If you actually step outside of the 'yet another microsoft virus' mindset you might be frightened more by the concept, although simple. Why hasn't someone (or has some one) created a virus that attacks the JRE. You could pretty well attack a large number of people by either A) attacking/modifying the JRE or B) Piggybacking java bytecode into other applications. Wouldn't one of these be just as damaging and at the current time even more wide-spread in their effect? Just a couple of thoughts.
This is by no means an obvious case. The difference between intercepting Internet communications and, say, communications on a phone line, is that the Internet is inherently unsafe, and information is publicly available. Every packet you send can be examined along each router through which is passes.
Wouldn't this also be true of telephone conversations? Before the advent of digital communications, wasn't a telephone connection merely a connection of two phones sending information in a manor that was inherantly unsafe? I knew that anyone who could splice wire could listen to my conversation. Does that make it so that wiretapping laws don't apply? Think again. The only issue at hand is what is continually happening: People (Courts, Police, General Population, etc) believe that just because something is digital different laws should apply. Just as someone with a clue can open a letter in the post office (read: police officer) and reseal it without me knowing, someone can read your IMs. If this is upheld in court, I don't understand what is stopping polic from just reading mail.
Wouldn't it be great if it were true that no one took Be up on the offer. As I recall fujitsu did, and actually had the computers almost ready to ship setup in a dual boot configuration, but then Microsoft exercised it's muscle and said that the terms surrounding their license prohibited you from shipping a dual-boot system. The bootloader was disabled and customers got machines with a beos partition, just no way to boot to it.
In many ways it's too bad that capitalism forces people to market towards the masses rather than just creating quality products. I understand why this is the way that it has to be, but it just seems to suck that the bulk of the gaming population prefers first person shooters over everything else, so that's where the money goes. I've watched this happen to so many other great games, it's just to bad.
heck, I even wonder about the telphone cards, which I never use. I would have to go to a store to look at one to see if they have visible numbers on them.
I remember a friend of mine once had some trouble with her phone card. The second time she used it, she noticed that it had more money than the value of the card. As it turns out, all of the cards were sequential and she was accessing the money on someone else's card. She used it once, but then feeling bad went back to using her own card. Two weeks later she went to go make another phone call and all of her minutes were gone, someone else had fucked her. Great eh? Just goes to show you how stupid people who make up these systems are. I wouldn't be suprised if by looking at the cards in a store (20 or more) you might be able to derive the formula that they use to generate card numbers. Wow wouldn't that be cool. Then they could steal EVERYONE's money. Once you had a bunch of people out of money, I bet companies would change their practices.
Do you feel that it is possible to have a unified monolithic Microsoft exist in the market without being anti-competetive? Specifically, if the United States government leaves Microsoft as-is (no "break-up") do you feel it is possible to regulate a company that in the past has shown no respect for government intervention?
Not only are links one way with HTML (excepting the http-referrer info, and this can be forged) but in fact for most site-owners, they themselves don't even know where they are sending people. Without using some database-backed link-tracking bouncer, you as a website designer have no idea who is clicking on what links. The times that this is most useful is for advertising because you are most likely getting paid per-click. Not only is it beyond the scope of most basic homepage authors to do this (or impossible depending on where you host), but also you then have a single point of failure -- when was the last time you clicked on a banner ad link or similiar just to have the script be broken in some way and not actually 403 you to the right site.
I'm not sure if this is what is allowing for realtime weather because their site has been/.ed
But anyways, you could do this sort of thing using traditional radio and/or shortwave. I have seen an alarm clock that could tell you the forcast (not just play that radio station, but it had a display) and the current conditions outside. The ability to include something like this in a car-based computer would most likely not add more than 15-20 to the total cost because there would be no need for a dedicated display.
This would be a function most people would actually use on the AutoPC.
P.S. It still makes me sick that people would actually want Windows CE running on their car stereo, let alone full blown Wnidows98 running in their dash board PC....
I understand that the USPTO office has no idea what is involved in any sort of tru innovation, but I really begin to wonder if things, such as organization of recorded programs, should ever be patentable. I understand patenting the technology behind the way that PVR stuff works, but to patent the idea of a pvr seems very silly to me. Couldn't the same thing have been done with an archive of VHS tapes and a computer. How is the technology behind this really new other than the fact that it is done with a different medium (tapes vs hard drive).
I would love to not have to support 5 diff apps!
on
Electronic Abacus
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· Score: 1
I am definately tired of supporting a whole bunch of apps that the accounting department uses. ADP eTime for swipe in/out, ADP PC/Payroll for actually running the payroll, Salomon for general financials, and Crystal Reports for running reports off of the MS SQL backend of Salomon. No fun at all. They NEVER play nice together.
I would imagine that for most developers, personal (shareware) or commercial houses, they go where the user base is. I can understand being interested in developing a new handheld, but I think that most developers are interested in marketing to where there are the most users: either PalmOS or WinCE. I would imagine that is where 95% of PDA users reside, so I can't imagine anyone devoting -THAT- much time/effort/resources to a PDA that has no user base.
I certainly wouldn't put my time into developing for a non-existant userbase. Who knows if this will even make it to market?
Although you might think that the primary audience for Futurama is college students, I would tend to disagree. Most college students I know watch television, but they rarely watch it with the kind of consistancy you look for in a target group for a once-a-week show. If I only have a 30minute window in which to catch a show, and that window happens to fall sometime when I would likely to be out (8-10ish) I very likely won't catch the show.
Shows that are truly geared towards college students (Southpark for example) would be aired many times a week, at normal (10pm) an strange (12 and 2:30) timeslots. This is a tactic that I haven't seen show up elsewhere too much in the TV world. Finally, I feel like a network is working it's schedule around me, rather than vice-versa.
This program offers some capability that I have not seen elsewhere, because of it's ability to change -ANY- window's transparency, but it seems like there could be more rubust functionality. Also, even though Windows 2000 has had alpha blending abilities since it's release, few programs have actually used it. (Two notable exceptions, Miranda ICQ and Winamp with one of the many available plugins.) One of these such plugins, TransparentFX not only has the ability to make portions of winamp transparent, but have varying levels of transparency for when the window is out of focus, when out of focus and the mouse is over that window, and also the speed of the fade-out/fade-in between them. I'm not sure how feasible this is to do on system wide basis, but I would imagine that it wouldn't be that tough because any application could easily find out where the mouse cursor is and focus/de-focus accordingly. Another thing, although the program has the option open the transparency options on right-click, it would be nice if you could selectively have this (when you right-click on the title-bar, not just anywhere.) This seems like a cool program, but not very polished, nor worthy of posting on the front-page of slashdot. I'm not quite sure if this actually qualifies as "news" although I am glad I happened to run across this link.
I'm not sure about the specific technologies, but I know it involved 802.11 of some flavor...but occording to a cisco pre-sales rep friend of mine they have gear that could do this with a wireless link. The number that he quoted me was 30miles line-of-sight easily. This is something that they have not completely finalized as a common solution for people (as far as I can tell), but if you contacted your local cisco corporate presales integrator you'd find someone who would most likely be able to help you whatever your problem may be.
I attend Guilford college in Greensboro, NC and after a few discussions with my macroeconomics professor, I started thinking about using a "smart" whiteboard to show developments which are drawn on the board to be played back later from a computer. After looking into many different options, most of which were $2-3k and up, and consisted of small boards which were pressure sensitive, I stumbled across something which left them all behind. The Mimio board.
The mimio board is a capture device that sticks onto (or can be mounted on) the upper left hand corner of any existing whiteboard. By inserting stantard markers in the jackets which go along with the capture board, the software captures every stroke along the way, step-by-step. This alone was something that few of the devices which I had investigated could do, but there is more. They also have a plugin available for it that allows you to record audio as well and create a realplayer simultaneous stream (smil file). The entire presentation can be played back by any machine with realplayer (when you play the file it downloads a plugin. I have tried it on windows and macintosh, I have no idea whether it works with any other platform, but I would assume not.) The file size created is very reasonable (example: selectble audio bitrate + 157Kbytes for a 1hr board intensive lecture). We have begun using it so that students may re-experience a class which they have missed or need work with. I am by no means a representive for mimio, there product just worked really well for us.
Total Cost: $775 + Shipping
$499---->Capture Device, 4 Marker Sleeves, Eraser and software
$249---->BoardCast Producer Plugin (So we could create the real streams with synced audio/board)
$25----->25ft Serial cable (So we could have the computer half way across the room)
Hope you enjoy it, if you end up buying one, or have any questions, I'd be interested to hear from you, feel free to email me at AptrippA@AguilfordA.edu (Remove the A's)
-Peter Tripp
Here's something that I haven't heard mentioned in this wonderful mess of -SLOW- websites and overloaded routers. Guess what. My Long Distance phone service is out. I can guess why too. They probably decided to save a few bucks by doing some of this trendy 'Voice over Data' you've been hearing all about. Well ain't that just wonderful. If you were wondering, I'm using Vartec as my LD carrier. Kinda scary. ATT works fine though. In this whole conversation though, I have heard no one speak of how this is affecting companies that count on semi-reasonably reliable connections to the internet. If the uplink from your ISP is being blasted because they host some site, that means you are hosed unless your isp happens to have redundant connections to different backbone providers. (Let me tell you, many ISPs do not.)
Anyways though. Think of all the other things that count on the internet, and are now probably stranded. (Can you hospitals? I've set them up before for record sharing, if you are trying to send something over any distance ISDN just won't cut it, so people send it over the internet. Much cheaper/easier, but what about now. When there is no link between the hospital out in the middle of nowhere and a patients regular hospital. And say a couple of years back they decided that they would save some money by not using ATT and using, god forbid, Vartec or some other discount Long Distance Provider.
When was the last time you saw a hospital which allowed you to choose your Long Distance Carrier. If yours is dead. There is nothing else you can do, but just forget about. Not to say that people will/are dying because of this, but it is a major hassel for the folks who you would not think of as 'techies'.
Believe you me. I see this having a greater affect on the world than: 'I can't check my email!'... 'I can't see whether my stock portfolio went up or down!'... 'I can't register my adobe product.'... 'I surf ebay to buy that new toy.'.......
People are affected by this. Not just folks who allready depend on the internet to be reliable (Individual brokers who use the internet/folks who earn their livelyhood on ebay/etc) but also the nurse who changes your bedpan who can't find out that you get diaper rash and need lotion.
Slashdot Mirror
If you actually step outside of the 'yet another microsoft virus' mindset you might be frightened more by the concept, although simple. Why hasn't someone (or has some one) created a virus that attacks the JRE. You could pretty well attack a large number of people by either A) attacking/modifying the JRE or B) Piggybacking java bytecode into other applications. Wouldn't one of these be just as damaging and at the current time even more wide-spread in their effect? Just a couple of thoughts.
This is by no means an obvious case. The difference between intercepting Internet communications and, say, communications on a phone line, is that the Internet is inherently unsafe, and information is publicly available. Every packet you send can be examined along each router through which is passes.
Wouldn't this also be true of telephone conversations? Before the advent of digital communications, wasn't a telephone connection merely a connection of two phones sending information in a manor that was inherantly unsafe? I knew that anyone who could splice wire could listen to my conversation. Does that make it so that wiretapping laws don't apply? Think again. The only issue at hand is what is continually happening: People (Courts, Police, General Population, etc) believe that just because something is digital different laws should apply. Just as someone with a clue can open a letter in the post office (read: police officer) and reseal it without me knowing, someone can read your IMs. If this is upheld in court, I don't understand what is stopping polic from just reading mail.
Wouldn't it be great if it were true that no one took Be up on the offer. As I recall fujitsu did, and actually had the computers almost ready to ship setup in a dual boot configuration, but then Microsoft exercised it's muscle and said that the terms surrounding their license prohibited you from shipping a dual-boot system. The bootloader was disabled and customers got machines with a beos partition, just no way to boot to it.
In many ways it's too bad that capitalism forces people to market towards the masses rather than just creating quality products. I understand why this is the way that it has to be, but it just seems to suck that the bulk of the gaming population prefers first person shooters over everything else, so that's where the money goes. I've watched this happen to so many other great games, it's just to bad.
heck, I even wonder about the telphone cards, which I never use. I would have to go to a store to look at one to see if they have visible numbers on them.
I remember a friend of mine once had some trouble with her phone card. The second time she used it, she noticed that it had more money than the value of the card. As it turns out, all of the cards were sequential and she was accessing the money on someone else's card. She used it once, but then feeling bad went back to using her own card. Two weeks later she went to go make another phone call and all of her minutes were gone, someone else had fucked her. Great eh? Just goes to show you how stupid people who make up these systems are. I wouldn't be suprised if by looking at the cards in a store (20 or more) you might be able to derive the formula that they use to generate card numbers. Wow wouldn't that be cool. Then they could steal EVERYONE's money. Once you had a bunch of people out of money, I bet companies would change their practices.
Do you feel that it is possible to have a unified monolithic Microsoft exist in the market without being anti-competetive? Specifically, if the United States government leaves Microsoft as-is (no "break-up") do you feel it is possible to regulate a company that in the past has shown no respect for government intervention?
Not only are links one way with HTML (excepting the http-referrer info, and this can be forged) but in fact for most site-owners, they themselves don't even know where they are sending people. Without using some database-backed link-tracking bouncer, you as a website designer have no idea who is clicking on what links. The times that this is most useful is for advertising because you are most likely getting paid per-click. Not only is it beyond the scope of most basic homepage authors to do this (or impossible depending on where you host), but also you then have a single point of failure -- when was the last time you clicked on a banner ad link or similiar just to have the script be broken in some way and not actually 403 you to the right site.
I'm not sure if this is what is allowing for realtime weather because their site has been /.ed
But anyways, you could do this sort of thing using traditional radio and/or shortwave. I have seen an alarm clock that could tell you the forcast (not just play that radio station, but it had a display) and the current conditions outside. The ability to include something like this in a car-based computer would most likely not add more than 15-20 to the total cost because there would be no need for a dedicated display.
This would be a function most people would actually use on the AutoPC.
P.S. It still makes me sick that people would actually want Windows CE running on their car stereo, let alone full blown Wnidows98 running in their dash board PC....
I understand that the USPTO office has no idea what is involved in any sort of tru innovation, but I really begin to wonder if things, such as organization of recorded programs, should ever be patentable. I understand patenting the technology behind the way that PVR stuff works, but to patent the idea of a pvr seems very silly to me. Couldn't the same thing have been done with an archive of VHS tapes and a computer. How is the technology behind this really new other than the fact that it is done with a different medium (tapes vs hard drive).
I am definately tired of supporting a whole bunch of apps that the accounting department uses. ADP eTime for swipe in/out, ADP PC/Payroll for actually running the payroll, Salomon for general financials, and Crystal Reports for running reports off of the MS SQL backend of Salomon. No fun at all. They NEVER play nice together.
I would imagine that for most developers, personal (shareware) or commercial houses, they go where the user base is. I can understand being interested in developing a new handheld, but I think that most developers are interested in marketing to where there are the most users: either PalmOS or WinCE. I would imagine that is where 95% of PDA users reside, so I can't imagine anyone devoting -THAT- much time/effort/resources to a PDA that has no user base.
I certainly wouldn't put my time into developing for a non-existant userbase. Who knows if this will even make it to market?
Just my thoughts.
Although you might think that the primary audience for Futurama is college students, I would tend to disagree. Most college students I know watch television, but they rarely watch it with the kind of consistancy you look for in a target group for a once-a-week show. If I only have a 30minute window in which to catch a show, and that window happens to fall sometime when I would likely to be out (8-10ish) I very likely won't catch the show.
Shows that are truly geared towards college students (Southpark for example) would be aired many times a week, at normal (10pm) an strange (12 and 2:30) timeslots. This is a tactic that I haven't seen show up elsewhere too much in the TV world. Finally, I feel like a network is working it's schedule around me, rather than vice-versa.
This program offers some capability that I have not seen elsewhere, because of it's ability to change -ANY- window's transparency, but it seems like there could be more rubust functionality. Also, even though Windows 2000 has had alpha blending abilities since it's release, few programs have actually used it. (Two notable exceptions, Miranda ICQ and Winamp with one of the many available plugins.) One of these such plugins, TransparentFX not only has the ability to make portions of winamp transparent, but have varying levels of transparency for when the window is out of focus, when out of focus and the mouse is over that window, and also the speed of the fade-out/fade-in between them. I'm not sure how feasible this is to do on system wide basis, but I would imagine that it wouldn't be that tough because any application could easily find out where the mouse cursor is and focus/de-focus accordingly. Another thing, although the program has the option open the transparency options on right-click, it would be nice if you could selectively have this (when you right-click on the title-bar, not just anywhere.) This seems like a cool program, but not very polished, nor worthy of posting on the front-page of slashdot. I'm not quite sure if this actually qualifies as "news" although I am glad I happened to run across this link.
I'm not sure about the specific technologies, but I know it involved 802.11 of some flavor...but occording to a cisco pre-sales rep friend of mine they have gear that could do this with a wireless link. The number that he quoted me was 30miles line-of-sight easily. This is something that they have not completely finalized as a common solution for people (as far as I can tell), but if you contacted your local cisco corporate presales integrator you'd find someone who would most likely be able to help you whatever your problem may be.
-Peter
I attend Guilford college in Greensboro, NC and after a few discussions with my macroeconomics professor, I started thinking about using a "smart" whiteboard to show developments which are drawn on the board to be played back later from a computer. After looking into many different options, most of which were $2-3k and up, and consisted of small boards which were pressure sensitive, I stumbled across something which left them all behind. The Mimio board.
The mimio board is a capture device that sticks onto (or can be mounted on) the upper left hand corner of any existing whiteboard. By inserting stantard markers in the jackets which go along with the capture board, the software captures every stroke along the way, step-by-step. This alone was something that few of the devices which I had investigated could do, but there is more. They also have a plugin available for it that allows you to record audio as well and create a realplayer simultaneous stream (smil file). The entire presentation can be played back by any machine with realplayer (when you play the file it downloads a plugin. I have tried it on windows and macintosh, I have no idea whether it works with any other platform, but I would assume not.) The file size created is very reasonable (example: selectble audio bitrate + 157Kbytes for a 1hr board intensive lecture). We have begun using it so that students may re-experience a class which they have missed or need work with. I am by no means a representive for mimio, there product just worked really well for us.
Total Cost: $775 + Shipping
$499---->Capture Device, 4 Marker Sleeves, Eraser and software
$249---->BoardCast Producer Plugin (So we could create the real streams with synced audio/board)
$25----->25ft Serial cable (So we could have the computer half way across the room)
Hope you enjoy it, if you end up buying one, or have any questions, I'd be interested to hear from you, feel free to email me at AptrippA@AguilfordA.edu (Remove the A's) -Peter Tripp
Here's something that I haven't heard mentioned in this wonderful mess of -SLOW- websites and overloaded routers. Guess what. My Long Distance phone service is out. I can guess why too. They probably decided to save a few bucks by doing some of this trendy 'Voice over Data' you've been hearing all about. Well ain't that just wonderful. If you were wondering, I'm using Vartec as my LD carrier. Kinda scary. ATT works fine though. In this whole conversation though, I have heard no one speak of how this is affecting companies that count on semi-reasonably reliable connections to the internet. If the uplink from your ISP is being blasted because they host some site, that means you are hosed unless your isp happens to have redundant connections to different backbone providers. (Let me tell you, many ISPs do not.)
... 'I can't see whether my stock portfolio went up or down!' ... 'I can't register my adobe product.' ... 'I surf ebay to buy that new toy.' .......
:) I guess.
Anyways though. Think of all the other things that count on the internet, and are now probably stranded. (Can you hospitals? I've set them up before for record sharing, if you are trying to send something over any distance ISDN just won't cut it, so people send it over the internet. Much cheaper/easier, but what about now. When there is no link between the hospital out in the middle of nowhere and a patients regular hospital. And say a couple of years back they decided that they would save some money by not using ATT and using, god forbid, Vartec or some other discount Long Distance Provider.
When was the last time you saw a hospital which allowed you to choose your Long Distance Carrier. If yours is dead. There is nothing else you can do, but just forget about. Not to say that people will/are dying because of this, but it is a major hassel for the folks who you would not think of as 'techies'.
Believe you me. I see this having a greater affect on the world than: 'I can't check my email!'
People are affected by this. Not just folks who allready depend on the internet to be reliable (Individual brokers who use the internet/folks who earn their livelyhood on ebay/etc) but also the nurse who changes your bedpan who can't find out that you get diaper rash and need lotion.
Just a ramble.
PS Vartec works again.