Back in the days (when Windows 98 was the best of the bunch) I used a great tool called ZipMagic. It turned zip files into folders, just as you describe, I could even share the zip file/folder using SMB and other people could connect directly to \\mycomp\stuff.zip\.
I always wondered how the magic was done, thanks for a very informative post.
CF is cool, it hits the sweet spot between size and features for a mobile device nicely. It's also nice that the same card will store mp3s and boot a computer.
Something I've wondered for a while though - could an adaptor be made allowing a CF host (ie a Zaurus or Ipaq) to talk to a full blown IDE hard drive. Obviously the speed would suck compared to an IDE controller, but it would be cool.
TThis link points to telnet://67.37.26.36 which opens to a linux shell at some American ISP, the connection may be logged somewhere and seen as 'questionable activity'.
Welcome to goat.cx TNG. That'll teach me to browse at -1.
If you have a recent java installed, then map24 knocks the veritable socks off all the competition. It displays an interactive vector map, complete with smooth scrolling, zooming and mouse over feature description.
The formatting of the route planning directions leaves a little to be desired, but that's the biggest fault I can think of. On the whole it compares favourably even to MS Autoroute - except it's free, always up to date and cross platform.
If you don't have java it falls back to a static image.
True, like anthing this has Good and Evil uses, but since it is kernel resident then it requires either a reboot or a siutable set of hooks in the running kernel so it can be loaded as a module.
Thus the impact of malicuous use of this technology could be mitigated by disabling loadable modules once booted, limiting access to kernel structures by loaded modules, using some varient of TCPA (rootkit module not signed), and/or only accepting shutdown signals from the local console.
In a corporate environment however I could see this used as a virtually undetectable piece of snitch software, ie for spying on employees at their workstation, even if they have root.
$ ping 127.0.0.1 PING 127.0.0.1 (127.0.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time= 408 ms 64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time= 376 ms ICMP Destination Unreachable: Missed a beat 64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time= 410 ms 64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time= 400 ms 64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time= 397 ms 64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time= 364 ms
If you do remember the brand of this device could you post it, I've been looking for something similar for a while (of course I was hoping firewire and IR too, but one can't be too picky:).
OK, this is off the cuff so probably got a few 'rough edges'.
X = Yearly cost of internet worms and other infectous software to (for instance) UK
Y = Cost of purchasing a virus scanner company & maintaining the database for 10 years. This could be reduced by encouraging community maintenance.
If X >= Y then I propose the government buyout a virus scanner company, open source the product, provide a sourceforge-like page to attract a few geeks, perhaps funds for a full-time developer or two & giveaway the whole lot.
Benefits: - A Government Approved free virus scanner far more likely to be installed and used by users - An open source Free virus scanner for those that shun 'Government Approved', ie mind-rays-removed - Reduced outages due to worms and email viruses, ie less hassle, more lower TCO
Issues - If too successful this would create a monoculture, although FLOSS approaches and it's inevitable cross platform nature might mitigate - Government sponsored anti competitive monopolistic practises (if you're in the AV business) - You still need to persuade people to install and keep the software up to date.
Perhaps something could be done with a floppy containing just a bootloader and a linux kernel to bootstrap the usb disk, one disk could probably do many operating systems, the question is whether linux would like pretending to be 'merely' a boot loader.
Ah yes, NTSC.. that wonderful standard, some claim it's somthing to do with National Televison System Committee - I believe. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. It actually stands for Never Twice the Same Colour (sorry Color).
Quote: KDE has way more options (the clock properties dialog has five tabs!),
Actually it has 6 in KDE version 3.1: General, Timezones, Plain Clock, Analogue Clock, Fuzzy Clock.
For some reason I find that amusing. If you're going to drop some FUD, at least get your facts straight.
I'm guessing 3.2 will have 12 or 24 depending on it's mode.
I don't think it was ever claimed that MS Office is a monopoly. Windows on the other hand is. I can't see an antitrust angle to bastarized file formats/protocols, other than opening them as a resolution. </bite>
gmplague: "Excellent, except as I recall, Microsoft Outlook has had this ability [email encryption] since the release of Windows XP."
XPlightcycler: (in reply) "Also to troll (sorry) what use email encryption if a virus can send the contents of your inbox + personal files to everyone in your address book?"
Sivar: (in reply to the reply) "The possibility that a rare and unlikely scenario may bypass a protection mechanism does not entirely preclude the usefulness of the mechanism."
This [sivar's] point is valid, but I have to ask, where do Outlook's suceptability to virii/remailer worms and 'rare and unlikely' meet. Outlook (& it's cousin Outlook Express) are extremely susceptable to them, in my experience atleast. Just because these pieces of software can do good encryption doesn't make them secure, for that you would atleast need to add a third party virus scanner.
I'm curious, as without the one off fee or per seat payment a developer/company/project may not make use of the MP3 patents (in countries the patents are recognised), will this mean that the various open source DVD and video projects cannot legally continue? As I understand certainly MPEG 2 (as used in DVD0 uses MP3 to encode the audio. Where does this software stand?
Alex
Re:ftp.kde.org/pub/stable/mandrake/3.0.1/8.2/
on
Is RPM Doomed?
·
· Score: 1
The kdevelop and koffice rpms are not directly related to kde, so the versions in/pub/stable/mandrake/3.0/8.2/ should still be good.
That there the locations of many upgrade rpms is too haphazard is true. Good places to watch out for new packages, I find, is mandrakeforum.net, and pclinuxonline.net which are the stomping grounds of a rather good packager - texstar. IIRC there was for a while, an unstable directory directly above cooker on many mirrors, perhaps that could be ressurected.
(Highly personal opinion) Suse packages suck, why they can't include the version of the package in the file name is beyond me.
I believe the new kde database class might have been responsible for the MySQL dependancy.
That rpm would benfit from a graded dependancy system [required, (highly) recommmended, suggested, would be nice,], I totally agree with.
Alex
Re:Just got ADSL, Just had a nightmare with packag
on
Is RPM Doomed?
·
· Score: 1
But mandrakes packages have some rediculios deps, to install KDE 3.0.1 from there cooker(dev), it wanted me to update thinkgs like unixODBC and MYSQl
Then don't do it! Cooker is not intended for grabbing upgrades from, it's a developer's playground (eg right now the whole thing is compiled with gcc 3.1, that definitely won't work on current releases). If you want KDE 3.0.1 you can get it at ftp.kde.org/pub/stable/mandrake/3.0.1/8.2/ (or better yet one of the mirrors). One set of mandrake 8.2 rpms, that don't have dependancies that aren't on the install CDs. I've used them, they work.
I'm not saying rpm/urpmi is perfect, but any tool used wrongly will not perform as expected.
Point taken, and in an odd way thankyou. In fairness most of those are typos rather than thinkos, but still '7/10 Let down by spelling' would be appropriate. I hadn't realised that I'd made quite that many mistakes to be honest.
As my user bio now says: Yes my touch typing sucks that bad.
Please in smeg's name don't correct this post as well, my ego couldn't take it:).
Ah I see the source of the confision now, I didn't mean tin the metal literally. I used tinfoil as a generic term meaning thin-metal-film-widely-used-in-food-preperation-an d-often-made-of-aluminium, it's a UKism I think, or maybe just a alexwillmerism.
Just a futher thought, the nanotubes in the article explode beacuse they're so effective at absorbing light, and because they have an extremely large surface are to mass ratio. Perhaps coating the tubes in a layer of aluminium a few atoms thick would solve the problem. The tinfoil inductry will be happy.
Quick: A Carbon Nanotube is a molecule of Carbon in the shape of a tube, a few nanometrea across and possibly infinitely long.
Helpful: Carbon Nanotubes are a varient of buckminsterfullerene. Molecules of which are made of 60 carbon atoms in a sephircal arrangement (like a british (soccar) football). Their exetremely tough, and have great potential for drug delivery and lubricant applications. Carbon Nanotubes split the fullerene molecule in half and extend it with a cylinder of carbon atoms. Another way to think of them is by imagining a rolled up sheet of grphite and capping the ends. Some pictures might make things clearer.
Nano is the next step from micro, current microchips are in the 0.1 micrometre range, this is the same as 100 nanometres. Carbon nanotubes are only a few (ie less than 10) nanometres across.
The article discusses single walled nanotubes, the other varient is multiwalled nanotubes, which are simply many nanotubes wrpped in layers - like a telescopic radio ariel. The potential of carbon nanotubes lies in making lots of them long and all in the same orientation, then we have a rope stronger than diamond (think space elevator strong). Also they might be used in nano scale electronics.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in the days (when Windows 98 was the best of the bunch) I used a great tool called ZipMagic. It turned zip files into folders, just as you describe, I could even share the zip file/folder using SMB and other people could connect directly to \\mycomp\stuff.zip\.
I always wondered how the magic was done, thanks for a very informative post.
Alex
PS Might you have a link to that 'update'?
Don't Panic.
They still screwed up the html.
The file is available on the edonkey filesharing network:
E 8D 15CACBEDACE6B5F361|/
ed2k://|file|ifhsetup.exe|220959945|3D8F3F39269
Downloading at the moment.
Alex
CF is cool, it hits the sweet spot between size and features for a mobile device nicely. It's also nice that the same card will store mp3s and boot a computer.
Something I've wondered for a while though - could an adaptor be made allowing a CF host (ie a Zaurus or Ipaq) to talk to a full blown IDE hard drive. Obviously the speed would suck compared to an IDE controller, but it would be cool.
Do you know if this has been, or could be done?
Regards
Alex
TThis link points to telnet://67.37.26.36 which opens to a linux shell at some American ISP, the connection may be logged somewhere and seen as 'questionable activity'.
Welcome to goat.cx TNG. That'll teach me to browse at -1.
If you have a recent java installed, then map24 knocks the veritable socks off all the competition. It displays an interactive vector map, complete with smooth scrolling, zooming and mouse over feature description.
The formatting of the route planning directions leaves a little to be desired, but that's the biggest fault I can think of. On the whole it compares favourably even to MS Autoroute - except it's free, always up to date and cross platform.
If you don't have java it falls back to a static image.
Regards
Alex
No, that's half the joke, as in the phrase said by the drummer of a group so everyone begins the song in synch: 1-2, 1-2-3-4
True, like anthing this has Good and Evil uses, but since it is kernel resident then it requires either a reboot or a siutable set of hooks in the running kernel so it can be loaded as a module.
Thus the impact of malicuous use of this technology could be mitigated by disabling loadable modules once booted, limiting access to kernel structures by loaded modules, using some varient of TCPA (rootkit module not signed), and/or only accepting shutdown signals from the local console.
In a corporate environment however I could see this used as a virtually undetectable piece of snitch software, ie for spying on employees at their workstation, even if they have root.
Regards
Alex
Or in the upgraded version:
$ ping 127.0.0.1
PING 127.0.0.1 (127.0.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time= 408 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time= 376 ms
ICMP Destination Unreachable: Missed a beat
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time= 410 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time= 400 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time= 397 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time= 364 ms
If you do remember the brand of this device could you post it, I've been looking for something similar for a while (of course I was hoping firewire and IR too, but one can't be too picky :).
Regards
Alex
OK, this is off the cuff so probably got a few 'rough edges'.
X = Yearly cost of internet worms and other infectous software to (for instance) UK
Y = Cost of purchasing a virus scanner company & maintaining the database for 10 years. This could be reduced by encouraging community maintenance.
If X >= Y then I propose the government buyout a virus scanner company, open source the product, provide a sourceforge-like page to attract a few geeks, perhaps funds for a full-time developer or two & giveaway the whole lot.
Benefits:
- A Government Approved free virus scanner far more likely to be installed and used by users
- An open source Free virus scanner for those that shun 'Government Approved', ie mind-rays-removed
- Reduced outages due to worms and email viruses, ie less hassle, more lower TCO
Issues
- If too successful this would create a monoculture, although FLOSS approaches and it's inevitable cross platform nature might mitigate
- Government sponsored anti competitive monopolistic practises (if you're in the AV business)
- You still need to persuade people to install and keep the software up to date.
Thoughts? Comments?
Regards
Alex
Perhaps something could be done with a floppy containing just a bootloader and a linux kernel to bootstrap the usb disk, one disk could probably do many operating systems, the question is whether linux would like pretending to be 'merely' a boot loader.
Alex
Ah yes, NTSC.. that wonderful standard, some claim it's somthing to do with National Televison System Committee - I believe. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. It actually stands for Never Twice the Same Colour (sorry Color).
Oops, I appear to have fudded in a sarcastic fudding actually meant to defud.
OK, as the other AC correctly noted, the sixth is Digital Clock.
Quote: KDE has way more options (the clock properties dialog has five tabs!),
Actually it has 6 in KDE version 3.1: General, Timezones, Plain Clock, Analogue Clock, Fuzzy Clock.
For some reason I find that amusing. If you're going to drop some FUD, at least get your facts straight.
I'm guessing 3.2 will have 12 or 24 depending on it's mode.
I don't think it was ever claimed that MS Office is a monopoly. Windows on the other hand is. I can't see an antitrust angle to bastarized file formats/protocols, other than opening them as a resolution.
</bite>
gmplague:
"Excellent, except as I recall, Microsoft Outlook has had this ability [email encryption] since the release of Windows XP."
XPlightcycler: (in reply)
"Also to troll (sorry) what use email encryption if a virus can send the contents of your inbox + personal files to everyone in your address book?"
Sivar: (in reply to the reply)
"The possibility that a rare and unlikely scenario may bypass a protection mechanism does not entirely preclude the usefulness of the mechanism."
This [sivar's] point is valid, but I have to ask, where do Outlook's suceptability to virii/remailer worms and 'rare and unlikely' meet. Outlook (& it's cousin Outlook Express) are extremely susceptable to them, in my experience atleast. Just because these pieces of software can do good encryption doesn't make them secure, for that you would atleast need to add a third party virus scanner.
I'm curious, as without the one off fee or per seat payment a developer/company/project may not make use of the MP3 patents (in countries the patents are recognised), will this mean that the various open source DVD and video projects cannot legally continue? As I understand certainly MPEG 2 (as used in DVD0 uses MP3 to encode the audio. Where does this software stand?
Alex
The kdevelop and koffice rpms are not directly related to kde, so the versions in /pub/stable/mandrake/3.0/8.2/ should still be good.
That there the locations of many upgrade rpms is too haphazard is true. Good places to watch out for new packages, I find, is mandrakeforum.net, and pclinuxonline.net which are the stomping grounds of a rather good packager - texstar. IIRC there was for a while, an unstable directory directly above cooker on many mirrors, perhaps that could be ressurected.
(Highly personal opinion) Suse packages suck, why they can't include the version of the package in the file name is beyond me.
I believe the new kde database class might have been responsible for the MySQL dependancy.
That rpm would benfit from a graded dependancy system [required, (highly) recommmended, suggested, would be nice,], I totally agree with.
Alex
Then don't do it! Cooker is not intended for grabbing upgrades from, it's a developer's playground (eg right now the whole thing is compiled with gcc 3.1, that definitely won't work on current releases). If you want KDE 3.0.1 you can get it at ftp.kde.org/pub/stable/mandrake/3.0.1/8.2/ (or better yet one of the mirrors). One set of mandrake 8.2 rpms, that don't have dependancies that aren't on the install CDs. I've used them, they work.
I'm not saying rpm/urpmi is perfect, but any tool used wrongly will not perform as expected.
Alex
Point taken, and in an odd way thankyou. In fairness most of those are typos rather than thinkos, but still '7/10 Let down by spelling' would be appropriate. I hadn't realised that I'd made quite that many mistakes to be honest.
:).
As my user bio now says:
Yes my touch typing sucks that bad.
Please in smeg's name don't correct this post as well, my ego couldn't take it
Ah I see the source of the confision now, I didn't mean tin the metal literally. I used tinfoil as a generic term meaning thin-metal-film-widely-used-in-food-preperation-an d-often-made-of-aluminium, it's a UKism I think, or maybe just a alexwillmerism.
Alex
It would probably have been better if I wrote:
:).
:)
Perhaps coating the tubes in a layer of aluminium a few atoms thick would solve the problem. The tinfoil inductry will be happy
It was only an inane comment
Alex
Just a futher thought, the nanotubes in the article explode beacuse they're so effective at absorbing light, and because they have an extremely large surface are to mass ratio. Perhaps coating the tubes in a layer of aluminium a few atoms thick would solve the problem. The tinfoil inductry will be happy.
Alex
Quick: A Carbon Nanotube is a molecule of Carbon in the shape of a tube, a few nanometrea across and possibly infinitely long.
Helpful: Carbon Nanotubes are a varient of buckminsterfullerene. Molecules of which are made of 60 carbon atoms in a sephircal arrangement (like a british (soccar) football). Their exetremely tough, and have great potential for drug delivery and lubricant applications. Carbon Nanotubes split the fullerene molecule in half and extend it with a cylinder of carbon atoms. Another way to think of them is by imagining a rolled up sheet of grphite and capping the ends. Some pictures might make things clearer.
Nano is the next step from micro, current microchips are in the 0.1 micrometre range, this is the same as 100 nanometres. Carbon nanotubes are only a few (ie less than 10) nanometres across.
The article discusses single walled nanotubes, the other varient is multiwalled nanotubes, which are simply many nanotubes wrpped in layers - like a telescopic radio ariel. The potential of carbon nanotubes lies in making lots of them long and all in the same orientation, then we have a rope stronger than diamond (think space elevator strong). Also they might be used in nano scale electronics.
Hope that helps
Alex