I wonder when somebody's going to decide to sue the living shit out of Slashdot for killing their site, therefore costing them downtime, robbing them of ad income, etc.
Now *that* would be funny. And well-deserved, actually. Killing people's sites is bad, mmm-kay.
The scariest part of this whole mess is the concept of the "analog hole". Read Sen. Hollings' comments, posted a few days back.
He states that a major flaw in current copy-protection is that the encrypted digital signal is eventually turned into unencrypted, analog signal, to go out to your speakers. Uh, yeah...He says that pirates can illegally tap this analog signal, re-digitize it, and distribute the now unencumbered files. He further says that a *government mandate* is required to "fix" this "problem", by encrypting the signal all the way into the output device! Um, not good.
Apparently we need to throw out all our speakers and headphones. Great! Thanks!
And moreover, why should they care? Microsoft has a massively overwhelming majority of installed clients. Microsoft dosen't care, because - suprise! - they won the browser war. They won it a long time ago. The minority using non-MS browsers is irrelevant to them. If they want their web site to not support anything but their product, that's their business. msn.com sucks anyway.
Mozilla, incidentally, helped this along by taking so bloody long to release a 1.0 browser. (When's 1.0 scheduled for, anyway?)
Dateline Vatican City(11:46 am) Pope-"Damn; What Were We Thinking"
In response to irrefutable proof that Darwinian evolution, not Creation, led to the existance of human life on planet Earth, Pope John Paul II is apparently looking for something else to do with his time. The Pope was reportedly "shocked and depressed" by the unimpeachable proof that Creation never really happened. The pontiff was quoted saying "Damn. So that Darwin guy that has been giving us trouble for all these years was right, huh? Wow. What were we thinking. Oh well. I guess we don't need a church now or anything. Time to look for new employment." John Paul plans to post a resume to popular job-hunting site Monster.com within the week.
The Pope is the spiritual leader of the so-called Catholic church, one of the world's leading organizations dedicated to spewing outdated, patently false beliefs.
Bill Joy has decided to become involved with a new startup company and will be phasing out of the CSRG over the next few months. He will be joining Sun Microsystems, Inc., a company whose founders include Andy Bechtolsheim, the designer of the Sun workstation. SMI is one of a number of companies which plan to offer microprocessor-based networked workstations running 4.2BSD software.
That in the very modern year of 2000, where digital audio, digital sound, and digital everything else rules, the industry has rediscovered video recording technology first pioneered in 1927(!!!)
A link for the curious. http://www.dfm.dircon.co.uk/recordng.htm
An important thing to remember is that Linus is an employee of Transmeta. It's not his company. It's been stated by TM management that he's just another coder working for them, albeit a very good one. Just because he holds a position of high esteem in the Linux community does not mean he holds sway over any company he works for.
This is too cool. I'm trying to think of possible uses for this stuff.
* Alcoholic beverages. Obviously, some bartender is going to start making Glowing Pan-Galactic Gargle-Blasters out of this stuff soon.
* Fountains. Now a building dosen't have to use lights to illuminate their expensive fountains. On the flip side, this could become a new prank. Instead of dishwashing liquid, use jellyfish powder to trash a fountain.
*Art. I don't know the physical properties of this stuff. If you could freeze the treated water, and assuming it would still glow, you could do some neat stuff. Imagine an ice sculpture, gently glowing from an internal bluish glow.
*Entertainment Treat the entire water supply in a water park. (Yes, this would require insane quantities of the jellyfish stuff). Going down a water slide in the dark when all the water is glowing around you would be a complete trip.
Cheating has been a problem in multiplayer games since Doom. A closed-source, security-through-obscurity solution isn't going to work in the long run, as observed above. Chances are the problem will simply degenerate into a circular "arms race" between those that are trying to cheat, and those who are trying to stop them.
The most practical solution is already in place. As cheats are released, obviously a number of people, mostly 'script kiddies' and the like, will start to use them. If cheaters start frequenting a game server, leave. Just leave. Eventually, the only people left will be the cheaters, and the servers will shrivel and die.
In this way, the problem effectively solves itself. The novelty of patching the game in order to cheat will, eventually, wear off. Servers that are known to harbor cheaters will dissolve. And, most importantly, the source remains open and free for all to study and learn from.
I, for one, think that the show in general, and the/. booth in particular, could be greatly improved if there was even more random firing of nerf darts into the air.
...is a nice, simple, black cube. Not clear. No racing stripes. No holes and crap drilled through the front. Drives hidden behind a panel somewhere, and maybe a tasteful bank of LEDs or an LCD panel on the front. Simple.
I'd even use a Rock City case, after I paint over all the funky squiggles over the front. Too bad you can't buy those seperately.
Is it possible to mod a Next cube to take PC internals?
Nope. As far as I can remember from the article, LCD panels have a layer in them(I think it's called a polarizer, not sure) that does some freaky voodoo, making the image on the LCD visible. Without it, you can't see squat. Basically, they take that layer out of the panel. The glasses are coated with the same stuff. Voila - no glasses, no picture.
I remember reading about a company that did this to laptops in PC Magazine years and years ago. You'd ship your laptop to them, who would modify the screen, and ship it back to you with a pair of those special glasses.
...but higher resolution is better. 160x160 isn't a lot of screen real estate. I could easily do without color if they would crank the resolution. Of course, color and higher resolution is even better, but there are battery life considerations.
And hey, a CompactFlash Type II or PC Card slot would be nifty too(hint hint)...
Slashdot Mirror
This site is toast.
I wonder when somebody's going to decide to sue the living shit out of Slashdot for killing their site, therefore costing them downtime, robbing them of ad income, etc.
Now *that* would be funny. And well-deserved, actually. Killing people's sites is bad, mmm-kay.
--riney
Just pick a name from the roster of any CS course...
--riney
The scariest part of this whole mess is the concept of the "analog hole". Read Sen. Hollings' comments, posted a few days back.
He states that a major flaw in current copy-protection is that the encrypted digital signal is eventually turned into unencrypted, analog signal, to go out to your speakers. Uh, yeah...He says that pirates can illegally tap this analog signal, re-digitize it, and distribute the now unencumbered files. He further says that a *government mandate* is required to "fix" this "problem", by encrypting the signal all the way into the output device! Um, not good.
Apparently we need to throw out all our speakers and headphones. Great! Thanks!
--riney
Just for heaven's sake, don't take the heatsink off.
*FOOMP!*
--riney
readme.txt
==========
To run this code, you will need the following:
* a Fortran compiler
* a space shuttle
--riney
And moreover, why should they care? Microsoft has a massively overwhelming majority of installed clients. Microsoft dosen't care, because - suprise! - they won the browser war. They won it a long time ago. The minority using non-MS browsers is irrelevant to them. If they want their web site to not support anything but their product, that's their business. msn.com sucks anyway.
Mozilla, incidentally, helped this along by taking so bloody long to release a 1.0 browser. (When's 1.0 scheduled for, anyway?)
--riney
Eddie -
I got your email address from your paper. I'd like a hooker. Please send to 204 Greendale Drive. Thanks.
I sure hope this message doesn't get diverted somewhere...
--riney
A television with a network connection. I can see it now.
Kiddie 1: "D00d! 1 r00t3d tH1s pH@t t3l3v1s10n!!"
Kiddie 2: "L33t! J00 0wnZ!"
I better go firm up my firewall...
--jwriney
This post is protected with Motorola technology. It may only be read in my cubicle.
*BOOM*
--riney
Dateline Vatican City(11:46 am) Pope-"Damn; What Were We Thinking"
In response to irrefutable proof that Darwinian evolution, not Creation, led to the existance of human life on planet Earth, Pope John Paul II is apparently looking for something else to do with his time. The Pope was reportedly "shocked and depressed" by the unimpeachable proof that Creation never really happened. The pontiff was quoted saying "Damn. So that Darwin guy that has been giving us trouble for all these years was right, huh? Wow. What were we thinking. Oh well. I guess we don't need a church now or anything. Time to look for new employment." John Paul plans to post a resume to popular job-hunting site Monster.com within the week.
The Pope is the spiritual leader of the so-called Catholic church, one of the world's leading organizations dedicated to spewing outdated, patently false beliefs.
--jwriney
Hmm. Based on this article, Electronics Boutique should start accepting pre-orders any minute now...
--jwriney
Bill Joy has decided to become involved with a new startup company and will be phasing out of the CSRG over the next few months. He will be joining Sun Microsystems, Inc., a company whose founders include Andy Bechtolsheim, the designer of the Sun workstation. SMI is one of a number of companies which plan to offer microprocessor-based networked workstations running 4.2BSD software.
8 2.04.16_ucbernie.2227_net.rumor.html
http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/NET.rumor/
That in the very modern year of 2000, where digital audio, digital sound, and digital everything else rules, the industry has rediscovered video recording technology first pioneered in 1927(!!!)
A link for the curious.
http://www.dfm.dircon.co.uk/recordng.htm
--riney
An important thing to remember is that Linus is an employee of Transmeta. It's not his company. It's been stated by TM management that he's just another coder working for them, albeit a very good one. Just because he holds a position of high esteem in the Linux community does not mean he holds sway over any company he works for.
--John Riney
riney@scra.org
This is too cool. I'm trying to think of possible uses for this stuff.
* Alcoholic beverages.
Obviously, some bartender is going to start making Glowing Pan-Galactic Gargle-Blasters out of this stuff soon.
* Fountains.
Now a building dosen't have to use lights to illuminate their expensive fountains. On the flip side, this could become a new prank. Instead of dishwashing liquid, use jellyfish powder to trash a fountain.
*Art.
I don't know the physical properties of this stuff. If you could freeze the treated water, and assuming it would still glow, you could do some neat stuff. Imagine an ice sculpture, gently glowing from an internal bluish glow.
*Entertainment
Treat the entire water supply in a water park. (Yes, this would require insane quantities of the jellyfish stuff). Going down a water slide in the dark when all the water is glowing around you would be a complete trip.
Any other ideas?
--jwriney
John Riney III
Cheating has been a problem in multiplayer games since Doom. A closed-source, security-through-obscurity solution isn't going to work in the long run, as observed above. Chances are the problem will simply degenerate into a circular "arms race" between those that are trying to cheat, and those who are trying to stop them.
The most practical solution is already in place. As cheats are released, obviously a number of people, mostly 'script kiddies' and the like, will start to use them. If cheaters start frequenting a game server, leave. Just leave. Eventually, the only people left will be the cheaters, and the servers will shrivel and die.
In this way, the problem effectively solves itself. The novelty of patching the game in order to cheat will, eventually, wear off. Servers that are known to harbor cheaters will dissolve. And, most importantly, the source remains open and free for all to study and learn from.
--jwriney
I, for one, think that the show in general, and the /. booth in particular, could be greatly improved if there was even more random firing of nerf darts into the air.
--John Riney
...is a nice, simple, black cube. Not clear. No racing stripes. No holes and crap drilled through the front. Drives hidden behind a panel somewhere, and maybe a tasteful bank of LEDs or an LCD panel on the front. Simple.
I'd even use a Rock City case, after I paint over all the funky squiggles over the front. Too bad you can't buy those seperately.
Is it possible to mod a Next cube to take PC internals?
--John Riney
jwriney@awod.com
"Obfuscated Perl"? Dosen't that kinda go without saying? *grin*
/me dons protective asbestos suit
--John Riney
jwriney@awod.com
...where's the "Transmeta Inside" sticker??
--John Riney
jwriney@awod.com
There are also sound cards, Ethernet adapters, modems, GPSs, etc, that come in both formats. That's more like what I'm talking about.
--John Riney
jwriney@awod.com
Nope. As far as I can remember from the article, LCD panels have a layer in them(I think it's called a polarizer, not sure) that does some freaky voodoo, making the image on the LCD visible. Without it, you can't see squat. Basically, they take that layer out of the panel. The glasses are coated with the same stuff. Voila - no glasses, no picture.
--John Riney
jwriney@awod.com
I remember reading about a company that did this to laptops in PC Magazine years and years ago. You'd ship your laptop to them, who would modify the screen, and ship it back to you with a pair of those special glasses.
Everything old is new again...
--John Riney
jwriney@awod.com
...but higher resolution is better. 160x160 isn't a lot of screen real estate. I could easily do without color if they would crank the resolution. Of course, color and higher resolution is even better, but there are battery life considerations.
And hey, a CompactFlash Type II or PC Card slot would be nifty too(hint hint)...
--John Riney
jwriney@awod.com
Mind that space bar - it's a killer.
http://www.steelcase.com/corporate/leap.html
--John Riney
jwriney@awod.com