Re:If this goes on credit cards and drivers licens
on
Sun Joins RFID Program
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· Score: 2
I can't see why it would go on credit cards.
One word: Speedpass. It's nothing other than a keyfob RFID tag that you carry around and use in lieu of a credit card. For all intents and purposes it is your credit card to a Speedpass reader.
Mobil and Exxon use these things at their pumps. McDonalds is testing them in the Chicago area. If it catches on I expect to see the readers in more places.
And, I expect someone to devise a little portable interrogator for these suckers. Stand in line next to your target, interrogate his Speedpass tag to get its ID, then use the ID yourself to make your own purchase. Hopefully some sort of challenge/response protocol is used to prevent this sort of abuse, but I haven't come across any sort of information about it.
I have a television, I don't really need streaming Olympics on my computer.
I don't watch the Olympics, but my sports nut wife does. (Don't worry, she does have some redeeming qualities!) Last Olympics she watched almost everything via webcast. The time delays between the events and the broadcast in the US stunk, and the network only ever showed the big-ticket sports which had US athletes in contention for the gold. I'm not sure how she's getting her fix this time.
There's already a similar project, WorldForge. If you're interested in this kind of thing, you might want to join that project rather than starting your own.
Although, if this article at O'Reilly's site is accurate, the idea hasn't exactly taken of like wildfire. All the more reason to throw your efforts in with them rather than dividing the development effort to start a new game.
I've been curious about ebooks but not enough to actually investigate them further. Are many people using them?
When my Palm III died, I replaced it with a Sony Clié specifically because the screen is sweet for reading books. I wouldn't really want it for reference books, but I love reading novels and the like on it. I always have my Clié with me, so I always have an assortment of reading material with me as well -- for no extra cost in space or weight. Plus, I can read it under any lighting conditions.
But I must admit, I'm really disappointed with most ebook offerings. They're either way overpriced (More expensive than the hardback? Give me a break!), or in some dippy "digital rights management" format, or both. No, I'm not going to pay $24 for a book in a format that may not survive in two years.
The absolute best publisher I've seen for ebooks has got to be Baen. They have a great ebook collection which includes just about everything they currently publish. The ebooks hit the street the same time as the paperbacks, and they're priced about the same. To me, that's a fair price. Sure, they're making some extra dough on the ebook version (no printing or distribution fees), but on the other hand I'm getting the product in a format that I prefer. I'm willing to encourage that!
But Baen's best decision was to release the books in plain ol' HTML format. They also have a few other formats, but HTML works best for me. And, even if someday HTML is dead and forgotten, I'll still be able to open these things up in a plain text editor and read them.
Baen also has a library of freebie books. Granted, many of them are the first books of one series or another, just to get you hooked. But the freebies are a great way to check out an author you've heard about, or just to play with the ebook format a little before making a commitment to it.
That is, of course, the point of such a price tag. I don't really want to sell; that machine represents a year and a half of my life. ("Don't think of it as getting laid off," said my wife. "Think of it as having gotten paid for a year and a half to program your own machine.") On the other hand, if someone is foolish enough to pay such an exorbitant amount, who am I to stop them?:-)
Agreed. Although in my experience about 2/3rds of embedded programmers have EE degrees and 1/3rd have CS degrees. So it's not quite as dismal as it may sound for a BSCS.
And there are embedded companies which recruit and hire new graduates. Usually this is done at on-campus job fairs. New grad jobs are rarely advertised. They don't need to be; there's always a stack of fresh resumes to wade through. The only jobs advertised are the hard-to-fill positions that actually need a lot of experience and a proven track record.
Go to job fairs. Mass-mail your resume out to the big guys, and go out of your way to find smaller companies. Be active in some sort of embedded side-project, and make sure to talk that up. When I'm interviewing I love to see that the candidate likes this stuff well enough to do it in the off-hours.
unless Georgia Tech simply accepts that certain freshman aren't going to make it...
I don't know about Georgia Tech, but when I was a Michigan Tech in the mid-80s there were definitely weeder courses. Chem 101 was a biggie. It was made intentionally hard to weed out students who really shouldn't be in an engineering school in the first place.
Of course, the average snowfall of over 200 inches per year and the 4:1 male:female ratio were also discouraging to many...:-)
I worked at Capcom Coin-Op during their brief flirtation with pinball. The real problem with pinball in arcades is that they take a hell of a lot of work to maintain. An arcade with 40 pinball machines? That's a full-time employee just to clean the damn playfields if you want them in top condition.
What's the maintenance on a vid? Wipe the screen with windex and empty the coinbox. What's the maintenance on a pin? Clean the playfield. Clean the glass. Check for stray objects. Adjust switches. Replace bulbs. Rotate and replace rubbers. Align drop targets. And heaven help you if you have a pin with really neat, but really fragile, special mechanical parts!
And what happens when the machine gets old and you want to make way for new games? Video cabinets can be re-used. Slap a new mobo in there and put a new marquee up and you're good to go. Not so with pinball machines. There's no practical way to gut one and upgrade it to a new machine. You can do it, but it costs way more in labor than just buying the new machine outright.
Don't get me wrong. I love pinball and would really like to see it make a comeback. But it takes lots of time and a dedicated technician to keep them running and fun.
I know that I, for one, am really looking forward to seeing HHGttG dubbed into American, just like the Region 1 releases of "Walking With Dinosaurs" and "The Planets". Enough of those stuffy British accents, I say!
Way back in the day, some smart cookie wrote an audio digitizer for the Apple ][ series. Plug an audio source into the cassette jack, and the software did a 1-bit digitization of it. It could even play back though the Apple's speaker. Sure, the audio quality was crummy, but hey... It was digital audio. It was cool. I think I typed the assembly listing in by hand from some magazine.
And Ozzy's "Iron Man" came out sounding pretty much the same as the original album...
Just last night some buddies and I were talking about Stupid Networking Tricks. We decided that writing a PPP-over-cassette-port hack wouldn't be too difficult. Wonder what kind of bandwidth you could get?
When I went looking for a new Palm last summer, I looked long and hard at both the Handera 330 and the Sony 710. The virtual Grafitti area is sweet; I wish other manufacturers would come out with it. But two things drew me to buy the Sony instead.
The Handera's 240-pixel width isn't an integer multiple of the standard 160-pixel width. To view standard low-res Palm apps in full-screen mode means the machine must scale by 1.5. In some of my tests, this caused bitmaps to look really bad. The Sony's 320-pixel width is exactly double the standard. While doubling the pixels makes things look blocky, they still look better than a stock color Palm or Visor.
The Sony's screen had much better contrast in all lighting conditions. I wanted a hi-res screen specifically so I could read books. Sony's screen wins, no question.
The Memory Stick format blows. I really wish Sony would adopt something the rest of the world agreed with. But frankly, the 8MB stick included with the 710 is more than enough for me. I just treat it an extra non-removable 8MB of storage anyway, so it doesn't really matter that it's incompatible with everything else I own. For my uses (books, once again; I don't care about MP3s) the stick is fine.
If you find a buyer, ask if they have a friend who wants to buy my 710 (with 4.0 upgrade).
My only complaint with the new models is that they replaced the up/down buttons with a dinky little paddle thing. Not too bad for "serious" applications (since I use the jog dial more than the buttons), but it blows chunks for games.
Actually, I keep an SSH connection open to my home machine, using port forwarding to a Squid proxy running there. When I need access to a blacklisted site I just point my browser's proxy settings to the appropriate port and I'm free to go where I want. My sysadmin (who has no control over the company's firewall settings) is cool with this. I just keep telling her, "Be glad I'm one of the good guys!"
My company's proxy blocks access to the EFF web site. They also block access to the ACLU's site. I'm sure this says something. (Most likely that our IT department never bothered to change the default filter list from the vendor.)
My SO can pick up a remote control, figure it our without the manual, and operate the TV, VCR, and Hi-Fi. So can my parents.
Then may I humbly suggest that your remote control is insufficiently complicated? Work at it a little. It's not hard to set up an absolutely incomprehensible remote control. Try getting a universal learning remote with labels like "A", "B", and "C" but no real function names...
Only when your toys are incomprehensible to the unwashed masses will you be considered a True Geek.
Oh, I don't know. Back in the Apple ][ days I regularly flew into the Hancock building. The only building on the entire horizon, but it was a big Cessna-sucking black-hole. Ever since, I've wondered why anyone without a death-wish would ever fly out of Meigs Field.
I guess I get the Bad Dad award for letting my 4yo play Diablo II. His favorite area is the River of Fire; he just loves seeing all the lava. The only part he doesn't like is the cow level. He gets uneasy fighting the cows. "Daddy, cows aren't evil!"
His favorite song is The Chainsaw Juggler He likes the part where the title character is found dead, "all bloody with his arms by his side". Another verse goes,
A Buddist, a Moslem, a Nun, and a Jew
Were all in a hot air balloon
It suddenly popped
And though they prayed as it dropped
It proves that God hates us all
Kevin's question was, "Who is God and why does he hate us?" I just hope he never asks about some of the other lyrics in that song!
He also has a stuffed Sylvester the Cat in a devil costume (was a give-away promotion a couple Halloweens ago). He came to me and said, "I'm going to take the devil to preschool to sleep with me!" Oh yeah, I'm just waiting for the child welfare authorities to knock on the door someday because of something the kid says at school...
And let's help out those poor souls in the stadiums and sports bars obviously addicted to football. Nor should we forget those addicted to model railroading. Oh, and TV, too! And reading certain websites. Yes sir, anything you do on a regular basis is an addiction and you should seek help.
Now I just have find a way to break this addiction to my job, and I'll be set!
I'm not disputing your point. I'll take it as given that "Whaddaya do?" is a lame opening. And I'll take it as given that I and whatever social groups to which I belong tend to use it for lack of anything better.
I'm asking, what's your solution? How would you strike up a conversation with someone you've just met at, say, an office Christmas party? Or better, your spouse's office party?
When I write my Über Virus, it'll look something like this:
To: {target}@{somedomain.com}
From: Help Desk <helpdesk@{somedomain.com}>
Subject: Virus Alert!
Warning! An especially dangerous new computer virus has been discovered. Please run the attached program to secure your system.
<Attachment: MSHOTFIX.EXE>
Then, of course, the "HOTFIX" pops up a notice saying you're secure, and goes into stealth mode. None of this pansy-ass "mail-to-everyone-on-earth" business, but something that'll go through and transpose random digits in any Excel spreadsheet it comes across.
And then, the world will be mine!Muah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!
Slashdot Mirror
One word: Speedpass. It's nothing other than a keyfob RFID tag that you carry around and use in lieu of a credit card. For all intents and purposes it is your credit card to a Speedpass reader.
Mobil and Exxon use these things at their pumps. McDonalds is testing them in the Chicago area. If it catches on I expect to see the readers in more places.
And, I expect someone to devise a little portable interrogator for these suckers. Stand in line next to your target, interrogate his Speedpass tag to get its ID, then use the ID yourself to make your own purchase. Hopefully some sort of challenge/response protocol is used to prevent this sort of abuse, but I haven't come across any sort of information about it.
I don't watch the Olympics, but my sports nut wife does. (Don't worry, she does have some redeeming qualities!) Last Olympics she watched almost everything via webcast. The time delays between the events and the broadcast in the US stunk, and the network only ever showed the big-ticket sports which had US athletes in contention for the gold. I'm not sure how she's getting her fix this time.
What, you mean like these?
There's already a similar project, WorldForge. If you're interested in this kind of thing, you might want to join that project rather than starting your own.
Although, if this article at O'Reilly's site is accurate, the idea hasn't exactly taken of like wildfire. All the more reason to throw your efforts in with them rather than dividing the development effort to start a new game.
When my Palm III died, I replaced it with a Sony Clié specifically because the screen is sweet for reading books. I wouldn't really want it for reference books, but I love reading novels and the like on it. I always have my Clié with me, so I always have an assortment of reading material with me as well -- for no extra cost in space or weight. Plus, I can read it under any lighting conditions.
But I must admit, I'm really disappointed with most ebook offerings. They're either way overpriced (More expensive than the hardback? Give me a break!), or in some dippy "digital rights management" format, or both. No, I'm not going to pay $24 for a book in a format that may not survive in two years.
The absolute best publisher I've seen for ebooks has got to be Baen. They have a great ebook collection which includes just about everything they currently publish. The ebooks hit the street the same time as the paperbacks, and they're priced about the same. To me, that's a fair price. Sure, they're making some extra dough on the ebook version (no printing or distribution fees), but on the other hand I'm getting the product in a format that I prefer. I'm willing to encourage that!
But Baen's best decision was to release the books in plain ol' HTML format. They also have a few other formats, but HTML works best for me. And, even if someday HTML is dead and forgotten, I'll still be able to open these things up in a plain text editor and read them.
Baen also has a library of freebie books. Granted, many of them are the first books of one series or another, just to get you hooked. But the freebies are a great way to check out an author you've heard about, or just to play with the ebook format a little before making a commitment to it.
Multiply by 2 and add 30.
Personally, I won't be satisfied until I have enough storage to catalog the quantum state of every particle in the universe.
That is, of course, the point of such a price tag. I don't really want to sell; that machine represents a year and a half of my life. ("Don't think of it as getting laid off," said my wife. "Think of it as having gotten paid for a year and a half to program your own machine.") On the other hand, if someone is foolish enough to pay such an exorbitant amount, who am I to stop them? :-)
My minimum bid is, "Pay off my mortgage." Which, at the moment, is about 10 times your offer... :-)
Agreed. Although in my experience about 2/3rds of embedded programmers have EE degrees and 1/3rd have CS degrees. So it's not quite as dismal as it may sound for a BSCS.
And there are embedded companies which recruit and hire new graduates. Usually this is done at on-campus job fairs. New grad jobs are rarely advertised. They don't need to be; there's always a stack of fresh resumes to wade through. The only jobs advertised are the hard-to-fill positions that actually need a lot of experience and a proven track record.
Go to job fairs. Mass-mail your resume out to the big guys, and go out of your way to find smaller companies. Be active in some sort of embedded side-project, and make sure to talk that up. When I'm interviewing I love to see that the candidate likes this stuff well enough to do it in the off-hours.
I don't know about Georgia Tech, but when I was a Michigan Tech in the mid-80s there were definitely weeder courses. Chem 101 was a biggie. It was made intentionally hard to weed out students who really shouldn't be in an engineering school in the first place.
Of course, the average snowfall of over 200 inches per year and the 4:1 male:female ratio were also discouraging to many... :-)
I worked at Capcom Coin-Op during their brief flirtation with pinball. The real problem with pinball in arcades is that they take a hell of a lot of work to maintain. An arcade with 40 pinball machines? That's a full-time employee just to clean the damn playfields if you want them in top condition.
What's the maintenance on a vid? Wipe the screen with windex and empty the coinbox. What's the maintenance on a pin? Clean the playfield. Clean the glass. Check for stray objects. Adjust switches. Replace bulbs. Rotate and replace rubbers. Align drop targets. And heaven help you if you have a pin with really neat, but really fragile, special mechanical parts!
And what happens when the machine gets old and you want to make way for new games? Video cabinets can be re-used. Slap a new mobo in there and put a new marquee up and you're good to go. Not so with pinball machines. There's no practical way to gut one and upgrade it to a new machine. You can do it, but it costs way more in labor than just buying the new machine outright.
Don't get me wrong. I love pinball and would really like to see it make a comeback. But it takes lots of time and a dedicated technician to keep them running and fun.
Oh well. Time to go down to my basement and fire up my Black Knight and Big Bang Bar.
I know that I, for one, am really looking forward to seeing HHGttG dubbed into American, just like the Region 1 releases of "Walking With Dinosaurs" and "The Planets". Enough of those stuffy British accents, I say!
Way back in the day, some smart cookie wrote an audio digitizer for the Apple ][ series. Plug an audio source into the cassette jack, and the software did a 1-bit digitization of it. It could even play back though the Apple's speaker. Sure, the audio quality was crummy, but hey... It was digital audio. It was cool. I think I typed the assembly listing in by hand from some magazine.
And Ozzy's "Iron Man" came out sounding pretty much the same as the original album...
Just last night some buddies and I were talking about Stupid Networking Tricks. We decided that writing a PPP-over-cassette-port hack wouldn't be too difficult. Wonder what kind of bandwidth you could get?
When I went looking for a new Palm last summer, I looked long and hard at both the Handera 330 and the Sony 710. The virtual Grafitti area is sweet; I wish other manufacturers would come out with it. But two things drew me to buy the Sony instead.
The Memory Stick format blows. I really wish Sony would adopt something the rest of the world agreed with. But frankly, the 8MB stick included with the 710 is more than enough for me. I just treat it an extra non-removable 8MB of storage anyway, so it doesn't really matter that it's incompatible with everything else I own. For my uses (books, once again; I don't care about MP3s) the stick is fine.
If you find a buyer, ask if they have a friend who wants to buy my 710 (with 4.0 upgrade).
My only complaint with the new models is that they replaced the up/down buttons with a dinky little paddle thing. Not too bad for "serious" applications (since I use the jog dial more than the buttons), but it blows chunks for games.
Actually, I keep an SSH connection open to my home machine, using port forwarding to a Squid proxy running there. When I need access to a blacklisted site I just point my browser's proxy settings to the appropriate port and I'm free to go where I want. My sysadmin (who has no control over the company's firewall settings) is cool with this. I just keep telling her, "Be glad I'm one of the good guys!"
http://www.eff.org/
My company's proxy blocks access to the EFF web site. They also block access to the ACLU's site. I'm sure this says something. (Most likely that our IT department never bothered to change the default filter list from the vendor.)
Then may I humbly suggest that your remote control is insufficiently complicated? Work at it a little. It's not hard to set up an absolutely incomprehensible remote control. Try getting a universal learning remote with labels like "A", "B", and "C" but no real function names...
Only when your toys are incomprehensible to the unwashed masses will you be considered a True Geek.
Oh, I don't know. Back in the Apple ][ days I regularly flew into the Hancock building. The only building on the entire horizon, but it was a big Cessna-sucking black-hole. Ever since, I've wondered why anyone without a death-wish would ever fly out of Meigs Field.
I guess I get the Bad Dad award for letting my 4yo play Diablo II. His favorite area is the River of Fire; he just loves seeing all the lava. The only part he doesn't like is the cow level. He gets uneasy fighting the cows. "Daddy, cows aren't evil!"
His favorite song is The Chainsaw Juggler He likes the part where the title character is found dead, "all bloody with his arms by his side". Another verse goes,
Kevin's question was, "Who is God and why does he hate us?" I just hope he never asks about some of the other lyrics in that song!
He also has a stuffed Sylvester the Cat in a devil costume (was a give-away promotion a couple Halloweens ago). He came to me and said, "I'm going to take the devil to preschool to sleep with me!" Oh yeah, I'm just waiting for the child welfare authorities to knock on the door someday because of something the kid says at school...
Riiiiggghht!
And let's help out those poor souls in the stadiums and sports bars obviously addicted to football. Nor should we forget those addicted to model railroading. Oh, and TV, too! And reading certain websites. Yes sir, anything you do on a regular basis is an addiction and you should seek help.
Now I just have find a way to break this addiction to my job, and I'll be set!
I'm not disputing your point. I'll take it as given that "Whaddaya do?" is a lame opening. And I'll take it as given that I and whatever social groups to which I belong tend to use it for lack of anything better.
I'm asking, what's your solution? How would you strike up a conversation with someone you've just met at, say, an office Christmas party? Or better, your spouse's office party?
When I write my Über Virus, it'll look something like this:
Then, of course, the "HOTFIX" pops up a notice saying you're secure, and goes into stealth mode. None of this pansy-ass "mail-to-everyone-on-earth" business, but something that'll go through and transpose random digits in any Excel spreadsheet it comes across.
And then, the world will be mine! Muah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!
So your suggestion for a good ice-breaker would be...?