I keep wondering why anyone would introduce a new high-end mouse with a ball. The new breed of track-on-any-surface opticals are far superior to anything mechanical, especially if you work in a dirty (or dusty, or cat-infested) environment.
Lemmings qualifies as non-violent? The game where those cute little guys can fall off cliffs, be fried by flamethrowers, blown up, drowned, decapitated, and squished? That Lemmings?:-)
Anyway, I recommend Droidworks. You build droids to solve various puzzles, then pilot them in an over-the-shoulder view. My kids love it.
I second this! I played Rocky's Boots on my Apple//e when I was in college. Even as an EE major I couldn't finish some of the puzzles. (The fact that propogation delay was modelled poorly didn't help at all...)
Cool, Google found this site which has links to Apple emulators and the Rocky's Boots disk image. Time to go kick some... um, brightly colored shapes.
This is the first time in human history disparate people in diverse places can communicate with one another instantaneously.
Say what? Let's see, I started college 17 years ago. Even before this newfangled "Internet" thing I had access to BITNET, which was a world-wide network of university computers. Guess what? That gave me email, file transfer, and chat (in the form of "relay", the precursor to IRC).
This year, the daughter of one of my college chums is a freshman. That means we've had an entire generation to cope with world-wide instantaneous communication via the computer nets. I have a hard time believing this is anything new.
And as for college kids not coping well... In my day we also had kids "not cope well" with being on their own and not having a mommy to make them do their homework. Hacky-sack, sports, drinking, fraternities, and just plain goofing-off provided plenty of opportunity to flunk out.
I don't care so much about movies, since I don't imagine they'll be releasing anything for download that isn't already available on DVD. However, I'd love to see the TV networks pick this up! How many times have you said, "Doh! I missed The Simpsons again!" (Or, more likely, "Doh! Fox screwed around with its schedule again!") I'd pay money to be able to download a missed episode of my favorite shows. Make 'em available for download a week after the original air date, and I'll guarrantee they'll find an audience.
NovAurora used to have a ton of rips from PC games, mostly MP3s and MIDI. Unfortunately, the owner of the site shut down the server and sold the domain name.
Fortunately I snarfed the archive before it went away. Between that collection, other game music sites on the web, and things I've ripped myself I have about 2GB of game music.
I know this guy, though I haven't talked with him for about six months. He does come to the USA periodically. His girlfriend is American and while they're both living in the Netherlands now, they do come over here once in a while. After the Sklyarov thing I'm not terribly surprised about his reluctance to come forth.
Last I knew, he was working with Bruce Schneier and Counterpane. It's possible that his connection to a US corporation also enters into the decision.
there is now way this could happen. (I have seen computers sit there with close to 55 volts AC on the serial pins being inducted from a long serial run in a factory. with no damage to the PC or the serial hardware.
Oh, it can happen, believe me! I've seen something similar once debugging an embedded system. We were using a ROM emulator attached to the PC via the parallel port. The PC and the target machine happened to be plugged into different AC circuits. The PC went *poof* suddenly. Turns out the cause was a 300 mV (yes, 300 millivolt) differential between the grounds on the two circuits.
The moral of the story is, some PCs will put up with a lot of electrical abuse, while others are pieces of junk with no isolation whatsoever. It can happen. However, in a case like this I'd say it's the PC at fault, not the external device.
Oh, and always use a common ground!
AT&T @Home Not Cut Off in Palatine, IL
on
Code Redux
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
AT&T @Home hasn't cut off port 80 where I live yet (Palatine IL, the NW Chicago 'burbs). A quick grep of my Apache logs shows that I got hit 499 times yesterday with requests for 'default.ida'. Just over 1200 times since this thing broke started.
What really annoys me is that I just inherited responsibility for maintaining code for a print server product we sell. Code Red is knocking these things off the net left and right (buffer overflow processing the URL, I suspect) and customers are screaming. Oh, and did I mention that since inheriting the code I haven't even been able to get the fscking debugger to run yet!?
Why anyone would leave a printer sitting wide open on the wild net is beyond me, but apparently it's not acceptable to just tell the customers to put it behind a firewall where it belongs...
No, the solution is to do just the reverse. Eliminate the.COM,.ORG,.NET, etc. domains altogether. Rely solely on country codes for the TLDs.
{But that's crazy talk!}
No it isn't, despite the fact that I seem to be talking to myself. Moving everything to the country TLDs allows domain registry, trademark disputes, and other ickiness to be handled on a country-by-country basis.
Each country is owner of its own domain, and can do whatever they want with it. Guidelines should be suggested, such as "try to put commercial entities in ".co.xx", but countries would be free to modify these guidelines as they see fit. And if some country wants to out-source its registry, or even sell rights to the domain outright, great. It's their domain. They get exactly one. They can use it however they wish.
Yes, this means that multi-national corporations would have to register in each country in which they want a cyberspace presence. Boo-hoo. It's not like they're not registering every TLD they can get their hands on already. So, the Coca-Cola corporation would have to register "cocacola.co.fr", "cocacola.co.uk", "cocacola.co.us", etc. And if they're smart, each one of these points to localized versions of their home page. No more "cocacola.com". Users all over the world can expect to see pages in their own languages. What a concept.
The biggest win is that trademark issues are resolved in the jurisdiction in which they occur. Say that the Scottish sheep farmer Angus McDonald registers "mcdonalds.co.uk". Now a certain multi-national fast-food restaurant wants the name. Who decides? With "mcdonalds.com" it's unclear what the legal jurisdiction is. With "mcdonalds.co.uk" it's perfectly clear that the courts of the United Kingdom need to settle the matter.
But that solution wouldn't generate anywhere near as much revenue for ICANN, so it'll never be done...
You thought wrong. It had been 17 years, and has been changed to 20 years. So that puts it at 2002 or 2005, depending on when the law was actually changed. But since E-Data has had this in court for years now, they can still try to collect fees retroactively. (Not to say they'll succeed, but they can try.)
As the lower court originally decided, this patent appears to apply primarily to kiosk systems. In that context it might be valid. However, the higher court ordered the lower court to "reconsider the scope" of the patent, stating that it should apply to all downloads. This may be a smart move on the court's part, since there was lots of prior art in 1985 regarding information downloads. I was downloading from BITNET then, and the FIDOnet and UUCP networks were alive and well. If the scope is determined to apply to all such downloads the patent can probably be overthrown completely.
Or then, the higher court may just be smoking something...
Oh, one thing's more amusing than a coffee snob on a rant. A martini snob on a rant!
"First you add the gin, you see. And not the cheap stuff from a grocery store! You need to get the good stuff, imported directly from the juniper fields of Bombay. Then you take a bottle of vermouth. DON'T OPEN IT or you'll spoil not only your martini but every one in a 3-mile radius! Shine a light through the vermouth bottle so that the light falls on the gin. It's best to use a blue LED as your light source, because the monochromatic nature will transfer just the right amount of 'vermouthness'..."
Yeah, yeah... Just admit that you like plain gin straight up.
I grab two random license plates, concatenate them, and screw with capitalization. I've been using this method since 6th grade and it's always been secure enough.
And in what situations, exactly, would this prove to be more secure than, say, taking one licence plate and not screwing with the capitalization?
There's no need for horribly complex password schemes. Really, you can have passwords that are "secure enough" for whatever environment you're in without having to resort to major convolutions or a radioactive decay random number generator. Pick something not in the dictionary that couldn't be guessed even by someone who knows you. If you can work in capitalization or punctuation, that's great.
Just make sure you eliminate everything that could reasonably be guessed or derived. (Don't use your mother's maiden name, not even backwards.) Once the cracker has to resort to a brute-force attack, any password is as good as any other.
Exactly my point. You just can't do a slap-save with a joystick or keyboard.
I've also never seen a really good physics simulator in a video-pin. It still takes too much CPU power to do full 3D collision detection and response, especially with curved (non-polygonal) objects. In a real pin you get weird bounces off a bumper or from a drop-target resetting underneath the ball; things that'd make you think there's a bug in the simulator if you didn't know you were batting a real steel ball around. That's the kind of thing that makes the game feel right.
Possibly true. But, out of the 2% of DVD's market that is comprised of Linux users, how many of them are satisfied with playing DVDs in other systems. I'm a Linux user, but I have absolutely no reason to watch a movie on my Linux box. I'd much rather pop it into my dedicated DVD player and watch it on my TV. Chelloveck
As video game systems and computers became more advanced they could run every game that was in arcades and more.
Not every game. I defy you to find any PC or console system capable of an accurate rendition of a pinball machine.
Of course, pinball had its own problems in the arcades. The machines were expensive, not prone to upgrading, and had hellish maintenance requirements. It was finally killed by video games which only required the operator to wipe the screen and empty the cashbox. And of course, since pinball is entirely skill-based someone who's good can play forever on a quarter or so. Timed video games work. Timed pinball games went over like a lead balloon. (Although Capcom's "Kingpin" had a lot of promise. Pity it never got released.)
Hopefully Stern can make inroads by marketing pinball as a novelty machine. But, having played Striker Xtreme just yesterday, I'm afraid I don't have much hope for them being able to reverse the trend that drove Alvin G., Gottlieb, Sega, Capcom, and even Bally/Williams out of the arena.
But I'll give up my Black Knight and Big Bang Bar machines when they pry the flippers out of my cold, dead hands!
Or don't even bother encrypting the file. Do you think anyone really cares about the password to your Burpee account? Or 99% of the other transient accounts you create on the web?
I've been using URLTrack on my Palm, which is designed for this. Lately I've switched over to using a generic database manager just to make it easier to export the data to my PC as a CSV file. I ought to remember to copy that CSV file to my shell account periodically, just in case I'm caught somewhere without my Palm and I desparately need to logon to Slashdot.
A backlight won't help in the GBA's case. The LCD screen has reflective faceting to improve the visual quality (not to be confused with the reflective plastic cover that actually makes frontlighting the unit unbearable due to glare).
My spiffy new Sony CLIÉ has the same style display. Their solution is a front-light that shines up from underneath the graffiti area. Looks great in all lighting conditions. (Though I admit that I never turn the light off unless I'm in bright sunlight.)
If battery life is a concern, you really should be using rechargables. Or, like I did with my son's GameBoy Pocket, velcro a couple of D-cells to the back of the thing. That sucker lasts for months now!
Chelloveck
Organize, change conditions, then disband.
on
Dial U for Union
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· Score: 3
Unions have a place. If working conditions are bad (for whatever definition of "bad"), organizing the workers can help get things changed. This is a Good Thing.
On the other hand, the big unions are also corporations in and of themselves. And, as such, they exist to propagate themselves. Have you ever seen a union voluntarily disband itself after the workers' needs are met? On the other hand, I've seen unions try to enter a shop where they're clearly unwanted by both the management and Joe-line-worker.
In an ideal world you'd have ad-hoc unions form when the workers collectively feel screwed. And that would dissolve again after an agreement was reached! There's really very little need for a strong-arm union in any industry in the USA these days.
I only saw half of one episode, so I was never really sure of the premise before reading this review. Still, of what I saw, much of the dialog was rhetoric about what a great and moral people the Confederation was, and how the captain was going to uphold their ethics at any cost. From that ep, it had sounded like the Confederation was still a going concern.
So, given that the Confederation collapsed n-years ago and Andromeda and her captain seem to be the last remnants of it, what's his goal? Is he trying to rebuild the Confederation? If so, how does he intend to do so by flying around from rock to rock? Or is he just playing interstellar evangelist, pulling into town, moralizing a bit, and leaving again?
That's a serious question, BTW. I actually liked the show (in my own twisted way, much as I also enjoyed "Space Rangers") but knowing what he's trying to accomplish would probably help.
Slashdot Mirror
I keep wondering why anyone would introduce a new high-end mouse with a ball. The new breed of track-on-any-surface opticals are far superior to anything mechanical, especially if you work in a dirty (or dusty, or cat-infested) environment.
Lemmings qualifies as non-violent? The game where those cute little guys can fall off cliffs, be fried by flamethrowers, blown up, drowned, decapitated, and squished? That Lemmings? :-)
Anyway, I recommend Droidworks. You build droids to solve various puzzles, then pilot them in an over-the-shoulder view. My kids love it.
I second this! I played Rocky's Boots on my Apple //e when I was in college. Even as an EE major I couldn't finish some of the puzzles. (The fact that propogation delay was modelled poorly didn't help at all...)
Cool, Google found this site which has links to Apple emulators and the Rocky's Boots disk image. Time to go kick some... um, brightly colored shapes.
Say what? Let's see, I started college 17 years ago. Even before this newfangled "Internet" thing I had access to BITNET, which was a world-wide network of university computers. Guess what? That gave me email, file transfer, and chat (in the form of "relay", the precursor to IRC).
This year, the daughter of one of my college chums is a freshman. That means we've had an entire generation to cope with world-wide instantaneous communication via the computer nets. I have a hard time believing this is anything new.
And as for college kids not coping well... In my day we also had kids "not cope well" with being on their own and not having a mommy to make them do their homework. Hacky-sack, sports, drinking, fraternities, and just plain goofing-off provided plenty of opportunity to flunk out.
Orange alert!
We want... information.
You can't have it!
By hook or by crook, we will.
I don't care so much about movies, since I don't imagine they'll be releasing anything for download that isn't already available on DVD. However, I'd love to see the TV networks pick this up! How many times have you said, "Doh! I missed The Simpsons again!" (Or, more likely, "Doh! Fox screwed around with its schedule again!") I'd pay money to be able to download a missed episode of my favorite shows. Make 'em available for download a week after the original air date, and I'll guarrantee they'll find an audience.
NovAurora used to have a ton of rips from PC games, mostly MP3s and MIDI. Unfortunately, the owner of the site shut down the server and sold the domain name.
Fortunately I snarfed the archive before it went away. Between that collection, other game music sites on the web, and things I've ripped myself I have about 2GB of game music.
Anyone want to volunteer a server to host it?
I know this guy, though I haven't talked with him for about six months. He does come to the USA periodically. His girlfriend is American and while they're both living in the Netherlands now, they do come over here once in a while. After the Sklyarov thing I'm not terribly surprised about his reluctance to come forth.
Last I knew, he was working with Bruce Schneier and Counterpane. It's possible that his connection to a US corporation also enters into the decision.
Oh, it can happen, believe me! I've seen something similar once debugging an embedded system. We were using a ROM emulator attached to the PC via the parallel port. The PC and the target machine happened to be plugged into different AC circuits. The PC went *poof* suddenly. Turns out the cause was a 300 mV (yes, 300 millivolt) differential between the grounds on the two circuits.
The moral of the story is, some PCs will put up with a lot of electrical abuse, while others are pieces of junk with no isolation whatsoever. It can happen. However, in a case like this I'd say it's the PC at fault, not the external device.
Oh, and always use a common ground!
AT&T @Home hasn't cut off port 80 where I live yet (Palatine IL, the NW Chicago 'burbs). A quick grep of my Apache logs shows that I got hit 499 times yesterday with requests for 'default.ida'. Just over 1200 times since this thing broke started.
What really annoys me is that I just inherited responsibility for maintaining code for a print server product we sell. Code Red is knocking these things off the net left and right (buffer overflow processing the URL, I suspect) and customers are screaming. Oh, and did I mention that since inheriting the code I haven't even been able to get the fscking debugger to run yet!?
Why anyone would leave a printer sitting wide open on the wild net is beyond me, but apparently it's not acceptable to just tell the customers to put it behind a firewall where it belongs...
No, the solution is to do just the reverse. Eliminate the .COM, .ORG, .NET, etc. domains altogether. Rely solely on country codes for the TLDs.
{But that's crazy talk!}
No it isn't, despite the fact that I seem to be talking to myself. Moving everything to the country TLDs allows domain registry, trademark disputes, and other ickiness to be handled on a country-by-country basis.
Each country is owner of its own domain, and can do whatever they want with it. Guidelines should be suggested, such as "try to put commercial entities in ".co.xx", but countries would be free to modify these guidelines as they see fit. And if some country wants to out-source its registry, or even sell rights to the domain outright, great. It's their domain. They get exactly one. They can use it however they wish.
Yes, this means that multi-national corporations would have to register in each country in which they want a cyberspace presence. Boo-hoo. It's not like they're not registering every TLD they can get their hands on already. So, the Coca-Cola corporation would have to register "cocacola.co.fr", "cocacola.co.uk", "cocacola.co.us", etc. And if they're smart, each one of these points to localized versions of their home page. No more "cocacola.com". Users all over the world can expect to see pages in their own languages. What a concept.
The biggest win is that trademark issues are resolved in the jurisdiction in which they occur. Say that the Scottish sheep farmer Angus McDonald registers "mcdonalds.co.uk". Now a certain multi-national fast-food restaurant wants the name. Who decides? With "mcdonalds.com" it's unclear what the legal jurisdiction is. With "mcdonalds.co.uk" it's perfectly clear that the courts of the United Kingdom need to settle the matter.
But that solution wouldn't generate anywhere near as much revenue for ICANN, so it'll never be done...
Chelloveck
You thought wrong. It had been 17 years, and has been changed to 20 years. So that puts it at 2002 or 2005, depending on when the law was actually changed. But since E-Data has had this in court for years now, they can still try to collect fees retroactively. (Not to say they'll succeed, but they can try.)
As the lower court originally decided, this patent appears to apply primarily to kiosk systems. In that context it might be valid. However, the higher court ordered the lower court to "reconsider the scope" of the patent, stating that it should apply to all downloads. This may be a smart move on the court's part, since there was lots of prior art in 1985 regarding information downloads. I was downloading from BITNET then, and the FIDOnet and UUCP networks were alive and well. If the scope is determined to apply to all such downloads the patent can probably be overthrown completely.
Or then, the higher court may just be smoking something...
Chelloveck
That was Space: 1999. It's fiction, honest! :-)
Chelloveck
Oh, one thing's more amusing than a coffee snob on a rant. A martini snob on a rant!
Yeah, yeah... Just admit that you like plain gin straight up.
Chelloveck
I'm more concerned about the Dalek quote. I mean, what good is a robotic security guard if it can't vaporize things?
Does it have manipulators? Can we at least duct-tape an acetylene torch to its arm or something?
Chelloveck
And in what situations, exactly, would this prove to be more secure than, say, taking one licence plate and not screwing with the capitalization?
There's no need for horribly complex password schemes. Really, you can have passwords that are "secure enough" for whatever environment you're in without having to resort to major convolutions or a radioactive decay random number generator. Pick something not in the dictionary that couldn't be guessed even by someone who knows you. If you can work in capitalization or punctuation, that's great.
Just make sure you eliminate everything that could reasonably be guessed or derived. (Don't use your mother's maiden name, not even backwards.) Once the cracker has to resort to a brute-force attack, any password is as good as any other.
Chelloveck
Exactly my point. You just can't do a slap-save with a joystick or keyboard.
I've also never seen a really good physics simulator in a video-pin. It still takes too much CPU power to do full 3D collision detection and response, especially with curved (non-polygonal) objects. In a real pin you get weird bounces off a bumper or from a drop-target resetting underneath the ball; things that'd make you think there's a bug in the simulator if you didn't know you were batting a real steel ball around. That's the kind of thing that makes the game feel right.
Chelloveck
Possibly true. But, out of the 2% of DVD's market that is comprised of Linux users, how many of them are satisfied with playing DVDs in other systems. I'm a Linux user, but I have absolutely no reason to watch a movie on my Linux box. I'd much rather pop it into my dedicated DVD player and watch it on my TV.
Chelloveck
Not every game. I defy you to find any PC or console system capable of an accurate rendition of a pinball machine.
Of course, pinball had its own problems in the arcades. The machines were expensive, not prone to upgrading, and had hellish maintenance requirements. It was finally killed by video games which only required the operator to wipe the screen and empty the cashbox. And of course, since pinball is entirely skill-based someone who's good can play forever on a quarter or so. Timed video games work. Timed pinball games went over like a lead balloon. (Although Capcom's "Kingpin" had a lot of promise. Pity it never got released.)
Hopefully Stern can make inroads by marketing pinball as a novelty machine. But, having played Striker Xtreme just yesterday, I'm afraid I don't have much hope for them being able to reverse the trend that drove Alvin G., Gottlieb, Sega, Capcom, and even Bally/Williams out of the arena.
But I'll give up my Black Knight and Big Bang Bar machines when they pry the flippers out of my cold, dead hands!
Chelloveck
In terms of market share? Approximately 0.00% ± .
Chelloveck
Or don't even bother encrypting the file. Do you think anyone really cares about the password to your Burpee account? Or 99% of the other transient accounts you create on the web?
I've been using URLTrack on my Palm, which is designed for this. Lately I've switched over to using a generic database manager just to make it easier to export the data to my PC as a CSV file. I ought to remember to copy that CSV file to my shell account periodically, just in case I'm caught somewhere without my Palm and I desparately need to logon to Slashdot.
Chelloveck
My spiffy new Sony CLIÉ has the same style display. Their solution is a front-light that shines up from underneath the graffiti area. Looks great in all lighting conditions. (Though I admit that I never turn the light off unless I'm in bright sunlight.)
If battery life is a concern, you really should be using rechargables. Or, like I did with my son's GameBoy Pocket, velcro a couple of D-cells to the back of the thing. That sucker lasts for months now!
Chelloveck
Unions have a place. If working conditions are bad (for whatever definition of "bad"), organizing the workers can help get things changed. This is a Good Thing.
On the other hand, the big unions are also corporations in and of themselves. And, as such, they exist to propagate themselves. Have you ever seen a union voluntarily disband itself after the workers' needs are met? On the other hand, I've seen unions try to enter a shop where they're clearly unwanted by both the management and Joe-line-worker.
In an ideal world you'd have ad-hoc unions form when the workers collectively feel screwed. And that would dissolve again after an agreement was reached! There's really very little need for a strong-arm union in any industry in the USA these days.
Chelloveck
I only saw half of one episode, so I was never really sure of the premise before reading this review. Still, of what I saw, much of the dialog was rhetoric about what a great and moral people the Confederation was, and how the captain was going to uphold their ethics at any cost. From that ep, it had sounded like the Confederation was still a going concern.
So, given that the Confederation collapsed n-years ago and Andromeda and her captain seem to be the last remnants of it, what's his goal? Is he trying to rebuild the Confederation? If so, how does he intend to do so by flying around from rock to rock? Or is he just playing interstellar evangelist, pulling into town, moralizing a bit, and leaving again?
That's a serious question, BTW. I actually liked the show (in my own twisted way, much as I also enjoyed "Space Rangers") but knowing what he's trying to accomplish would probably help.
Chelloveck
But never retold in nearly as entertaining a fashion as in...
Chelloveck