Your legacy systems are highly unlikely to have healthy IDE HDDS after this long in service, and getting replacements is not likely to be possible in another 5 years.
If you use this "preboot ramdisk" method, you can use a poor man's SSD, like a CF->IDE adaptor. the limited speed (often painfully slow. My CF adaptor is limited to PIO4 tranfers! Gerk!) And limited writelife of this super bargain basement solution are mostly overcome by the read once, write never nature of this setup. The adaptors themselves are cheap. If you don't want to dish out the $$ for CF modules, you actually *can* chain an SDHC->CF adaptor to the IDE interface, and use dirt cheap SD cards. (These solutions are very popular with embedded systems where rugged and cheap are both required. Tradeoff is speed. Boot up time will be painful, but once up, will be a speed demon.)
That would let your industrial install 9x systems live for a *very* long time, and would put a lot less wear on the system's PSU.
Since you are booting them via syslinux, you can have a great many fully configured disk images stored on the media. A commodity 32gb SDCard could hold 64 fully configured image configurations, and present a list on bootup! (Even more if you use win95B, or win98 first edition, which can live in 256mb and 384mb images, respectively. Tested!)
For ease of maintenance, I strongly suggest a uniform workstation hardware base, so that you can use one system as the testbed, build images from it, and deploy them everywhere else. Possbly use a startup script to change the network IDs to avoid collisions on the fly.
Ideally, once all set up, this is a "set and forget" solution. However, the tradeoff is in prepping suitable images, which isn't a trivial exercise.
There was a time in the distant past that I built a "very special" win9x machine for this very purpose.
Yes, I can read your mind. "Win9x? Are you fucking serious? Turn in your geek card right now!" Yadda, yadda.
Just hear me out.
Win9x, because it relies on realmode dos interrupt disk handlers, can be loaded from a preboot environment ram only block device. Such as that provided by Memdisk, from the syslinux tool set.
Essentially, you have a disk image file on a bootable EXT2 volume (nothing ever gets written on it, so it doesn't need a journal.) With the syslinux bootloader on the MBR. It is the default boot device.
On boot, syslinux starts, loads the memdisk block device driver, and copies the win9x image into ram, it patches int15 to report a different max size of installed XMS, then executes the "mbr" of the ram block device.
BOOM. Win9x in a ramdisk.
You can use a drivespace compressed image to achieve maximum data density for the consumed block of memory. Drivespace3 with ultrapack on gets almost 2:1 packing on normal program and file data. You can get a *lot* of stuff inside a 512mb image file.
Throw in a reasonably recent firefox, courtesy of KernelEx (an open source kernel resource extender for win9x, which allows a good deal of 2k and XP native applications to run, including FF10, and a modern flashplayer with ABP and noscript.) And a good software firewall, turn off all filesahring services, and essentially lock down the 9x system as far as possible, and you have exactly what your horrible family member and or aquaintence wants: a familiar user environment that they can walk all over.
It also has what you want: pull the plug, and it is magically fresh, clean, shiny and new again as soon as you power it on.
9x doesn't know how to deal with EXT filesystems, so the physical HDD is never exposed to your user.
The only major problems are 9x's abhorrent 2gb RAM limit, and its abysmal network safety rating, coupled with its rather dated hardware base. (Plus the difficulty of getting a 9x install up and running smoothly with all the perks a normal user could want, without breaking it, on a teensy weensie volume.)
On the plus side, being 100% in RAM on a reasonably modern hardware platform, it is fast as fuck. The test systems I built had Office97, firefox 10, flashplayer10, the WEP, a pirate copy of zonealarm pro, photoshop7, media player 10, KernelEx, and a few other odds and ends on it, with 50mb of "free" space left on the compressed volume to serve as browsing cache space. It was snappy as hell.
I have only done this a few times as just a lesson in self-punishment/"let's see what kind of frankenstein's monster we can build out of retro parts!" Type exercise, but the finished product is incredibly hard to kill, and keep dead. Bluescreens of death? Caught a nasty worm in the 10 seconds it was on the net? Power it off, power it back on. Good as new.
Gives a whole new meaning to "zombie workstation".
I have a celeron POS I am contemplating doing this to actually. I would prefer ramdisked win2k or better though, but I don't know of a way to boot the OS out of a block device after NTLDR starts, and before control is passed to NTOSKRNL. Maybe a hacked FreeLDR from reactos would work though.
4) avoid litigation when the "hot coffee" easter egg gets accidentally (on purpose) unlocked on the geological simulation system, under the codename "rock her world."
Mostly that has to do with incorrect/inappropriate weights being assigned to gameworld objects.
Many world objects weight exactly the same as styrofoam, but somehow have enough kinetic energy when thrown to instagib the bad guy. Others are made to weigh 100x that of lead, but somehow actually get tossed by an explosion instead of simply pushed a little.
If they plug in sane values for mass, center of mass, "bounciness", elasticity, inertia, and gravity, the should get mostly useful simulations. Issues with air pressure (it is an enclosed space, with an explosive charge, after all) might cause problems, but adapting it with another added value as a delta to object vectors (with a fall off radius) would fix it somewhat.
Incorrect, determining the mechanism behind the "paranormal" telepathy makes it cease being "paranormal" under the definition you are employing, because it then DOES fall inside the realm of scientific knowledge. In order for it to satisfy that definition, the following would have to be true:
1) there is a multiverse 2) the phenomenon makes use of the physics inside another different universe 3) because of 1 and 2, the full scope of possible interaction and mechanism can never be fully known by the science and physics of THIS universe, only the intial states, and the outputs.
Eg, something akin to:
"Oh look! I can send a superluminal message via (mechanism X) of a W boson! Who knew that you could correlate natural weak force decay of two baryons consistently using the (X mechanism), regardless of the distances between them!?"
"That's fascinting Mr Specious P. Aytchdee! How does it work!?"
"We don't know, and can never know! It somehow just does!"
*THAT* is the goalpost set by the challenge, using the definition of paranormal you are invoking.
"Looking behind a door", and 'looking behind a closet door are not the same thing!
Eg, the GP's analysis would hold if said door was to the "don't go in here! Top secret and unethical genetic experiments room! NO admittance!" Room, and the mad scientist inside had indeed injected somatic cells from a goose embryo and a norwhal embryo into a miniature pony embryo, causing it to develop goose wings and a spiral horn on its head, and gestating the animal to term.
It *IS* possible to do that, so the "pegacorn" can potentially exist. He did an end run around your claiming te transgenic horror isn't a "true" pegacorn, hence the no true scottsman rhetoric.
Your response was to move the goal post, (so, now its somehow specifically a CLOSET door? And not just any old door, like it was before? Interesting...) and verbally abuse him, rather than behave yourself with propr candor.
Good show sir, your wit has been absolutely entertaining.
Personally, I think the issue (weather or not the money will be awarded) depends on how one defines "paranormal".
If you mean "paranormal" as in "cannot possibly happen/pure suspension of the real/magic." Then no, it will never be awarded, because nothing unreal exists.
If you mean "paranormal" as in "falls outside the scope of what is considered humanly possible" then it is theoretically awardable.
Example experiment:
Humans can't normally see UV light or UV dyes. So, I paint a sheet of purple paper with UV reflective dyes that respond to UV emissions *WAY* outside human perception. The dyes are aranged on the paper in the form of a very recognizable image. I will pay you to tell me what the images I have printed on my papers are, reliably, consistently, and without any external assistance.
The experiment tests for paranormal vision, where "paranormal" is used in the second sense of the word. Humans with mutant photoreceptor protiens may well be able to meet the qualifications of the test, and would indeed have such paranormal vision.
Same with ESP. Humans lack specialized sensory organs to detect electromagnetism, for instance. Demonstrating an ability to reliably detect such phenomena would be genuine ESP.
Again, if you kneejerk stamp "MAGIC!" On those terms, then science is not and cannot ever deal with them.
If you have copyright granted redistribution rights to the cd image file contents, then yes. Putting ripped CD images on a webserver *IS* perfectly legal.
The scenario you painted is not a good comparison to this judgement.
A dvr allows you to record live a live stream, and then play it back later. It is legal under rulings related to vcr devices. A slingbox does a point to point retransmission from a remote media source to the recipient. It is basically a cleaner version of watching (well trying to anyway...) a movie over RDP.
In both cases, it is presumed that the user has legal rights to the media being recorded, and has limited rights to timeshift and transcode the content into a format suitable for their viewer. Those rights come directly from being within the broadcast area, and being legit customers.
This device requires the user to physically have the reception equipment inside the service area, which then prevents it from running foul of that regional licensing, and the previously held rulings.
eg, to make it fit with your webserver + cd image analogy, we have to do a lot of shoehorning:
1) we have to assume (an absurd ruling exists to permit) that simplying in a certain region immediately grants you access to a specific disk's contents.
2) you place that disk in a drive attached to the webserver, which you operate in a remote location that is within the 'authorized playing area'.
3) only you are then able to access the contents of that disk remotely.
When seen this way, what the TV broadcasters are offering is this:
*a 'disk' that immediately self destructs after being played *a limited personal use only right to record subsequently re-view the playback of the disk, and a right to view the contents of the played back disk, dependent upon your home address. *a defacto ability to convert that recording into another format.
What they are objecting to:
*recording the playback, per bulleted item 2, within the authorized viewing area, per bullet 2, of the disk provided per bullet 1, re-coding that recording per bullet 3, and then viewing that re-coded recording outside of the authorized viewing area.
In other words, what they are objecting to is functionally identical to what happens if I physically pack my DVR with me when I leave the authorized viewing area, and view my legal recordings while on vacation. The only difference is the degree of time shifting. (The Aerero timeshifts a few seconds from live broadcast time. Packing one of my DVRs with me on vacation timeshifts several hours to several days from live broadcast time. Otherwise the effect is exactly the same: I am viewing their regional programming "outside the viewing area."
Much like the quip about quibbling over the price of prostitution(1), these companies are quibbling over the amount of time delay between local broadcast, and viewing of a legally made recording.
([1), a wealthy man candidly asks an attractive woman if she will have sex with him for 10 million dollars. She says yes. He offers her 10 dollars. She is insensed, and demands to know what kind of woman he thinks she is. He calmly replies: madame, we have already established that you are a prostitute, we are just haggling over the price.")
Why not use a harvard based system then? Seprating program ram from data ram would fantastically limit the options of malicious asshats attempting exploits. Trojan horsing an executable payload in the data portion of the stack and jumping execution simply wouldn't work on harvard.
Designing a device that can do all these things is not terribly difficult. There is really no reason for the "OMG! It has to have all the things, and ON der interwebz!" Other than becaue doing so eases central management. "Central management" is the exact same thing as vendor lock in. When the device and its software are subject to central managment, YOU don't manage the device, THEY do. That's the point!
They can enforce a consistent and quality experience without that kind of leash.
They just don't want to, because the users you cite aren't educated enough to know that the things being given up are not necessary things they must trade to get what they want.
The problem with allowing offline applications, is that it totally negates the power inherent in the system to combat unauthorized applet use/development.
Eg, if there is a local cached copy of [superfantastical high dollar app], I can manipulate this cached copy, and then release it through less controlled channels. Allowing offline cached programs to be run permits users to run such pirated copies, and permits tinkerers to break the ecosystem further by circumenting the central control heirarchy in the system's design.
It would fundementally break what makes the chromebook "different" from just being another computer and OS combo.
Sadly, the trend seems to have reversed in the past decade.:(
Look at facebook and pals. People seem hell bent on throwing their privacy into the hands of shysters for something shiny. Apple is already on the way this direction with siri, which is exactly this kind of application. (Siri runs on servers owned by apple, the app is just an interface to the big iron.) I don't imagine apple will find siri's adoption "discouraging".
Just turn the heat up slowly instead of all at once, and people will cease to remember how things used to be. (Afterall, we will all be "grandpa telling stories" by then.) After that, its all downhill.
The decision that "privacy is dead" happened over a decade ago. Or, do you not remember Scott McNealy, former chairman of Sun Microsystems, who in 1999 said, "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." And the observation by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison: "The privacy you're concerned about is largely an illusion. All you have to give up is your illusions, not any of your privacy." ??
Government has no incentive whatsoever to intervene here, because they also directly profit from stomping on privacy. Look at this editorial for instance. Unless the politicos are themselves harmed by the loss of privacy, they have no incentive to protect it, and every reason to trample all over it instead.
The cleary proscribed solution to this problem is to exploit the fuck out of this surveylance society they are working oh so hard to make, and put THEM under the spotlight. It is the only way to get the retractions on positions and rulings required to halt the slide downhill. The leaders are only concerned with themselves, as is true of all psychopaths. You have to make them feel the fires too to get them motivated to do what is right, and they will bitch mightily about it the whole time.
Amusingly, that's what orgs like wikileaks aimed to do. We saw how that's worked for the likes of Assange. (Yes, he is the very definition of douche, but a douche that exposed a lot of dirty dealing, and pissed in a lot of cheerios, which is exactly what was needed, and is still desperately needed.)
But that would imply that a too_big_to_fail process can indeed fail! Allowing the contention to kill the first process, instead of jumping instantly to the allocator of last resort breaks the model!
Specifically, it is a computer controlled answering machine. (Finally, something to use those old pci phone modems for!) When a call goes through the preprogrammed number of rings, it answers, like a normal answering machine. Then it sits there on the line issuing perfect silence. It waits for the caller to speak. If the caller speaks first, it presumes that this is a real human calling, and issues the recorded answering message for humans. If there are several seconds of protracted silence, it issues a "hello?" In the owners voice. If this initiates activity on the line, it triggers some accoustic analysis software, which looks for audio compression artifacts, which would indicate that the "caller" is a robot. During this time it is silent. If "activity" continues, and the accoustic analysis indicates a robot, it cordially greets the fellow robot, and proudly states that it wishes to only speak in binary, then proceeds to say "one zero zero one one one zero one.." in a very stilted microsoft SAM type voice. At this rate, it saying "fuck off and die, robocalling assholes." Will take several minutes, and not run foul of any telephone decency lws that might be involved with the likely international transaction. Keeping the robot on line as long as possible reduces the profit margin of the cold calling center.
The robot answering machine should have some LED lights on top to indicate the "status" of the system, showing "sandby", "hello human caller", and "fucking with another robot."
a voice modem attached to something like a sheeva plug would be ideal.
As I understood it, a message travelling at FTL will experience exotic negative time, since it is travelling faster than light. (At exactly c, it experiences 0 time) the sender and reciever do not experience this exotic time. However, the message itself acheives its apparent FTL by going backward in time as measured by the conversationalists respectively.
Combining normal time reference frames with imaginary negative time reference frames results in strange voodoo though. I would conjecture that because we don't see oddball neutrinos with antimass traveling at ftl velocities in particle collisions, that this kind of communication is not really possible. The closest thing the time reversed data transmission I can think of is the "charlie sends photons to alice and bob, they later compre notes" experiment:
So, this gets to be used by all those bank and loan institutions who use trade bots to manipulate the global stock market?
Question: what happens if 2 such processes re running concurrently on the same node, and actively try to outperform the other by proactivally allocating all available free memory?
If all it was doing was serving print jobs, and it had enough RAM on it, the netware server should never have needed to access the drive after being booted.
Netware 5 products had some silly issues where if the SYS volume became full, the server would panic and halt, but NW3 didnt have such an issue. When I was forced to take that NW5 class so many years ago, I spent ample amounts of time poking holes in the NW server's supposed security. Oh, the joys of getting the server to create printer spool objects on the sys volume, using its own credentials instead of mine.:D NW3 was much more sane bout such things.
*I never did get a satisfactory answer from my instructor on how NW5's proprietary filesystem could do subsector allocations and also not need defragementation after many years of dealing with small and large files on the same disk, nor on how much bloat the equivalent of the MFT would gain when millions of teeny files get put on the volume. (sigh)
The only hassle I really remember with NW3 and 4 were in trying to get windows clients to play nice, or in trying to get DOS network adaptors to load their drivers and NOT stomp all over the conventional memory space.
1) in what neighborhoods are these proactive activities being conducted?
2) what demographics specifically are benefitted by this malappropriation of resources?
Consider how the Kennedys managed to halt the cape windfarm project buildout for decades, because they didn't want to see any windmills from their summer homes.
Now... consider: "Martha's Vineyard + roudy teenagers with loud music", interrupting their wealthy, well to do lifestyles. (Yes, I know MV is not in boston. I am pointing at the stereotype.)
It isn't hard for me to see this kind of thing happening, if "Mr Kennedy is being disturbed by all those rave parties down the street."
The issue isn't that cracking down on rave parties has more merit than cracking down on rape, armed robbery, kidnappings, etc. It is that "the wishes of wealthy and influential citizens" are more important than those things.
I didn't mean it in a snarky way, even if the replies came out that way due to responding in kind.
I just like being able to grab the image and keep it. Totally agree about being to pan and zoom on the martian landscape from a POS android phone. Totally diggin it.
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You have to support legacy 9x systems? Ouch.
Here's a few other tidbits to help then. :D
Your legacy systems are highly unlikely to have healthy IDE HDDS after this long in service, and getting replacements is not likely to be possible in another 5 years.
If you use this "preboot ramdisk" method, you can use a poor man's SSD, like a CF->IDE adaptor. the limited speed (often painfully slow. My CF adaptor is limited to PIO4 tranfers! Gerk!) And limited writelife of this super bargain basement solution are mostly overcome by the read once, write never nature of this setup. The adaptors themselves are cheap. If you don't want to dish out the $$ for CF modules, you actually *can* chain an SDHC->CF adaptor to the IDE interface, and use dirt cheap SD cards. (These solutions are very popular with embedded systems where rugged and cheap are both required. Tradeoff is speed. Boot up time will be painful, but once up, will be a speed demon.)
That would let your industrial install 9x systems live for a *very* long time, and would put a lot less wear on the system's PSU.
Since you are booting them via syslinux, you can have a great many fully configured disk images stored on the media. A commodity 32gb SDCard could hold 64 fully configured image configurations, and present a list on bootup! (Even more if you use win95B, or win98 first edition, which can live in 256mb and 384mb images, respectively. Tested!)
For ease of maintenance, I strongly suggest a uniform workstation hardware base, so that you can use one system as the testbed, build images from it, and deploy them everywhere else. Possbly use a startup script to change the network IDs to avoid collisions on the fly.
Ideally, once all set up, this is a "set and forget" solution. However, the tradeoff is in prepping suitable images, which isn't a trivial exercise.
There was a time in the distant past that I built a "very special" win9x machine for this very purpose.
Yes, I can read your mind. "Win9x? Are you fucking serious? Turn in your geek card right now!" Yadda, yadda.
Just hear me out.
Win9x, because it relies on realmode dos interrupt disk handlers, can be loaded from a preboot environment ram only block device. Such as that provided by Memdisk, from the syslinux tool set.
Essentially, you have a disk image file on a bootable EXT2 volume (nothing ever gets written on it, so it doesn't need a journal.) With the syslinux bootloader on the MBR. It is the default boot device.
On boot, syslinux starts, loads the memdisk block device driver, and copies the win9x image into ram, it patches int15 to report a different max size of installed XMS, then executes the "mbr" of the ram block device.
BOOM. Win9x in a ramdisk.
You can use a drivespace compressed image to achieve maximum data density for the consumed block of memory. Drivespace3 with ultrapack on gets almost 2:1 packing on normal program and file data. You can get a *lot* of stuff inside a 512mb image file.
Throw in a reasonably recent firefox, courtesy of KernelEx (an open source kernel resource extender for win9x, which allows a good deal of 2k and XP native applications to run, including FF10, and a modern flashplayer with ABP and noscript.) And a good software firewall, turn off all filesahring services, and essentially lock down the 9x system as far as possible, and you have exactly what your horrible family member and or aquaintence wants: a familiar user environment that they can walk all over.
It also has what you want: pull the plug, and it is magically fresh, clean, shiny and new again as soon as you power it on.
9x doesn't know how to deal with EXT filesystems, so the physical HDD is never exposed to your user.
The only major problems are 9x's abhorrent 2gb RAM limit, and its abysmal network safety rating, coupled with its rather dated hardware base. (Plus the difficulty of getting a 9x install up and running smoothly with all the perks a normal user could want, without breaking it, on a teensy weensie volume.)
On the plus side, being 100% in RAM on a reasonably modern hardware platform, it is fast as fuck. The test systems I built had Office97, firefox 10, flashplayer10, the WEP, a pirate copy of zonealarm pro, photoshop7, media player 10, KernelEx, and a few other odds and ends on it, with 50mb of "free" space left on the compressed volume to serve as browsing cache space. It was snappy as hell.
I have only done this a few times as just a lesson in self-punishment/"let's see what kind of frankenstein's monster we can build out of retro parts!" Type exercise, but the finished product is incredibly hard to kill, and keep dead. Bluescreens of death? Caught a nasty worm in the 10 seconds it was on the net? Power it off, power it back on. Good as new.
Gives a whole new meaning to "zombie workstation".
I have a celeron POS I am contemplating doing this to actually. I would prefer ramdisked win2k or better though, but I don't know of a way to boot the OS out of a block device after NTLDR starts, and before control is passed to NTOSKRNL. Maybe a hacked FreeLDR from reactos would work though.
4) avoid litigation when the "hot coffee" easter egg gets accidentally (on purpose) unlocked on the geological simulation system, under the codename "rock her world."
Mostly that has to do with incorrect/inappropriate weights being assigned to gameworld objects.
Many world objects weight exactly the same as styrofoam, but somehow have enough kinetic energy when thrown to instagib the bad guy. Others are made to weigh 100x that of lead, but somehow actually get tossed by an explosion instead of simply pushed a little.
If they plug in sane values for mass, center of mass, "bounciness", elasticity, inertia, and gravity, the should get mostly useful simulations. Issues with air pressure (it is an enclosed space, with an explosive charge, after all) might cause problems, but adapting it with another added value as a delta to object vectors (with a fall off radius) would fix it somewhat.
Incorrect, determining the mechanism behind the "paranormal" telepathy makes it cease being "paranormal" under the definition you are employing, because it then DOES fall inside the realm of scientific knowledge. In order for it to satisfy that definition, the following would have to be true:
1) there is a multiverse
2) the phenomenon makes use of the physics inside another different universe
3) because of 1 and 2, the full scope of possible interaction and mechanism can never be fully known by the science and physics of THIS universe, only the intial states, and the outputs.
Eg, something akin to:
"Oh look! I can send a superluminal message via (mechanism X) of a W boson! Who knew that you could correlate natural weak force decay of two baryons consistently using the (X mechanism), regardless of the distances between them!?"
"That's fascinting Mr Specious P. Aytchdee! How does it work!?"
"We don't know, and can never know! It somehow just does!"
*THAT* is the goalpost set by the challenge, using the definition of paranormal you are invoking.
Moving the goalpost mark?
"Looking behind a door", and 'looking behind a closet door are not the same thing!
Eg, the GP's analysis would hold if said door was to the "don't go in here! Top secret and unethical genetic experiments room! NO admittance!" Room, and the mad scientist inside had indeed injected somatic cells from a goose embryo and a norwhal embryo into a miniature pony embryo, causing it to develop goose wings and a spiral horn on its head, and gestating the animal to term.
It *IS* possible to do that, so the "pegacorn" can potentially exist. He did an end run around your claiming te transgenic horror isn't a "true" pegacorn, hence the no true scottsman rhetoric.
Your response was to move the goal post, (so, now its somehow specifically a CLOSET door? And not just any old door, like it was before? Interesting...) and verbally abuse him, rather than behave yourself with propr candor.
Good show sir, your wit has been absolutely entertaining.
Personally, I think the issue (weather or not the money will be awarded) depends on how one defines "paranormal".
If you mean "paranormal" as in "cannot possibly happen/pure suspension of the real/magic." Then no, it will never be awarded, because nothing unreal exists.
If you mean "paranormal" as in "falls outside the scope of what is considered humanly possible" then it is theoretically awardable.
Example experiment:
Humans can't normally see UV light or UV dyes. So, I paint a sheet of purple paper with UV reflective dyes that respond to UV emissions *WAY* outside human perception. The dyes are aranged on the paper in the form of a very recognizable image. I will pay you to tell me what the images I have printed on my papers are, reliably, consistently, and without any external assistance.
The experiment tests for paranormal vision, where "paranormal" is used in the second sense of the word. Humans with mutant photoreceptor protiens may well be able to meet the qualifications of the test, and would indeed have such paranormal vision.
Same with ESP. Humans lack specialized sensory organs to detect electromagnetism, for instance. Demonstrating an ability to reliably detect such phenomena would be genuine ESP.
Again, if you kneejerk stamp "MAGIC!" On those terms, then science is not and cannot ever deal with them.
If you have copyright granted redistribution rights to the cd image file contents, then yes. Putting ripped CD images on a webserver *IS* perfectly legal.
The scenario you painted is not a good comparison to this judgement.
A dvr allows you to record live a live stream, and then play it back later. It is legal under rulings related to vcr devices. A slingbox does a point to point retransmission from a remote media source to the recipient. It is basically a cleaner version of watching (well trying to anyway...) a movie over RDP.
In both cases, it is presumed that the user has legal rights to the media being recorded, and has limited rights to timeshift and transcode the content into a format suitable for their viewer. Those rights come directly from being within the broadcast area, and being legit customers.
This device requires the user to physically have the reception equipment inside the service area, which then prevents it from running foul of that regional licensing, and the previously held rulings.
eg, to make it fit with your webserver + cd image analogy, we have to do a lot of shoehorning:
1) we have to assume (an absurd ruling exists to permit) that simplying in a certain region immediately grants you access to a specific disk's contents.
2) you place that disk in a drive attached to the webserver, which you operate in a remote location that is within the 'authorized playing area'.
3) only you are then able to access the contents of that disk remotely.
When seen this way, what the TV broadcasters are offering is this:
*a 'disk' that immediately self destructs after being played
*a limited personal use only right to record subsequently re-view the playback of the disk, and a right to view the contents of the played back disk, dependent upon your home address.
*a defacto ability to convert that recording into another format.
What they are objecting to:
*recording the playback, per bulleted item 2, within the authorized viewing area, per bullet 2, of the disk provided per bullet 1, re-coding that recording per bullet 3, and then viewing that re-coded recording outside of the authorized viewing area.
In other words, what they are objecting to is functionally identical to what happens if I physically pack my DVR with me when I leave the authorized viewing area, and view my legal recordings while on vacation. The only difference is the degree of time shifting. (The Aerero timeshifts a few seconds from live broadcast time. Packing one of my DVRs with me on vacation timeshifts several hours to several days from live broadcast time. Otherwise the effect is exactly the same: I am viewing their regional programming "outside the viewing area."
Much like the quip about quibbling over the price of prostitution(1), these companies are quibbling over the amount of time delay between local broadcast, and viewing of a legally made recording.
([1), a wealthy man candidly asks an attractive woman if she will have sex with him for 10 million dollars. She says yes. He offers her 10 dollars. She is insensed, and demands to know what kind of woman he thinks she is. He calmly replies: madame, we have already established that you are a prostitute, we are just haggling over the price.")
Why not use a harvard based system then? Seprating program ram from data ram would fantastically limit the options of malicious asshats attempting exploits. Trojan horsing an executable payload in the data portion of the stack and jumping execution simply wouldn't work on harvard.
Designing a device that can do all these things is not terribly difficult. There is really no reason for the "OMG! It has to have all the things, and ON der interwebz!" Other than becaue doing so eases central management. "Central management" is the exact same thing as vendor lock in. When the device and its software are subject to central managment, YOU don't manage the device, THEY do. That's the point!
They can enforce a consistent and quality experience without that kind of leash.
They just don't want to, because the users you cite aren't educated enough to know that the things being given up are not necessary things they must trade to get what they want.
The problem with allowing offline applications, is that it totally negates the power inherent in the system to combat unauthorized applet use/development.
Eg, if there is a local cached copy of [superfantastical high dollar app], I can manipulate this cached copy, and then release it through less controlled channels. Allowing offline cached programs to be run permits users to run such pirated copies, and permits tinkerers to break the ecosystem further by circumenting the central control heirarchy in the system's design.
It would fundementally break what makes the chromebook "different" from just being another computer and OS combo.
Sadly, the trend seems to have reversed in the past decade. :(
Look at facebook and pals. People seem hell bent on throwing their privacy into the hands of shysters for something shiny. Apple is already on the way this direction with siri, which is exactly this kind of application. (Siri runs on servers owned by apple, the app is just an interface to the big iron.) I don't imagine apple will find siri's adoption "discouraging".
Just turn the heat up slowly instead of all at once, and people will cease to remember how things used to be. (Afterall, we will all be "grandpa telling stories" by then.) After that, its all downhill.
The decision that "privacy is dead" happened over a decade ago. Or, do you not remember Scott McNealy, former chairman of Sun Microsystems, who in 1999 said, "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." And the observation by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison: "The privacy you're concerned about is largely an illusion. All you have to give up is your illusions, not any of your privacy." ??
Privacy gets in the way of money, and money is a means of attaining and exercising power. Throw in the alarming statistic about CEO psychopaths, and you have what ails our world today.
Government has no incentive whatsoever to intervene here, because they also directly profit from stomping on privacy. Look at this editorial for instance. Unless the politicos are themselves harmed by the loss of privacy, they have no incentive to protect it, and every reason to trample all over it instead.
The cleary proscribed solution to this problem is to exploit the fuck out of this surveylance society they are working oh so hard to make, and put THEM under the spotlight. It is the only way to get the retractions on positions and rulings required to halt the slide downhill. The leaders are only concerned with themselves, as is true of all psychopaths. You have to make them feel the fires too to get them motivated to do what is right, and they will bitch mightily about it the whole time.
Amusingly, that's what orgs like wikileaks aimed to do. We saw how that's worked for the likes of Assange. (Yes, he is the very definition of douche, but a douche that exposed a lot of dirty dealing, and pissed in a lot of cheerios, which is exactly what was needed, and is still desperately needed.)
But that would imply that a too_big_to_fail process can indeed fail! Allowing the contention to kill the first process, instead of jumping instantly to the allocator of last resort breaks the model!
I had this idea once not that long ago.
You tie up the robo callers with robo answerers.
Specifically, it is a computer controlled answering machine. (Finally, something to use those old pci phone modems for!) When a call goes through the preprogrammed number of rings, it answers, like a normal answering machine. Then it sits there on the line issuing perfect silence. It waits for the caller to speak. If the caller speaks first, it presumes that this is a real human calling, and issues the recorded answering message for humans. If there are several seconds of protracted silence, it issues a "hello?" In the owners voice. If this initiates activity on the line, it triggers some accoustic analysis software, which looks for audio compression artifacts, which would indicate that the "caller" is a robot. During this time it is silent. If "activity" continues, and the accoustic analysis indicates a robot, it cordially greets the fellow robot, and proudly states that it wishes to only speak in binary, then proceeds to say "one zero zero one one one zero one.." in a very stilted microsoft SAM type voice. At this rate, it saying "fuck off and die, robocalling assholes." Will take several minutes, and not run foul of any telephone decency lws that might be involved with the likely international transaction. Keeping the robot on line as long as possible reduces the profit margin of the cold calling center.
The robot answering machine should have some LED lights on top to indicate the "status" of the system, showing "sandby", "hello human caller", and "fucking with another robot."
a voice modem attached to something like a sheeva plug would be ideal.
This is (almost certainly) probably wrong, but...
As I understood it, a message travelling at FTL will experience exotic negative time, since it is travelling faster than light. (At exactly c, it experiences 0 time) the sender and reciever do not experience this exotic time. However, the message itself acheives its apparent FTL by going backward in time as measured by the conversationalists respectively.
Combining normal time reference frames with imaginary negative time reference frames results in strange voodoo though. I would conjecture that because we don't see oddball neutrinos with antimass traveling at ftl velocities in particle collisions, that this kind of communication is not really possible. The closest thing the time reversed data transmission I can think of is the "charlie sends photons to alice and bob, they later compre notes" experiment:
http://www.gizmag.com/quantum-entanglement-speed-10000-faster-light/26587/
And the "charlie predicts if alice and bob entangled their photons" experiment:
http://www.livescience.com/19975-spooky-quantum-entanglement.html
I am not sufficiently educated to sanely discuss these findings, but others here are.
So, this gets to be used by all those bank and loan institutions who use trade bots to manipulate the global stock market?
Question: what happens if 2 such processes re running concurrently on the same node, and actively try to outperform the other by proactivally allocating all available free memory?
If all it was doing was serving print jobs, and it had enough RAM on it, the netware server should never have needed to access the drive after being booted.
Netware 5 products had some silly issues where if the SYS volume became full, the server would panic and halt, but NW3 didnt have such an issue. When I was forced to take that NW5 class so many years ago, I spent ample amounts of time poking holes in the NW server's supposed security. Oh, the joys of getting the server to create printer spool objects on the sys volume, using its own credentials instead of mine. :D NW3 was much more sane bout such things.
*I never did get a satisfactory answer from my instructor on how NW5's proprietary filesystem could do subsector allocations and also not need defragementation after many years of dealing with small and large files on the same disk, nor on how much bloat the equivalent of the MFT would gain when millions of teeny files get put on the volume. (sigh)
The only hassle I really remember with NW3 and 4 were in trying to get windows clients to play nice, or in trying to get DOS network adaptors to load their drivers and NOT stomp all over the conventional memory space.
My how things have changed...
But I read a post that he keeps his bitcoin wallet there!
Are you sure that isn't a malapropism crossed with a portmantaeu?
Dare I say it, the dreaded malamantaeu?
A few simple questions to ask.
1) in what neighborhoods are these proactive activities being conducted?
2) what demographics specifically are benefitted by this malappropriation of resources?
Consider how the Kennedys managed to halt the cape windfarm project buildout for decades, because they didn't want to see any windmills from their summer homes.
Now... consider: "Martha's Vineyard + roudy teenagers with loud music", interrupting their wealthy, well to do lifestyles. (Yes, I know MV is not in boston. I am pointing at the stereotype.)
It isn't hard for me to see this kind of thing happening, if "Mr Kennedy is being disturbed by all those rave parties down the street."
The issue isn't that cracking down on rave parties has more merit than cracking down on rape, armed robbery, kidnappings, etc. It is that "the wishes of wealthy and influential citizens" are more important than those things.
Just something to think about.
Oh shit!
You just summoned APK and JC! When Micheal Kristopiet shows up and demands they use their real names, the end will be upon us!
Andrew, do you remember that time at bandcamp when you had that piccolo up your ass?
Remember how I said I deleted the pictures?
I lied.
RTC == RealTime Clock
It has meant that since at last the 1980s that I know of.
Naw, Shit happens man.
I didn't mean it in a snarky way, even if the replies came out that way due to responding in kind.
I just like being able to grab the image and keep it. Totally agree about being to pan and zoom on the martian landscape from a POS android phone. Totally diggin it.
I'm glad you submitted the article. :D
Sweet! Thanks!