The music industry doesn't seem to have realized that the Compact Disc is just too good a (physical) format. Consumers are happy with the quality of the sound reproduction (even though the dynamic range being used is fractional thanks to today's editing style), and there's a MASSIVE infrastructre built around the medium.
There is no future in physical media. The movie business might be realizing this with the whole Blu Ray/HD-DVD debacle, and the music industry should be watching those download vs. physical purchase statistics, because they're tilting further and further towards digital distrubution.
I expect my next car stereo to have a Type A USB socket on it, so I can plug in a flash drive, or an iPod, or whatever else the TECH industry (not the music industry) comes up with.
The barcode format is trivial to forge, but if you have a cryptographically signed (or preferably encrypted) 2D barcode, not so much.
If each country has, say, a 16kbit secret key that is used to sign 'passport issuing' certificates (which could be associated with specific staff if you wanted to be really paranoid), then you could confirm the keys up the signing chain and get at the data. All the nations publish their passport issuing public keys at the UN or something similar.
Yes - one of my former co-workers is on the staff of Jive Software as a result of the additions he made to the forums. I added a couple of pieces of functionality too. Version 1 was Apache licensed I believe.
Saudi Arabia has been known to be very particular about keeping itself very non-Christian.
10-15 years ago there was a new 100 Riyal bank note put into circulation, a much nicer design than the previous one. It had a picture of a mosque on one side (probably a famous one, but I don't know enough to comment).
Unfortunately, the bars in the windows(!) were drawn in such a way that it created the illusion they were crucifixes.
Oops! All the notes were recalled; they became collectors' pieces amongst the expatriate community.
With apologies to Sean O'Keefe
on
Brine on Mars?
·
· Score: 1
Who I seemed to think was Sean O'Neill. Where the hell did I get that from?
With apologies to Nickelodeon....
on
Brine on Mars?
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Administrator O'Neill: Are ya ready engineers?
Engineers: Aye Aye, Administrator!
AON: I can't hear you!
ENG: AYE AYE, ADMINISTRATOR!
AON: Ohhhh.... who's driving around on a planet briney?
ENG: Spirit Squarepants!
AON: Along with his good friend Opportunity!
ENG: Spirit Squarepants!
AON: He's grinding at rocks with his robotic arm...
ENG: Spirit Squarepants!
AON: Hoping his file system does him no harm!
ENG: Spirit Squarepants!
All Together: SPIRIT SQUAREPANTS, SPIRIT SQUAREPANTS, SPIRIT SQUAREPANTS
Some of us hosers have had a couple of elections recently: the Ontario provincial election and the city council/mayoral election.
I was most impressed by the mayoral elections. In Toronto (don't know about the rest of them), the voting was electronically tallied but had a built-in audit trail.
The ballot was pretty simple: you connected two parts of an arrow together that pointed at your choice of candidate. None of this Florida confusion, you literally pointed at who you were voting for! Then, the ballot was read by a scanner that was placed over a large box. The scanner confirmed that your vote had been counted correctly, and the box kept the ballot.
At the end of the day, the election TV coverage was almost farcical because almost all the results were in within an hour. If any candidate wanted to contest the vote, all the original ballots had been retained as part of the system.
Maybe that would be a good system for the U.S.
Two questions, and a suggestion for an alternative
on
New VOIP App. Profiled
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Quotes relating to the two questions here are from the Skype help FAQ.
Q1. key exchange?
What type of encryption is used?
Skype uses AES (Advanced Encryption Standard), which is also used by U.S. Government organizations to protect sensitive, information. Skype uses 256-bit encryption, which has a total of 1.1 x 1077 possible keys, in order to actively encrypt the data in each Skype call or instant message.
And the key exchange is handled by... ? AES is a symmetric cypher, so there has to be some kind of key exchange. I'd like to know what that mechanism is, or if there's just one key and they can listen in on anything. After all, who'd need spy-ware if the whole thing was insecure by design? Oh, and if they've reinvented a bunch of cryptologic libraries, look out - there will most likely be fresh exploits to be had.
Q2. Why the lock-in?
Which protocols does Skype use?
Skype uses a proprietary protocol which we have developed. We looked at many available protocols when designing Skype and none were good enough for us. We hope you agree!
Okay, so they're trying to make a buck or two here eventually, but touting a proprietary protocol as being a good thing is usually not a good sign. People buy Microsoft Office though, so I guess it's not that big a deal for the average person.
Suggestion. Would someone (or some group) restart development on Speak Freely?
Okay, so this is a bit of a sidetrack, but it's a valid point. There is a large body of tested code available for doing most of this kind of thing, and it's called Speak Freely. However, on the downside, John Walker (Mr. AutoCad to you) has decided to cease development, as of August 1 2003 (yes, that's in the past). All the code is at SourceForge, (both Unix and Windows) so you can go wild with it.
Something to think about.
I hope this is better than their firewall offering
on
Nokia Enters PVR Market
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The company I work for ordered several Nokia firewall devices. They list for about $35,000 US.
Not one of them worked.
We ended up having their top tech staff in the country give us a visit, with everyone wondering why a six figure purchase should be quite so DOA. At first, there was a lot of head scratching, but it turned out that the machines had a variety of hardware and some software problems.
Allegedly these systems are well tested prior to shipping. At that price, you'd hope so! I hope they test these PVRs well, otherwise they're in for a world of support pain.
Re:Landing most impressive
on
TAM 5 Has landed
·
· Score: 4, Informative
According to a National Geographic article from last year's attempts, the landing is handled by a local pilot:
Pilot Paul Howey and others will be in Ireland waiting for the plane to appear on the horizon. They will head out to the bog and, if the plane comes in, take over manual control and land it.
That seems a lot easier than trying to have the plane land itself, or landing it remotely (and by remotely I mean from the wrong side of the Atlantic).
There have been a few things that I haven't seen Apple pull out of the hat in the last few years:
a revolution in hardware platform (not since G4 launch);
SPEC benchmark results;
a fast response to potentially damaging remarks
Okay, so Apple needs the G5 to succeed in order to survive. Motorola just aren't sending out the chip upgrades fast enough. They (Motorola) have enough other problems in their wide range of markets that they're in that not having to worry about CPU competition is probably a good thing as far as they're concerned.
The fact that the (almost) top person at Apple has made this clarification shows how much importance they're putting against these claims. Given that nobody else has had a chance to verify yet, and people are making wild speculations based off of paper and a lack of understanding, it's probably just as well that they're putting a positive spin on things.
Maybe the documents should have been clearer, showing why these configuration decisions were taken.
The "we had to use GCC" argument is a little strange though; is there any other good compiler available for the PPC at the moment? if so, I'd like to know; I use macs myself!:)
Struts is great, but...
on
Struts Kick Start
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I've been working on a reasonably sized project for some time now (still undercover, so can't go into details)... I'd been looking for a good framework to use, and Struts looked like it fitted the bill.
Until I started dealing with the display (view) side of things.
Getting to grips with the Action and ActionForm stuff is simple, and I think that anyone could do it. However, because they expect you to use all the usual standard stuff (taglibs, etc), building new taglibs and dealing with that was going to be a nightmare.
Also, the HTML taglib, when told to output XHTML only, doesn't work. tags like the BASE tag aren't closed properly.
Fortunately, I'd been looking at using Tea earlier on (Jason Hunter uses it at servlets.com). Someone on the tea mailing list posted a link to a very useful article on using Struts for the backend of a web app and Tea for the front end. You can find it here:
Quite frankly, Julian Haight comports himself like a True Asshole. Admittedly, Theo can be rather terse himself, but he generally doesn't cause innocent third parties distress while attempting to achieve his goals.
This Research Report consists of two invited papers for the Classic Papers sectoin of the 18th Annual Computer Security Conference (ACSAC) to be held 9-13 December 2002 in Las Vegas, NV. The papers will be available on the web after the conference at http://www.acsac.org/
Your post has all the classic elements of the "I have no power, the world is spinning out of control and I'm along for the ride" complaint which people seem to enjoy.
Perhaps the best thing you can do is to understand that you are in control of your own destiny, and to take charge of it.
To give you a work-related example, I tend to do the same basic job day-in, day-out. I used to have to code for each specific case, and it was a royal PITA. Eventually, I got so fed up with that, I decided that I would throw a solution together which didn't require me to do custom coding; instead, I would simply reconfigure the one program to suit the problem.
Nobody told me to do that; nobody really expected me to do that. However, now I've shared that little tool with others in my company, and everyone loves it because it reduces their tedious workload too.
Now that direct corporate support for open source projects in general appears to be waning (what with this and other cutbacks taking place), it's good to have the community take up the slack.
At least we as a group can remember our roots, and return to them, rather than doing the human equivalent of exploding in a blaze of chapter 11.
And remembering these 11 digit numbers could be fun...
Well, I'm sure you don't remember lots of (up to) 12 digit sequences that already exist, but have no problems remembering things like 'slashdot.org' and 'www.userfriendly.org'. As in the Internet, so with life. If you want to do this right, you'd have some form of "Personal Name System" to act as an equivalent to the "Domain Name System" we already seem to use quite successfully.
Slashdot Mirror
The music industry doesn't seem to have realized that the Compact Disc is just too good a (physical) format. Consumers are happy with the quality of the sound reproduction (even though the dynamic range being used is fractional thanks to today's editing style), and there's a MASSIVE infrastructre built around the medium.
There is no future in physical media. The movie business might be realizing this with the whole Blu Ray/HD-DVD debacle, and the music industry should be watching those download vs. physical purchase statistics, because they're tilting further and further towards digital distrubution.
I expect my next car stereo to have a Type A USB socket on it, so I can plug in a flash drive, or an iPod, or whatever else the TECH industry (not the music industry) comes up with.
The barcode format is trivial to forge, but if you have a cryptographically signed (or preferably encrypted) 2D barcode, not so much.
If each country has, say, a 16kbit secret key that is used to sign 'passport issuing' certificates (which could be associated with specific staff if you wanted to be really paranoid), then you could confirm the keys up the signing chain and get at the data. All the nations publish their passport issuing public keys at the UN or something similar.
Is that so hard?
So, based on the articles, Vonage will be selling this handset (PDF of details available from page).
I can't wait to get my hands on kernel 'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX'.
this is slashdot - tell us about the Small Form Factor edition.
Yes - one of my former co-workers is on the staff of Jive Software as a result of the additions he made to the forums. I added a couple of pieces of functionality too. Version 1 was Apache licensed I believe.
Joel Spolsky (of Joel On Software) published his views on software pricing a little while ago too. Worth a look to see how someone else thinks about the topic.
Saudi Arabia has been known to be very particular about keeping itself very non-Christian.
10-15 years ago there was a new 100 Riyal bank note put into circulation, a much nicer design than the previous one. It had a picture of a mosque on one side (probably a famous one, but I don't know enough to comment).
Unfortunately, the bars in the windows(!) were drawn in such a way that it created the illusion they were crucifixes.
Oops! All the notes were recalled; they became collectors' pieces amongst the expatriate community.
Who I seemed to think was Sean O'Neill.
Where the hell did I get that from?
Administrator O'Neill: Are ya ready engineers?
Engineers: Aye Aye, Administrator!
AON: I can't hear you!
ENG: AYE AYE, ADMINISTRATOR!
AON: Ohhhh.... who's driving around on a planet briney?
ENG: Spirit Squarepants!
AON: Along with his good friend Opportunity!
ENG: Spirit Squarepants!
AON: He's grinding at rocks with his robotic arm...
ENG: Spirit Squarepants!
AON: Hoping his file system does him no harm!
ENG: Spirit Squarepants!
All Together: SPIRIT SQUAREPANTS, SPIRIT SQUAREPANTS, SPIRIT SQUAREPANTS
AON: Spirit.... Squarepants!
Some of us hosers have had a couple of elections recently: the Ontario provincial election and the city council/mayoral election.
I was most impressed by the mayoral elections. In Toronto (don't know about the rest of them), the voting was electronically tallied but had a built-in audit trail.
The ballot was pretty simple: you connected two parts of an arrow together that pointed at your choice of candidate. None of this Florida confusion, you literally pointed at who you were voting for! Then, the ballot was read by a scanner that was placed over a large box. The scanner confirmed that your vote had been counted correctly, and the box kept the ballot.
At the end of the day, the election TV coverage was almost farcical because almost all the results were in within an hour. If any candidate wanted to contest the vote, all the original ballots had been retained as part of the system.
Maybe that would be a good system for the U.S.
Q1. key exchange?
And the key exchange is handled by... ? AES is a symmetric cypher, so there has to be some kind of key exchange. I'd like to know what that mechanism is, or if there's just one key and they can listen in on anything. After all, who'd need spy-ware if the whole thing was insecure by design? Oh, and if they've reinvented a bunch of cryptologic libraries, look out - there will most likely be fresh exploits to be had.
Q2. Why the lock-in?
Okay, so they're trying to make a buck or two here eventually, but touting a proprietary protocol as being a good thing is usually not a good sign. People buy Microsoft Office though, so I guess it's not that big a deal for the average person.
Suggestion. Would someone (or some group) restart development on Speak Freely?
Okay, so this is a bit of a sidetrack, but it's a valid point. There is a large body of tested code available for doing most of this kind of thing, and it's called Speak Freely. However, on the downside, John Walker (Mr. AutoCad to you) has decided to cease development, as of August 1 2003 (yes, that's in the past). All the code is at SourceForge, (both Unix and Windows) so you can go wild with it.
Something to think about.
The company I work for ordered several Nokia firewall devices. They list for about $35,000 US.
Not one of them worked.
We ended up having their top tech staff in the country give us a visit, with everyone wondering why a six figure purchase should be quite so DOA. At first, there was a lot of head scratching, but it turned out that the machines had a variety of hardware and some software problems.
Allegedly these systems are well tested prior to shipping. At that price, you'd hope so! I hope they test these PVRs well, otherwise they're in for a world of support pain.
That seems a lot easier than trying to have the plane land itself, or landing it remotely (and by remotely I mean from the wrong side of the Atlantic).
Fine, but I'm going to patent the Denial Of Sewage attack. Toilet blockages, here we come!
Okay, so Apple needs the G5 to succeed in order to survive. Motorola just aren't sending out the chip upgrades fast enough. They (Motorola) have enough other problems in their wide range of markets that they're in that not having to worry about CPU competition is probably a good thing as far as they're concerned.
The fact that the (almost) top person at Apple has made this clarification shows how much importance they're putting against these claims. Given that nobody else has had a chance to verify yet, and people are making wild speculations based off of paper and a lack of understanding, it's probably just as well that they're putting a positive spin on things.
Maybe the documents should have been clearer, showing why these configuration decisions were taken.
The "we had to use GCC" argument is a little strange though; is there any other good compiler available for the PPC at the moment? if so, I'd like to know; I use macs myself!
I've been working on a reasonably sized project for some time now (still undercover, so can't go into details)... I'd been looking for a good framework to use, and Struts looked like it fitted the bill.
Until I started dealing with the display (view) side of things.
Getting to grips with the Action and ActionForm stuff is simple, and I think that anyone could do it. However, because they expect you to use all the usual standard stuff (taglibs, etc), building new taglibs and dealing with that was going to be a nightmare.
Also, the HTML taglib, when told to output XHTML only, doesn't work. tags like the BASE tag aren't closed properly.
Fortunately, I'd been looking at using Tea earlier on (Jason Hunter uses it at servlets.com). Someone on the tea mailing list posted a link to a very useful article on using Struts for the backend of a web app and Tea for the front end. You can find it here:
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/wa-
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/wa-
Perhaps because SpamCop is overzealous to the point of stupidity?
See, for instance:
Quite frankly, Julian Haight comports himself like a True Asshole. Admittedly, Theo can be rather terse himself, but he generally doesn't cause innocent third parties distress while attempting to achieve his goals.
Uh, it appears that they're already on the web.
Hi there.
Your post has all the classic elements of the "I have no power, the world is spinning out of control and I'm along for the ride" complaint which people seem to enjoy.
Perhaps the best thing you can do is to understand that you are in control of your own destiny, and to take charge of it.
To give you a work-related example, I tend to do the same basic job day-in, day-out. I used to have to code for each specific case, and it was a royal PITA. Eventually, I got so fed up with that, I decided that I would throw a solution together which didn't require me to do custom coding; instead, I would simply reconfigure the one program to suit the problem.
Nobody told me to do that; nobody really expected me to do that. However, now I've shared that little tool with others in my company, and everyone loves it because it reduces their tedious workload too.
Self-empowerment is a good thing.
That may be true, but remember that the machines that were being magnified were Apple ][-based ;)
So was Disney. In Snow White and The Seven Dwarves. That was in 1937. Rotoscoping is nothing new at all, and wasn't at the time of Bakshi either.
Now that direct corporate support for open source projects in general appears to be waning (what with this and other cutbacks taking place), it's good to have the community take up the slack.
At least we as a group can remember our roots, and return to them, rather than doing the human equivalent of exploding in a blaze of chapter 11.
You people may like to look at Bob's article from August 30 which quite neatly explains where Excite@Home finds itself.
Remind me to buy stock in Cringely if he ever IPOs.
Well, I'm sure you don't remember lots of (up to) 12 digit sequences that already exist, but have no problems remembering things like 'slashdot.org' and 'www.userfriendly.org'. As in the Internet, so with life. If you want to do this right, you'd have some form of "Personal Name System" to act as an equivalent to the "Domain Name System" we already seem to use quite successfully.