember to tell them not to install software updates for you (since they will commonly do that as a courtesy).
However, there will also be a point where features in the older software versions may no longer be supported and capabilities may degrade, particularly if Tesla's server-side communications specific to those older versions are discontinued, particularly around the navigation features. The Tesla Service Center may also say that they are logistically unable to fix or support some issues without upgrading to a current version.
Although commercial planes do fly on autopilot for most of the flight once they are in cruise, you still need the pilots that are fully capable of controlling the plane and landing it when the autopilot suddenly drops offline because the pitot tubes freeze, wings ice over, a gyro fails, or an engine catches on fire. The routine flights can indeed be handled by most any low-time pilot, but the unusual circumstances are where you need pilots with sufficient experience.
The top 100 most often played missions at the end of every month are guaranteed to be played by the developers or GMs or player volunteers, and officially rated. Those that are good get awarded manually and a form of in-game badge next to them.
There is already a "Dev's Choice" and "Hall of Fame" category for missions that have been officially played by staff. Those missions receive special recognition and will reward players with standard item drops, rather than tickets.
Now you could go slightly further by changing things so that missions have not been approved do not receive tickets or experience at all. This has been discussed in their forums and many vocal users indicated that would not have any motivation to create or play (legitimate non-farm) architect missions if that were the case.
http://www.navizon.com/ is another alternative that uses a community-based approach to build its database of cell tower and wifi access point locations. Users who want to use the service pay a small fee, while users who have a GPS can get paid for contributing location data.
Since Navizon also combines wifi access points (which are generally have shorter ranges), it can theoretically narrow down your position even more accurately than relying just on cell towers.
Is it certain that you will actually need to click twice initially? Microsoft could choose to allow the "activation click" itself to also be forwarded to the ActiveX control, allowing the "activation" to be entirely transparent to the user. The extra activation phase could become purely an unimportant legal technicality, but they might be able to better defend it in court.
There has been an earlier public version of MSN Search Toolbar before this one for several months (that did not have the Desktop Search functionality). That earlier version included the popup-blocker functionality before Windows XP SP2 was available, so the fact that the new MSN Search Toolbar still includes it should not be a major surprise. Besides as the parent poster points out, the MSN Popup-blocker is still a benefit for users that are not running XP-SP2.
I set up a similar looking LED sign a couple years ago at work and we have an internal webserver that hosts the web interface to it (using Apache for Win32). The CGI interface is written in Perl, using a perl module (that I also wrote) that provides an minimal Perl API for the sign.
When a new line of text is submitted to the sign, the CGI script also sends the text to our office IRC channel via a separate Perl IRC bot, so you don't have to be sitting within visible range of the sign in order to enjoy it.
Full Perl source, a sample POD text output, and some pictures and screen snapshots are all available online on my website. (Note that no actual public interface to my LED sign setup is provided.)
If you read the Terms and Conditions on the Cowan Alexander website, you'll see a section where it says:
The sale of computer hardware does not include any software programs or any data that may exist in such computer hardware. Purchaser agrees and warrants that any software accompanying the property that is the subject of this bill of sale will be removed by the purchaser and destroyed, including, without limitation, the removal and destruction of any software or intellectual property. Purchaser shall indemnify and hold seller harmless from any claims arising from failure to comply with the provisions of this paragraph.
Actually they did "give in" for NT4 Server by giving it a 6-month extension, even though they held their ground on NT4 Workstation and let its support period expire.
The problem with this is that it is difficult for arbitrary library developers to always provide a fully regression-tested and backwards-compatible new version (even if it is just a minor version increment). Yes you can argue that it is good practice to always try to provide backwards-compatible API changes, but sometimes bugs cause even the best intentions to fail.
So now when you change libfoo.so.4.3 to point from libfoo.so.4.3.2 to the new libfoo.so.4.3.5, you might have just simultaneously broken several applications that were all depending on libfoo.so.4.3
Another unofficial website that says up to date with Danger info is at hiptop411.com
Decrypt the solutions yourself
on
RC5-64 Success
·
· Score: 2
Here are some Perl scripts that make use of a modified version of Crypt::RC5 to decrypt the RC5-64 solution, the RC5-56 solution, and the RC5-64 false-positive.
Re:False positives in RC5-64 - SO IS NEXT?
on
RC5-64 Success
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Depending on the speed of your machine, OGR stubs may indeed take a very long time (many hours typically). If you have a relatively slow machine, this may indeed keep your machine busy for more than a day--just be patient. The individual size of each OGR workunit can varies greatly from one workunit to the next, by design.
Re:an interesting bit of trivia
on
RC5-64 Success
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Nugget is wrong, the false positive was actually found three times. Most recently, the bymer@ukrpost.net worm found the false-positive on November 6, 2001. There potentially could be problems identifying the owner of that worm-infected machine and having to explain the circumstances of a winning solution, but fortunately that was only a false positive.
False positives in RC5-64
on
RC5-64 Success
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Naturally there is a lot of interest about finding the solution, but what about "almost solutions" found by false-positive hits?
In the interests of speed, only the first "block" of the crypted RC5-64 text is decrypted and evaluated for a solution. This means that it's possible for a key which isn't the correct key to report as a false positive because although it doesn't decrypt the text it does yield a plaintext which matches "The unkn" for the first eight bytes.
The key 0xBB27D52F60FD932C does, indeed, decrypt to a plaintext for which the first eight bytes match the known plaintext for the contest. This key has actually been submitted three times over the course of the contest, once by three different users.
In August 1999, again in July 2000. Most recently, the bymer@ukrpost.net worm found the false-positive on November 6, 2001. There potentially could be problems identifying the owner of that worm-infected machine and having to explain the circumstances of a winning solution, but fortunately that was only a false positive.
Fortunately, we eventually found the actual key. But because we were seeing these legitimate false-positives being reported throughout the duration of the contest, we had full confidence that our network and our clients were functioning properly and that we would eventually find the actual solution in time.
It is a recording from the Cartoon Network "Space Ghost" parody series (either "Space Ghost: Coast to coast" or "The Brak Show"). The character speaking is Brak.
(Here's a good article that briefly describes some more of the benefits that the OGSA initiative provides and how it will eventually enable the cooperation and interaction between all types of distributed computing systems. It's unlikely that the marketplace will remain dominated by only a single distributed computing vendor's (commercial or non-commercial), but at least OGSA will provide a means for equal interoperability and features such as load-balancing between different vendors.)
---
Check out the entire article in whole at: http://www.supercomputingonline.com/article.p hp?si d=2236
SCO: How do Web services play a role in the future of the Grid?
MANDYAM: The promise of grid computing is to integrate a variety of systems into a virtual supercomputer capable of aggregating resources such as, processor cycles and storage within a large network consisting of one or more organizations. This far-reaching vision experienced a setback, however, by a lack of interoperability standards among grid computing technologies that were being used in the individual organizations. The advent of Web services has revived the vision by allowing grids to be specified as services that can interoperate with each other.
The interoperability benefits in grid computing come in two areas: one is in the area of tying together heterogeneous resources managed by different grid technologies. The development of Web services-based standards will specify XML-based languages for these technologies to talk to each other. Secondly, the interoperability will extend to existing infrastructures enterprises have in place today. Web services-based interfaces will permit companies to integrate grid computing frameworks more easily into their environments because Web services-based development is designed to be easier and faster than traditional methods. Interfaces described in WSDL will provide the flexibility for companies to build higher-level, Web services-based applications that can also be discovered and shared.
A grid service is built on concepts and technologies from the Grid and Web services communities, such as the W3C and GGF/OGSA, and will be the basis of Web services influence on grid computing. Its architecture defines standard mechanisms for creating, naming, and discovering grid service instances: providing location transparency, network and platform heterogeneity.
The Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) is in the process of defining a set of Web Services Description Language (WSDL) interfaces and for creating, managing and securely accessing large computational grids.
SCO: So would you say that it's critical for companies with Grid solutions to plan for Web services in their architecture?
MANDYAM: Yes, there is unanimous support for a fusion of Web services with Grid services in the grid computing space, and both major and small vendors are embracing the OGSA standards. Fortunately for companies, Web services will make grid solutions easier to implement and more powerful. Vendors will be to make their product architectures compliant.
Large and progressive enterprises that are planning to deploy enterprise-wide grid solutions should definitely review and follow the standards being specified by the OGSA. In some cases, it may be necessary for enterprises to actively participate in GGF/OGSA to incorporate business critical features into OGSA standards.
SCO: Does the advent of Web services lead to the potential for a worldwide, Internet grid?
MANDYAM: As enterprises begin advertising their grid service capabilities using OGSA-based WSDL interfaces, there will be a strong desire among government organizations and private enterprises to build a worldwide Internet grid. However, such a grid would require a lot of cooperation among the various IT departments to develop and implement usage and access control policies. Web services will be secondary to enhancing this potential, as the important milestone will be a general agreement on standards for interoperability. Web services seem to be fueling that through support for the OGSA.
SCO: On Monday UD announced the availability of the MetaProcessor platform 3.0. Please tell the readers about it.
MANDYAM: The MetaProcessor platform v3.0 is United Devices' latest version of its computing platform for building grids that harness underutilized compute resources on Windows and Linux. The platform allows companies to effectively incorporate their desktops into enterprise grids capable of delivering a high performance computing engine.
The platform builds on its recognized ease of manageability and scalability to add important features that make the product easier to integrate and use. It offers a SOAP-based interface and WSDL specification which companies can use to more easily integrate the grid into their infrastructure and to package research applications with Web services. The platform adds the ability to submit and run simple batch jobs that are not as computationally demanding via command line, as opposed to data-intensive high throughput jobs that the platform was originally designed for. Lastly, getting applications onto the platform has also become easier with a simplification of the migration process for application developers. No API's are necessary to access the platform's robust security and network optimization features such as data encryption and compression, and applications can be run without source code modification whatsoever.
Although United Devices is currently graciously hosting some of the displaced distributed.net hardware temporarily, they've indicated that they are not willing to do this long term (which is quite a reasonable decision, since it is a lot of bandwidth).
Note that several of the distributed.net volunteer staff (including myself) do indeed work for United Devices during the day, and that our employment there began awhile ago (more than 15 months ago), so that partnership announcement is not really related.
Running our personal proxy for large teams (particularly if they are all at a single corporation or a single school) can indeed help, because it reduces some of the overhead of communications with each individual client. There is also some optimization done by the personal proxy to allow it to request larger blocks of work and partition it into smaller portions when it finally distributes to the actual clients.
However, this doesn't reduce the bandwidth at the keymaster any further, since this sort of splitting is already also being done at a larger scale between the keymaster and fullservers (and the bandwidth issue is with the keymaster, not the fullservers).
We get hardware donations occasionally and use them when we get them (the previous stats server was donated, we have had drives and memory donated, and my multi-proc development machine's motherboard was donated). Those are usually not as hard to get since those are one-time gifts.
Getting donations of bandwidth and hosting is harder because those are ongoing commitments (including potential staff-support, and physical colo access, etc).
Direct money donations are also somewhat hard to get. Fortunately distributed.net is a 501(c)(3) organization, which means anyone can donate and receive an income tax writeoff (see articles of incorporation). Tax day is coming up soon, folks!:)
That figure is actually closer to the current average peak. We in fact currently have an ipfw bandwidth limit on the machine to limit it to 3Mbit/sec and it mostly stays under it. We just over-quoted that figure a little bit in our announcement so that there would be fewer concerns over some marginal potential growth and try to factor in some of the bandwidth peaks.
Client downloads are PGP signed http://http.distributed.net/pub/dcti/v2.8015/ and are served by machines that mirror it (via rsync over ssh) from a tightly controlled host, which is not one of the servers that actually publicly serve the files. Although the binaries are pre-compiled, the original source code is open for review at http://www.distributed.net/source/
Slashdot Mirror
Each update must be acknowledged and scheduled for installation by the user, although theoretically there might be a backdoor way for them to remotely install updates without user consent. If you ever go a Tesla Service Center you'll need to remember to tell them not to install software updates for you (since they will commonly do that as a courtesy).
However, there will also be a point where features in the older software versions may no longer be supported and capabilities may degrade, particularly if Tesla's server-side communications specific to those older versions are discontinued, particularly around the navigation features. The Tesla Service Center may also say that they are logistically unable to fix or support some issues without upgrading to a current version.
Although commercial planes do fly on autopilot for most of the flight once they are in cruise, you still need the pilots that are fully capable of controlling the plane and landing it when the autopilot suddenly drops offline because the pitot tubes freeze, wings ice over, a gyro fails, or an engine catches on fire. The routine flights can indeed be handled by most any low-time pilot, but the unusual circumstances are where you need pilots with sufficient experience.
The top 100 most often played missions at the end of every month are guaranteed to be played by the developers or GMs or player volunteers, and officially rated. Those that are good get awarded manually and a form of in-game badge next to them.
There is already a "Dev's Choice" and "Hall of Fame" category for missions that have been officially played by staff. Those missions receive special recognition and will reward players with standard item drops, rather than tickets.
Now you could go slightly further by changing things so that missions have not been approved do not receive tickets or experience at all. This has been discussed in their forums and many vocal users indicated that would not have any motivation to create or play (legitimate non-farm) architect missions if that were the case.
Old news. Southern California Edison has been offering the ability to do this for awhile by adding an external device on the outside compressor... http://www.sce.com/RebatesandSavings/Residential/_Heating+and+Cooling/SummerDiscountPlan/Details/default.htm
As others have noted, this is also done by other utility companies throughout the U.S. too. For instance, Austin Energy (in Texas) also offers a radio controlled thermostat program: http://www.austinenergy.com/Energy%20Efficiency/Programs/Power%20Partner/index.htm
http://www.navizon.com/ is another alternative that uses a community-based approach to build its database of cell tower and wifi access point locations. Users who want to use the service pay a small fee, while users who have a GPS can get paid for contributing location data.
Since Navizon also combines wifi access points (which are generally have shorter ranges), it can theoretically narrow down your position even more accurately than relying just on cell towers.
Is it certain that you will actually need to click twice initially? Microsoft could choose to allow the "activation click" itself to also be forwarded to the ActiveX control, allowing the "activation" to be entirely transparent to the user. The extra activation phase could become purely an unimportant legal technicality, but they might be able to better defend it in court.
There has been an earlier public version of MSN Search Toolbar before this one for several months (that did not have the Desktop Search functionality). That earlier version included the popup-blocker functionality before Windows XP SP2 was available, so the fact that the new MSN Search Toolbar still includes it should not be a major surprise. Besides as the parent poster points out, the MSN Popup-blocker is still a benefit for users that are not running XP-SP2.
"found by Finnish security researcher Jouko Pynnonen in June, was patched last month by Sun, but its details were not made public until Tuesday."
But according to the Bugtraq posting Sun Microsystems was informed on April 29, 2004.
I set up a similar looking LED sign a couple years ago at work and we have an internal webserver that hosts the web interface to it (using Apache for Win32). The CGI interface is written in Perl, using a perl module (that I also wrote) that provides an minimal Perl API for the sign.
When a new line of text is submitted to the sign, the CGI script also sends the text to our office IRC channel via a separate Perl IRC bot, so you don't have to be sitting within visible range of the sign in order to enjoy it.
Full Perl source, a sample POD text output, and some pictures and screen snapshots are all available online on my website. (Note that no actual public interface to my LED sign setup is provided.)
Actually they did "give in" for NT4 Server by giving it a 6-month extension, even though they held their ground on NT4 Workstation and let its support period expire.
The problem with this is that it is difficult for arbitrary library developers to always provide a fully regression-tested and backwards-compatible new version (even if it is just a minor version increment). Yes you can argue that it is good practice to always try to provide backwards-compatible API changes, but sometimes bugs cause even the best intentions to fail.
So now when you change libfoo.so.4.3 to point from libfoo.so.4.3.2 to the new libfoo.so.4.3.5, you might have just simultaneously broken several applications that were all depending on libfoo.so.4.3
Check out Danger Info's unofficial forums or their main page. Note that they are not officially affiliated with Danger Inc.
Another unofficial website that says up to date with Danger info is at hiptop411.com
Here are some Perl scripts that make use of a modified version of Crypt::RC5 to decrypt the RC5-64 solution, the RC5-56 solution, and the RC5-64 false-positive.
http://www1.distributed.net/~bovine/perl-rc5/
Depending on the speed of your machine, OGR stubs may indeed take a very long time (many hours typically). If you have a relatively slow machine, this may indeed keep your machine busy for more than a day--just be patient. The individual size of each OGR workunit can varies greatly from one workunit to the next, by design.
Nugget is wrong, the false positive was actually found three times. Most recently, the bymer@ukrpost.net worm found the false-positive on
November 6, 2001. There potentially could be problems identifying the owner of that worm-infected machine and having to explain the
circumstances of a winning solution, but fortunately that was only a false positive.
Naturally there is a lot of interest about finding the solution, but what about "almost solutions" found by false-positive hits?
In the interests of speed, only the first "block" of the crypted RC5-64 text is decrypted and evaluated for a solution. This means that it's possible for a key which isn't the correct key to report as a false positive because although it doesn't decrypt the text it does yield a plaintext which matches "The unkn" for the first eight bytes.
The key 0xBB27D52F60FD932C does, indeed, decrypt to a plaintext for which the first eight bytes match the known plaintext for the contest. This key has actually been submitted three times over the course of the contest, once by three different users.
In August 1999, again in July 2000. Most recently, the bymer@ukrpost.net worm found the false-positive on November 6, 2001. There potentially could be problems identifying the
owner of that worm-infected machine and having to explain the circumstances of a winning solution, but fortunately that was only a false positive.
Fortunately, we eventually found the actual key. But because we were seeing these legitimate false-positives being reported throughout the duration of the contest, we had full confidence that our network and our clients were functioning properly and that we would eventually find the actual solution in time.
It is a recording from the Cartoon Network "Space Ghost" parody series (either "Space Ghost: Coast to coast" or "The Brak Show"). The character speaking is Brak.
(Here's a good article that briefly describes some more of the benefits that the OGSA initiative provides and how it will eventually enable the cooperation and interaction between all types of distributed computing systems. It's unlikely that the marketplace will remain dominated by only a single distributed computing vendor's (commercial or non-commercial), but at least OGSA will provide a means for equal interoperability and features such as load-balancing between different vendors.)
p hp?si d=2236
---
Check out the entire article in whole at:
http://www.supercomputingonline.com/article.
SCO: How do Web services play a role in the future of the Grid?
MANDYAM: The promise of grid computing is to integrate a variety of systems into a virtual supercomputer capable of aggregating resources such as, processor cycles and storage within a large network consisting of one or more organizations. This far-reaching vision experienced a setback, however, by a lack of interoperability standards among grid computing technologies that were being used in the individual organizations. The advent of Web services has revived the vision by allowing grids to be specified as services that can interoperate with each other.
The interoperability benefits in grid computing come in two areas: one is in the area of tying together heterogeneous resources managed by different grid technologies. The development of Web services-based standards will specify XML-based languages for these technologies to talk to each other. Secondly, the interoperability will extend to existing infrastructures enterprises have in place today. Web services-based interfaces will permit companies to integrate grid computing frameworks more easily into their environments because Web services-based development is designed to be easier and faster than traditional methods. Interfaces described in WSDL will provide the flexibility for companies to build higher-level, Web services-based applications that can also be discovered and shared.
A grid service is built on concepts and technologies from the Grid and Web services communities, such as the W3C and GGF/OGSA, and will be the basis of Web services influence on grid computing. Its architecture defines standard mechanisms for creating, naming, and discovering grid service instances: providing location transparency, network and platform heterogeneity.
The Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) is in the process of defining a set of Web Services Description Language (WSDL) interfaces and for creating, managing and securely accessing large computational grids.
SCO: So would you say that it's critical for companies with Grid solutions to plan for Web services in their architecture?
MANDYAM: Yes, there is unanimous support for a fusion of Web services with Grid services in the grid computing space, and both major and small vendors are embracing the OGSA standards. Fortunately for companies, Web services will make grid solutions easier to implement and more powerful. Vendors will be to make their product architectures compliant.
Large and progressive enterprises that are planning to deploy enterprise-wide grid solutions should definitely review and follow the standards being specified by the OGSA. In some cases, it may be necessary for enterprises to actively participate in GGF/OGSA to incorporate business critical features into OGSA standards.
SCO: Does the advent of Web services lead to the potential for a worldwide, Internet grid?
MANDYAM: As enterprises begin advertising their grid service capabilities using OGSA-based WSDL interfaces, there will be a strong desire among government organizations and private enterprises to build a worldwide Internet grid. However, such a grid would require a lot of cooperation among the various IT departments to develop and implement usage and access control policies. Web services will be secondary to enhancing this potential, as the important milestone will be a general agreement on standards for interoperability. Web services seem to be fueling that through support for the OGSA.
SCO: On Monday UD announced the availability of the MetaProcessor platform 3.0. Please tell the readers about it.
MANDYAM: The MetaProcessor platform v3.0 is United Devices' latest version of its computing platform for building grids that harness underutilized compute resources on Windows and Linux. The platform allows companies to effectively incorporate their desktops into enterprise grids capable of delivering a high performance computing engine.
The platform builds on its recognized ease of manageability and scalability to add important features that make the product easier to integrate and use. It offers a SOAP-based interface and WSDL specification which companies can use to more easily integrate the grid into their infrastructure and to package research applications with Web services. The platform adds the ability to submit and run simple batch jobs that are not as computationally demanding via command line, as opposed to data-intensive high throughput jobs that the platform was originally designed for. Lastly, getting applications onto the platform has also become easier with a simplification of the migration process for application developers. No API's are necessary to access the platform's robust security and network optimization features such as data encryption and compression, and applications can be run without source code modification whatsoever.
FYI, web server content is actually hosted on unrelated servers for which bandwidth is not currently an issue.
Although United Devices is currently graciously hosting some of the displaced distributed.net hardware temporarily, they've indicated that they are not willing to do this long term (which is quite a reasonable decision, since it is a lot of bandwidth).
Note that several of the distributed.net volunteer staff (including myself) do indeed work for United Devices during the day, and that our employment there began awhile ago (more than 15 months ago), so that partnership announcement is not really related.
However, this doesn't reduce the bandwidth at the keymaster any further, since this sort of splitting is already also being done at a larger scale between the keymaster and fullservers (and the bandwidth issue is with the keymaster, not the fullservers).
Getting donations of bandwidth and hosting is harder because those are ongoing commitments (including potential staff-support, and physical colo access, etc).
Direct money donations are also somewhat hard to get. Fortunately distributed.net is a 501(c)(3) organization, which means anyone can donate and receive an income tax writeoff (see articles of incorporation). Tax day is coming up soon, folks! :)
That figure is actually closer to the current average peak. We in fact currently have an ipfw bandwidth limit on the machine to limit it to 3Mbit/sec and it mostly stays under it. We just over-quoted that figure a little bit in our announcement so that there would be fewer concerns over some marginal potential growth and try to factor in some of the bandwidth peaks.
Client downloads are PGP signed http://http.distributed.net/pub/dcti/v2.8015/ and are served by machines that mirror it (via rsync over ssh) from a tightly controlled host, which is not one of the servers that actually publicly serve the files. Although the binaries are pre-compiled, the original source code is open for review at http://www.distributed.net/source/