The OP's link is to a Dummies book, "Forensics for Dummies"... The blurb reads 'Now, everyone can get the lowdown on the science behind crime scene investigations. Using lots of fascinating case studies, forensics expert Dr. D. P. Lyle clues people in on everything from determining cause and time of death to fingerprints, fibers, blood, ballistics, forensic computing, and forensic psychology.'.
Then, lower down the page, in the Related Articles section...
- Acquiring Kitchen Equipment for Your Restaurant
Spooky huh? "Yes, like I said, this big-ass carving knife, and that hog bunger, they're for my restaurant... what else would I want them for?"
Yeah, Monk is what Rain Man became when he grew up.
Journalistic Integrity and other oxymorons...
on
Future of Internet News?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
since I can use many sources for articles that give depth and background information to the news
I apply the same approach to television news. Where I am, we get one channel broadcasting news at 5pm, another two at 6pm, and a fourth at 7pm. That means that (if you can stand listening to that much crap for that long) you can get at least three different versions of events from TV alone every day.
At first I found it interesting that each providor put such a totally different spin on the 'facts', then it amused me - don't these people realise that people can watch other versions of events, and see right through their sensationalist crap?
Now it just sickens me. It sickens me that they have zero conscience and zero integrity, and zero interest in reporting what actually happened and that they spin such totally misrepresented crap knowing full well that plenty of people don't know any better than to just swallow their stories hook, line and sinker.
Journalistic integrity is a long-dead myth. Those bastards don't care about reporting facts, they care about finding ways to feed advertising to people, and if they have to sensationalise a story to the point of outright lying to get people to listen/read/watch their advertising, then they won't hesitate for a second to do it.
It's not about the news anymore folks, it's about the advertising.
A quick rtfa tells me that this isn't a sniffer at all, it's just a perl script that parses the plain-text output from someone elses sniffer. Sorry, no donut. NEXT!
I believe that they mean 'unviel' as in they actually now have an aircraft
They actually have six of them. They've just painted one and they're gonna wheel it out for the press, etc. First flight will be a couple of months from now, but they apparently plan to announce that after the first flight!
Airliners.net actually has lots of good photos already.
I dunno where michael got his '800 seats' headline from. Sure, you can fit eight hundred people in an A380, but (notwithstanding the superb Qantas effort with 500+ people on a B747 out of Darwin immediately before Cyclone Tracey hit), it's not gonna fly very far.
I use a weather plugin for the Miranda IM messaging
client (win32), something called "Weather Protocol 3.3.8", though there's a whole bunch of them there. I just add locations by IATA code, and they appear on my 'buddy' list with all the other entries. Works well.
High bidder will get to place an ad for exactly one week on this man's forehead.
His name is Whag, he is a co-worker of mine. Whag gets around alot, a pretty social guy. Aside from working here at the office (where he interacts with about 20 people a day), Whag also volunteers for his local fire company. On top of that, he spends a significant amount of time at the local hosey, and you know that ad's just going to look that much better after a couple of beers. Overall, the ad on his forehead would probably reach anywhere from 20-100 people per day.
Any actual placing of an ad on whag's forehead is entirely at whag's discretion, and i must warn you that i haven't told him that i'm selling his forehead on ebay, so he may be a little opposed to the idea at first. But with a little prodding and some cold hard cash, i'm sure it'll all work out.
It is. It just doesn't meet the specifics of CAN-SPAM, which is evidently what he was charged with, and tried to plead guilty to.
I gotta say, his lawyer must be pretty f**kin' dumb to have gone in there prepared to let the guy cop a guilty plea. I'd like to think that if I had the slightest chance of successfully defending something, that my lawyer would argue as such. Silly goose doesn't even appear to have read the Act!
Trillian is nice... but that lost me with that...
on
Trillian 3.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
Trillian is nice... but they lost me with that bug-ridden free version 1.7.2 (or whatever it was) that they left to stagnate for what must be a couple of years now, if not more.
IMHO, it's too late for Trillian to claw market space back. As people have mentioned, GAIM is there, works really well, and is cross platform. Personally, I use Miranda IM now, and I run IRC, ICQ, MSN (bleh!), Yahoo and Jabber all at once (it supports many others, those are just the ones I want/need). It's current, maintained software (whereas I'm once bitten, twice shy on the issue of maintenance with Trillian) and I have absolutely no inclination to bother going over to look at Trillian again.
It's also important to realise that Trillian is commercial-ware and that the 'free' version is, at best, a crippled attempt at tempting you to buy the actual featured version.
IIRC, this isn't the first time someone senior and clueless got it in their heads that it would be a great idea to just store everything that ever passes across a given network. They tend to go really quiet right after someone sits them down in a quiet room and spells out a few of the 'practical' details of what they think they're going to do...
"You mean we're gonna need how much disk space exactly?". "We're gonna have to invade which small nation just to get enough physical space to store all this stuff?".
Worry not, it will blow over soon enough:-)
Re:I did some work with this stuff...
on
Emergence
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Better yet, use a simulation environment like breve and you get 3d rendering, collision detection, basic physics, and a lot more for free.
We did look at a bunch of those tools. An argument that I was trying to make, and trying to demonstrate, was that many common-or-garden programming languages - perl, java et al - are perfectly suitable tools for this type of work. There are a lot of simulation environments around, and they all have their quirks, their own languages, and stuff. What I wanted to demonstrate was that I could develop equally effective simulations without using specialised tools. I wasn't trying to suggest that the specialised tools were bad, just that they weren't the only way to skin that particular cat.
I guess I was coming at it from a different angle to a lot of researchers in that I already had good programming skills with mainstream languages, and I wasn't particularly excited about learning another language. In particular, I felt that the absolute vast magority of coding for the things I was trying to simulate was peculiar to the specific simulation - there wasn't much coding going into wrappers and housekeeping and game execution, and so I questioned the degree of contribution that a specialised environment could make.
Of course, as you imply, one of the issues with this type of work is finding ways to represent the outcomes in ways that you can demonstrate in presentations and ideally, in static printed form. That's not easy. The graphical capabilities of some of the simulation environments are, arguably, one of their key benefits.
I did some work with this stuff...
on
Emergence
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Emergence is a really interesting field to tinker in. I've been doing some work with this, have a couple of published papers on the application of agent based modelling to operations management problems.
The essential concept is that each individual is a simple agent that operates autonomously, and makes very few very simple decisions as it goes about its work. The behaviour of one individual is unremarkable, but the behaviour that emerges from a large group of the same individuals is really quite amazing.
Because the concepts are really quite logically simple, this stuff is really simple to program too. Just fire up perl or java or any language that has a similar capability to OO concepts, write a simple object - your agent - that behaves according to a simple set of rules and responds in defined ways to certain stimuli. Make a wrapper program to create the playing field, instantiate as many 'agents' as you see fit, and let them loose. Tweak, rinse, repeat.
As an aside, when I was writing a simulation to emulate the behaviour of ants foraging (more to prove that perl and java were suitable languages for the task than to demonstrate anything new with ants per se), I went off and RTFM'ed quite a bit on ants. They're very interesting little critters in their own right. I picked the eyes out of the various behaviours of a bunch of different species of ants to come up with one that made a fun simulation (refer references below).
The bare mechanical simplicity with which some of these critters operate is really quite amazing. Take, for example, the concept of trail laying. I guess it's pretty widely known that many species of ants lay trails from food sources back to the nest to guide other ants to the food. (Try: find a line of ants climbing up the wall in the kitchen or somewhere, moisten your finger, wipe straight through the line (washing off the trail). They'll be all disoriented for a little while, but they'll quickly re-establish the trail, largely by random search). Anyhoo, what's really quite cool is how one species does it. The trail is just an emission from the back end of the ant that wipes along the ground as it walks. The mechanics are such that if the ant has a full crop, it puts pressure on the digestive tract, and forces stuff out the back. If its only lightly fed, it only forces a bit out the back, if its had a big feed, it forces a lot out the back and lays a denser trail. The outcome is that the ants lay stronger trails to the better food sources. Elegant, isn't it!
I could go on forever, but I won't. Some references below. Another behaviour that is probably even more interesting than trail laying is navigation. They're absolutely amazing. Various ants use various combinations of reference to the sun, counting the amount of ground that passes underneath them as they walk *AND* remembering turns!!!, and reference to major landmarks as they travel. Did I say amazing?
Anyhoo, here's a bunch of references on ant behaviour if anyone's interesting.
NOTE: slashdot doesn't like 'junk' characters, so I'm removing all the comment chars:-( #!/usr/local/bin/perl -w /* Dancing Ants. An agent-based simulation of ant scouting and foraging behaviour. Demonstrating the application of open- source programming tools to agent-based simulation.
# B747SP, University of xxxxxxxxxxxx. 3rd December 2003
# In this simulation, we define an 'ant' object with behavioural # patterns drawn from various published works on Biology, Zoology, # and Behavioural science. We define a 'foraging area', then release # those ants into it. And then we observe...
# What we know about ants...
Note: These 'definitions' merely describe the behaviour of a fictional, theoretical ant specifically 'bred' in the mind of the author for this specific simulation. Their behaviours are derived from the various species of ants studied in the belowreferenced research papers. The behaviour describe
They're legally a Vanuatuan (sp? - based in Vanuatu - french South Pacific) company IIRC. Big chunks of their company operate out of Australia though. As you prolly know, they're battling something or other out with someone or other in the Australian courts at the moment.
In the future, maybe a USB ice-cream maker which makes ice-cream of your choice, after you ordered it via Movenpick's website. Or a massaging chair that starts working on you after you have made the payment via PayPal?
And immediately after that, a slashdot headline... "Movenpick's USB massage chair hacked!"
Can you imagine, a fleet of iBooks or Powerbooks that all, without exception, suffer uneconomical-to-repair hardware failures at precisely three years +/- three months of age?
That's what an IBM/Apple merger means to me.
In my extended experience, IBM are the experts at designing equipment to fail. Their gear simply cannot be relied upon in a commercial setting. Worthless junk, designed for the sole porpoise of stripping money out of commercial customers, that's my IBM.
Slashdot Mirror
Then, lower down the page, in the Related Articles section...
- Acquiring Kitchen Equipment for Your Restaurant
Spooky huh? "Yes, like I said, this big-ass carving knife, and that hog bunger, they're for my restaurant... what else would I want them for?"
Yeah, Monk is what Rain Man became when he grew up.
I apply the same approach to television news. Where I am, we get one channel broadcasting news at 5pm, another two at 6pm, and a fourth at 7pm. That means that (if you can stand listening to that much crap for that long) you can get at least three different versions of events from TV alone every day.
At first I found it interesting that each providor put such a totally different spin on the 'facts', then it amused me - don't these people realise that people can watch other versions of events, and see right through their sensationalist crap?
Now it just sickens me. It sickens me that they have zero conscience and zero integrity, and zero interest in reporting what actually happened and that they spin such totally misrepresented crap knowing full well that plenty of people don't know any better than to just swallow their stories hook, line and sinker.
Journalistic integrity is a long-dead myth. Those bastards don't care about reporting facts, they care about finding ways to feed advertising to people, and if they have to sensationalise a story to the point of outright lying to get people to listen/read/watch their advertising, then they won't hesitate for a second to do it.
It's not about the news anymore folks, it's about the advertising.
For the benefit of this discussion, selling your soul is the same as buying.
What's up with tcpdump and friends, snort, kismet, bsd-airtools and ethereal anyway?
They actually have six of them. They've just painted one and they're gonna wheel it out for the press, etc. First flight will be a couple of months from now, but they apparently plan to announce that after the first flight!
Airliners.net actually has lots of good photos already.
I dunno where michael got his '800 seats' headline from. Sure, you can fit eight hundred people in an A380, but (notwithstanding the superb Qantas effort with 500+ people on a B747 out of Darwin immediately before Cyclone Tracey hit), it's not gonna fly very far.
I use a weather plugin for the Miranda IM messaging client (win32), something called "Weather Protocol 3.3.8", though there's a whole bunch of them there. I just add locations by IATA code, and they appear on my 'buddy' list with all the other entries. Works well.
High bidder will get to place an ad for exactly one week on this man's forehead. His name is Whag, he is a co-worker of mine. Whag gets around alot, a pretty social guy. Aside from working here at the office (where he interacts with about 20 people a day), Whag also volunteers for his local fire company. On top of that, he spends a significant amount of time at the local hosey, and you know that ad's just going to look that much better after a couple of beers. Overall, the ad on his forehead would probably reach anywhere from 20-100 people per day. Any actual placing of an ad on whag's forehead is entirely at whag's discretion, and i must warn you that i haven't told him that i'm selling his forehead on ebay, so he may be a little opposed to the idea at first. But with a little prodding and some cold hard cash, i'm sure it'll all work out.
... are like a bunch of bloody sheeps.
I believe that I'll have another beer.
I gotta say, his lawyer must be pretty f**kin' dumb to have gone in there prepared to let the guy cop a guilty plea. I'd like to think that if I had the slightest chance of successfully defending something, that my lawyer would argue as such. Silly goose doesn't even appear to have read the Act!
IMHO, it's too late for Trillian to claw market space back. As people have mentioned, GAIM is there, works really well, and is cross platform. Personally, I use Miranda IM now, and I run IRC, ICQ, MSN (bleh!), Yahoo and Jabber all at once (it supports many others, those are just the ones I want/need). It's current, maintained software (whereas I'm once bitten, twice shy on the issue of maintenance with Trillian) and I have absolutely no inclination to bother going over to look at Trillian again.
It's also important to realise that Trillian is commercial-ware and that the 'free' version is, at best, a crippled attempt at tempting you to buy the actual featured version.
"You mean we're gonna need how much disk space exactly?". "We're gonna have to invade which small nation just to get enough physical space to store all this stuff?".
Worry not, it will blow over soon enough :-)
We did look at a bunch of those tools. An argument that I was trying to make, and trying to demonstrate, was that many common-or-garden programming languages - perl, java et al - are perfectly suitable tools for this type of work. There are a lot of simulation environments around, and they all have their quirks, their own languages, and stuff. What I wanted to demonstrate was that I could develop equally effective simulations without using specialised tools. I wasn't trying to suggest that the specialised tools were bad, just that they weren't the only way to skin that particular cat.
I guess I was coming at it from a different angle to a lot of researchers in that I already had good programming skills with mainstream languages, and I wasn't particularly excited about learning another language. In particular, I felt that the absolute vast magority of coding for the things I was trying to simulate was peculiar to the specific simulation - there wasn't much coding going into wrappers and housekeeping and game execution, and so I questioned the degree of contribution that a specialised environment could make.
Of course, as you imply, one of the issues with this type of work is finding ways to represent the outcomes in ways that you can demonstrate in presentations and ideally, in static printed form. That's not easy. The graphical capabilities of some of the simulation environments are, arguably, one of their key benefits.
The essential concept is that each individual is a simple agent that operates autonomously, and makes very few very simple decisions as it goes about its work. The behaviour of one individual is unremarkable, but the behaviour that emerges from a large group of the same individuals is really quite amazing.
Because the concepts are really quite logically simple, this stuff is really simple to program too. Just fire up perl or java or any language that has a similar capability to OO concepts, write a simple object - your agent - that behaves according to a simple set of rules and responds in defined ways to certain stimuli. Make a wrapper program to create the playing field, instantiate as many 'agents' as you see fit, and let them loose. Tweak, rinse, repeat.
As an aside, when I was writing a simulation to emulate the behaviour of ants foraging (more to prove that perl and java were suitable languages for the task than to demonstrate anything new with ants per se), I went off and RTFM'ed quite a bit on ants. They're very interesting little critters in their own right. I picked the eyes out of the various behaviours of a bunch of different species of ants to come up with one that made a fun simulation (refer references below).
The bare mechanical simplicity with which some of these critters operate is really quite amazing. Take, for example, the concept of trail laying. I guess it's pretty widely known that many species of ants lay trails from food sources back to the nest to guide other ants to the food. (Try: find a line of ants climbing up the wall in the kitchen or somewhere, moisten your finger, wipe straight through the line (washing off the trail). They'll be all disoriented for a little while, but they'll quickly re-establish the trail, largely by random search). Anyhoo, what's really quite cool is how one species does it. The trail is just an emission from the back end of the ant that wipes along the ground as it walks. The mechanics are such that if the ant has a full crop, it puts pressure on the digestive tract, and forces stuff out the back. If its only lightly fed, it only forces a bit out the back, if its had a big feed, it forces a lot out the back and lays a denser trail. The outcome is that the ants lay stronger trails to the better food sources. Elegant, isn't it!
I could go on forever, but I won't. Some references below. Another behaviour that is probably even more interesting than trail laying is navigation. They're absolutely amazing. Various ants use various combinations of reference to the sun, counting the amount of ground that passes underneath them as they walk *AND* remembering turns!!!, and reference to major landmarks as they travel. Did I say amazing?
Anyhoo, here's a bunch of references on ant behaviour if anyone's interesting.
I just sucked all the relevant pages through the coral cache, so it should be fine that way. Here's a link.
(I'm posting from Australia, it's a joke!)
They're legally a Vanuatuan (sp? - based in Vanuatu - french South Pacific) company IIRC. Big chunks of their company operate out of Australia though. As you prolly know, they're battling something or other out with someone or other in the Australian courts at the moment.
And immediately after that, a slashdot headline... "Movenpick's USB massage chair hacked!"
And *BSD... you forgot to mention that *BSD is dying too!
That's what an IBM/Apple merger means to me.
In my extended experience, IBM are the experts at designing equipment to fail. Their gear simply cannot be relied upon in a commercial setting. Worthless junk, designed for the sole porpoise of stripping money out of commercial customers, that's my IBM.
I've got to say, given our (.au) history on matters Internet related, this is very much out-of-character. Refreshing though!
In case of karma whoring, mirror the site here!
Boy is Al Gore gonna be pissed when he heards that microsoft is trying to steal his thunder. Those bastards!