It still makes sense to be a little paranoid. Securing a system from the beggining [i.e. open ports] is of course a good idea, but it is also a very good idea to catch any alterations after the fact.
Still, there is always
rpm --verify -a
...which uses a MD5 hash to check for alterations in files, for those of you who always wondered why/var/lib/rpm took up so much space
But, of course, rpm could be among the compromised files, if someone has hacked root on your system. But, of course, so could 'veracity', I imagine, although perhaps having it run remotely on a network could make things harder for an intruder.
--
man sig
It is the only 'medical condition' for which there is no lab test of any kind.
It's diagnosis is an arbitrary and subjective judgement. [Of course, when someone is clearly psychotic, this is not overly hard, but the new 'soft' mental illnesses that have become such a striking feature of the mental health system are all about defining as ill people who are aware of reality and the world around them, but are deemed to not feel sufficiently happy or calm about their situation in life]
Anyone know of any affordable hardware MPEG encoders with support for linux?
I once purchased the Dazzle DVC encoder, which only does MPEG1, but does it in realtime in hardware, which actually makes it usable on a normal basis. [Capturing 2 gigs of raw video, only to spend 6 hours compressing it, is too much work except for something very special]
Unfortunately, there is no linux driver for the Daz DVC, (which is why I rarely if ever use it anymore, sadly). It plugs in through the parallel port, so it shouldn't be -that- hard to reverse engineer.
Still, seems like it might be wasted effort, when MPEG2 [and, hopefully, soon MPEG4] will be standard into the future.
--
man sig
Raw computational fabric / open source hardware?
on
The Computer of 2010
·
· Score: 1
One can only hope, but perhaps at some future point we can move beyond propriatary hardware implementations... that's right, open-source hardware...
Many of us today recourse in horror at the notion of using software whose stucture and method is wholly determined by a fixed entity; but all of our software is running on propriatary hardware platforms.
Yes, of course, there is currently competition in the x86 family, with offerings from AMD, Transmeta, Cyrix, etc.
...but they are still all using [essentially] the same instruction set.
I envision/idealize a future in which a standard computational fabric, inspired perhaps by
the RAW project at MIT
(which is akin to a FPGA [field programmable gate array], but with a different sort of abstraction... Unlike a FPGA, in which you actually program a virtual machine in hardware [unfortunately needing something like 8-12 (?) transitors for ever simulated one].
FPGA's have proved very usefull for certain DSP type operations and for their utility of giving you 'hardware speed' for custom algorithims that can be rewritten onto the chip 'on-the-fly'.
The raw architecture, although simmilar, instead creates a massive SMP machine-on-a-chip with hundreds or even thousands of mini-cpu's, local memory units, and 'network-switches' to control the data flow.
Imagine having as many companies that make networking cards today all competing with each other to produce RAW chips.
[Of course, we will need a whole new world of compiler-theoreticians to allow contemporary software to be most-efficiently implemented on such an architecture]
If this ever happens, I will be waiting next for an open-source car!
[I just paid 170$ for a propriatary rubber tube from volvo. argh..]
Ahem. I have long held the view that the additional competition in DSL provision [vs. static natural monopolies r.e. cable] made it the better choice by far... But after encountering a situation in which my choices were to A: pay 150$ a month for 300Kb/s [Kb, not KB] DSL, or 39 a month for 2Mb/s cable, the choice was hard to avoid.
I have now been using RoadRunner for several months, and honestly, have no real complaints.
I originally thought DSL would be better because the provision for CLOC's in the telecomunications "de"regulation act of 96, while cable would remain a monopoly and thus be less efficient... But I wonder now if perhaps the opening of the door for anyone to colocate at the neighborhood switch to hook up to the termination of your POTS [copper] wires if you agreed to it, has prevented the assorted bells from rolling out the necessary infrastructure as would be needed to get backbone bandwith to the neighborhoods. After all, why invest in tech that is free to be used at near cost by others?
Just a thought.
Actually, back in the day'... the phone company actually -did- charge extra to have extra phones installed, and you couldn't even purchase your own phone, you had to use one from the phone company! [My parents told me this once, this was before my time].
And, until recently, Time Warner wanted to charge for each additional hookup of another television in a home; they stopped that around the time of the new digital satellite dishes...
So, we can hope that this sort of thing is a growing pain, and will be resented/circumvented by the customers more and more, until it is abandonded.
Another disgusting example of technophobia run amuck. I'm not overly surprised
that it happened on the other side of the Atlantic as anti-
genetic-engineering vitriol is quite strong over there. I see more and more
ludditeism every day lately.
David
--
man signature
Using, say, masquerading for many machines inside your home or buisness to seem to be coming from the one IP your ISP gives you is NAT (network address translation[I prefer masquerading, it is more descriptive, more obvious to the novice])
VPN, or (virtual private networking), is when you tunnel IP over something else, so it's sort of like you have a PPP link [across the net] to some other host... and it is usually encrypted so that you can have the effect of a WAN or a dedicated private leased line, but using the public internet infrastructure instead. [Except for cpu lost in crypt [Still much cheaper;) ]
If it is possible to produce perfect copies of the famrmers fine fruit, then his labor is unnecessary, and it is unlikely there would be any farmers involed in back breaking labor to produce in a world bearing such technological possibilites as instant matter duplication...
And, although the development of such a device would surely put many fine farmers out of buisness at first, their overall quality of life in a world of such nearly free production would more then offset it, surely.
Your arguement is the scarecrow in farmer fred's field. [Straw man, get it... {argh, I need sleep...} ]
Come ON, slashdot! You can do better then this fuzzy thinking and, well, stupidity.
I've encountered people in my workplace who have claimed the GPL and it's adherents are socialist, and I have vehemently disagreed, arguing that it is a legally codified "public grounds" that provides an excellent (upgradable, debug-able) grounds to build software upon/with... and you are only giving people like that amunition with this silliness. The GPL is beutifull in providing the freedom for software to be used by all.
If anyone were to attempt enforce the type of contamination you are talking about, no one would use it any GPL'd software in the real world.
I mean, I know./ has to have fresh content on a regular basis, but why not just links to something uninteresting so I can shrug and say "slow news day, eh..." to myself, instead of a frightfull article like this...
Anyone interested in AI and natural language processing knows the value of common sense assertion databases (i.e., "water is wet", as is given by an example on your site), and I think that it would be a wonderfull thing to leverage the internet and collaborative filtering to come cheaply come up with a vast data set.
But why must you own it? I for one would not waste my time inputting significant amounts of data just for another to own it; however, if those participating knew that the data would be available, say, under the LGPL, and that any AI/MI afficionado could use to whatever purpose inspired them, I think you would create a much greater good.
The annoying things about the current databases is that they are all propriatary and subject to significant licensing, in part justifiably because of the ammount of human effort in their production... I remember when the internet CD database was cool, and I inputed info on many CDs, only to have them later see out to a commercial interest, making all that distributed participation into so much free labor.
You do, at least, offer stock to the contributors, but shouldn't something this valuable be made free?
As the development of nanotech is quite possible inevitable, assuming it is possible [as it dosen't seem to violate any laws of physics, I would say it is] I am pretty sure it is only a matter of time. The notion of a central state having control of it is truly terrifying, but that may well be the way it happens, due to the massive R&D and extremely precise [and new] manufacturing processes that will be needed to make NT a reality [although you really need only one functional programmable nano-assembly system to start making others]. NT will be so unbelievably powerfull, I hope and pray [figuratively speaking] that it will come to be available to private citizens as part of their everyday lives. [I mean, you think internet privacy is an issue today, imagine self replicating surveilance agents across the landscape, invisibly within your home, your body, even perhaps your brain]. If only one or few interests control NT, those without it will be powerless to oppose their power. I prefer the notion of an organic approach wherin everybody has their own personal NT systems to protect them from other malicious systems, (which of course will sometimes win, as measures and counter-measures evolve together [life has never been without risk]). I doubt any privacy or such freedoms will survive, otherwise. Imagine getting a McAfee vaccination from your doctor!
Severly offtopic, but nonthesless extremely funny!
Perhaps slashdot could have a "jokes" section or some sort of wholly general message board to prevent such, [but then again, I would probably never read it], eiye! slashboard spam...
While $0.10 dosen't exactly seem like "skyrocketing", nontheless it is a strong sign of a possibile sea change in a market where, until now, prices have been on a general downward trend. If other manufacturers go along, it could harbinge a sudden increase in prices. What is more telling is the comment about the 50% decrease in inventory that micron has engineered, which sets the stage for sudden price increases based on limited supply. I might be tempted to buy some, but of what real use is PC133 SDRAM when DDR SDRAM, i.e. PC200 is on the immidiate horizon!? I remember buying a lot of EDO dram one day, only to find it essentially useless in newer sytems where you wanted decent performance. With a significant increase in speed the coming soon, my money is staying in the bank for now.
------------------------------------------------ Rambus is an evil intel plot! DDR SDRAM anyday now! For a fascinating story on intel and rambus, read http://www.32bitsonline.com/article.php3?file=issu es/200004/rambusb&page=1
I know it won't happen, but wouldn't it be wonderfull if yahoo were to take a stand against such horrific statist attempts to manhandle them and solve the problem by merely completely barring all access to yahoo from french domains altogether. A valuable resource on the net that countless citizens use on a daily basis would suddenly be gone, which could lead to citizen unrest. Yahoo could even make a valid arguement that they are in many ways just a pipe [even in yahoo online stores, which are available to anyone (yahoo just process creditcards & hosts) ], and the the process of reviewing all content is infeasible; in short, if the government tries to foist such self censorship on a medium of public expression, then they have to pay the price... [Of course, yahoo has stockholders who would not want to be possibly left behind in a concievably lucrative future market in france, but da*m, it would set a nice precedent...]
Although I suspect that holographic storage is closer to realizaability in the immidiate future, near-atomic-scale memory is an awesome possiblility! The quantitities of gold invloved shouldn't unduly effect the price if the stuff can ever be mass produced. I imagine that refresh is still a problem, however. If you're interested, check out scientific american's article on molecular computing at: http://www.sciam.com/2000/0600issue/0600reed.html Amazing stuff! [May moore's law never die!]
I believe that intel owns a significant share of rambus, which is a -propriatary- memory technology... Unlike other forms of ram, like SDRAM, no rambus owns "key patents" on the RDRAM architecture, so no company will be able to manufacture and sell ram to work with a system that needs RDRAM except those who -pay money to rambus-... One reason SDRAM has gotten so cheap is because it is a commodity, and massive competition between different manufacturors has driven the price pleasantly low... I think that this is a contemptible move on intel's part... They are clearly trying to create a monopsony on memory that is compatible with their systems... It is an ugly attempt at a hidden memory tax, on every Mb bought, and I hope it backfires horribly, as open chip ram chip [and bus] designs surplant it, and RDRAM dies a horrible death....Although I do value performance, I would not be willing to support an attempt to introduce a proprieatary technology into all systems... Luckily I feel better because I am writing this on a wonderfull K7 system [which I waited for for what seemed like forever, even though I needed more horsepower, because I didn't want to support the P3]... It was worth the wait... [And by the way, I do not think that any arguements here are based upon any implicit assertion that "all big cooperation's are evil"... most of us are technologists and love a free market... However, -some- companies, and the techniques they use to try to victimize their consumers, are evil, and I as a member of of the demand side of that market am proud to make ethical choices about what products to support [which really come down to self interest anyway, just with a longer view...]]
I believe that intel owns a significant share of rambus, which is a -propriatary- memory technology... Unlike other forms of ram, like SDRAM, no rambus owns "key patents" on the RDRAM architecture, so no company will be able to manufacture and sell ram to work with a system that needs RDRAM except those who -pay money to rambus-... One reason SDRAM has gotten so cheap is because it is a commodity, and massive competition between different manufacturors has driven the price pleasantly low... I think that this is a contemptible move on intel's part... They are clearly trying to create a monopsony on memory that is compatible with their systems... It is an ugly attempt at a hidden memory tax, on every Mb bought, and I hope it backfires horribly, as open chip ram chip [and bus] designs surplant it, and RDRAM dies a horrible death....Although I do value performance, I would not be willing to support an attempt to introduce a proprieatary technology into all systems... Luckily I feel better because I am writing this on a wonderfull K7 system [which I waited for for what seemed like forever, even though I needed more horsepower, because I didn't want to support the P3]... It was worth the wait... [And by the way, I do not think that any arguements here are based upon any implicit assertion that "all big cooperation's are evil"... most of us are technologists and love a free market... However, -some- companies, and the techniques they use to try to victimize their consumers, are evil, and I as a member of of the demand side of that market am proud to make ethical choices about what products to support [which really come down to self interest anyway, just with a longer view...]]
Slashdot Mirror
It still makes sense to be a little paranoid. Securing a system from the beggining [i.e. open ports] is of course a good idea, but it is also a very good idea to catch any alterations after the fact.
...which uses a MD5 hash to check for alterations in files, for those of you who always wondered why /var/lib/rpm took up so much space
Still, there is always
rpm --verify -a
But, of course, rpm could be among the compromised files, if someone has hacked root on your system. But, of course, so could 'veracity', I imagine, although perhaps having it run remotely on a network could make things harder for an intruder.
--
man sig
It is the only 'medical condition' for which there is no lab test of any kind.
It's diagnosis is an arbitrary and subjective judgement. [Of course, when someone is clearly psychotic, this is not overly hard, but the new 'soft' mental illnesses that have become such a striking feature of the mental health system are all about defining as ill people who are aware of reality and the world around them, but are deemed to not feel sufficiently happy or calm about their situation in life]
--
man sig
Anyone know of any affordable hardware MPEG encoders with support for linux?
I once purchased the Dazzle DVC encoder, which only does MPEG1, but does it in realtime in hardware, which actually makes it usable on a normal basis. [Capturing 2 gigs of raw video, only to spend 6 hours compressing it, is too much work except for something very special]
Unfortunately, there is no linux driver for the Daz DVC, (which is why I rarely if ever use it anymore, sadly). It plugs in through the parallel port, so it shouldn't be -that- hard to reverse engineer.
Still, seems like it might be wasted effort, when MPEG2 [and, hopefully, soon MPEG4] will be standard into the future.
--
man sig
One can only hope, but perhaps at some future point we can move beyond propriatary hardware implementations... that's right, open-source hardware...
...but they are still all using [essentially] the same instruction set.
Many of us today recourse in horror at the notion of using software whose stucture and method is wholly determined by a fixed entity; but all of our software is running on propriatary hardware platforms.
Yes, of course, there is currently competition in the x86 family, with offerings from AMD, Transmeta, Cyrix, etc.
I envision/idealize a future in which a standard computational fabric, inspired perhaps by the RAW project at MIT
(which is akin to a FPGA [field programmable gate array], but with a different sort of abstraction... Unlike a FPGA, in which you actually program a virtual machine in hardware [unfortunately needing something like 8-12 (?) transitors for ever simulated one].
FPGA's have proved very usefull for certain DSP type operations and for their utility of giving you 'hardware speed' for custom algorithims that can be rewritten onto the chip 'on-the-fly'.
The raw architecture, although simmilar, instead creates a massive SMP machine-on-a-chip with hundreds or even thousands of mini-cpu's, local memory units, and 'network-switches' to control the data flow.
Imagine having as many companies that make networking cards today all competing with each other to produce RAW chips.
[Of course, we will need a whole new world of compiler-theoreticians to allow contemporary software to be most-efficiently implemented on such an architecture]
If this ever happens, I will be waiting next for an open-source car!
[I just paid 170$ for a propriatary rubber tube from volvo. argh..]
--------
man sig
Ahem. I have long held the view that the additional competition in DSL provision [vs. static natural monopolies r.e. cable] made it the better choice by far... But after encountering a situation in which my choices were to A: pay 150$ a month for 300Kb/s [Kb, not KB] DSL, or 39 a month for 2Mb/s cable, the choice was hard to avoid.
I have now been using RoadRunner for several months, and honestly, have no real complaints.
I originally thought DSL would be better because the provision for CLOC's in the telecomunications "de"regulation act of 96, while cable would remain a monopoly and thus be less efficient... But I wonder now if perhaps the opening of the door for anyone to colocate at the neighborhood switch to hook up to the termination of your POTS [copper] wires if you agreed to it, has prevented the assorted bells from rolling out the necessary infrastructure as would be needed to get backbone bandwith to the neighborhoods. After all, why invest in tech that is free to be used at near cost by others? Just a thought.
Actually, back in the day'... the phone company actually -did- charge extra to have extra phones installed, and you couldn't even purchase your own phone, you had to use one from the phone company! [My parents told me this once, this was before my time].
And, until recently, Time Warner wanted to charge for each additional hookup of another television in a home; they stopped that around the time of the new digital satellite dishes...
So, we can hope that this sort of thing is a growing pain, and will be resented/circumvented by the customers more and more, until it is abandonded.
David
--
man signature
Another disgusting example of technophobia run amuck. I'm not overly surprised that it happened on the other side of the Atlantic as anti- genetic-engineering vitriol is quite strong over there. I see more and more ludditeism every day lately. David -- man signature
The best interview I've read here in a long time! Truly brought up some wonderfull issues.
You people are confusing VPN's with NAT!
;) ]
Using, say, masquerading for many machines inside your home or buisness to seem to be coming from the one IP your ISP gives you is NAT (network address translation[I prefer masquerading, it is more descriptive, more obvious to the novice])
VPN, or (virtual private networking), is when you tunnel IP over something else, so it's sort of like you have a PPP link [across the net] to some other host... and it is usually encrypted so that you can have the effect of a WAN or a dedicated private leased line, but using the public internet infrastructure instead. [Except for cpu lost in crypt [Still much cheaper
--sanemind
man signature
If it is possible to produce perfect copies of the famrmers fine fruit, then his labor is unnecessary, and it is unlikely there would be any farmers involed in back breaking labor to produce in a world bearing such technological possibilites as instant matter duplication...
And, although the development of such a device would surely put many fine farmers out of buisness at first, their overall quality of life in a world of such nearly free production would more then offset it, surely.
Your arguement is the scarecrow in farmer fred's field. [Straw man, get it... {argh, I need sleep...} ]
Come ON, slashdot! You can do better then this fuzzy thinking and, well, stupidity.
./ has to have fresh content on a regular basis, but why not just links to something uninteresting so I can shrug and say "slow news day, eh..." to myself, instead of a frightfull article like this...
I've encountered people in my workplace who have claimed the GPL and it's adherents are socialist, and I have vehemently disagreed, arguing that it is a legally codified "public grounds" that provides an excellent (upgradable, debug-able) grounds to build software upon/with... and you are only giving people like that amunition with this silliness. The GPL is beutifull in providing the freedom for software to be used by all.
If anyone were to attempt enforce the type of contamination you are talking about, no one would use it any GPL'd software in the real world.
I mean, I know
Anyone interested in AI and natural language processing knows the value of common sense assertion databases (i.e., "water is wet", as is given by an example on your site), and I think that it would be a wonderfull thing to leverage the internet and collaborative filtering to come cheaply come up with a vast data set.
But why must you own it? I for one would not waste my time inputting significant amounts of data just for another to own it; however, if those participating knew that the data would be available, say, under the LGPL, and that any AI/MI afficionado could use to whatever purpose inspired them, I think you would create a much greater good.
The annoying things about the current databases is that they are all propriatary and subject to significant licensing, in part justifiably because of the ammount of human effort in their production... I remember when the internet CD database was cool, and I inputed info on many CDs, only to have them later see out to a commercial interest, making all that distributed participation into so much free labor.
You do, at least, offer stock to the contributors, but shouldn't something this valuable be made free?
As the development of nanotech is quite possible inevitable, assuming it is possible [as it dosen't seem to violate any laws of physics, I would say it is] I am pretty sure it is only a matter of time. The notion of a central state having control of it is truly terrifying, but that may well be the way it happens, due to the massive R&D and extremely precise [and new] manufacturing processes that will be needed to make NT a reality [although you really need only one functional programmable nano-assembly system to start making others]. NT will be so unbelievably powerfull, I hope and pray [figuratively speaking] that it will come to be available to private citizens as part of their everyday lives. [I mean, you think internet privacy is an issue today, imagine self replicating surveilance agents across the landscape, invisibly within your home, your body, even perhaps your brain]. If only one or few interests control NT, those without it will be powerless to oppose their power. I prefer the notion of an organic approach wherin everybody has their own personal NT systems to protect them from other malicious systems, (which of course will sometimes win, as measures and counter-measures evolve together [life has never been without risk]). I doubt any privacy or such freedoms will survive, otherwise. Imagine getting a McAfee vaccination from your doctor!
It would be better with some sort of neuromancer-ish cyberpunk direct brain-machine connection sort of thing.
Perhaps slashdot could have a "jokes" section or some sort of wholly general message board to prevent such, [but then again, I would probably never read it], eiye! slashboard spam...
I remember buying a lot of EDO dram one day, only to find it essentially useless in newer sytems where you wanted decent performance.
With a significant increase in speed the coming soon, my money is staying in the bank for now.
------------------------------------------------ Rambus is an evil intel plot! DDR SDRAM anyday now! For a fascinating story on intel and rambus, read http://www.32bitsonline.com/article.php3?file=issu es/200004/rambusb&page=1
I know it won't happen, but wouldn't it be wonderfull if yahoo were to take a stand against such horrific statist attempts to manhandle them and solve the problem by merely completely barring all access to yahoo from french domains altogether. A valuable resource on the net that countless citizens use on a daily basis would suddenly be gone, which could lead to citizen unrest. Yahoo could even make a valid arguement that they are in many ways just a pipe [even in yahoo online stores, which are available to anyone (yahoo just process creditcards & hosts) ], and the the process of reviewing all content is infeasible; in short, if the government tries to foist such self censorship on a medium of public expression, then they have to pay the price... [Of course, yahoo has stockholders who would not want to be possibly left behind in a concievably lucrative future market in france, but da*m, it would set a nice precedent...]
Although I suspect that holographic storage is closer to realizaability in the immidiate future, near-atomic-scale memory is an awesome possiblility! The quantitities of gold invloved shouldn't unduly effect the price if the stuff can ever be mass produced. I imagine that refresh is still a problem, however. If you're interested, check out scientific american's article on molecular computing at: http://www.sciam.com/2000/0600issue/0600reed.html Amazing stuff! [May moore's law never die!]
I believe that intel owns a significant share of rambus, which is a -propriatary- memory technology... Unlike other forms of ram, like SDRAM, no rambus owns "key patents" on the RDRAM architecture, so no company will be able to manufacture and sell ram to work with a system that needs RDRAM except those who -pay money to rambus-... One reason SDRAM has gotten so cheap is because it is a commodity, and massive competition between different manufacturors has driven the price pleasantly low... I think that this is a contemptible move on intel's part... They are clearly trying to create a monopsony on memory that is compatible with their systems... It is an ugly attempt at a hidden memory tax, on every Mb bought, and I hope it backfires horribly, as open chip ram chip [and bus] designs surplant it, and RDRAM dies a horrible death. ...Although I do value performance, I would not be willing to support an attempt to introduce a proprieatary technology into all systems... Luckily I feel better because I am writing this on a wonderfull K7 system [which I waited for for what seemed like forever, even though I needed more horsepower, because I didn't want to support the P3]... It was worth the wait... [And by the way, I do not think that any arguements here are based upon any implicit assertion that "all big cooperation's are evil"... most of us are technologists and love a free market... However, -some- companies, and the techniques they use to try to victimize their consumers, are evil, and I as a member of of the demand side of that market am proud to make ethical choices about what products to support [which really come down to self interest anyway, just with a longer view...]]
I believe that intel owns a significant share of rambus, which is a -propriatary- memory technology... Unlike other forms of ram, like SDRAM, no rambus owns "key patents" on the RDRAM architecture, so no company will be able to manufacture and sell ram to work with a system that needs RDRAM except those who -pay money to rambus-... One reason SDRAM has gotten so cheap is because it is a commodity, and massive competition between different manufacturors has driven the price pleasantly low... I think that this is a contemptible move on intel's part... They are clearly trying to create a monopsony on memory that is compatible with their systems... It is an ugly attempt at a hidden memory tax, on every Mb bought, and I hope it backfires horribly, as open chip ram chip [and bus] designs surplant it, and RDRAM dies a horrible death. ...Although I do value performance, I would not be willing to support an attempt to introduce a proprieatary technology into all systems... Luckily I feel better because I am writing this on a wonderfull K7 system [which I waited for for what seemed like forever, even though I needed more horsepower, because I didn't want to support the P3]... It was worth the wait... [And by the way, I do not think that any arguements here are based upon any implicit assertion that "all big cooperation's are evil"... most of us are technologists and love a free market... However, -some- companies, and the techniques they use to try to victimize their consumers, are evil, and I as a member of of the demand side of that market am proud to make ethical choices about what products to support [which really come down to self interest anyway, just with a longer view...]]