I was trying to figure out what the point of this would be.
But after seeing the download rates of German, UK, and Swedish downloaders in one BitTorrent session, I think it's to buy three of these phones for each side of the ocean and hook the remotes to Bredbandsbolaget.
It'd be easier, faster, and cheaper than trying to find that kind of bandwidth from a local provider, even if you throw in the cost of a house in Sweden.
The size of the R/W (read/write) heads is the second-biggest determinant, after the size of the platter(s), of the size of the drive.
By harnessing the power of the microwaves inherent in the phone -- part of the electromagnetic spectrim -- it's possible to write to the drives simply by beaming the proper electromagnetic frequencies at the platters, and to read from the drives by doing the same thing in reverse.
Unfortunately, 10GB is probably as dense as these things can get, scientifically speaking.
It'd be best for liberals to just step away from this one.
I remember after the CBS memo thing a number of people yielded to the temptation to say "Well, maybe the memos were fake, but the information in them must be true."
Occasionally you need to concede that the news gets it wrong instead of trying to bail out a leaky story. It reeks of desperation when instead of simply admitting you've been had on this one you cling to something that is rapidly being proven false. Isn't this the mentality you're trying to fight against?
It is HR4569. THOMAS appears a little slow at the moment, but it is available elsewhere on Google I think.
John Conyers indicated he will discuss this further on his blog later as well, as the issue was brought up by some angry people under one of his posts (I think as a result of a Daily Kos article on the matter). Comment #80 on this page appears to be the start of the comments on the matter, and it might be worth hovering around the blog in days to come to see if he gives the opportunity for people to (calmly and rationally) express their thoughts on the matter.
BTW: his comment in the thread above (Comment #96) gives more details about why he signed on. I don't think it even begins to consider the spirit of Fair Use or the rights of the average consumer, but then I don't get the impression that Congress thinks we're worth a damn beyond our votes and purchasing power.
It's been a long time since I made a screensaver. I kind of miss it -- it'd access a page of terms users were searching on using a popular engine at the time, then scroll those terms across the screen marquee-style, so about 80% of the time I would get to see a remarkably mistyped query for porn or warez.
I modified a Visual C++ 5.0 screensaver example to do it, and I seem to recall some extra plumbing having to do with getting the thing to preview properly in the screensaver selector.
All of which really doesn't answer your question, but thank you for reminding me of an old project to learn Windows 95 programming. I know worms/viruses will transfer via.SCR which would suggest the equivalency is close enough, and a hexdump shows a.SCR looks like an.EXE, but I've never actually tried renaming and running stuff to find out.
For example, you can now pipe the X.org modules through an MP3 encoder and listen to the only standard platform-independent networked graphical window system bridging the heterogeneous platforms in today's enterprise wherever you go.
As suggested in the article, the better security gets, the more it will
interfere with usability.
For example, if you create a VPN with this latest OpenSSH, a lossy network
will hold up your traffic. Despite the fact that TCP/IP will try to continue
operating with dropped packets, with OpenSSH if you miss one packet the loss
cascades into succeeding packets until the client and server are able to
resync or the packet is delivered. This accumulation of tolerances is
not a problem with IPsec, which is designed cipherwise to work around
occasional packet loss.
Most experts agree the product of the best cryptography will be
indistinguishable from random noise. This means that it is difficult to
share the benefits of compression with file encryption because random
noise compresses very poorly, as anyone who attempts to archive their
MP3s of today's artists will attest. Additionally, if you accidentally
store your encrypted files amongst files containing random noise you run
the risk of generating new data during decryption.
The secret is to understand the technology before you use the
technology. The problem with encryption is twofold -- some people are
overconfident in what they're using and either lose data or risk more than
they would if they were fully informed, and others think it's too difficult
a topic to broach and leave themselves open to exploitation by network
explorers. Certainly when I was in the second category I became convinced
of the problem once I saw tools like 'tcpdump' and 'ethereal'.
But, objectively speaking, wouldn't they still be facing a ton of legal problems even if it never existed?
It still seems right to criticize the DMCA to me. It isn't necessary to get pirates but it does criminalize a whole range of activities that really shouldn't be illegal.
I know a lot of people found themselves enthralled in the whole "cowboys in space" theme, but why I cannot fathom.
Sci-Fi is about breaking the constraints and tired plots of conventional stories. This means fantastic things like aliens, robots, artificial intelligence and time travel. Not rehashing the stale concept that the rest of the universe really isn't so different from home and we'll never really evolve past the emotions and biases we've got right now.
There is a case to be made, I think, that if certain ports were disabled for home users a serious dent could be made in this P2P population -- not to mention the great deal of bandwidth freed up for more serious Internet activity.
This is already accepted to some extent by anti-SPAM policies that forbid access to external SMTP servers, and has been used to great effect by university administrators.
It would be far better than the legal approach, which is inefficient and expensive for all parties involved, and would prevent many viruses along with piracy.
That's an excellent idea. Especially since I can't think of any tycoon titles currently on the shelves featuring employee odor control as a gaming element.
It's difficult to use like a laptop -- even plugging keyboard and mouse into the USB, I doubt there's enough room on most laps to hold a keyboard and this device. You can prop it up against a wall, however, if you want to use this like a desktop with an LCD monitor.
The device does not contain a cellphone, which is a little confusing.
For the price, it would be nice to have Windows XP on the device. Even if it had to be in a dual-boot configuration, it'd make gaming easier.
Huh, I wonder if the jelly/peanut butter combination is a product that defies preservation.
I've had orange and raspberry sticks, which were semi-solid jelled fruit centers with a dark chocolate coating (though from a candy store, not off a gas station shelf), and maybe this technique could be extended to PBJ cup manufacture. Like either jelling the jelly, or going so far as to embed a chocolate-coated half-sized raspberry stick in a peanut butter cup to prevent the oils or whatever in the peanut butter from wreaking havoc on the jelly flavor.
But... why not go one step further and make peanut butter and jelly cups? Strawberry goes well with peanut butter and chocolate, and if you want to go crazy with the concept so does raspberry and orange marmalade.
Additionally, those apple-cinammon creme-filled cupcakes were pretty good back in the day, but were inexplicably pulled from the market at the same time they replaced the chocolate on the chocolate cupcakes with black wax. They need to bring those back (preferably avoiding the waxy "improvement" to the frosting.)
My brief experience with the concept was a crossover patch cable modified to work in one direction. One interface wired directly to the other with the ability to use a packet sniffer on the receiver to see what's on the wire.
Clearly the machine wouldn't respond to ARP probes, but quality routers permit the manual specification of ARP mapping entries (for example, 'arp -s' under Linux).
Hypothetical situation: a Linux webserver with an external interface card to deal with the Internet (ignored here) and an internal interface card connected to transmit over unidirectional crossover patch cable directly to an interface card in the database server. Assuming 10.0.0.0/255.255.255.0 is unused, set the database server interface to 10.0.0.1/255.255.255.0 and the webserver interface to 10.0.0.2/255.255.255.0. Obtain the Ethernet hardware address and use 'arp -s' on the webserver to tie 10.0.0.1 to the Ethernet address of the database server.
At this point, a UDP server application on the database server should be capable of receiving packets from the webserver over the internal interface. Assuming of course the Ethernet cards don't get confused about the lack of signal over the transmit wires to the webserver. The cards in the setup I saw didn't care, but if you're using this sort of system as a passive sniffer on a hub it is probable you will need to work around the hub detecting a bad connection to the card and ignoring it (and I presume the same for connection to a switch.)
Things may be a little different today, but at least when I was growing up it was pretty much impossible to conceal anything. And my parents weren't even nosy. You leave the game in the pants pocket, on the table, or in the PSP, or you watch a "premium" channel when you don't realize they're home and they walk in, or you have a friend that can't keep the mouth shut about the fireworks.
Of course, you could let the kid take the console to school with him. Or ignore the fact that he's spending a stretch of five or six hours in his room. But that'd be parenting of a far lower caliber than I'd expect from these Family types.
And again, if the penalty for being caught is destruction of the game (or sale of the console)... well, it's not a mistake one repeats. But this really never was about parental responsibility, or they'd be publicizing tips and techniques about how to look after your own instead of trying to further dictate what we may all do as a society and how we may do it.
I should confess that, having started this topic, I actually do not think businesses should have to card for games. I recently had a discussion about this topic and wanted to float the idea in here to see how reasonable people feel it is.
Personally, I think it's a damned inconvenience to retailers and myself to have to fish for my ID before I buy a video game. Kids who want access to mature games will manage it through friends, older siblings, or software piracy. To enjoy games, one needs an expensive console or computer which can be monitored by a suitably attentive and nosy parent. With the understanding that any game purchased on the sly will be destroyed on sight by the parent, sneaking mature games into the house becomes a risky endeavor. In sum, good parents concerned about what their children consume gain nothing by altering the status quo, other parents simply don't care, and businesses and customers suffer so a handful of folks can justify themselves. Meanwhile we all continue to pay for V-chips in our TV sets that few bother to use.
There's more support in here than I expected for this idea, which is a little surprising given my assumptions about the audience.
But I must say I'm intrigued by your approach. Is there really no scenario where you'd say no as a retailer? A handgun sold to an eight-year-old, for example, where the consequences of "inadequate parenting" not only permit the individual to harm himself but others around him?
To get retailers to start carding everybody for games?
Parents should have the right to determine for themselves whether or not a game is appropriate for their child rather than worrying that the little tyke is at the store buying an M-rated title behind their backs.
The most fragile point in any computer-based security system is the point at which an attacker can interface with the system.
With regard to databases, one means of preventing illicit data retrieval is to implement a one-way directional data filter. In a business setting, this can be achieved by removing the (server-side) TX wires from the Ethernet cable.
I've been around the Internet for a long time -- since the early 90s in
fact -- and am thus quite aware of the ruinous activities it has been
subjected to by the typical user since then. You know, things like people
popping into a random USENET group and treating it like a tech support
line, or in the larger picture basically assuming the entire network is
there to serve as some form of entertainment.
When I started, the USENET application would inform me that my message would
be spread across tens of thousands of computers at immeasurable cost as
a subtle hint to keep things interesting, and Internet Chat required some
basic knowledge of Makefiles and attention to documentation before you could
run a client. Frankly, things became unmanageable at the point the Internet
was made accessible to anybody with a web browser; anybody who's been around
this long knows what I'm talking about.
It's a short hop to realizing that the problems we're experiencing with virii
and worms are the same problem. Intimate knowledge of x86 assembly used to be
a requirement -- along with a malcontent-type disposition -- in order to wreak
the sort of havoc that today requires fifteen minutes and an Effective
VBScript In Fifteen Minutes manual. Every document is now a program, and
e-mail doubles as FTP.
Many experts believe we should raise the barrier of entry by requiring
programmers to undergo education, certification, and maybe even an oath to do
no harm as part of the certification process if going into a security field.
It used to take years to do what kids today can do in months; additionally, a
would-be programmer who spends a few months picking up Visual Basic or
whatever has hardly learned the fundamentals of programming any more than
someone who reads a manual about his DVD player has become a laser engineer.
I suggest that the field and the general user experience would be greatly
enhanced by limiting access to compilers/assemblers (by means of pricing and
with the cooperation of the open source community) and by separating macros
or other executable content from documents.
It makes more sense than trying to go out and educate every user. Think
about it; in what other field do we "educate" "users"? We don't try to
educate people with electrical outlets and let any curious individual perform
as a licensed electrician. We don't "educate" passengers and let anyone
who cares be a bus driver give it a try. Why are things always so difficult
when it comes to computers?
The last three systems I've owned has used them for memory interface, and never gave me a problem -- their embedded devices (audio, USB, etc.) have all performed well and saved me from the cost of additional peripherals... unlike other embeds I've used in the past.
However, with the increasing price of oil, I can't help wondering what the face of
computing is going to look like five or ten years down the line. The average
computer uses as much as the Mayflower worth of coal to run on
any given day. Much of this is spent on wasteful peripherals we could do
without, such as fancy 3D graphics cards or optical mice, but even more is
being spent on processing power well beyond the needs of the average user.
Inefficiencies in microcomponent fabrication mean that a great deal of the
electricity that goes into your computer is given off as heat. Techniques
such as reversible or quantum computing hold much promise in the future for
putting more energy into computation but today it is up to the consumer to
safeguard the environment.
In a way, the argument is the same as with vehicles -- most people don't need
a SUV or a top-of-the-line system but many choose to get them to compensate
for inadequacies or because of marketing -- but with computers at least it
is impossible to argue you are "safer" for having a faster system. Indeed,
you are more likely to run viruses or worms without realizing it because you
don't notice the hit in operating performance.
I've noticed that I've been holding on to computer equipment longer and
longer these days. Oh sure, I have to fix a power supply here and a fan
there, but besides slack engineering standards from software companies there
is little reason to keep up with the hardware treadmill... and at least one
compelling reason not to.
Slashdot Mirror
Is that you don't have to go through all the trouble of fundraising. Just grab what you need when you need it.
But after seeing the download rates of German, UK, and Swedish downloaders in one BitTorrent session, I think it's to buy three of these phones for each side of the ocean and hook the remotes to Bredbandsbolaget.
It'd be easier, faster, and cheaper than trying to find that kind of bandwidth from a local provider, even if you throw in the cost of a house in Sweden.
By harnessing the power of the microwaves inherent in the phone -- part of the electromagnetic spectrim -- it's possible to write to the drives simply by beaming the proper electromagnetic frequencies at the platters, and to read from the drives by doing the same thing in reverse.
Unfortunately, 10GB is probably as dense as these things can get, scientifically speaking.
I remember after the CBS memo thing a number of people yielded to the temptation to say "Well, maybe the memos were fake, but the information in them must be true."
Occasionally you need to concede that the news gets it wrong instead of trying to bail out a leaky story. It reeks of desperation when instead of simply admitting you've been had on this one you cling to something that is rapidly being proven false. Isn't this the mentality you're trying to fight against?
John Conyers indicated he will discuss this further on his blog later as well, as the issue was brought up by some angry people under one of his posts (I think as a result of a Daily Kos article on the matter). Comment #80 on this page appears to be the start of the comments on the matter, and it might be worth hovering around the blog in days to come to see if he gives the opportunity for people to (calmly and rationally) express their thoughts on the matter.
BTW: his comment in the thread above (Comment #96) gives more details about why he signed on. I don't think it even begins to consider the spirit of Fair Use or the rights of the average consumer, but then I don't get the impression that Congress thinks we're worth a damn beyond our votes and purchasing power.
I modified a Visual C++ 5.0 screensaver example to do it, and I seem to recall some extra plumbing having to do with getting the thing to preview properly in the screensaver selector.
All of which really doesn't answer your question, but thank you for reminding me of an old project to learn Windows 95 programming. I know worms/viruses will transfer via .SCR which would suggest the equivalency is close enough, and a hexdump shows a .SCR looks like an .EXE, but I've never actually tried renaming and running stuff to find out.
Every so often I think about cancelling the job, but then I'd have to go shop for a space heater.
For example, you can now pipe the X.org modules through an MP3 encoder and listen to the only standard platform-independent networked graphical window system bridging the heterogeneous platforms in today's enterprise wherever you go.
For example, if you create a VPN with this latest OpenSSH, a lossy network will hold up your traffic. Despite the fact that TCP/IP will try to continue operating with dropped packets, with OpenSSH if you miss one packet the loss cascades into succeeding packets until the client and server are able to resync or the packet is delivered. This accumulation of tolerances is not a problem with IPsec, which is designed cipherwise to work around occasional packet loss.
Most experts agree the product of the best cryptography will be indistinguishable from random noise. This means that it is difficult to share the benefits of compression with file encryption because random noise compresses very poorly, as anyone who attempts to archive their MP3s of today's artists will attest. Additionally, if you accidentally store your encrypted files amongst files containing random noise you run the risk of generating new data during decryption.
The secret is to understand the technology before you use the technology. The problem with encryption is twofold -- some people are overconfident in what they're using and either lose data or risk more than they would if they were fully informed, and others think it's too difficult a topic to broach and leave themselves open to exploitation by network explorers. Certainly when I was in the second category I became convinced of the problem once I saw tools like 'tcpdump' and 'ethereal'.
It still seems right to criticize the DMCA to me. It isn't necessary to get pirates but it does criminalize a whole range of activities that really shouldn't be illegal.
Sci-Fi is about breaking the constraints and tired plots of conventional stories. This means fantastic things like aliens, robots, artificial intelligence and time travel. Not rehashing the stale concept that the rest of the universe really isn't so different from home and we'll never really evolve past the emotions and biases we've got right now.
I meant lower-case 'spam' there (unsolicited commercial e-mail), not upper-case (meat product good with cheddar and onion in omelets).
This is already accepted to some extent by anti-SPAM policies that forbid access to external SMTP servers, and has been used to great effect by university administrators.
It would be far better than the legal approach, which is inefficient and expensive for all parties involved, and would prevent many viruses along with piracy.
That's an excellent idea. Especially since I can't think of any tycoon titles currently on the shelves featuring employee odor control as a gaming element.
I've had orange and raspberry sticks, which were semi-solid jelled fruit centers with a dark chocolate coating (though from a candy store, not off a gas station shelf), and maybe this technique could be extended to PBJ cup manufacture. Like either jelling the jelly, or going so far as to embed a chocolate-coated half-sized raspberry stick in a peanut butter cup to prevent the oils or whatever in the peanut butter from wreaking havoc on the jelly flavor.
But... why not go one step further and make peanut butter and jelly cups? Strawberry goes well with peanut butter and chocolate, and if you want to go crazy with the concept so does raspberry and orange marmalade.
Additionally, those apple-cinammon creme-filled cupcakes were pretty good back in the day, but were inexplicably pulled from the market at the same time they replaced the chocolate on the chocolate cupcakes with black wax. They need to bring those back (preferably avoiding the waxy "improvement" to the frosting.)
My brief experience with the concept was a crossover patch cable modified to work in one direction. One interface wired directly to the other with the ability to use a packet sniffer on the receiver to see what's on the wire.
Clearly the machine wouldn't respond to ARP probes, but quality routers permit the manual specification of ARP mapping entries (for example, 'arp -s' under Linux).
Hypothetical situation: a Linux webserver with an external interface card to deal with the Internet (ignored here) and an internal interface card connected to transmit over unidirectional crossover patch cable directly to an interface card in the database server. Assuming 10.0.0.0/255.255.255.0 is unused, set the database server interface to 10.0.0.1/255.255.255.0 and the webserver interface to 10.0.0.2/255.255.255.0. Obtain the Ethernet hardware address and use 'arp -s' on the webserver to tie 10.0.0.1 to the Ethernet address of the database server.
At this point, a UDP server application on the database server should be capable of receiving packets from the webserver over the internal interface. Assuming of course the Ethernet cards don't get confused about the lack of signal over the transmit wires to the webserver. The cards in the setup I saw didn't care, but if you're using this sort of system as a passive sniffer on a hub it is probable you will need to work around the hub detecting a bad connection to the card and ignoring it (and I presume the same for connection to a switch.)
Of course, you could let the kid take the console to school with him. Or ignore the fact that he's spending a stretch of five or six hours in his room. But that'd be parenting of a far lower caliber than I'd expect from these Family types.
And again, if the penalty for being caught is destruction of the game (or sale of the console)... well, it's not a mistake one repeats. But this really never was about parental responsibility, or they'd be publicizing tips and techniques about how to look after your own instead of trying to further dictate what we may all do as a society and how we may do it.
I do wonder how to figure out whether the data was written successfully, however.
Personally, I think it's a damned inconvenience to retailers and myself to have to fish for my ID before I buy a video game. Kids who want access to mature games will manage it through friends, older siblings, or software piracy. To enjoy games, one needs an expensive console or computer which can be monitored by a suitably attentive and nosy parent. With the understanding that any game purchased on the sly will be destroyed on sight by the parent, sneaking mature games into the house becomes a risky endeavor. In sum, good parents concerned about what their children consume gain nothing by altering the status quo, other parents simply don't care, and businesses and customers suffer so a handful of folks can justify themselves. Meanwhile we all continue to pay for V-chips in our TV sets that few bother to use.
There's more support in here than I expected for this idea, which is a little surprising given my assumptions about the audience.
But I must say I'm intrigued by your approach. Is there really no scenario where you'd say no as a retailer? A handgun sold to an eight-year-old, for example, where the consequences of "inadequate parenting" not only permit the individual to harm himself but others around him?
Parents should have the right to determine for themselves whether or not a game is appropriate for their child rather than worrying that the little tyke is at the store buying an M-rated title behind their backs.
With regard to databases, one means of preventing illicit data retrieval is to implement a one-way directional data filter. In a business setting, this can be achieved by removing the (server-side) TX wires from the Ethernet cable.
When I started, the USENET application would inform me that my message would be spread across tens of thousands of computers at immeasurable cost as a subtle hint to keep things interesting, and Internet Chat required some basic knowledge of Makefiles and attention to documentation before you could run a client. Frankly, things became unmanageable at the point the Internet was made accessible to anybody with a web browser; anybody who's been around this long knows what I'm talking about.
It's a short hop to realizing that the problems we're experiencing with virii and worms are the same problem. Intimate knowledge of x86 assembly used to be a requirement -- along with a malcontent-type disposition -- in order to wreak the sort of havoc that today requires fifteen minutes and an Effective VBScript In Fifteen Minutes manual. Every document is now a program, and e-mail doubles as FTP.
Many experts believe we should raise the barrier of entry by requiring programmers to undergo education, certification, and maybe even an oath to do no harm as part of the certification process if going into a security field. It used to take years to do what kids today can do in months; additionally, a would-be programmer who spends a few months picking up Visual Basic or whatever has hardly learned the fundamentals of programming any more than someone who reads a manual about his DVD player has become a laser engineer. I suggest that the field and the general user experience would be greatly enhanced by limiting access to compilers/assemblers (by means of pricing and with the cooperation of the open source community) and by separating macros or other executable content from documents.
It makes more sense than trying to go out and educate every user. Think about it; in what other field do we "educate" "users"? We don't try to educate people with electrical outlets and let any curious individual perform as a licensed electrician. We don't "educate" passengers and let anyone who cares be a bus driver give it a try. Why are things always so difficult when it comes to computers?
However, with the increasing price of oil, I can't help wondering what the face of computing is going to look like five or ten years down the line. The average computer uses as much as the Mayflower worth of coal to run on any given day. Much of this is spent on wasteful peripherals we could do without, such as fancy 3D graphics cards or optical mice, but even more is being spent on processing power well beyond the needs of the average user.
Inefficiencies in microcomponent fabrication mean that a great deal of the electricity that goes into your computer is given off as heat. Techniques such as reversible or quantum computing hold much promise in the future for putting more energy into computation but today it is up to the consumer to safeguard the environment.
In a way, the argument is the same as with vehicles -- most people don't need a SUV or a top-of-the-line system but many choose to get them to compensate for inadequacies or because of marketing -- but with computers at least it is impossible to argue you are "safer" for having a faster system. Indeed, you are more likely to run viruses or worms without realizing it because you don't notice the hit in operating performance.
I've noticed that I've been holding on to computer equipment longer and longer these days. Oh sure, I have to fix a power supply here and a fan there, but besides slack engineering standards from software companies there is little reason to keep up with the hardware treadmill... and at least one compelling reason not to.