Enforced 7 digit dialing is a real pain in the ass. I have to figure out which identical suburban town I'm standing in before dialing someone? "Let's see, now, I crossed the river, so I must be in 952 -- no wait, I'm WEST of Cedar Avenue, but still east of Burnsville... (Excuse me, sir, but are we still south of the airport?), so this is 651?
There's your Bull. I can't wait for the cutover to catch up to all the phone switches so it's all 10 digit enabled.
Another worm problem that bugged me was when they were mounting the worms, they stuck the maker hooks in front of the direction of motion. This meant that either the worm was moving backwards, the plates on that stunt worm were reversed, or that the F/X folx didn't care how they worked.
I thought the casting and acting on this version was spotty. Most of it was very good:
About Paul, you wrote, "he looks like a crazy religious psycho to me."
I thought he played the part to perfection. For some reason, the religious fanatacism that Herbert was trying to get across never really struck me, but when I saw the character transform himself from "annoyed kid stuck when his dad got a job transfer to some hick town" to "atheist exploiting a legend" into "messianic fanatic", wow, I think he did an excellent job making the part and character come to life! Just seeing that him play that part causes Children of Dune and Dune Messiah to suddenly make sense.
I also thought they brought the character of Irulan out very well. Smart, scheming, flirtatious, playing all sides (including her father) against each other -- all of that was never made so clear as in this version.
Chani also came out better here. In the Lynch version, you hear the voice-over of Irulan saying "Paul's love for Chani grew." Five thin words to describe a torrid romance? At least she gave Paul a character he could love.
Feyd was also played very well. Condescending, smug, arrogant, haughty, he had it all and balanced it well. And at least the Baron wasn't given to perversions we couldn't understand in this version.
But there was also some really bad acting. William Hurt (the only "name" in the SciFi version) couldn't have inspired a troop of Cub Scouts with his lack of enthusiasm, much less lead a Great House.
The navigators were just stupid. "Hey, lets wave our hands mystically and dramatically when we get upset." Why? And what was with the melange of bad accents? It was like being at the Rennaisance Festival trying to figure out if any of these people had actually ever been to Britain.
And ugly? How about Stilgar? Paul should have just called him out and taken his middle-aged, balding, paunchy water. He looked more like a pointy-haired boss than a knife-fighting, water-starved, sietch-inspiring leader. I couldn't get past his appearance far enough to notice his acting.
The SciFi version did bring some fresh new perspectives to some of the characters. I found it more engrossing than the Lynch version, by far.
Agreed. The distant shots of Arrakkis, especially during the battle last night, were rendered fine until they added the "smoke" effects, which looked like a guy with a leaky marker smeared it up the screen. That, and to do an epic battle takes more than 48 feydakin and 52 sardaukar extras. Also, if they're going to overdub a fight scene with an explosive fireball, perhaps it'd be best if the actors involved would quit fighting and start acting like they'd been blown up.
I don't remember the ships being described by Mr. Herbert in the books, and can only wonder at the remarkable resemblence between the SciFi version ships and the David Lynch version ships.
I found just too many striking similarities between the two versions to make this version stand out. I was grateful for the lack of voice-over thoughts (a la Lynch), but was disappointed that many of those thoughts weren't then exposed through dialog or action.
Oh, well, all bitching aside, it was good enough to keep me up way too late finishing the series last night.:-)
Actually, OneForAll makes some very nice replacements that have almost complete functionality. See http://www.hifi-remote.com/ofa/ for some really good info, and lots of codes to make them do what you need.
And for remote purposes, I've been a mostly happy user of Pacific NeoTek's OmniRemote on both a Palm Professional and a Handspring Visor Deluxe (the 2MB Handsprings are now available at Target for $149, btw, not a bad price for a universal remote.)
However, to answer your original question, I've not found ANY IrDA software for the PC that will operate a remote, and I've been looking for a long time... Most everybody needs you to add a chunk of external hardware on a serial (or parallel) port.
Why let the government act as the regulator? Why not allow the monopoly to exist as a monopoly?
Sorry if this sounds like a Microsoft shill post here (I'm not trying to be one) but I kind of think Microsoft will defeat themselves with bloat. Look at the stuff they're pushing with.NET -- subscription versions of software. How long are people going to lie back and take cruft like that? At some point, Microsoft will cross the threshold of pissing off too many of their customers, and the monopoly will cure itself.
The point is adding more encrypted traffic to a system tends to "hide" other encrypted traffic. It's also a good precedent to get other free e-mail hosts such as Hotmail to encrypt their mail, just to "keep up with the Joneses."
Look at it math-wise: if 0.1% of the e-mail traffic today is encrypted (which I'm personally guessing would be way high,) if you were to send an encrypted letter to your buddy (whose ISP is being Carnivored,) it'd get noticed. Being only one message out of a thousand, it might even merit a few minutes on FBI's Deep Crack.
Now, add in all the Yahoo e-mail traffic and that number might rise to 1.0%. Include encrypting lots of Hotmail traffic, and it might rise to 2.0% Pretty soon, there's too much traffic to Deep Crack every encrypted message that runs past. And eventually, once encrypted e-mails outnumber regular e-mails, seeing encrypted traffic go past a router won't even raise a flag.
If you're actually concerned about security, of course you won't use Yahoo's service. Let the "commoners" think that they're getting security. But for now, they're providing background cover to help hide the mail that truly needs encryption.
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion,
It is by the beans of Java the thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a warning,
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.
That's fine. Their stockholders seriously don't want or care about "noble" reasons. They only want profits. A corporation can't do anything without considering the bottom line. This is a huge win for IBM IIF consumers go for it.
I've got enuf old junk laying around that I'm considering shipping them a bunch. I hope that they'll not notice if the machine has four old MOBOs stacked up inside it...:-)
If Gore loses because of Nader votes in swing states, hopefully the democrats will realize they'll have to move farther left to differentiate themselves.
Yeah, a Bush presidency is a dreadful thought, but something has to be done to wake them up. You'd have thought losing Congress in 1994 would have done the trick...
Perhaps November will be more meaningful if large numbers of Americans deliberately choose not to participate in this election, and make their reasons known, rather than shrugging and ignoring it. Perhaps then, the Beltway might really buckle a bit.
And you think that voters staying away in droves will somehow differentiate itself from business as usual in what way? First, the candidates themselves want low voter turnout. Low turnout means less chances for the wild cards. If only the party faithful turn out, no real changes will happen.
Personally, I think the best thing that can happen is that power is fragmented more ways. I live in Minnesota, where the Independant Jesse Ventura controls the executive branch, the Republicans control the senate, and the Democrats control the house. For me, it's perfect. Getting three distinct groups to align is even harder than getting two groups to agree, which means less gets done. In my book, the fewer laws that get passed mean the least amount of damage done.
I personally think the power split we have in the US today is responsible for our country's current political "success story". The executive Democrat at the top prevents the legislative Republicans from implementing their absurd policies, and the Republican congress refuses to support the Democratic president's absurd policies. Nothing gets done, the status quo remains, and the world has a nice, safe, predictable environment to exploit.
Toss in a Green president, give us a Democratic Senate and a Republican House, and Washington will be in for another four-year bowel blockage, while the rest of us continue to prosper.
NeuticlesUltra are solid silicon and is 30% softer than NeuticlesNatural for an even softer feel-marshmellow soft.
Does this mean they finally found a use for all those old defective floating point Pentiums?
Some time before, as one can remember, another technology was proposed. It employed liquid polymer that can be made solid by laser light. But it was impossible to create dangling parts with it (something like several connected chain rings), because some parts of such things have to 'float' during layer-by-layer creation process. In liquid, they sank. In powder, they're firm
These machines are now in fairly common use. The "dangling" problem was easily resolved by building everything on a common sprue, and cutting it free after the piece was cured.
Umm, how about automotive parts? Short runs of components for proof-of-concept? Repair or restorative parts, especially ones for which the molds have been lost?
Perhaps an actual production scenario will help.
Picture making a window crank handle for a prototype car. Make an ice sculpture, and let the designer see it. He doesn't like it, so you drop it in the sink while he goes back and changes his design. You make another ice sculpture, and he likes it. Take the ice version and pack it in plaster (or some other molding compound.) The block of plaster is then warmed slightly and the water drained out. Now, you have a hole in a block of plaster the exact shape of the original window crank. Fill this block of plaster with molten plastic to make a more durable duplicate of your original window handle. Hand the plastic crank to your designer, who then approves it. So far, you've spent about $100 dollars, and your designer has seen the finished part already.
OK, you're with me so far, right?
Now, make another copy of your window crank, only this time make it out of metal. Slice it in two and nail both halves to the opposite sides of a board. Put the board in a box and pack both top and bottom with plaster. Lift off the top, remove the board, and carefully place the top back over the bottom. Fill the cavity with your production plastic. Repeat this step thousands of times and you can make thousands of duplicate parts.
You just made a temporary production mold (probably good for about 10,000 parts or so) for a total cost of maybe $500. A tool-and-die shop would charge about $20,000 for a real mold to do the same thing. And you did it in about two days, instead of two months.
I've seen this done with a 3D stereo lithography machine, and it was used to make a temporary mold for a plastic fan shroud. (The original design didn't fit in the car.) They were able to run 5000 parts from the temporary mold before the production mold was returned from the tool and die shop. The novel part of this equipment is their use of water and ice, instead of a tank of toxic plastic resins and UV lasers.
There is real value to this research. It's worth a LOT of money in the manufacturing world.
Given that your support needs sound like they're growing enough to overwhelm any one person, consider establishing a "help desk". They could staff a desk 24/7/365 and handle some first level calls (my password doesn't work, my e-mail prints on the wrong printer, etc.) Anything requiring escalation is sent by them to your pager. The staff doesn't call you directly.
This not only solves your problem of tech staff being overwhelmed by on-call duties, but the manager of the help desk is then responsible for budget and staff increases as the responsibilities increase.
You're just experiencing growning pains. Remember, support needs always grow. I have never heard of a support organization shrink because the company involved dropped some troublesome technology. Sell this idea by telling management you're positioning yourself for the future.
If they balk at the expense, you can lease 24/7 support desk service from any number of vendors. And before you ask, yes, prompt service will suck if you don't spend the cash. Hey, it's that or lose the techies they've already got...
John
Disclaimer: Before you believe anything I write, remember that in the back of my mind my retirement depends on my company's stock doing well over the next 20-30 years.
The algorithm is completely irrelevant. They could have used RSA, DH, El Gamal, IDEA and Rijndael all strung together and it wouldn't have made the slightest difference.
The reason is pirates don't care what the algorithm is. They just want to remove the watermark, and the watermark is just a series of pseudorandom noisy bits hidden in the datastream.
First, assume the noise has to be identifiable as a watermark (or else their players won't refuse to play it.) Thus, any software player that can identify it can be disassembled to point out which bits of the stream are watermarks. Remove those bits, and it's gone. The meanings of the bits are irrelevant.
A couple of points: First, there is no next step. It is not mathematically possible to secure data in a non-trusted non-secured HARDWARE environment. Can't be done, mathematically provable (wish I could offer the URL of a decent proof here, oh well, that's what google's for, right?) Physically provable also, as well evidenced by this announcement.
The ONLY possible result was to have their watermarking broken. As I mentioned above, it's not possible to secure it.
What you describe as their best possible result would actually be the penultimate nightmare scenario for SDMI. Ramping up production of new hardware and media is an incredibly expensive undertaking. Not to mention the risk of public rejection (for a primo example of this, learn the lessons of DIVX.) To get $2 billion down that path, only to be shot down by hackers. At this point, they're only out a few million. The $10K prize was a spit in the bucket.
As to your last point, professional cryptographers have been telling them this is impossible and a huge waste of money. People with money don't believe in "impossible." They don't understand technology, they understand money. And in their world, money can buy the impossible. They don't live in our world, where code can always do the possible.
Does that mean that if you send it, you think your mail is magically "gone" after six months? If you send it to me, I'm sure to save it for at least six years. Can I not trot out your old e-mail against you?
And what determines how old is old, anyway? The headers? Does this mean my forged e-mail headers are now legally admittable evidence that my offensive letter is seven months old?
I hope this receives more careful thought than other bad recent computer laws, such as the DMCA.
Slashdot Mirror
There's your Bull. I can't wait for the cutover to catch up to all the phone switches so it's all 10 digit enabled.
John
Jeez, do I sound enough like a Dune geek now? :-)
John
About Paul, you wrote, "he looks like a crazy religious psycho to me."
I thought he played the part to perfection. For some reason, the religious fanatacism that Herbert was trying to get across never really struck me, but when I saw the character transform himself from "annoyed kid stuck when his dad got a job transfer to some hick town" to "atheist exploiting a legend" into "messianic fanatic", wow, I think he did an excellent job making the part and character come to life! Just seeing that him play that part causes Children of Dune and Dune Messiah to suddenly make sense.
I also thought they brought the character of Irulan out very well. Smart, scheming, flirtatious, playing all sides (including her father) against each other -- all of that was never made so clear as in this version.
Chani also came out better here. In the Lynch version, you hear the voice-over of Irulan saying "Paul's love for Chani grew." Five thin words to describe a torrid romance? At least she gave Paul a character he could love.
Feyd was also played very well. Condescending, smug, arrogant, haughty, he had it all and balanced it well. And at least the Baron wasn't given to perversions we couldn't understand in this version.
But there was also some really bad acting. William Hurt (the only "name" in the SciFi version) couldn't have inspired a troop of Cub Scouts with his lack of enthusiasm, much less lead a Great House.
The navigators were just stupid. "Hey, lets wave our hands mystically and dramatically when we get upset." Why? And what was with the melange of bad accents? It was like being at the Rennaisance Festival trying to figure out if any of these people had actually ever been to Britain.
And ugly? How about Stilgar? Paul should have just called him out and taken his middle-aged, balding, paunchy water. He looked more like a pointy-haired boss than a knife-fighting, water-starved, sietch-inspiring leader. I couldn't get past his appearance far enough to notice his acting.
The SciFi version did bring some fresh new perspectives to some of the characters. I found it more engrossing than the Lynch version, by far.
John
I don't remember the ships being described by Mr. Herbert in the books, and can only wonder at the remarkable resemblence between the SciFi version ships and the David Lynch version ships.
I found just too many striking similarities between the two versions to make this version stand out. I was grateful for the lack of voice-over thoughts (a la Lynch), but was disappointed that many of those thoughts weren't then exposed through dialog or action.
Oh, well, all bitching aside, it was good enough to keep me up way too late finishing the series last night. :-)
John
And for remote purposes, I've been a mostly happy user of Pacific NeoTek's OmniRemote on both a Palm Professional and a Handspring Visor Deluxe (the 2MB Handsprings are now available at Target for $149, btw, not a bad price for a universal remote.)
However, to answer your original question, I've not found ANY IrDA software for the PC that will operate a remote, and I've been looking for a long time... Most everybody needs you to add a chunk of external hardware on a serial (or parallel) port.
John
Sorry if this sounds like a Microsoft shill post here (I'm not trying to be one) but I kind of think Microsoft will defeat themselves with bloat. Look at the stuff they're pushing with .NET -- subscription versions of software. How long are people going to lie back and take cruft like that? At some point, Microsoft will cross the threshold of pissing off too many of their customers, and the monopoly will cure itself.
John
hmm...maybe I *SHOULD* have voted for Browne...
Look at it math-wise: if 0.1% of the e-mail traffic today is encrypted (which I'm personally guessing would be way high,) if you were to send an encrypted letter to your buddy (whose ISP is being Carnivored,) it'd get noticed. Being only one message out of a thousand, it might even merit a few minutes on FBI's Deep Crack.
Now, add in all the Yahoo e-mail traffic and that number might rise to 1.0%. Include encrypting lots of Hotmail traffic, and it might rise to 2.0% Pretty soon, there's too much traffic to Deep Crack every encrypted message that runs past. And eventually, once encrypted e-mails outnumber regular e-mails, seeing encrypted traffic go past a router won't even raise a flag.
If you're actually concerned about security, of course you won't use Yahoo's service. Let the "commoners" think that they're getting security. But for now, they're providing background cover to help hide the mail that truly needs encryption.
John
Arsenal
Scunthorpe
Manchester-fucking-United.
John
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion,
It is by the beans of Java the thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a warning,
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.
John
I've got enuf old junk laying around that I'm considering shipping them a bunch. I hope that they'll not notice if the machine has four old MOBOs stacked up inside it... :-)
John
John
Yeah, a Bush presidency is a dreadful thought, but something has to be done to wake them up. You'd have thought losing Congress in 1994 would have done the trick...
John
... and your e-mail address has to be lower case. Go figure.
And you think that voters staying away in droves will somehow differentiate itself from business as usual in what way? First, the candidates themselves want low voter turnout. Low turnout means less chances for the wild cards. If only the party faithful turn out, no real changes will happen.
Personally, I think the best thing that can happen is that power is fragmented more ways. I live in Minnesota, where the Independant Jesse Ventura controls the executive branch, the Republicans control the senate, and the Democrats control the house. For me, it's perfect. Getting three distinct groups to align is even harder than getting two groups to agree, which means less gets done. In my book, the fewer laws that get passed mean the least amount of damage done.
I personally think the power split we have in the US today is responsible for our country's current political "success story". The executive Democrat at the top prevents the legislative Republicans from implementing their absurd policies, and the Republican congress refuses to support the Democratic president's absurd policies. Nothing gets done, the status quo remains, and the world has a nice, safe, predictable environment to exploit.
Toss in a Green president, give us a Democratic Senate and a Republican House, and Washington will be in for another four-year bowel blockage, while the rest of us continue to prosper.
John
Does this mean they finally found a use for all those old defective floating point Pentiums?
John
These machines are now in fairly common use. The "dangling" problem was easily resolved by building everything on a common sprue, and cutting it free after the piece was cured.
John
Perhaps an actual production scenario will help.
Picture making a window crank handle for a prototype car. Make an ice sculpture, and let the designer see it. He doesn't like it, so you drop it in the sink while he goes back and changes his design. You make another ice sculpture, and he likes it. Take the ice version and pack it in plaster (or some other molding compound.) The block of plaster is then warmed slightly and the water drained out. Now, you have a hole in a block of plaster the exact shape of the original window crank. Fill this block of plaster with molten plastic to make a more durable duplicate of your original window handle. Hand the plastic crank to your designer, who then approves it. So far, you've spent about $100 dollars, and your designer has seen the finished part already.
OK, you're with me so far, right?
Now, make another copy of your window crank, only this time make it out of metal. Slice it in two and nail both halves to the opposite sides of a board. Put the board in a box and pack both top and bottom with plaster. Lift off the top, remove the board, and carefully place the top back over the bottom. Fill the cavity with your production plastic. Repeat this step thousands of times and you can make thousands of duplicate parts.
You just made a temporary production mold (probably good for about 10,000 parts or so) for a total cost of maybe $500. A tool-and-die shop would charge about $20,000 for a real mold to do the same thing. And you did it in about two days, instead of two months.
I've seen this done with a 3D stereo lithography machine, and it was used to make a temporary mold for a plastic fan shroud. (The original design didn't fit in the car.) They were able to run 5000 parts from the temporary mold before the production mold was returned from the tool and die shop. The novel part of this equipment is their use of water and ice, instead of a tank of toxic plastic resins and UV lasers.
There is real value to this research. It's worth a LOT of money in the manufacturing world.
John
This not only solves your problem of tech staff being overwhelmed by on-call duties, but the manager of the help desk is then responsible for budget and staff increases as the responsibilities increase.
You're just experiencing growning pains. Remember, support needs always grow. I have never heard of a support organization shrink because the company involved dropped some troublesome technology. Sell this idea by telling management you're positioning yourself for the future.
If they balk at the expense, you can lease 24/7 support desk service from any number of vendors. And before you ask, yes, prompt service will suck if you don't spend the cash. Hey, it's that or lose the techies they've already got...
John
Disclaimer: Before you believe anything I write, remember that in the back of my mind my retirement depends on my company's stock doing well over the next 20-30 years.
The reason is pirates don't care what the algorithm is. They just want to remove the watermark, and the watermark is just a series of pseudorandom noisy bits hidden in the datastream.
First, assume the noise has to be identifiable as a watermark (or else their players won't refuse to play it.) Thus, any software player that can identify it can be disassembled to point out which bits of the stream are watermarks. Remove those bits, and it's gone. The meanings of the bits are irrelevant.
John
The ONLY possible result was to have their watermarking broken. As I mentioned above, it's not possible to secure it.
What you describe as their best possible result would actually be the penultimate nightmare scenario for SDMI. Ramping up production of new hardware and media is an incredibly expensive undertaking. Not to mention the risk of public rejection (for a primo example of this, learn the lessons of DIVX.) To get $2 billion down that path, only to be shot down by hackers. At this point, they're only out a few million. The $10K prize was a spit in the bucket.
As to your last point, professional cryptographers have been telling them this is impossible and a huge waste of money. People with money don't believe in "impossible." They don't understand technology, they understand money. And in their world, money can buy the impossible. They don't live in our world, where code can always do the possible.
John
And what determines how old is old, anyway? The headers? Does this mean my forged e-mail headers are now legally admittable evidence that my offensive letter is seven months old?
I hope this receives more careful thought than other bad recent computer laws, such as the DMCA.
John
So, does this one still want to talk to Goliath?
John
John
Geeks! This is just too cool! :-)
John