I've recently got ADSL here in the UK. I've bought it from my old dialup ISP. However, BT provide most of the infrastructure, did the install, and take the lions share of the monthly fee.
I opted for the business service (you can run services, get static IPs, they promise to only oversell the bandwidth by 50%, instead of the 400% on residential etc), which sets me back £100/month ($140/month) for a 512kbps downlink / 256kbps uplink. Every extra 256kbps downwards costs another £20, and you can't start buying more uplink bandwidth until your downlink is at 1Mbit/s.
Initially, I got a static IP thrown in with the deal. I've just gone over to 6 IPs (one for the dsl router, leaving 5 for my boxes), and that was only another £20 / month, but that sort of charge is much higher if you're buying direct from BT
Umm, wtf? Why did the first </a> suddenly jump into the second paragraph like that? And why the hell did it display fine in preview? Something odd going on here...
As a bonus, there is a GTK client gtetrinet and also a commandline one (needs 80x50 though, so either console framebuffer or SVGAConsole is needed), so I can happilly play away the hours from linux:)
If your product requires some crucial part of it to remain secure, then that will be its biggest weakness. As soon as that one thing comes out into the open, a huge swathe of the security it offered is gone. Think CSS here.
However, if your product is secure despite everyone knowning about it (because you published it), then it will be more secure than one relying on people not knowing how it works. Think DES and friends here.
There is quite a short article on Security by Obscurity with microsoft as the case study
here.
Alternatly, pick up your nearest book by Bruce Schneier
"By definition a standard drm is less secure than a proprietary one," says Gregg Makuch, senior product manager for mobile product and services at Seattle-based Realnetworks.
Yes, security by obscurity, that well known way to make your product more secure... anyone else scared by people with this sort of mindset potentially having so much control over what we will and won't be able to do?
I've got an IBM 40gb disk (calls itself a IBM-DTLA-305040), and I've had no issues with it at all for about a year. Several of people I know have also had no issues with their IBM disks.
My advice with any new disk is to put it in to a non critical box, then thrash it like mad for about a week solid. Lots of disk IO, keep the head moving a fair bit, read and write data etc. If it survives that, you shouldn't have any problems with it for the next two years (based on the normal failure to useage distribution curves). If it does fail, you haven't lost any data when you send for a new one.
Part of the problem seems to be that most disk manufacturers don't like to advertise exactly how reliable (or not) their disks really are. The best way to tell how reliable they think they are is to look at their returns process. If it is really really easy and straightforward, they can't be expecting many returns (or else it wouldn't be ecconomic).
Haven't these guys heard of etree.org? Etree has been around for a few years, and exists to allow the trading of lossless recordings of live shows from bands who allow trading.
Its not p2p, mostly ftps and burn + post cds, but it has been there for some time. Loads of good shows too:)
I think one of the important points is how much clue is required for the setup of the two systems.
With firewire, you just plug the device in, and the firewire protocol details to broadcast, service announcements etc. As a user, no setup, no extra services required, the firewire devices work it all out for themselves.
With ethernet, presumably you're also going to use TCP/IP to address things, shift your data around etc. So, now you either need a dhcp server somewhere, or some manual configuration. Otherwise, how will this new device know what address space to talk on? Also, you then have issues with device discovery.
The result - end user stuff gets firewire, as you plug it into one machine and "it just works(tm)". Don't ask about sharing it though.. Meanwhile, your business oriented products come with ethernet and a proper IP stack, an IT guy with "some clue(tm)" configures it (as needed), and several people can use it at once.
So, whats missing for home use of ethernet and TCP/IP in all the devices? A standard, flexible resource discovery system (I know of a few in the works, none finished), and every home to have a NATing DHCPing DSL / cable modem router, so any boxes the user plugs in will be given an IP in the correct address space.
Well, I live in Bournemouth and study in Oxford, so not really.
Given that a fair proportion of the/. readship aren't from the UK, London is where they'll most likely end up if they visit. So, it would be somewhat of an issue for them
I think the only downside on the eden project is its location - Cornwall. You're looking at a good 3-4 hours from London to get there. That said, if you're in London, you can always make a weekend of it, see the Eden project one day, say Dartmoor the other.
One of the very cool things about it was that its built in an old mine. They started off with this slightly polluted hole in the ground, created their own soil on site from the mineing slag. Now if only we could be doing similar regenerative projects for all our mine sites...
As someone at college currently, I have quite varied sleep patterns. On a "normal" night, I aim for 8 hours sleep, and normally manage 7-7.5 hours, and with a few coffees during the day I'm fine. If I get any less I tend to fall asleep in lectures. That said, if I don't set my alarm, I'll normally sleep for 10 hours, after a night of heavy partying it can be more (but I suspect the alcohol plays an effect there...).
Being the mad fool that I am, I also row from time to time, which involves getting up at 5:30am instead of my usual 8:15. On a day when I'm rowing, I normally get 5 hours sleep before the outing (i.e. the night before), go to only one or two of my usual three lectures, then go back to bed for an hour and a half. Follow that with a decent lunch, and I'm fine for the rest of the day.
Well, I have just over 5 years experience, and am only 20
I got a job working holidays and weekends just after I turned 16. It was a contract for a couple of months, and I've had it renewed ever since. Started doing some donkey work, now I get some of the collest projects going.
I do hit issues with my age, but only when dealing with other groups. My group think I'm great, my boss especially. HR wouldn't give me a payrise, he fought hard and won me one. Three times now:)
So, I'd say to the original poster, are you so sure your boss isn't the slightest bit resentful? My boss has had to jump through a lot of hoops, and fight a lot of political battles to keep me employed all this time, and get me something close to the pay I deserve. Maybe you need to work hard to ensure he's totally on your side, convince him of your value, then maybe he'll help stand up for you more.
0.0.3? 0.0.4 is in the works...
on
Parrot Updates
·
· Score: 1
If you're interested in Parrot, get the version from cvs, and get on the mailing list. There's a hell of a lot of interesting and cool stuff thats gone in since 0.0.3, not least of which is JIT on a few platforms (linux among them). Just check out
the mailing list for details.
Oh, and if you run an unusual system, then get in contact with the parrot team! They need more exotic systems to get parrot building on!/p
Xine does Quicktime to, has done for quite some time. Doesn't do Sorenson either, but they do support win32 codecs, so dropping in the Quicktime dlls isn't impossible futher down the line.
There's Ogg Tarkin as was mentioned in the main post. Its by no means finished, but there were some pretty neat ideas banded around before it left the vorbis mailinglist for its own one (and I hence stopped reading about it..)
Its not ready now, but keep an eye on it,
it could well be what you're after.
Initially, ogg vorbis was GPL/LGPL. They to wanted lots of people to use the format, implement it in hardware etc. The result is that sometime around Beta 3, they went over to the BSD style license.
Alas the WarpVision mailing list isn't archived anywhere that I know of, but I'll do my best to sumarise:
Someone noticed that WarpVision had changed a lot between two versions, doing some things better but some no longer. Someone else then noticed that the debug output was much like that of MPlayer
At that point, the MPlayer guys were alearted, and decided that it was very likely that WarpVision was an uncredited port of MPlater to OS/2, and also a closed source one. They mailed the WarpVision Developers, and asked what was up.
The WarpVision guys initially played dum, then said they had only used a tiny bit of code and would release the source later.
Tempers flared, and a lot of discussion went on between the WarpVision guys and the MPlayer guys. In the end, the WarpVision developers credited MPlayer, and released the source.
Now, the flame is over who was in the wrong, who needs to apologise, and if the projects should remain seperate, or if the WarpVision changes should go into the offical MPlayer tree. The issue isn't resolved, but the GPL violation is
Just got a few of these cdr's myself, and my favourite burn is all the useful bits of dos.
I've got my old dos floppy boot disk in the el dorado boot section, it also needs some cdrom drivers. On the cd proper, I've got the rest of dos, the dos version of partition magic, a ram disk driver (PQM needs to write some stuff while running), and then a few dos games that I found lying around.
I've used msdos 6.22, as I happened to find it on a technet cd, but freedos should work equally well.
A friend of mine has just bought a copy of this cd in the UK, and when he tried to make a copy of it onto minidisc so he could take it into work, the copy failed. He couldn't make it work in his laptop either, except for using the low quality digital versions in the data section on the disc
So, he brought it round for me to prod and poke it. Turned out that in my drive, it ripped fine. I've written it back out to cd, and now he can make minidiscs, and listen to it in his computer.
All seems a little pointless to me, but aparently its progress.... thank god for the RIAA and similar bodies, where else would we be otherwise?;)
Article 3 Illegal interception
Each Party shall adopt such legislative and other measures as may be necessary to establish as criminal offences under its domestic law, when committed intentionally, the interception without right, made by technical means, of non-public transmissions of computer data to, from or within a computer system, including electromagnetic emissions from a computer system carrying such computer data. A Party may require that the offence be committed with dishonest intent, or in relation to a computer system that is connected to another computer system.
Given the number of organisations that the UK government is planning to give access to your IT data under "anti terrorist legislation" (eg Guardian article), this will surely require some tricky legal manouvers to get every man and his dog working for the government classed as "with right" to intercept?
Also, what it'll be interesting to see how the data that the ISPs are being told to collect for "anti terrorist" means will be classed as "with right" to intercept, given the provisions in the human rights act on privacy...
Maybe there are less of us than before, and maybe our numbers are dropping, but we're still all out there! Check out the comp.os.os2 heirachy to find a few of us, and a google search will unearth a few more hiding places;)
Another place we'll surface is mailing lists for open source projects. With the EMX runtime (on hobbes among other places), we can easily port a lot of cool stuff quite easily. Theres a supprisingly large number of projects out there which will build on os2, just look for #ifdef __EMX__ in the code.
Apart from os/2 servers, you'll find that most machines running os/2 will dual boot into windows and linux or bsd. Very few of us use only os/2, but we use os/2 because it does most of what we want. Now if only IBM would open source the WPS...
I thought it'd been released several days back. Maybe its just because on monday I went to help someone with problems burning
a CD, and it turned out to be an ISO of
WinXP they'd downloaded off a warez site over the weekend...
Hmm, here's a thought, I wonder if the version he downloaded had the stupid activation feature on it, or if it's been cracked already!
Slashdot Mirror
I've recently got ADSL here in the UK. I've bought it from my old dialup ISP. However, BT provide most of the infrastructure, did the install, and take the lions share of the monthly fee.
I opted for the business service (you can run services, get static IPs, they promise to only oversell the bandwidth by 50%, instead of the 400% on residential etc), which sets me back £100/month ($140/month) for a 512kbps downlink / 256kbps uplink. Every extra 256kbps downwards costs another £20, and you can't start buying more uplink bandwidth until your downlink is at 1Mbit/s.
Initially, I got a static IP thrown in with the deal. I've just gone over to 6 IPs (one for the dsl router, leaving 5 for my boxes), and that was only another £20 / month, but that sort of charge is much higher if you're buying direct from BT
Umm, wtf? Why did the first </a> suddenly jump into the second paragraph like that? And why the hell did it display fine in preview? Something odd going on here...
Tetrinet is a multiplayer version of tetris. You get special blocks, can attack other players, all the usual plus more! I find it very addictive, and often go on for a game but stay on for 2 hours.
As a bonus, there is a GTK client gtetrinet and also a commandline one (needs 80x50 though, so either console framebuffer or SVGAConsole is needed), so I can happilly play away the hours from linux :)
If your product requires some crucial part of it to remain secure, then that will be its biggest weakness. As soon as that one thing comes out into the open, a huge swathe of the security it offered is gone. Think CSS here.
However, if your product is secure despite everyone knowning about it (because you published it), then it will be more secure than one relying on people not knowing how it works. Think DES and friends here.
There is quite a short article on Security by Obscurity with microsoft as the case study here. Alternatly, pick up your nearest book by Bruce Schneier
"By definition a standard drm is less secure than a proprietary one," says Gregg Makuch, senior product manager for mobile product and services at Seattle-based Realnetworks.
Yes, security by obscurity, that well known way to make your product more secure... anyone else scared by people with this sort of mindset potentially having so much control over what we will and won't be able to do?
I've got an IBM 40gb disk (calls itself a IBM-DTLA-305040), and I've had no issues with it at all for about a year. Several of people I know have also had no issues with their IBM disks.
My advice with any new disk is to put it in to a non critical box, then thrash it like mad for about a week solid. Lots of disk IO, keep the head moving a fair bit, read and write data etc. If it survives that, you shouldn't have any problems with it for the next two years (based on the normal failure to useage distribution curves). If it does fail, you haven't lost any data when you send for a new one.
Part of the problem seems to be that most disk manufacturers don't like to advertise exactly how reliable (or not) their disks really are. The best way to tell how reliable they think they are is to look at their returns process. If it is really really easy and straightforward, they can't be expecting many returns (or else it wouldn't be ecconomic).
Haven't these guys heard of etree.org? Etree has been around for a few years, and exists to allow the trading of lossless recordings of live shows from bands who allow trading.
Its not p2p, mostly ftps and burn + post cds, but it has been there for some time. Loads of good shows too :)
I think one of the important points is how much clue is required for the setup of the two systems.
With firewire, you just plug the device in, and the firewire protocol details to broadcast, service announcements etc. As a user, no setup, no extra services required, the firewire devices work it all out for themselves.
With ethernet, presumably you're also going to use TCP/IP to address things, shift your data around etc. So, now you either need a dhcp server somewhere, or some manual configuration. Otherwise, how will this new device know what address space to talk on? Also, you then have issues with device discovery.
The result - end user stuff gets firewire, as you plug it into one machine and "it just works(tm)". Don't ask about sharing it though.. Meanwhile, your business oriented products come with ethernet and a proper IP stack, an IT guy with "some clue(tm)" configures it (as needed), and several people can use it at once.
So, whats missing for home use of ethernet and TCP/IP in all the devices? A standard, flexible resource discovery system (I know of a few in the works, none finished), and every home to have a NATing DHCPing DSL / cable modem router, so any boxes the user plugs in will be given an IP in the correct address space.
Well, I live in Bournemouth and study in Oxford, so not really. /. readship aren't from the UK, London is where they'll most likely end up if they visit. So, it would be somewhat of an issue for them
Given that a fair proportion of the
I think the only downside on the eden project is its location - Cornwall. You're looking at a good 3-4 hours from London to get there. That said, if you're in London, you can always make a weekend of it, see the Eden project one day, say Dartmoor the other.
One of the very cool things about it was that its built in an old mine. They started off with this slightly polluted hole in the ground, created their own soil on site from the mineing slag. Now if only we could be doing similar regenerative projects for all our mine sites...
As someone at college currently, I have quite varied sleep patterns. On a "normal" night, I aim for 8 hours sleep, and normally manage 7-7.5 hours, and with a few coffees during the day I'm fine. If I get any less I tend to fall asleep in lectures. That said, if I don't set my alarm, I'll normally sleep for 10 hours, after a night of heavy partying it can be more (but I suspect the alcohol plays an effect there...).
Being the mad fool that I am, I also row from time to time, which involves getting up at 5:30am instead of my usual 8:15. On a day when I'm rowing, I normally get 5 hours sleep before the outing (i.e. the night before), go to only one or two of my usual three lectures, then go back to bed for an hour and a half. Follow that with a decent lunch, and I'm fine for the rest of the day.
Well, I have just over 5 years experience, and am only 20
I got a job working holidays and weekends just after I turned 16. It was a contract for a couple of months, and I've had it renewed ever since. Started doing some donkey work, now I get some of the collest projects going.
I do hit issues with my age, but only when dealing with other groups. My group think I'm great, my boss especially. HR wouldn't give me a payrise, he fought hard and won me one. Three times now :)
So, I'd say to the original poster, are you so sure your boss isn't the slightest bit resentful? My boss has had to jump through a lot of hoops, and fight a lot of political battles to keep me employed all this time, and get me something close to the pay I deserve. Maybe you need to work hard to ensure he's totally on your side, convince him of your value, then maybe he'll help stand up for you more.
If you're interested in Parrot, get the version from cvs, and get on the mailing list. There's a hell of a lot of interesting and cool stuff thats gone in since 0.0.3, not least of which is JIT on a few platforms (linux among them). Just check out the mailing list for details.
Oh, and if you run an unusual system, then get in contact with the parrot team! They need more exotic systems to get parrot building on!/p
I've got a Toshiba laptop dvd drive (sd-c2502), and it had not trouble at all ripping the Natalie Imbruglia cd that was Cactus Broken^H^H protected.
A couple of friends have Toshiba laptop cd only drives, and they couldn't play the cd :(
Xine does Quicktime to, has done for quite some time. Doesn't do Sorenson either, but they do support win32 codecs, so dropping in the Quicktime dlls isn't impossible futher down the line.
There's Ogg Tarkin as was mentioned in the main post. Its by no means finished, but there were some pretty neat ideas banded around before it left the vorbis mailinglist for its own one (and I hence stopped reading about it..)
Its not ready now, but keep an eye on it, it could well be what you're after.
Initially, ogg vorbis was GPL/LGPL. They to wanted lots of people to use the format, implement it in hardware etc. The result is that sometime around Beta 3, they went over to the BSD style license.
Alas the WarpVision mailing list isn't archived anywhere that I know of, but I'll do my best to sumarise:
Someone noticed that WarpVision had changed a lot between two versions, doing some things better but some no longer. Someone else then noticed that the debug output was much like that of MPlayer
At that point, the MPlayer guys were alearted, and decided that it was very likely that WarpVision was an uncredited port of MPlater to OS/2, and also a closed source one. They mailed the WarpVision Developers, and asked what was up.
The WarpVision guys initially played dum, then said they had only used a tiny bit of code and would release the source later.
Tempers flared, and a lot of discussion went on between the WarpVision guys and the MPlayer guys. In the end, the WarpVision developers credited MPlayer, and released the source.
Now, the flame is over who was in the wrong, who needs to apologise, and if the projects should remain seperate, or if the WarpVision changes should go into the offical MPlayer tree. The issue isn't resolved, but the GPL violation is
Just got a few of these cdr's myself, and my favourite burn is all the useful bits of dos.
I've got my old dos floppy boot disk in the el dorado boot section, it also needs some cdrom drivers. On the cd proper, I've got the rest of dos, the dos version of partition magic, a ram disk driver (PQM needs to write some stuff while running), and then a few dos games that I found lying around.
I've used msdos 6.22, as I happened to find it on a technet cd, but freedos should work equally well.
A friend of mine has just bought a copy of this cd in the UK, and when he tried to make a copy of it onto minidisc so he could take it into work, the copy failed. He couldn't make it work in his laptop either, except for using the low quality digital versions in the data section on the disc
So, he brought it round for me to prod and poke it. Turned out that in my drive, it ripped fine. I've written it back out to cd, and now he can make minidiscs, and listen to it in his computer.
All seems a little pointless to me, but aparently its progress.... thank god for the RIAA and similar bodies, where else would we be otherwise? ;)
It states:
Article 3 Illegal interception
Each Party shall adopt such legislative and other measures as may be necessary to establish as criminal offences under its domestic law, when committed intentionally, the interception without right, made by technical means, of non-public transmissions of computer data to, from or within a computer system, including electromagnetic emissions from a computer system carrying such computer data. A Party may require that the offence be committed with dishonest intent, or in relation to a computer system that is connected to another computer system.
Given the number of organisations that the UK government is planning to give access to your IT data under "anti terrorist legislation" (eg Guardian article), this will surely require some tricky legal manouvers to get every man and his dog working for the government classed as "with right" to intercept?
Also, what it'll be interesting to see how the data that the ISPs are being told to collect for "anti terrorist" means will be classed as "with right" to intercept, given the provisions in the human rights act on privacy...
Maybe there are less of us than before, and maybe our numbers are dropping, but we're still all out there! Check out the comp.os.os2 heirachy to find a few of us, and a google search will unearth a few more hiding places ;)
Another place we'll surface is mailing lists for open source projects. With the EMX runtime (on hobbes among other places), we can easily port a lot of cool stuff quite easily. Theres a supprisingly large number of projects out there which will build on os2, just look for #ifdef __EMX__ in the code.
Apart from os/2 servers, you'll find that most machines running os/2 will dual boot into windows and linux or bsd. Very few of us use only os/2, but we use os/2 because it does most of what we want. Now if only IBM would open source the WPS...
They have released a lot of their OMNI print drivers for inkjets. The details are at:
oss.software.ibm.com
I thought it'd been released several days back. Maybe its just because on monday I went to help someone with problems burning a CD, and it turned out to be an ISO of WinXP they'd downloaded off a warez site over the weekend...
Hmm, here's a thought, I wonder if the version he downloaded had the stupid activation feature on it, or if it's been cracked already!
Like it Dave. Where's the sound though? ;)
On a related issue, shouldn't you like be taking your finals and not doing amusing animated gifs for slashdot consumption?