We picked up an 8 sensor model of the AKCP sensorProbe a while back. I don't recall it being particularly expensive and it seems to work very well. It's got 8 ports on it, into which you can plug a variety of different sensors. Sensors can be things like temperature, water, AC voltage, smoke, motion, etc. The sensors all terminate in normal RJ45 connectors, so it's pretty easy to reuse existing wiring infrastructure to get your sensors wherever you need them.
It has a web interface for configuration with all the pretty graphs you might want. Notifications are handled via email. We've got the emails going to a box running sendpage to send us SMS messages to our cellphones as well. SNMP is also an option.
I'm reasonably happy with it and would say it's at least worth a look. The specific model we have is here.
Adjustable fan speeds, from 800 to 4000 rpm. If you read the article, the volume from the front is 48db, which is fairly impressive. Quieter than the 2nd gen G series Shuttles which I've seen/heard in person.
The P series Shuttles all come with 350W power supplies. Pretty much neccesary for a power hungry PCIe graphics card, 3 hard drives, optical drive, etc.
There is a 350W P series with a Prescott P4 that works just fine... the far less power hungry Athlon64 should be even better off.
The iPod's success isn't _just_ because it's small and light. Nor is it just because it's the trendy thing. It did two things perfectly right and that's why it's managed to gain so much marketshare.
1. The interface. It's downright brilliantly intuitive. Especially the click-wheel on the 4Gs. You can't help but feel just how right Apple got the interface every time you use it. Never before has so much functionality been jammed into so few buttons. You look at some of the other players out there and boggle at how _less_ usable they are despite having several times more buttons.
2. iTunes. No hard drive based MP3 player is ever going to be able to compete against the iPod until it comes packaged with an audio player with the power and flexibility of iTunes. You can add capacity, fancy screens, or what have you, but unless there's something as plug-and-go as iTunes to get the music onto it it's not going to fly. I'm not even talking about the iTunes music store, I'm just talking about smart things like smart playlists, party shuffle, and other ways of easily and powerfully customizing how your music plays. When all of that functionaltiy can then be transferred right over to your portable player as well _then_ you've got a winner. Previous attempts at playlist management were always clunky and unrefined and often not worth the effort. Dynamically updating lists based on infinitely customizable triggers is a huge evolutionary leap.
I just bought a 20gig 4G iPod earlier this month. It cost too much, but I can say without reservation it was worth it. Oxymoronic, I know, but it's the truth. It's the best value for your money and the little extras make you feel like you got your moneys worth even though you know you spent too much. There's nothing out there, yet, that can compete, and I really don't think anything will until my points above are satisfied.
Uses the IE rendering engine, but adds useful features like tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, etc. I've always found the Mozilla derivatives to be cumbersome under Windows and Opera's interface irritated me, so finally getting decent tabbed browsing was most excellent.
As for popup killing, either google toolbar (toolbar.google.com), which you should have on any Windows machine since it is just that useful. Simple, effective, clean.
The -RELEASE branches _are_ kept secured as a security branch for all currently maintained -RELEASE branches.
Any time a vulnerability is found, the patches go into -STABLE, but are also added to all of the supported -RELEASE trees, which would then show as a patchlevel in the version. If you cvsup a 4.8-RELEASE box to RELENG_4_8 right now, you'd end up with 4.8-RELEASE-p7, which would include patches for all of the security vulnerabilities up till now (including the latest OpenSSH and Sendmail vulnerabilities).
Personally, I find tracking the security branches of -RELEASEs to be safer and more convenient, since I always know what is running on a given server. Since new features _are_ backported from -CURRENT to -STABLE, I could end up with two 4-STABLE machines running different versions of software. The only time I'll run -STABLE on a production server is when there is a bug in a -RELEASE, or there is a new feature in -STABLE I really need. And frankly, that hasn't happened since the early 3.x days.
I heartily reccomend anything by Sean McMullen. He's easily one of the most entertaining authors I've ever read and really does present likable yet flawed characters. It's hard to say whether you'd call his stuff SciFi or Fantasy as it's somewhere in between, with the Greatwinter books set far in the future where technology has regressed. Ultimately it's a lot of politics and a lot of plot threads all weaving around before they're tied together in the end, so there's a bit more thinking required than pulp like Dragonlance and Piers Anthony.
Souls in the Great Machine, the Miocene Arrow, and Eyes of the Calculor comprise the Greatwinter Trilogy, and his latest standalone book is Voyage of the Shadowmoon. Shadowmoon was entertaining, if a bit of a let down from the spectacular Greatwinter books. His first book, the Centurion's Empire, is only mediocre but you could do worse for the price of a paperback.
Other random suggestions would be any of Dave Duncan's books, especially the King's Blades books if you like more traditional fantasy fare. Patricia Kenneally-Morrison's Keltiad books are, as a whole, entertaining reads.
If you happen to have any used bookstores around by all means just wander in and judge books by their cover (and the sumary on the back). I've had surprisingly good success just randomly buying books when the cost is cheap enough that I don't care if it ends up sucking.
You can do a lot by chrooting the ftpd you use to allow users to upload files (I highly reccomend proftpd because of it's nice apache-esque config files) locking them into their home directory. That's step one.
Step two is to deal with PHP, perl, cgi's and whatnot which all run as whatever user the web server is running as. For PHP, for example, you can set the variable open_basedir to force it to not descend any farther than your base document root directory (i.e./var/www or/usr/local/www or whatever), but that won't stop users from peeking into others directories.
Sadly, the best solution I've found is to cheat and just try and obscure things. Make it not obvious what a given directory might be and then it is much harder for naughty users to look where they shouldn't be. An MD5 sum of the domain name chopped in some fashion, or hell, even a totally random string can be used. You'd then have a website stored something like this:
/var/www/{hash}/www.domain.com
/var/www/{different-hash}/www.differentdomain.co m
The user who owns www.domain.com would then need to know what the hash is for www.differentdomain.com to be able to try and access those files. Make your hash generation random or at least very, very non-obvious and you're about as secure as you're going to get with Apache in it's current state.
Not only will it block all conventional banner ads and popups, it also does useful things with respect to stopping embedded multimedia. By default stuff like flash, embedded quicktime, embedded midi's or wav files, etc are all filtered out and a link to them is inserted in their place so if it is ever something you actually want to view you just click the link and it loads.
Works flawlessly... no aggravating floating flash ads at IGN, makes it easier to save embedded videos (right click on the link, save as), and I haven't seen a popup since I installed it.
That's apparently the whole idea behind this new line of "Bionicles" Lego is releasing. They've setup an entire universe full of heroes and villains complete with an ongoing story told on their website and such.
I actually saw some of the toys from the line when I was at Toys'R'Us the other day.. they're basically these canisters of legos used to build these robots (sort of like the Throwbots line from last year). Each one has a name and a backstory and thus fits together into the larger world....
But I really don't think it's going to work. Lego was far cooler before the advent of all these specialized pieces. I can remember me and my dad building a pirate ship out of generic Lego pieces with a cut up bleach bottle for a sail (later replaced by propellers after I played Final Fantasy 2e/4j). About a year later they started coming out with these pirate sets which contained basically a preconstructed hull and sails... where's the fun in that?
It's only gotten worse in recent years... sets are having more and more specialized pieces severely limiting doing anything other than building what the set is supposed to be....
Once, a long long time ago, I was checking out the stats for my webpage with the Webalizer and was noticing an awful lot of referrals from eBay. Manually parsing my Apache log files I found the auction number and looked it up...
Imagine my surprise when I found it was some lamer selling burned CD's of encoded anime fansubs. Being friends with people who encode fansubs (freely) I was most put out by the fact that some scumbag was attempting to profit from it. There was only one thing I could do...
Since the lamer had linked to a (huge) wallpaper image on my site to use as his page background I did the sensible thing: renamed the wallpaper, downloaded the picture of Sting3r (the goatse guy) and stuck it in place of the wallpaper's original filename.
Needless to say eBay pulled the auction in short order, something they wouldn't have done if I'd simply cried "copyright infringement!"
As I was going through the page I was fairly unimpressed, largely. Much of what was there has been in Photoshop (and probably the Gimp) for years now, i.e. filters to make photo's look like paintings or apply textures or whatever.
However... the texture by numbers section was exceedingly cool and I could see a myriad of uses were someone to port it to Photoshop's plugin format. Being able to take an image, mask it with various different colors, and then have an entirely new image generated based on the textures you extracted... yeh, thats nifty =)
By far the coolest thing I've seen on/. in a while.
1. Nobody has licensed Macross: DYRL as of yet, and what with Whoremony Gold being the bastards they are, I wouldn't expect it for a long, long time.
2. That's Valkyrie, Veritech is a Robotech term. And no, it's looking increasingly unlikely that the YAMATO/Toycom MacPlus Valk's (or the upcoming DYRL Valkyries) will ever see a North American release. Blame Harmony Gold. If you really want them, import them. Get 'em at Hobbylink Japan. You pay Yen price + shipping.
That doesn't help much, though.
It's trivial to know what the directory name his web files are in, and since it only takes a visit to his webpage to find out the filenames for his PHP sourcefiles. A simple 'cat' and you've got the database passwords.
Honestly, I'm not sure what you can do on a true multiuser system, especially with PHP. You could certainly try and obscure things through some evil hacks and kludges but you can always work around it.
The submitter said it himself: since apache runs as nobody, any files it accesses need to be readable by nobody. I've never found anything that can get around that fact...
My solution? Don't run any of my websites on machines that have users I don't trust.
Up here in Canada I too avoid shopping at Thinkgeek because of the bloody ridiculous shipping charges. When one is already paying in US dollars (vs our "weak" Canadian dollar) getting gouged on shipping totally sucks.
Thankfully, the "other" geek t-shirt'n'stuff place, CopyLeft.net has much more reasonable shipping to north of the border. It was only a couple of bucks on the last T-Shirt I ordered (the oh so spiffy BOFH t-shirt).
I have no idea how their shipping is to Europe, but given that their shipping to Canada was a fraction of what Thinkgeek wanted, my guess is it would be a comparable difference.
That hardly seems reasonable to me. In fact, it's just about the stupidest idea I've ever heard. What in the bloody hell would be the point in accellerating wireframe heads for videoconferencing? Matrox ain't dumb... hence the reason they've stayed out of the R&D expensive power gamer market and instead concentrated on the much more lucrative business market. I'd be highly surprised if "Headcasting" had anything to do with videoconferencing wireframe heads.
What is it, then? One must look no farther than another one of Matrox's buzzwords: Dualhead, i.e. two displays off of one video card. When combined with GoIP, if it is indeed Graphics over IP, it seems much more "reasonable" that this instead means that you can broadcast one of your "heads" (read: displays) to another computer (or computers).
Certainly nothing we haven't seen before in standalone applications (i.e. VNC and whatnot) but if this was tightly integrated into the Matrox drivers and very intuitive it would be pretty cool. Think about it, your primary monitor is showing your desktop with whatever you're working on. Your secondary monitor is using Headcasting to broadcast someone else's, while yours is broadcast to their second monitor. Quick and easy collaboration through the magic of the Internet.
I can forsee all kinds of uses for such a thing, even just within an office, let alone worldwide.
... is truly laugh worthy.
"Making it happen"
Seems innocious enough, right? Now here's the kicker. The CompSci department adjusts it slightly: "Making IT happen..." as in IT... as in Information Technology... as in...groan. Make it stop. I'm sure someone thought it was very clever and all but it's just too cute for its own good.
Of all the stuff talked about in the article, the only one that made sense was a holographic image (a la the one on Microsoft product ID cards) that would actually be on the ring on the inside part of the DVD itself.
It won't stop people from copying the DVD's (Which is realistically an impossible goal) but it will make it very easy to determine whether a DVD is pirated or not. That will hopefully protect people from being scammed and buying bootlegs unintentionally and it doesn't require some watermarking or encryption scheme that is doomed to fail.
As the article also mentions it will make it very easy for law enforcement to ID bootleggged DVDs. That's the route they need to take. Go after the scum who are actually profiting off of other peoples work. That's who's costing them real money and frankly, that's a whole lot easier to get a handle on than trying to come up with yet another copy protection scheme that just pisses the customer off...
TLC's own robot fighting show, "Robitica" is airing tonight (i.e. April 4th). I've been seeing commercials for it every week when I watch Junkyard Wars (one of my favorite things on TV) and it certainly does look interesting... we'll see later tonight though;p
The show's page can be found here: http://tlc.discovery.com/fansites/robotica/robotic a.html
I love the Discovery Channel. So much cool crap on it all the time.
I heard this firsthand from someone who is presently coding on the PS2. Can't mention who specifically, since I have no idea what his NDA's are like.
Anyway, his beefs were three-fold. First, the documentation given to them by Sony was bloody awful. The translation wasn't so hot, and some parts ranged from confusing to flat out wrong. Some documented functions just didn't behave the way the docs said they would. It's hard coding blind.
Secondly, the architecture is overly strange whereby established procedures just couldn't be used. There are multiple paths one can take to accomplish and no one really knows which ones work yet since the design is so foreign. I got the feeling that prior console or PC programming experience was probably a bad thing, since the way you previously would have done things was no longer valid. These sentiments were echoed by Dr. Buchanan, head of Research at Electronic Arts at a presentation at the University of Alberta last year.
Oh, and the third thing? And I quote: "It doesn't have enough texture memory to render my ass, let alone a good game."
The idea was nixed because retailers were balking at having the same game with two different prices. Too bad, since that was a really cool idea.
As far as I know, though, it will be shipping in the black and white boxes, but at the same pricepoint (like Starcraft's Terran, Zerg, and Protoss boxes)... why? Because there are people out there who will buy them both.;p
Oh well, I've got my copy preordered from EB and I really don't care what color box it is... I just plan on playing a right evil bastard of a God =)
This is why you use the Proxomitron. It's another local web proxy but it does quite a bit more than the usual banner stripper. It stops javascript popups (you don't even see them), stops embedded MIDI's and wav files (woohoo!), along with a huge number of other optional filters (want to hide your referer? It can. Disguise your user agent? Got that covered too). It's also completely customizable, so you can make it filter your own personal annoyances.
I've been using the Logitech Trackman Marble since it came out.. oh... 6 or 7 years ago? I replaced my original one with the new Marble+, which added the obligatory mousewheel, although my old one is still in service on another one of my machines.
My entire family uses them as well, both at home and work, and I've convinced at least a half dozen friends to buy them as well, and not one ever went back to a mouse.
There's definately a little learning curve, but once you get used to one, you'll never go back.
Not only do you not have to move your wrist, you can lean back in your chair and hold it in your lap, on your chair arm, etc... whatever is comfortable. I also find you get much finer controler with it than a mouse.
It's also extremely good for gaming, allowing all kinds of fast spins and such for FPS and RTS gamers alike. Unlike a mouse, you just need to spin the trackball's ball with your thumb, rather than lifting the whole mouse up. Interestingly enough, at the last LAN party I was at, there were 13 people there, 10 of whom had the Trackman Marble+'s =) I actually tried sitting down at someone's mouse equipped computer and tried to play, and I just couldn't grasp how someone could possibly play without a Marble. =P
Honestly, it was one of the best purchases I've ever made.
I would reccomend you avoid the Microsoft Optical Trackball. I demoed one in a store and I just didn't like the feel of it. It was overly large and felt decidedly flimsy. I'm not keen on the Logitech Trackman Marble FX either, but I know at least a couple of people who swear by them.
If I was you, I'd find a store with a generous return policy and pick up a Marble+ and try it out for a week or two. Odds are you'll keep it though
When I just started using FreeBSD (back in 2.2.7), the ports collection saved me a lot of hassle. A directory change and then a "make install clean" meant I had whatever program I wanted installed and working... honestly, I can't think of a more newbie friendly system.
Telling a newbie that they need to go out and download the source to program "x", get the source for any neccesary dependencies, build and install those dependencies, then build and install their original app... that's not fun.
Telling them to type "cd/usr/ports/www/w3m" and then "make install clean", however is simplicity itself. Ports handles any dependencies automagically, stopping the build of whatever you're installing, going out and building and dependencies, and then resuming the original install.
For people coming over from the Windows world, this is even easier than installing programs there. Want to install Netscape on Win98? You need to go to download.com or somesuch, find the binary you want, download it. Then you navigate to the directory that you downloaded it to, run the setup program, click through the installer, and you're done. In FreeBSD, a quick "cd/usr/ports/netscape-navigator-4.76 && make install clean" does the same thing. Alternatively, you could use the handy Package installer that's built into sysinstall that would do the same thing with binary packages.
I've shown ports to Windows users who've never touched a UNIX in their life, and even they were quite impressed. This of course applies equally to NetBSD and OpenBSD.
Sure you sometimes need a little more control over the install of certain applications, at which time you can build it manually, but for system staples, ports certainly makes life easier.
I went and saw it with a bunch of the guys from BioWare (I'll let them post their own responses;p), and I can honestly say it wasn't as bad as I expected. It could have been a lot worse. Some of the CGI was pretty, and the overall plot wasn't horrible, and it was essentially a pretty average movie. Unfortunately, there were more than a few moments of complete and utter suck. Usually these moments happened when one of the characters opened their mouth. There were honestly groans at some of the dialogue at quite a few points in the movie... the Empress specifically. I've seen junior high drama students who've got better acting ability. Most of the other actors weren't much better, and even worse, they weren't given much of a script to work with. The dialogue was clumsy, it was seriously Hollywood-ized at points, and there were far too many Star Wars references to count.
Ultimately though, for the sole reason that it wasn't as bad as I was expecting, I'd call it a 2 star movie. Certainly not something I'm going to buy on DVD when it comes out, but I've paid seven bucks to see worse movies. If you're going to go, go with a bunch of friends and heckle the hell out of it... at the very least you'll leave the theatre knowing that you could have written a better script.
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We picked up an 8 sensor model of the AKCP sensorProbe a while back. I don't recall it being particularly expensive and it seems to work very well. It's got 8 ports on it, into which you can plug a variety of different sensors. Sensors can be things like temperature, water, AC voltage, smoke, motion, etc. The sensors all terminate in normal RJ45 connectors, so it's pretty easy to reuse existing wiring infrastructure to get your sensors wherever you need them.
It has a web interface for configuration with all the pretty graphs you might want. Notifications are handled via email. We've got the emails going to a box running sendpage to send us SMS messages to our cellphones as well. SNMP is also an option.
I'm reasonably happy with it and would say it's at least worth a look. The specific model we have is here.
Adjustable fan speeds, from 800 to 4000 rpm. If you read the article, the volume from the front is 48db, which is fairly impressive. Quieter than the 2nd gen G series Shuttles which I've seen/heard in person.
The P series Shuttles all come with 350W power supplies. Pretty much neccesary for a power hungry PCIe graphics card, 3 hard drives, optical drive, etc.
... the far less power hungry Athlon64 should be even better off.
There is a 350W P series with a Prescott P4 that works just fine
The iPod's success isn't _just_ because it's small and light. Nor is it just because it's the trendy thing. It did two things perfectly right and that's why it's managed to gain so much marketshare.
1. The interface. It's downright brilliantly intuitive. Especially the click-wheel on the 4Gs. You can't help but feel just how right Apple got the interface every time you use it. Never before has so much functionality been jammed into so few buttons. You look at some of the other players out there and boggle at how _less_ usable they are despite having several times more buttons.
2. iTunes. No hard drive based MP3 player is ever going to be able to compete against the iPod until it comes packaged with an audio player with the power and flexibility of iTunes. You can add capacity, fancy screens, or what have you, but unless there's something as plug-and-go as iTunes to get the music onto it it's not going to fly. I'm not even talking about the iTunes music store, I'm just talking about smart things like smart playlists, party shuffle, and other ways of easily and powerfully customizing how your music plays. When all of that functionaltiy can then be transferred right over to your portable player as well _then_ you've got a winner. Previous attempts at playlist management were always clunky and unrefined and often not worth the effort. Dynamically updating lists based on infinitely customizable triggers is a huge evolutionary leap.
I just bought a 20gig 4G iPod earlier this month. It cost too much, but I can say without reservation it was worth it. Oxymoronic, I know, but it's the truth. It's the best value for your money and the little extras make you feel like you got your moneys worth even though you know you spent too much. There's nothing out there, yet, that can compete, and I really don't think anything will until my points above are satisfied.
For tabbed browsing under Windows, grab MyIE2:
www.myie2.com/html_en/home.htm
Uses the IE rendering engine, but adds useful features like tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, etc. I've always found the Mozilla derivatives to be cumbersome under Windows and Opera's interface irritated me, so finally getting decent tabbed browsing was most excellent.
As for popup killing, either google toolbar (toolbar.google.com), which you should have on any Windows machine since it is just that useful. Simple, effective, clean.
Errr, no.
The -RELEASE branches _are_ kept secured as a security branch for all currently maintained -RELEASE branches.
Any time a vulnerability is found, the patches go into -STABLE, but are also added to all of the supported -RELEASE trees, which would then show as a patchlevel in the version. If you cvsup a 4.8-RELEASE box to RELENG_4_8 right now, you'd end up with 4.8-RELEASE-p7, which would include patches for all of the security vulnerabilities up till now (including the latest OpenSSH and Sendmail vulnerabilities).
Personally, I find tracking the security branches of -RELEASEs to be safer and more convenient, since I always know what is running on a given server. Since new features _are_ backported from -CURRENT to -STABLE, I could end up with two 4-STABLE machines running different versions of software. The only time I'll run -STABLE on a production server is when there is a bug in a -RELEASE, or there is a new feature in -STABLE I really need. And frankly, that hasn't happened since the early 3.x days.
I heartily reccomend anything by Sean McMullen. He's easily one of the most entertaining authors I've ever read and really does present likable yet flawed characters. It's hard to say whether you'd call his stuff SciFi or Fantasy as it's somewhere in between, with the Greatwinter books set far in the future where technology has regressed. Ultimately it's a lot of politics and a lot of plot threads all weaving around before they're tied together in the end, so there's a bit more thinking required than pulp like Dragonlance and Piers Anthony.
Souls in the Great Machine, the Miocene Arrow, and Eyes of the Calculor comprise the Greatwinter Trilogy, and his latest standalone book is Voyage of the Shadowmoon. Shadowmoon was entertaining, if a bit of a let down from the spectacular Greatwinter books. His first book, the Centurion's Empire, is only mediocre but you could do worse for the price of a paperback.
Other random suggestions would be any of Dave Duncan's books, especially the King's Blades books if you like more traditional fantasy fare. Patricia Kenneally-Morrison's Keltiad books are, as a whole, entertaining reads.
If you happen to have any used bookstores around by all means just wander in and judge books by their cover (and the sumary on the back). I've had surprisingly good success just randomly buying books when the cost is cheap enough that I don't care if it ends up sucking.
You can do a lot by chrooting the ftpd you use to allow users to upload files (I highly reccomend proftpd because of it's nice apache-esque config files) locking them into their home directory. That's step one.
/var/www or /usr/local/www or whatever), but that won't stop users from peeking into others directories.
o m
Step two is to deal with PHP, perl, cgi's and whatnot which all run as whatever user the web server is running as. For PHP, for example, you can set the variable open_basedir to force it to not descend any farther than your base document root directory (i.e.
Sadly, the best solution I've found is to cheat and just try and obscure things. Make it not obvious what a given directory might be and then it is much harder for naughty users to look where they shouldn't be. An MD5 sum of the domain name chopped in some fashion, or hell, even a totally random string can be used. You'd then have a website stored something like this:
/var/www/{hash}/www.domain.com
/var/www/{different-hash}/www.differentdomain.c
The user who owns www.domain.com would then need to know what the hash is for www.differentdomain.com to be able to try and access those files. Make your hash generation random or at least very, very non-obvious and you're about as secure as you're going to get with Apache in it's current state.
Get the Proxomitron here: http://www.computerstuff.net/prox/
Not only will it block all conventional banner ads and popups, it also does useful things with respect to stopping embedded multimedia. By default stuff like flash, embedded quicktime, embedded midi's or wav files, etc are all filtered out and a link to them is inserted in their place so if it is ever something you actually want to view you just click the link and it loads.
Works flawlessly... no aggravating floating flash ads at IGN, makes it easier to save embedded videos (right click on the link, save as), and I haven't seen a popup since I installed it.
That's apparently the whole idea behind this new line of "Bionicles" Lego is releasing. They've setup an entire universe full of heroes and villains complete with an ongoing story told on their website and such.
.. they're basically these canisters of legos used to build these robots (sort of like the Throwbots line from last year). Each one has a name and a backstory and thus fits together into the larger world....
... where's the fun in that?
... sets are having more and more specialized pieces severely limiting doing anything other than building what the set is supposed to be....
I actually saw some of the toys from the line when I was at Toys'R'Us the other day
But I really don't think it's going to work. Lego was far cooler before the advent of all these specialized pieces. I can remember me and my dad building a pirate ship out of generic Lego pieces with a cut up bleach bottle for a sail (later replaced by propellers after I played Final Fantasy 2e/4j). About a year later they started coming out with these pirate sets which contained basically a preconstructed hull and sails
It's only gotten worse in recent years
Once, a long long time ago, I was checking out the stats for my webpage with the Webalizer and was noticing an awful lot of referrals from eBay. Manually parsing my Apache log files I found the auction number and looked it up...
Imagine my surprise when I found it was some lamer selling burned CD's of encoded anime fansubs. Being friends with people who encode fansubs (freely) I was most put out by the fact that some scumbag was attempting to profit from it. There was only one thing I could do...
Since the lamer had linked to a (huge) wallpaper image on my site to use as his page background I did the sensible thing: renamed the wallpaper, downloaded the picture of Sting3r (the goatse guy) and stuck it in place of the wallpaper's original filename.
Needless to say eBay pulled the auction in short order, something they wouldn't have done if I'd simply cried "copyright infringement!"
As I was going through the page I was fairly unimpressed, largely. Much of what was there has been in Photoshop (and probably the Gimp) for years now, i.e. filters to make photo's look like paintings or apply textures or whatever. ... the texture by numbers section was exceedingly cool and I could see a myriad of uses were someone to port it to Photoshop's plugin format. Being able to take an image, mask it with various different colors, and then have an entirely new image generated based on the textures you extracted ... yeh, thats nifty =) /. in a while.
However
By far the coolest thing I've seen on
1. Nobody has licensed Macross: DYRL as of yet, and what with Whoremony Gold being the bastards they are, I wouldn't expect it for a long, long time. 2. That's Valkyrie, Veritech is a Robotech term. And no, it's looking increasingly unlikely that the YAMATO/Toycom MacPlus Valk's (or the upcoming DYRL Valkyries) will ever see a North American release. Blame Harmony Gold. If you really want them, import them. Get 'em at Hobbylink Japan. You pay Yen price + shipping.
That doesn't help much, though.
It's trivial to know what the directory name his web files are in, and since it only takes a visit to his webpage to find out the filenames for his PHP sourcefiles. A simple 'cat' and you've got the database passwords.
Honestly, I'm not sure what you can do on a true multiuser system, especially with PHP. You could certainly try and obscure things through some evil hacks and kludges but you can always work around it.
The submitter said it himself: since apache runs as nobody, any files it accesses need to be readable by nobody. I've never found anything that can get around that fact...
My solution? Don't run any of my websites on machines that have users I don't trust.
Up here in Canada I too avoid shopping at Thinkgeek because of the bloody ridiculous shipping charges. When one is already paying in US dollars (vs our "weak" Canadian dollar) getting gouged on shipping totally sucks. Thankfully, the "other" geek t-shirt'n'stuff place, CopyLeft.net has much more reasonable shipping to north of the border. It was only a couple of bucks on the last T-Shirt I ordered (the oh so spiffy BOFH t-shirt). I have no idea how their shipping is to Europe, but given that their shipping to Canada was a fraction of what Thinkgeek wanted, my guess is it would be a comparable difference.
That hardly seems reasonable to me. In fact, it's just about the stupidest idea I've ever heard. What in the bloody hell would be the point in accellerating wireframe heads for videoconferencing? Matrox ain't dumb ... hence the reason they've stayed out of the R&D expensive power gamer market and instead concentrated on the much more lucrative business market. I'd be highly surprised if "Headcasting" had anything to do with videoconferencing wireframe heads.
What is it, then? One must look no farther than another one of Matrox's buzzwords: Dualhead, i.e. two displays off of one video card. When combined with GoIP, if it is indeed Graphics over IP, it seems much more "reasonable" that this instead means that you can broadcast one of your "heads" (read: displays) to another computer (or computers).
Certainly nothing we haven't seen before in standalone applications (i.e. VNC and whatnot) but if this was tightly integrated into the Matrox drivers and very intuitive it would be pretty cool. Think about it, your primary monitor is showing your desktop with whatever you're working on. Your secondary monitor is using Headcasting to broadcast someone else's, while yours is broadcast to their second monitor. Quick and easy collaboration through the magic of the Internet.
I can forsee all kinds of uses for such a thing, even just within an office, let alone worldwide.
... is truly laugh worthy. ... as in Information Technology ... as in ...groan. Make it stop. I'm sure someone thought it was very clever and all but it's just too cute for its own good.
"Making it happen"
Seems innocious enough, right? Now here's the kicker. The CompSci department adjusts it slightly: "Making IT happen..." as in IT
Of all the stuff talked about in the article, the only one that made sense was a holographic image (a la the one on Microsoft product ID cards) that would actually be on the ring on the inside part of the DVD itself.
It won't stop people from copying the DVD's (Which is realistically an impossible goal) but it will make it very easy to determine whether a DVD is pirated or not. That will hopefully protect people from being scammed and buying bootlegs unintentionally and it doesn't require some watermarking or encryption scheme that is doomed to fail.
As the article also mentions it will make it very easy for law enforcement to ID bootleggged DVDs. That's the route they need to take. Go after the scum who are actually profiting off of other peoples work. That's who's costing them real money and frankly, that's a whole lot easier to get a handle on than trying to come up with yet another copy protection scheme that just pisses the customer off...
TLC's own robot fighting show, "Robitica" is airing tonight (i.e. April 4th). I've been seeing commercials for it every week when I watch Junkyard Wars (one of my favorite things on TV) and it certainly does look interesting... we'll see later tonight though ;p
c a.html
The show's page can be found here: http://tlc.discovery.com/fansites/robotica/roboti
I love the Discovery Channel. So much cool crap on it all the time.
I heard this firsthand from someone who is presently coding on the PS2. Can't mention who specifically, since I have no idea what his NDA's are like.
Anyway, his beefs were three-fold. First, the documentation given to them by Sony was bloody awful. The translation wasn't so hot, and some parts ranged from confusing to flat out wrong. Some documented functions just didn't behave the way the docs said they would. It's hard coding blind.
Secondly, the architecture is overly strange whereby established procedures just couldn't be used. There are multiple paths one can take to accomplish and no one really knows which ones work yet since the design is so foreign. I got the feeling that prior console or PC programming experience was probably a bad thing, since the way you previously would have done things was no longer valid. These sentiments were echoed by Dr. Buchanan, head of Research at Electronic Arts at a presentation at the University of Alberta last year.
Oh, and the third thing? And I quote: "It doesn't have enough texture memory to render my ass, let alone a good game."
The idea was nixed because retailers were balking at having the same game with two different prices. Too bad, since that was a really cool idea. ... why? Because there are people out there who will buy them both. ;p
As far as I know, though, it will be shipping in the black and white boxes, but at the same pricepoint (like Starcraft's Terran, Zerg, and Protoss boxes)
Oh well, I've got my copy preordered from EB and I really don't care what color box it is... I just plan on playing a right evil bastard of a God =)
This is why you use the Proxomitron. It's another local web proxy but it does quite a bit more than the usual banner stripper. It stops javascript popups (you don't even see them), stops embedded MIDI's and wav files (woohoo!), along with a huge number of other optional filters (want to hide your referer? It can. Disguise your user agent? Got that covered too). It's also completely customizable, so you can make it filter your own personal annoyances.
I've been using the Logitech Trackman Marble since it came out .. oh ... 6 or 7 years ago? I replaced my original one with the new Marble+, which added the obligatory mousewheel, although my old one is still in service on another one of my machines. ... whatever is comfortable. I also find you get much finer controler with it than a mouse.
My entire family uses them as well, both at home and work, and I've convinced at least a half dozen friends to buy them as well, and not one ever went back to a mouse.
There's definately a little learning curve, but once you get used to one, you'll never go back. Not only do you not have to move your wrist, you can lean back in your chair and hold it in your lap, on your chair arm, etc
It's also extremely good for gaming, allowing all kinds of fast spins and such for FPS and RTS gamers alike. Unlike a mouse, you just need to spin the trackball's ball with your thumb, rather than lifting the whole mouse up. Interestingly enough, at the last LAN party I was at, there were 13 people there, 10 of whom had the Trackman Marble+'s =) I actually tried sitting down at someone's mouse equipped computer and tried to play, and I just couldn't grasp how someone could possibly play without a Marble. =P
Honestly, it was one of the best purchases I've ever made.
I would reccomend you avoid the Microsoft Optical Trackball. I demoed one in a store and I just didn't like the feel of it. It was overly large and felt decidedly flimsy. I'm not keen on the Logitech Trackman Marble FX either, but I know at least a couple of people who swear by them.
If I was you, I'd find a store with a generous return policy and pick up a Marble+ and try it out for a week or two. Odds are you'll keep it though
When I just started using FreeBSD (back in 2.2.7), the ports collection saved me a lot of hassle. A directory change and then a "make install clean" meant I had whatever program I wanted installed and working ... honestly, I can't think of a more newbie friendly system. ... that's not fun.
Telling them to type "cd /usr/ports/www/w3m" and then "make install clean", however is simplicity itself. Ports handles any dependencies automagically, stopping the build of whatever you're installing, going out and building and dependencies, and then resuming the original install. /usr/ports/netscape-navigator-4.76 && make install clean" does the same thing. Alternatively, you could use the handy Package installer that's built into sysinstall that would do the same thing with binary packages.
Telling a newbie that they need to go out and download the source to program "x", get the source for any neccesary dependencies, build and install those dependencies, then build and install their original app
For people coming over from the Windows world, this is even easier than installing programs there. Want to install Netscape on Win98? You need to go to download.com or somesuch, find the binary you want, download it. Then you navigate to the directory that you downloaded it to, run the setup program, click through the installer, and you're done. In FreeBSD, a quick "cd
I've shown ports to Windows users who've never touched a UNIX in their life, and even they were quite impressed. This of course applies equally to NetBSD and OpenBSD.
Sure you sometimes need a little more control over the install of certain applications, at which time you can build it manually, but for system staples, ports certainly makes life easier.
I went and saw it with a bunch of the guys from BioWare (I'll let them post their own responses ;p), and I can honestly say it wasn't as bad as I expected. It could have been a lot worse. Some of the CGI was pretty, and the overall plot wasn't horrible, and it was essentially a pretty average movie. ... the Empress specifically. I've seen junior high drama students who've got better acting ability. Most of the other actors weren't much better, and even worse, they weren't given much of a script to work with. The dialogue was clumsy, it was seriously Hollywood-ized at points, and there were far too many Star Wars references to count.
Ultimately though, for the sole reason that it wasn't as bad as I was expecting, I'd call it a 2 star movie. Certainly not something I'm going to buy on DVD when it comes out, but I've paid seven bucks to see worse movies. If you're going to go, go with a bunch of friends and heckle the hell out of it ... at the very least you'll leave the theatre knowing that you could have written a better script.
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Hail Eris! All Hail Discordia!
Unfortunately, there were more than a few moments of complete and utter suck. Usually these moments happened when one of the characters opened their mouth. There were honestly groans at some of the dialogue at quite a few points in the movie