Leo Laporte (host of This Week in Tech) recently bought a 2010 SYNC-equipped Mustang, and seems to like it a lot. (Of course, Ford is an advertiser, but otoh he bought the Mustang with his own money.) http://leoville.com/to-the-twitmobile
Note that the above vulnerability note is not this particular vulnerability, but the same mitigations apply time and time again. The mitigations include:
- Enable DEP - Disable JavaScript - Disable automatic opening of PDF files by Internet Explorer - Disable the displaying of PDF files in your web browser
How about the automatic opening of PDF files by Firefox or Chrome?
This can be done by un-checking the 'Enable Acrobat JavaScript' in the Edit -> Preferences -> JavaScript window.
I've used Reader forever, and I never even noticed that there was a preferences dialog. There's 26 sub-dialogs, each with one or two dozen options, and (checking a few at random) I see several that look worthy of more investigation. Anyone know of any recommendations of where I should start?
I have a project that requires text recognition. I'm need to quickly identify the presence of text URLs in several thousand photographs. In the easy cases, the URL is a solid color on a contrasting background, added as a band across the top or bottom of the photo. But in the hard cases it's a partially transparent watermark across the center of the photo that may be rotated several degrees from horizontal. The good news is that the URLs all start with "http://", and I don't need the software to capture the entire URL, just let me know that it's present. I need a solution that is faster than a human and reasonably reliable. Can current OCR software handle this? Thanks!
Since exFAT apparently is referenced in the SD standard, people will be forced to use it, if they buy any consumer electronic device containing an SD slot. They can't choose not to use it. It's a hardware standard.
So after exFAT, they won't be able to do what they do today, that is, freely exchange their media among their devices at their will. That's evil, and once again, it comes from Microsoft.
Is there any reason why you can't use UDF on flash media? It's designed for media that wears out with too many writes, so it seems like a perfect fit. And recent (since ~2000) versions support Unicode, so you can use Tengwar Sindarin for your file names.
Non-Windows systems have never required Joliet, but Windows has, because all other solutions are technically inadequate for that OS.
In what way is Rock Ridge "technically inadequate"? For that matter, why not just use UDF? It's designed for all optical media, not just DVDs, and has supported Unicode for almost a decade.
Seriously, until and unless there's (at a minimum) royalty-free supported drivers for non-Microsoft and pre-Vista (not just XP, I use 98 in some situations) operating systems, I don't see this going anywhere.
There is no sugar-coating this: for the purposes of such a specialised course, the only sort of person who can both instill a healthy dose of needed realism in young programmers, and at the same time show them at least some relevant tricks that actually work, and make sense in a real environment, are people who have done this in practice. Themselves. Hands on.
But these guys are expensive to hire. So who you get taught by are, more often than not, the existing staff members of a college. Usually, these are of course your average academic, who are very good at writing up their stuff to appear at SIGGRAPH. But perhaps not quite as good at writing code that is not of throw-away quality.
Have you read Outliers yet? Apparently, the New York City public school system was the best in the world immediately following the Great Depression. This was because the best of the best in science and industry all lost their jobs and got work as teachers instead. Also, the birthrate fell, so the few kids growing up afterwards had very small classes. I mention this because the current recession is also throwing lots of talented people out of work (even in the video game industry), so the next generation may turn out as fortunate as those born in the '20s and 30s.
Re:Only copyleft is "commie", BSD isn't.
on
OpenSolaris Or FreeBSD?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Some of the other systems you mentioned should be, logically, looking at their design and historical position before Linux really took off and the number of products developed from them which could have contributed to their develomement dominating the market. However they have failed. The reason is simple. Every time someone comes up with a product based on a non copyleft system (OS-X; JunOS, Microsoft's TCP/IP stack, IPSO etc. etc.) the community divides between those working on the product and those working on the OS
Surely the BSD lawsuit had something to do with Linux taking off instead of BSD?
I rather doubt it, the timelines don't fit. "USL v. BSDi was a lawsuit brought in the United States in 1992 [...]. The case was settled out of court in 1993 [...]."
Meanwhile, Linux didn't hit version 1.0 until March, 1994. Yggdrasil, the first distro, was released in November, 1992, and Slackware in June, 1993, but they were strictly for hobbyists. Anyone looking to do something commercial would have wanted to use a more mature OS, and as I recall there were lots of commercial solutions during that time frame that were based off of BSD derivatives.
IMHO, Linux beat the BSDs for the same reason it beat Minux. It provided meaningful work for outside contributors. To be meaningful, work has to provide autonomy, complexity and a connection between effort and reward. The first two are easy, they are practically inherent to the software development process. The last one is the winner. Wikipedia had the same property, and look at how it grew. Now it seems to be getting harder to make meaningful contributions, and participation seems to be falling. It took a while for people to discover that the iPhone App Store never had this property, but now even the commercial developers are leaving. Especially in the early days, Linus accepted other people's contributions with very few strings, so people got rapid positive feedback. As Linux has grown, it has gotten harder to keep doing this, but Linus seems to try harder than his "competitors". This is the core of the success of Linux.
I work as an academic in Computer Graphics, so I sort of know what I'm talking about here... and frankly, there are too many people in this area already who "are into" game developing. Far too many.
Personally, I'm "into" game developing. I've written a number of games, one of which even won an (admittedly minor) award. How much money have I earned from this? Zip. It's a hobby. In my day job, I do nothing but Perl and Korn shell scripting, validating command line or CGI inputs and gluing together programs that other people wrote. It pays well and it seems immune to being outsourced overseas, so I'm happy. On my home PC, however, I have a few IDEs installed which I use for various personal projects. Sometimes I assist in various GPL projects to add features I want, but most of the time I'm writing games, most of which will probably never be seen by anyone but me. It gives me a fun way to practice the technical skills I use at work: requirements gathering, specification writing, unit testing. Yeah, it's informal and I cut corners a lot, but more than once I've had a project tossed on my plate that required skills I'd been honing at home in my free time. (This is very likely why my job pays well and seems immune to being outsourced overseas.)
So, how do you feel about youth sports leagues? Are there far too many people who are already into sports, so kids should stop playing? As I see it, you'll probably never play in the big leagues (or even on a high school team) but you learn habits that will be useful for a lifetime.
I have always believed that if something is networked, it can be subject to unauthorized access. I hope I am wrong.
I know that you mean computer networking, but there are other types of networks and power grids are one of them. There is no single US power grid. North America has two major and several minor grids covering most of the US and Canada, and there are lots of local grids that aren't interconnected at all. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nercmap.JPG I suppose that knocking out the Eastern or Western Interconnection is possible, but the other side would stay up, as would Alaska, Quebec and Texas.
Well, that sounds like it should be no problem at all! In reality: read up on the system known as ERGM - the Extended Range Guided Munition. This was to be a rocked-assisted round fired out of a 5" gun barrel. The program was ultimately cancelled in 2008 after almost 14 years of development. The reason: the innards couldn't withstand the G forces involved without malfunctioning. The bottom line here is that packing stuff to withstand very high accelerations is a lot harder than you think.
So call me when 1) we actually know how to build an electrical launcher big enough to launch something the size of a space power satellite and 2) we can do it without pulverizing the payload. Until then, this is about as realistic as planning for invisible unicorns to produce your power.
Addressing your first point: "During development, the ERGM failed several tests in which the tail fins failed to deploy at launch, rocket motors did not ignite or the electronic components did not survive the stress of being shot from a deck gun." That's three issues, but the first won't matter if you're launching to orbit. For the third, I looked up the details of the ERGM's "launch platform": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5%22/54_caliber_Mark_45_gun. An 8 meter barrel with an 808 m/s muzzle velocity implies an average acceleration of 36,270 m/s^2, which is over 4,000 Gs, and I expect that there's a bit more acceleration at the start than at the end. That's quite a bit different from the projected 2,000 Gs of the proposed launcher. That leaves reliably igniting the rocket motors, and all I can say is that again the reducing acceleration should make that easier as well.
Addressing your second point: A lot of the mass of an SSPS is in the structural members. It boils down to an optimization problem; which things can be shipped via a high-gee launcher and which are better shipped by conventional rockets? Steel girders and copper wire should withstand very high accelerations very easily. Photo-voltaic cells can probably also be shipped this way, as they aren't very complicated. People go up the expensive way, and maybe the most sensitive electronics. But note that even if only 1% of the samples of a component survive a high-gee launch, it could still be cheaper to ship that way and just toss the dead samples upon arrival.
The gist is, if you can pack things to withstand 2,000 Gs of acceleration, you can launch an object into orbit using just electricity. Once the cargo reaches apogee, you need to adjust the orbit to one that won't re-intercept the atmosphere, but that only take a small solid fuel thruster. Here's one that is very cheap to make: http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/091021-tw-alice-rocket.html
Given that it will undoubtedly be necessary to NewSID machines after all, who's got a copy of NewSID?
http://thepiratebay.org/details.php?id=3504780 This is a snapshot of all of the SysInternals utilities made immediately after Microsoft purchased the company. I don't know which version of NewSID is in it (I'm downloading it myself right now). Hopefully, someone will create a torrent containing the final version of NewSID and put it somewhere.
And, um, you know... this wouldn't be a way for Microsoft to discredit Ghosting?
Actually, I'm wondering exactly who made the "occasional reports that some Windows component would fail after NewSID was used". Other people are speculating that resetting the SID also resets the product activation clock. That would be a very interesting "failure" as it would explain the speed with which NewSID was removed. Obviously, the guy that created that torrent no longer seems quite as paranoid as he probably did when he created it.
I once took a class in AI in which the professor showed us a film from the late 1960's that demonstrated just such a tool. You wrote an equation in math notation with a light-pen (or something similar) on to a screen, and it translated your marks (pen movements) into an internal representation and then displayed a formatted version on the screen.
If it could be done for a research project in the late 60's, then surely it's still technically possible and could probably do better.
I remember that project. As I recall, it was all well and good up to the moment the software went sentient and tried to kill the researchers. DARPA dropped funding and began a campaign to convince everyone that AI would never be practical.
Sony also says it could have a number of applications, such as a digital sign, a digital frame, a medical display, or a virtual pet. Looking at the product image, who else wants to bet on the latter?)
There are two alternatives being discussed. The first (or former) is "a number of applications, such as a digital sign, a digital frame, a medical display", where the conjunction has been elided. The second (or latter) is "a virtual pet", as in "Sony also says it could have a virtual pet." This is indicative of the advanced nature of the design. We should be glad that its pets would be virtual, as a device of such capabilities could easily have human pets. And if such a situation were to come to pass, I, for one, would welcome our new 360 3-D display overlords.
NASA announced plans to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade, the president announced that he was not a crook, and thousands of hippies descended upon Woodstock for 3 days of peace & music,
Slashdot Mirror
Leo Laporte (host of This Week in Tech) recently bought a 2010 SYNC-equipped Mustang, and seems to like it a lot. (Of course, Ford is an advertiser, but otoh he bought the Mustang with his own money.) http://leoville.com/to-the-twitmobile
CERT has some suggestions for securing Adobe Reader here:
http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/257117
Note that the above vulnerability note is not this particular vulnerability, but the same mitigations apply time and time again. The mitigations include:
- Enable DEP
- Disable JavaScript
- Disable automatic opening of PDF files by Internet Explorer
- Disable the displaying of PDF files in your web browser
How about the automatic opening of PDF files by Firefox or Chrome?
This can be done by un-checking the 'Enable Acrobat JavaScript' in the Edit -> Preferences -> JavaScript window.
I've used Reader forever, and I never even noticed that there was a preferences dialog. There's 26 sub-dialogs, each with one or two dozen options, and (checking a few at random) I see several that look worthy of more investigation. Anyone know of any recommendations of where I should start?
I have a project that requires text recognition. I'm need to quickly identify the presence of text URLs in several thousand photographs. In the easy cases, the URL is a solid color on a contrasting background, added as a band across the top or bottom of the photo. But in the hard cases it's a partially transparent watermark across the center of the photo that may be rotated several degrees from horizontal. The good news is that the URLs all start with "http://", and I don't need the software to capture the entire URL, just let me know that it's present. I need a solution that is faster than a human and reasonably reliable. Can current OCR software handle this? Thanks!
Since exFAT apparently is referenced in the SD standard, people will be forced to use it, if they buy any consumer electronic device containing an SD slot. They can't choose not to use it. It's a hardware standard.
So after exFAT, they won't be able to do what they do today, that is, freely exchange their media among their devices at their will. That's evil, and once again, it comes from Microsoft.
Is there any reason why you can't use UDF on flash media? It's designed for media that wears out with too many writes, so it seems like a perfect fit. And recent (since ~2000) versions support Unicode, so you can use Tengwar Sindarin for your file names.
Non-Windows systems have never required Joliet, but Windows has, because all other solutions are technically inadequate for that OS.
In what way is Rock Ridge "technically inadequate"? For that matter, why not just use UDF? It's designed for all optical media, not just DVDs, and has supported Unicode for almost a decade.
Seriously, until and unless there's (at a minimum) royalty-free supported drivers for non-Microsoft and pre-Vista (not just XP, I use 98 in some situations) operating systems, I don't see this going anywhere.
NASA is *always* under-budget. Out-sourcing a one-off design to private industry *always* costs more than doing something in-house. Do the math.
Hello, old meme, long time no see.
There is no sugar-coating this: for the purposes of such a specialised course, the only sort of person who can both instill a healthy dose of needed realism in young programmers, and at the same time show them at least some relevant tricks that actually work, and make sense in a real environment, are people who have done this in practice. Themselves. Hands on.
But these guys are expensive to hire. So who you get taught by are, more often than not, the existing staff members of a college. Usually, these are of course your average academic, who are very good at writing up their stuff to appear at SIGGRAPH. But perhaps not quite as good at writing code that is not of throw-away quality.
Have you read Outliers yet? Apparently, the New York City public school system was the best in the world immediately following the Great Depression. This was because the best of the best in science and industry all lost their jobs and got work as teachers instead. Also, the birthrate fell, so the few kids growing up afterwards had very small classes. I mention this because the current recession is also throwing lots of talented people out of work (even in the video game industry), so the next generation may turn out as fortunate as those born in the '20s and 30s.
Surely the BSD lawsuit had something to do with Linux taking off instead of BSD?
I rather doubt it, the timelines don't fit. "USL v. BSDi was a lawsuit brought in the United States in 1992 [...]. The case was settled out of court in 1993 [...]."
Meanwhile, Linux didn't hit version 1.0 until March, 1994. Yggdrasil, the first distro, was released in November, 1992, and Slackware in June, 1993, but they were strictly for hobbyists. Anyone looking to do something commercial would have wanted to use a more mature OS, and as I recall there were lots of commercial solutions during that time frame that were based off of BSD derivatives.
IMHO, Linux beat the BSDs for the same reason it beat Minux. It provided meaningful work for outside contributors. To be meaningful, work has to provide autonomy, complexity and a connection between effort and reward. The first two are easy, they are practically inherent to the software development process. The last one is the winner. Wikipedia had the same property, and look at how it grew. Now it seems to be getting harder to make meaningful contributions, and participation seems to be falling. It took a while for people to discover that the iPhone App Store never had this property, but now even the commercial developers are leaving. Especially in the early days, Linus accepted other people's contributions with very few strings, so people got rapid positive feedback. As Linux has grown, it has gotten harder to keep doing this, but Linus seems to try harder than his "competitors". This is the core of the success of Linux.
Why do games have to be 2D? I've programmed fairly complex text adventures just fine.
I work as an academic in Computer Graphics, so I sort of know what I'm talking about here... and frankly, there are too many people in this area already who "are into" game developing. Far too many.
Personally, I'm "into" game developing. I've written a number of games, one of which even won an (admittedly minor) award. How much money have I earned from this? Zip. It's a hobby. In my day job, I do nothing but Perl and Korn shell scripting, validating command line or CGI inputs and gluing together programs that other people wrote. It pays well and it seems immune to being outsourced overseas, so I'm happy. On my home PC, however, I have a few IDEs installed which I use for various personal projects. Sometimes I assist in various GPL projects to add features I want, but most of the time I'm writing games, most of which will probably never be seen by anyone but me. It gives me a fun way to practice the technical skills I use at work: requirements gathering, specification writing, unit testing. Yeah, it's informal and I cut corners a lot, but more than once I've had a project tossed on my plate that required skills I'd been honing at home in my free time. (This is very likely why my job pays well and seems immune to being outsourced overseas.)
So, how do you feel about youth sports leagues? Are there far too many people who are already into sports, so kids should stop playing? As I see it, you'll probably never play in the big leagues (or even on a high school team) but you learn habits that will be useful for a lifetime.
I have always believed that if something is networked, it can be subject to unauthorized access. I hope I am wrong.
I know that you mean computer networking, but there are other types of networks and power grids are one of them. There is no single US power grid. North America has two major and several minor grids covering most of the US and Canada, and there are lots of local grids that aren't interconnected at all. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nercmap.JPG I suppose that knocking out the Eastern or Western Interconnection is possible, but the other side would stay up, as would Alaska, Quebec and Texas.
Well, that sounds like it should be no problem at all! In reality: read up on the system known as ERGM - the Extended Range Guided Munition. This was to be a rocked-assisted round fired out of a 5" gun barrel. The program was ultimately cancelled in 2008 after almost 14 years of development. The reason: the innards couldn't withstand the G forces involved without malfunctioning. The bottom line here is that packing stuff to withstand very high accelerations is a lot harder than you think.
So call me when 1) we actually know how to build an electrical launcher big enough to launch something the size of a space power satellite and 2) we can do it without pulverizing the payload. Until then, this is about as realistic as planning for invisible unicorns to produce your power.
OK, I did some reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Range_Guided_Munition.
Addressing your first point: "During development, the ERGM failed several tests in which the tail fins failed to deploy at launch, rocket motors did not ignite or the electronic components did not survive the stress of being shot from a deck gun." That's three issues, but the first won't matter if you're launching to orbit. For the third, I looked up the details of the ERGM's "launch platform": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5%22/54_caliber_Mark_45_gun. An 8 meter barrel with an 808 m/s muzzle velocity implies an average acceleration of 36,270 m/s^2, which is over 4,000 Gs, and I expect that there's a bit more acceleration at the start than at the end. That's quite a bit different from the projected 2,000 Gs of the proposed launcher. That leaves reliably igniting the rocket motors, and all I can say is that again the reducing acceleration should make that easier as well.
Addressing your second point: A lot of the mass of an SSPS is in the structural members. It boils down to an optimization problem; which things can be shipped via a high-gee launcher and which are better shipped by conventional rockets? Steel girders and copper wire should withstand very high accelerations very easily. Photo-voltaic cells can probably also be shipped this way, as they aren't very complicated. People go up the expensive way, and maybe the most sensitive electronics. But note that even if only 1% of the samples of a component survive a high-gee launch, it could still be cheaper to ship that way and just toss the dead samples upon arrival.
Not going to happen. No use writing why AGAIN, I think this reply to the original post is just fine:
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2009/09/01/here-we-go-again-with-the-spss/
You don't seem to realize that there's more than one way to launch a payload. Here's a /. article from 2006, for instance, that discusses ballistic launches: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/03/1732258.
The gist is, if you can pack things to withstand 2,000 Gs of acceleration, you can launch an object into orbit using just electricity. Once the cargo reaches apogee, you need to adjust the orbit to one that won't re-intercept the atmosphere, but that only take a small solid fuel thruster. Here's one that is very cheap to make: http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/091021-tw-alice-rocket.html
For all those who have trouble following the math, here's what Google says: http://www.google.com/search?q=2040+feet+/+30+seconds+in+miles+per+hour
Given that it will undoubtedly be necessary to NewSID machines after all, who's got a copy of NewSID?
http://thepiratebay.org/details.php?id=3504780
This is a snapshot of all of the SysInternals utilities made immediately after Microsoft purchased the company. I don't know which version of NewSID is in it (I'm downloading it myself right now). Hopefully, someone will create a torrent containing the final version of NewSID and put it somewhere.
And, um, you know... this wouldn't be a way for Microsoft to discredit Ghosting?
Actually, I'm wondering exactly who made the "occasional reports that some Windows component would fail after NewSID was used". Other people are speculating that resetting the SID also resets the product activation clock. That would be a very interesting "failure" as it would explain the speed with which NewSID was removed. Obviously, the guy that created that torrent no longer seems quite as paranoid as he probably did when he created it.
I once took a class in AI in which the professor showed us a film from the late 1960's that demonstrated just such a tool. You wrote an equation in math notation with a light-pen (or something similar) on to a screen, and it translated your marks (pen movements) into an internal representation and then displayed a formatted version on the screen.
If it could be done for a research project in the late 60's, then surely it's still technically possible and could probably do better.
I remember that project. As I recall, it was all well and good up to the moment the software went sentient and tried to kill the researchers. DARPA dropped funding and began a campaign to convince everyone that AI would never be practical.
I'd like to "try before I buy", but I can't find any links to just the emulator.
You've parsed the sentence wrong. Let me help.
Sony also says it could have a number of applications, such as a digital sign, a digital frame, a medical display, or a virtual pet. Looking at the product image, who else wants to bet on the latter?)
There are two alternatives being discussed. The first (or former) is "a number of applications, such as a digital sign, a digital frame, a medical display", where the conjunction has been elided. The second (or latter) is "a virtual pet", as in "Sony also says it could have a virtual pet." This is indicative of the advanced nature of the design. We should be glad that its pets would be virtual, as a device of such capabilities could easily have human pets. And if such a situation were to come to pass, I, for one, would welcome our new 360 3-D display overlords.
And I almost forgot: telnet://nethack.alt.org/
In order of my personal preferences, I'd suggest NetHack, Angband, NetHack, SLASH'EM, NetHack, ADOM, NetHack, and, oh yeah, NetHack.
NASA announced plans to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade, the president announced that he was not a crook, and thousands of hippies descended upon Woodstock for 3 days of peace & music,
(*) at least it SHOULD be rare, because it totally breaks the separation between UI, Code and Data, by mixing all three together into one huge mess.
But it's a tasty mess!