Except nobody wants to "give away" subscription services. Look at xmltv. They had a very hard time keeping up with north american tv schedules because GIST and TV Guide constantly modified their listings to foil the screen scrapers. (They now have partnered with zap2it, who merely requires a montly survey of their subscribers.)
With xmltv being open source, I suspect GIST had a techie or two whose job it was to keep current with it, analyze the source and ensure their website was quickly modified to break it. And I suspect TV Guide has a similar employee.
That's why subscriptions are important. These people want something for their efforts in collecting this data, or they may as well go home. The difference is that you see the subscription fee as "paying for something that should be free", and they see it as "making this week's payroll." There needs to be some kind of medium ground.
You're surrounded by people who are unable to properly configure their wireless routers.
The answer is staring you in the face. You simply find one of your neighbor's Linksys routers that's wide open, and save yourself $40/month on your Comcast bill. Duh!
Re:Biggest LOTR bug of all was their "Quick Hit"!?
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Top 50 DVDs
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Well, it would probably win an Oscar(TM) for the longest movie title ever (stealing shamelessly from Douglas Adams): "Lord of the Rings: The Scouring of the Shire -- Part Four of the Increasingly Inaccurately Titled Trilogy."
But yeah, I'd pay to see it. I already did, in a way -- I was hoping for the Scouring to be included in the Extended Edition of part 3.
Re:Biggest LOTR bug of all was their "Quick Hit"!?
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· Score: 1
Budgetary, that's sad, especially on a half-billion dollar budget.
I didn't mind them skipping a lot of things that Tolkien obviously thought important. Bill Ferny, Bill the Pony, the barrow-downs, Old Man Willow, Tom Bombadil, all that stuff -- didn't miss it. I also don't care how many times Arwen showed up, or how many elves they cut out and/or replaced with her. I got sick of the books where you'd get Elf #38: "Hi, I'm Hellengone, and I'm here to carry this elvish plot device for thirteen feet to Elf #39." So what if Jackson "reused" the Arwen character? The essence of the story remained intact.
But the Scouring was different -- it was a treat for the reader, and it would have been a treat for the viewer. And Jackson obviously gave it thought, because you could see the various hobbits wincing in pain as they imagined the Shire burning. So he had the set, he had the "burning of the set", he could have just finished it right. It wouldn't even have to have been Saruman -- Pippin and Merry could have opened the can of whup-ass on Arwen, for all I cared. But that segment of story was essence, and it was missing.
OK, I'm done crying now. I guess I really am a Tolkien fanboi, even if I don't speak Quenta or Sindarin. (And I do have elvish fonts installed... oops, I admitted it out loud.)
Biggest LOTR bug of all was their "Quick Hit"!?!
on
Top 50 DVDs
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· Score: 1
Quick Hit:
Watching the full version of the confrontation with Sauraman at the Tower of Orthanc scene that was controversially cut from the theatrical version of The Return of the King is sheer joy.
[ Warning: spoiler of spoilage following ]
Not that I'm a total Tolkien fanboy or anything, but the absolute best part of the book trilogy for me was the hobbits' return home to find the Shire had been corrupted by Saruman. "The Scouring of the Shire" gave just the best picture of Merry and Pippin having grown up to the point where they could ride in, take names and kick ass. Seeing the Party Tree cut down, the filthy brick buildings inhabited by Bill Ferny and his ilk, and the entire Shire corrupted and being dismantled by Saruman made you cry, and the hobbits cleaning up (at Sharkey's End) was an absolute delight. While reading the book, I always knew that Frodo would prevail, and that the ring would be destroyed. But I didn't expect the devastation in the Shire, and I just got such a kick from Merry and Pippin being the heroes for a change.
And that fool of a director cut the entire ending from the movie. Killing Saruman at Orthanc was both anti-climactic and frustrating, because it meant the Shire wouldn't need scouring, even though he showed Frodo having glimpses of it in Galadrial's mirror. It wasn't a controversial cut; rather, it was a controversial inclusion.
I know what you're saying about technology invention articles containing future predictions (for example, by now we should all be driven to work by autonomous hovercars on maglev monorails.) Maybe these guys have hit serious limitations and don't have a producible product yet; I wouldn't know how to set up a factory to produce "quantum dots" and certainly wouldn't know how to produce a 5 gallon pail of them.
Or maybe the paint doesn't function below 5 degrees C, making it useless to the Canadian inventor who only sees sweaters all day long.
Not that I know or understand your company's financial situation, but if you do decide to roll-your-own server, I'd recommend purchasing the components from a local source with knowledgable staff (if you're completely alone on this.) A second pair of eyes to help you if you get stuck is a valuable resource, and the slight premium you'll pay could prove to be cheap insurance.
Some of the local places around here are only a few dollars above pricewatch figures, and they'll even assemble and test the machine for you for an extra $60.
I buy all my hardware from the locals, and it's saved my butt more than once.
and one of the finest Lego modelers out there is Jennifer Clark.
Look at her website for a while, and you'll just say "wow." She has the most amazing designs, and stays as true to the equipment she's modeling as she can.
offer lots of unimaginative plastic pieces of very limited use.
The Lego Group realized this, too; and hopefully not too late. They've changed their offerings dramatically in the last year or two, have cut back on the inflexible kits, and are now focusing on their core sales. They're not going to release as many movie tie-ins, and they're opting for "construction" and "imagination" toys again.
One can only hope that they'll still be able to spark kids' imaginations.
TCG refers to that as the "BORE" problem - Break Once, Run Everywhere. With DRM enabled, your CPU will recognize it as "supposed to be signed but isn't" and refuse to run it, or even delete it. According to TFA, the TCG will be supplying computers with periodically updated lists of "pirated" applications or data files, and if your OS finds them, they'll be deleted.
Anyway, I wouldn't be selling that used computer these days. At least you know it doesn't already have TC inside!
I imagine the cell phone companies would be all over this.
They're already selling their phones "locked" (tied to a particular service provider), and some people are making a few bucks by offering an "unlock" service (they know the magic sequence of buttons to press to cancel this lock.)
With DRM on board, a locked phone will stay locked. And a $4.95 java game, well, you only get it for the month. Seeing as how people are "selling" ringtones and "screensavers" and making a boatload of money off of the sheeple, public acceptance is not even likely to be an issue.
Actually, I'm not quite understanding that one myself. Both Mozilla/Firefox and IE store the user's cached data in the user's personal folder. Frankly, I don't know where else you should put it on a Windows box.
You can set up your NTFS security such that only %USERNAME% can see the data in %USERNAME%'s folder. Very few home users do this, of course, and most wouldn't want to. Typical users wouldn't be able to function if Mom couldn't view the family pictures that Dad downloaded from the family's digital camera. But if you did change your security, this "problem" is "fixed."
Perhaps they are suggesting the cache should be encrypted on a by-user basis? Sure, my browsing is too fast already...
I think it's very interesting that I figured out the exact same "brute force" method 30 years ago in junior high school. There was an old Master lock clipped to a door handle near the bus entrance where we had to wait, and it had been hanging there for months. I was early for the bus one night, so I started playing with the lock (all of us kids did.) I already understood the internal wheel mechanics of combination locks, but had never seen them. What made me try it was when I realized my own personal lock had a "tolerance" of about +/- 1.5 digits, and that I wouldn't have to try every single number. Like you, I chose to stop every 2.5 numbers out of convenience, and I realized it meant I could be a tiny bit less precise and still hit every workable combination.
Those "old style" Master locks had knurled steel knobs, as opposed to the single cast knob and plate common today. It was commonly known that by pulling up on the shackle that you could "feel" the last digit. At that time they did not have false gates on the third wheel. Knowing the last digit, I started by spinning right to zero, left past zero to the first "pickup point" for the middle wheel (again, very easy to both feel and hear in those old locks) and back to the known final digit. If it failed, I'd spin left to 2.5 before the previous number (moving the middle wheel back one test point,) and back to the final digit again. I found the entire first digit test could be performed in less than a minute with this method, so I continued. In 15 minutes, I had the lock as my prize.
In junior high, it was also common for kids to forget to secure their lock in their gym locker. The penalty paid if someone found your lock hanging open was that they clipped it to an overhead pipe, along with several dozen other forgotten locks. I found that pipe to be a rich bounty of locks that I opened, took home and later took apart. My goal was to locate the "drill point" out of some fanciful notion that if it worked in the movies, I could do it too. I did map out the point at which to drill them, and then discovered I could drive a nail into the mechanism at a certain point in the back and it would pop right open. Of course, hammering sheet metal wasn't much of a challenge, so I then found I could carefully pry off the thin backplate, examine the wheels, and replace the backplate (poorly.) In the end, though, spinning the dial was the most satisfying method of opening the locks.
Around that time, Master came out with the notched 3rd wheel (probably because I couldn't have been the only kid to open their locks.) It wasn't for several years that I dared to try one, but then found I could brute force the third digit almost as quickly as spinning it back to a known number (the false gates were quick checkpoints.) It was then that I discovered that the latch would pull "farther" for certain second digits, and it was about that time I realized it hinted that my second number was probably correct, saving lots of time in the brute-force arena. If only I had realized that in the era of non-false-gated old locks, I probably could have opened any of them in about a minute or two.
One other lock-related thing I remember vividly from the mid '70s were the TV commercials featuring a Master padlock clipped to the center of a large bullseye, and a.30-06 rifle being fired through the middle of the lock. The lock held, of course, and we viewers were supposed to believe that "proved" Master Locks couldn't get shot open, and that any lock shot open on a TV cop show must have been some other brand. I smiled, of course, since I had already filed off the wards from my cheap padlock key and had made a master key that would have opened the TV lock quicker than the original key.
It still takes me around 4-5 minutes to open any of the modern Master combination locks these days, and I'm just a programmer who likes to have "finger puzzles" -- no experience cracking safes here!
Are you familiar with Triple DES? DES is considered weak because it offers only 55 bits of security. Double DES should offer 110 bits of security, then, right? In actuallity it allows for a specific type of attack called meet-in-the-middle (in which encryptions are tested against decryptions,) and it literally adds only one single "bit" of keylength to the decryption challenge. Triple DES (encrypt with K1, decrypt with K2, encrypt with K3) offers 112 bits of security with its 168 bits of keylength and is considered moderately secure, but slow.
So, cracks in one layer might reveal enough information to break the next layer. Or, a break in an inner layer may compromise the security of the outer layer. For a physical analogue, see the book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynmann," and specifically the part where he fiddles with people's already open safes to learn their combinations.
Here's a possible example. RSA has an encryption method called OAEP. This page notes "to construct a valid OAEP encoded message, an adversary must know the original plaintext." Let's say that Eve manages to find the plaintext of one message (perhaps through dumpster diving, or whatever.) She might now be able to create OAEP encodings that can spoof the inner layer. By introducing them at the right point in Bob's stream, he may believe that they're valid. Or, Eve might be able to use her computed OAEP encoded message as a plaintext crib to help her break the outer layer's key.
Sure, there's a lot of "what if" there (of the sort cryptographers love to endlessly debate) but the point is that "stacking" algorithms is not an automatic guarantee of "more" security.
No, a $100 green laser is an above average laser pointer. But it's still just a laser pointer, it's not a weapons-grade "pilot blinder" like the Soviets developed and deployed in their "fishing trawlers" during the cold war.
You're not thinking like a big-time ripoff artist (which is not a bad thing!)
They could have structured their purchases using legitimate motherboard companies as intermediaries, or they could have set up their own front company to hide the purchase. Just because you've never heard of Panashiba doesn't mean AMD's sales rep won't sell to them.
Possibly they used a Chinese or Russian firm as a cutout. Both of those countries are large enough that a million chips not hitting the market might go unnoticed. The order could also have come through a corrupt government official from a smaller country, such as Cuba, under the pretext of a military or governmental order.
They could even have hijacked a freighter or cargo containers carrying product. Computer chips long ago replaced lipstick as the highest dollar value per truck for hijacking. They have a tremendous resale value.
We may never know, but it sure would be interesting to find out.
I think Linux already has a very large pool of talented developers who are already contributing a vast number of exceedingly cool tools.
Overall, it seems to me that Windows that has been lacking a large number of open source developers. I think most Windows developers are already of the mindset that "hey, if Bill Gates gets paid for this, so should I." Yes, there some freeware, and even some open source projects that are Windows-based. Overall, though, the Open Source community has always rallied more around the Open Source OS.
Slashdot Mirror
A: Not enough sand.
Q: Why don't sharks attack lawyers?
A: Professional courtesy.
"No technology is sufficiently advanced until it is used for pr0n."
In Soviet Russia, phone gives YOU the finger!
With xmltv being open source, I suspect GIST had a techie or two whose job it was to keep current with it, analyze the source and ensure their website was quickly modified to break it. And I suspect TV Guide has a similar employee.
That's why subscriptions are important. These people want something for their efforts in collecting this data, or they may as well go home. The difference is that you see the subscription fee as "paying for something that should be free", and they see it as "making this week's payroll." There needs to be some kind of medium ground.
It was also mostly a joke. Perhaps I should have included more smiley faces to get the point across.
The answer is staring you in the face. You simply find one of your neighbor's Linksys routers that's wide open, and save yourself $40/month on your Comcast bill. Duh!
But yeah, I'd pay to see it. I already did, in a way -- I was hoping for the Scouring to be included in the Extended Edition of part 3.
I didn't mind them skipping a lot of things that Tolkien obviously thought important. Bill Ferny, Bill the Pony, the barrow-downs, Old Man Willow, Tom Bombadil, all that stuff -- didn't miss it. I also don't care how many times Arwen showed up, or how many elves they cut out and/or replaced with her. I got sick of the books where you'd get Elf #38: "Hi, I'm Hellengone, and I'm here to carry this elvish plot device for thirteen feet to Elf #39." So what if Jackson "reused" the Arwen character? The essence of the story remained intact.
But the Scouring was different -- it was a treat for the reader, and it would have been a treat for the viewer. And Jackson obviously gave it thought, because you could see the various hobbits wincing in pain as they imagined the Shire burning. So he had the set, he had the "burning of the set", he could have just finished it right. It wouldn't even have to have been Saruman -- Pippin and Merry could have opened the can of whup-ass on Arwen, for all I cared. But that segment of story was essence, and it was missing.
OK, I'm done crying now. I guess I really am a Tolkien fanboi, even if I don't speak Quenta or Sindarin. (And I do have elvish fonts installed ... oops, I admitted it out loud.)
Watching the full version of the confrontation with Sauraman at the Tower of Orthanc scene that was controversially cut from the theatrical version of The Return of the King is sheer joy.
[ Warning: spoiler of spoilage following ]
Not that I'm a total Tolkien fanboy or anything, but the absolute best part of the book trilogy for me was the hobbits' return home to find the Shire had been corrupted by Saruman. "The Scouring of the Shire" gave just the best picture of Merry and Pippin having grown up to the point where they could ride in, take names and kick ass. Seeing the Party Tree cut down, the filthy brick buildings inhabited by Bill Ferny and his ilk, and the entire Shire corrupted and being dismantled by Saruman made you cry, and the hobbits cleaning up (at Sharkey's End) was an absolute delight. While reading the book, I always knew that Frodo would prevail, and that the ring would be destroyed. But I didn't expect the devastation in the Shire, and I just got such a kick from Merry and Pippin being the heroes for a change.
And that fool of a director cut the entire ending from the movie. Killing Saruman at Orthanc was both anti-climactic and frustrating, because it meant the Shire wouldn't need scouring, even though he showed Frodo having glimpses of it in Galadrial's mirror. It wasn't a controversial cut; rather, it was a controversial inclusion.
Ha! With the Congress firmly in the grip of the finest polititicans money can buy, the last thing we need is MORE laws.
You are just freakin' hilarious, mate.
I know what you're saying about technology invention articles containing future predictions (for example, by now we should all be driven to work by autonomous hovercars on maglev monorails.) Maybe these guys have hit serious limitations and don't have a producible product yet; I wouldn't know how to set up a factory to produce "quantum dots" and certainly wouldn't know how to produce a 5 gallon pail of them.
Or maybe the paint doesn't function below 5 degrees C, making it useless to the Canadian inventor who only sees sweaters all day long.
Who knows if it will be expensive, cheap, emit toxic byproducts, or even be producable in consumer quantites yet? It's just research, not a factory.
Some of the local places around here are only a few dollars above pricewatch figures, and they'll even assemble and test the machine for you for an extra $60.
I buy all my hardware from the locals, and it's saved my butt more than once.
Look at her website for a while, and you'll just say "wow." She has the most amazing designs, and stays as true to the equipment she's modeling as she can.
The Lego Group realized this, too; and hopefully not too late. They've changed their offerings dramatically in the last year or two, have cut back on the inflexible kits, and are now focusing on their core sales. They're not going to release as many movie tie-ins, and they're opting for "construction" and "imagination" toys again.
One can only hope that they'll still be able to spark kids' imaginations.
Anyway, I wouldn't be selling that used computer these days. At least you know it doesn't already have TC inside!
They're already selling their phones "locked" (tied to a particular service provider), and some people are making a few bucks by offering an "unlock" service (they know the magic sequence of buttons to press to cancel this lock.)
With DRM on board, a locked phone will stay locked. And a $4.95 java game, well, you only get it for the month. Seeing as how people are "selling" ringtones and "screensavers" and making a boatload of money off of the sheeple, public acceptance is not even likely to be an issue.
You can set up your NTFS security such that only %USERNAME% can see the data in %USERNAME%'s folder. Very few home users do this, of course, and most wouldn't want to. Typical users wouldn't be able to function if Mom couldn't view the family pictures that Dad downloaded from the family's digital camera. But if you did change your security, this "problem" is "fixed."
Perhaps they are suggesting the cache should be encrypted on a by-user basis? Sure, my browsing is too fast already ...
Those "old style" Master locks had knurled steel knobs, as opposed to the single cast knob and plate common today. It was commonly known that by pulling up on the shackle that you could "feel" the last digit. At that time they did not have false gates on the third wheel. Knowing the last digit, I started by spinning right to zero, left past zero to the first "pickup point" for the middle wheel (again, very easy to both feel and hear in those old locks) and back to the known final digit. If it failed, I'd spin left to 2.5 before the previous number (moving the middle wheel back one test point,) and back to the final digit again. I found the entire first digit test could be performed in less than a minute with this method, so I continued. In 15 minutes, I had the lock as my prize.
In junior high, it was also common for kids to forget to secure their lock in their gym locker. The penalty paid if someone found your lock hanging open was that they clipped it to an overhead pipe, along with several dozen other forgotten locks. I found that pipe to be a rich bounty of locks that I opened, took home and later took apart. My goal was to locate the "drill point" out of some fanciful notion that if it worked in the movies, I could do it too. I did map out the point at which to drill them, and then discovered I could drive a nail into the mechanism at a certain point in the back and it would pop right open. Of course, hammering sheet metal wasn't much of a challenge, so I then found I could carefully pry off the thin backplate, examine the wheels, and replace the backplate (poorly.) In the end, though, spinning the dial was the most satisfying method of opening the locks.
Around that time, Master came out with the notched 3rd wheel (probably because I couldn't have been the only kid to open their locks.) It wasn't for several years that I dared to try one, but then found I could brute force the third digit almost as quickly as spinning it back to a known number (the false gates were quick checkpoints.) It was then that I discovered that the latch would pull "farther" for certain second digits, and it was about that time I realized it hinted that my second number was probably correct, saving lots of time in the brute-force arena. If only I had realized that in the era of non-false-gated old locks, I probably could have opened any of them in about a minute or two.
One other lock-related thing I remember vividly from the mid '70s were the TV commercials featuring a Master padlock clipped to the center of a large bullseye, and a .30-06 rifle being fired through the middle of the lock. The lock held, of course, and we viewers were supposed to believe that "proved" Master Locks couldn't get shot open, and that any lock shot open on a TV cop show must have been some other brand. I smiled, of course, since I had already filed off the wards from my cheap padlock key and had made a master key that would have opened the TV lock quicker than the original key.
It still takes me around 4-5 minutes to open any of the modern Master combination locks these days, and I'm just a programmer who likes to have "finger puzzles" -- no experience cracking safes here!
So, cracks in one layer might reveal enough information to break the next layer. Or, a break in an inner layer may compromise the security of the outer layer. For a physical analogue, see the book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynmann," and specifically the part where he fiddles with people's already open safes to learn their combinations.
Here's a possible example. RSA has an encryption method called OAEP. This page notes "to construct a valid OAEP encoded message, an adversary must know the original plaintext." Let's say that Eve manages to find the plaintext of one message (perhaps through dumpster diving, or whatever.) She might now be able to create OAEP encodings that can spoof the inner layer. By introducing them at the right point in Bob's stream, he may believe that they're valid. Or, Eve might be able to use her computed OAEP encoded message as a plaintext crib to help her break the outer layer's key.
Sure, there's a lot of "what if" there (of the sort cryptographers love to endlessly debate) but the point is that "stacking" algorithms is not an automatic guarantee of "more" security.
No, a $100 green laser is an above average laser pointer. But it's still just a laser pointer, it's not a weapons-grade "pilot blinder" like the Soviets developed and deployed in their "fishing trawlers" during the cold war.
Neither China nor Taiwan has Cuba under an embargo. That's an American thing only.
They could have structured their purchases using legitimate motherboard companies as intermediaries, or they could have set up their own front company to hide the purchase. Just because you've never heard of Panashiba doesn't mean AMD's sales rep won't sell to them.
Possibly they used a Chinese or Russian firm as a cutout. Both of those countries are large enough that a million chips not hitting the market might go unnoticed. The order could also have come through a corrupt government official from a smaller country, such as Cuba, under the pretext of a military or governmental order.
They could even have hijacked a freighter or cargo containers carrying product. Computer chips long ago replaced lipstick as the highest dollar value per truck for hijacking. They have a tremendous resale value.
We may never know, but it sure would be interesting to find out.
Overall, it seems to me that Windows that has been lacking a large number of open source developers. I think most Windows developers are already of the mindset that "hey, if Bill Gates gets paid for this, so should I." Yes, there some freeware, and even some open source projects that are Windows-based. Overall, though, the Open Source community has always rallied more around the Open Source OS.
Perhaps you can have someone bear your CrusFX 1000 for you...