I just read "Spin Control" by Chris Moriarty. In this novel, to reduce troop losses along the Palestine-Israeli border both sides have the soldiers remote-controlled by an AI (called "EMET" on the Israeli side, after the word "Truth" inscribed on the Golem of Prague's forehead). The AI is "told" that it's just playing a video game, and when it realizes that its "character" is a real person killing other real people it can't deal with it... so they terminate it and boot up another copy that hasn't had that realization yet to take over.
Welly, welly, welly, so humans have the same problem...
Verified by Visa, 3D Secure, etc are GOOD for you.
Adding an inherently insecure stage to every transaction... which provides another opportunity for fraudsters using cross site and cross zone attacks to steal your authentication tokens... is good for you?
ANY system that redirects me to a framed third-party page that I can't verify to provide authentication information is inherently insecure and I will not use it. I've had problems with identity fraud online even without this extra layer of insecurity...
If this means I only buy online with Paypal (which I have funded by an account with a limited balance that I *only* use for Paypal) and one-shot debit cards from the grocery store, I guess I should thank them for making me shop more safely online.
That one review that said something like "I clicked on buy as a joke and it bought it!"... what else would happens?
One-click buying makes this kind of thing too easy. When I click on a "buy" link for anything more expensive than a candybar, I expect to get to a shopping cart page, and enter my billing info, and then approve the purchase. On the web-based Apple Store at least it's almost as easy to cancel your purchase as to buy, I'm really shocked that the Apple would bill you for $1000 without any kind of automated cancellation mechanism. I don't have an iPhone, but that sure makes me glad I've disabled "one click" in iTunes anyway...
The original article I read indicated that one of the buyers had been distracted when he clicked on the purchase link, and didn't realize he'd actually bought something. This is not that uncommon. A friend of mine accidentally bought a printer from the Apple store this way, and I bought an iPod Shuffle when I clicked on the "buy" link to see what the shipping would be... not realizing that Apple had implemented one-click buying. Now I was thinking of buying the shuffle anyway, and decided not to cancel it during the grace period, but I can easily see someone not realizing that they were looking at a receipt instead of a shopping cart until too late.
I disable "one-click" purchasing, and I almost wish Amazon WAS able to prevent Apple or anyone else from implementing this dangerous scheme. It makes me think there might be a place for an organization that simply patented bad ideas to keep people from implementing them... it's no crazier than anything else happening in patents and copyrights these days.
Nice to see someone else noticing that little problem. I wonder if this will convince Gnome and KDE to dump the bloat... or maybe get some of the lighter weight desktops like Windowmaker (and toolkits like GNUstep) some traction on teh Linux desktop.
(yes, I know GNUstep is copying NeXT, but NeXTstep on a 40 MHz 68030 was faster and more responsive than any of the leading contenders on processors 10 times as powerful)
Sounds like they've found another gap in the walls between security zones. THe whole IE/ActiveX security model is fundamentally flawed, and new holes are found on a regular basis, because the model depends on the HTML control guessing at the permissions to grant a potentially untrusted object based on "where it is", not on "how it got there". If you can find a location (local file, 'trusted' website, etc) that the HTML control trusts and either get your exploit code there or find an exploitable object there, the game's over.
A decade ago I looked at IE and the HTML control and banned it at work until Microsoft backed out their desktop/browser integration. I seriously believed that they would dump it within a couple of months, as soon as someone at Microsoft realized what an appalling security hole it was.
Boy, was I naive. What the hell do they care about security? Security doesn't sell software. Bill Gates said it himself... he believed there were no bugs in Windows that people would pay to get fixed. And so far he's been proven right.:(
All my bank's ATMs run Windows, and they just started pulling them all out of all the convenience stores and replacing them with something less flashy run by some independent ATM company that will probably charge me $5.00 a transaction. Why? Well it turns out that a bunch of similar machines got pwned...
Unless you're using Basic to be compatible with an existing Basic implementation, in which case you want to really be making an Apple ][ clone, you're much better off with something like Logo. The recent version of Basic I've used have abandoned the interactivity and robustness that made Basic fun without becoming more than a mediocre structured language. They're a better language than Dartmouth Basic, or Applesoft, they're out of the gutter and onto the sidewalk... but why shoot for the sidewalk when you can have the stars?
Merit raises, completion bonuses, having a salary based on accomplishing certain tasks, and if those tasks require overtime, they require overtime, and if you get them done early, you get to leave early. Yes, this really happens.
No manager or CEO would ever go out of their way to help you
Managers like that don't get rewarded by uncompensated overtime for very long.
To sell for $12.00 you a parts list under $6.00. That means using a single-chip ARM7 with on-chip ram and ROM, and the ones I'm finding have less ram than an Apple II. You're not going to fit even a 1970s UNIX implementation in that, and you'll end up with the same problem the original Mac had: the system software took up so much RAM your 128k Mac had about 12k free for working space with even the simplest apps, and to make even that possible the OS design crippled them until they replaced it with OS X.
So you're going to have to bootstrap the whole OS and development environment from scratch, and what you end up with isn't going to have any kind of upwards growth towards an open source free unix environment.
To make an ARM-based design actually useful, you're going to have to target RISC-OS, not a new OS, and I have a feeling that even RISC-OS is going to push the limits of what you can run in $6.00 worth of parts.
I can visualize an Apple-][ clone fitting in that budget, but I think ARM is pushing it.
If they can do it for $12.00 (to start with, this should go down in price over time FROM $12.00, not work down to $12.00 from $50), more power to them. But my experience with the price effect of emulating a processor on an ARM makes me distinctly dubious.
Well, strictly speaking, by definition a $12 game console is a $12 computer as well.
Well, strictly speaking, by definition a $12 digital calculator watch is a $12 computer as well.
It may be all very ho-hum for you with your GHz PC and internet connection
No, I'm comparing it with the "$12 Apple ][" that it was originally rumored to be.
all MIT has to do is come up with a NES cartridge with decent software
And its own cartridge slot and some kind of removable mass storage so you can share what you've created with it. That's what made the personal computer revolution. That's why the Apple II and Commodore 64 and Atari 800 beat the technically superior but fatally crippled TI-99/4a.
Which ended up being nothing more than a console, in the end.
I haven't had guaranteed overtime pay at any salaried technical job, ever. And I'm pushing 50. The only time I've gotten overtime is on contract, or during deadline crunch and even there it's something the company does because they don't expect to meet a deadline otherwise. On the other hand, I've only once been officially asked to work more than 40 hours without overtime... and the company was working out of bankruptcy at the time.
Slashdot Mirror
Whoever moderated that offtopic didn't RTFA or didn't understand the last line of it. :)
I just read "Spin Control" by Chris Moriarty. In this novel, to reduce troop losses along the Palestine-Israeli border both sides have the soldiers remote-controlled by an AI (called "EMET" on the Israeli side, after the word "Truth" inscribed on the Golem of Prague's forehead). The AI is "told" that it's just playing a video game, and when it realizes that its "character" is a real person killing other real people it can't deal with it... so they terminate it and boot up another copy that hasn't had that realization yet to take over.
Welly, welly, welly, so humans have the same problem...
Verified by Visa, 3D Secure, etc are GOOD for you.
Adding an inherently insecure stage to every transaction... which provides another opportunity for fraudsters using cross site and cross zone attacks to steal your authentication tokens... is good for you?
On what planet?
So what you are basically saying is that in Denmark the bank charges higher fees to make up for the loss instead of the merchant charging higher fees?
The issue isn't the cost of the protection, it's the implementation.
ANY system that redirects me to a framed third-party page that I can't verify to provide authentication information is inherently insecure and I will not use it. I've had problems with identity fraud online even without this extra layer of insecurity...
If this means I only buy online with Paypal (which I have funded by an account with a limited balance that I *only* use for Paypal) and one-shot debit cards from the grocery store, I guess I should thank them for making me shop more safely online.
Oh-oh, you might have a colon problem. Better see your doctor...
That one review that said something like "I clicked on buy as a joke and it bought it!"... what else would happens?
One-click buying makes this kind of thing too easy. When I click on a "buy" link for anything more expensive than a candybar, I expect to get to a shopping cart page, and enter my billing info, and then approve the purchase. On the web-based Apple Store at least it's almost as easy to cancel your purchase as to buy, I'm really shocked that the Apple would bill you for $1000 without any kind of automated cancellation mechanism. I don't have an iPhone, but that sure makes me glad I've disabled "one click" in iTunes anyway...
The original article I read indicated that one of the buyers had been distracted when he clicked on the purchase link, and didn't realize he'd actually bought something. This is not that uncommon. A friend of mine accidentally bought a printer from the Apple store this way, and I bought an iPod Shuffle when I clicked on the "buy" link to see what the shipping would be... not realizing that Apple had implemented one-click buying. Now I was thinking of buying the shuffle anyway, and decided not to cancel it during the grace period, but I can easily see someone not realizing that they were looking at a receipt instead of a shopping cart until too late.
I disable "one-click" purchasing, and I almost wish Amazon WAS able to prevent Apple or anyone else from implementing this dangerous scheme. It makes me think there might be a place for an organization that simply patented bad ideas to keep people from implementing them... it's no crazier than anything else happening in patents and copyrights these days.
Anyone who can make this look cool should be able to sell Vista.
What seems to be another spin on the same talk: IBM To Linux Desktop Developers: 'Stop Copying Windows'.
Nice to see someone else noticing that little problem. I wonder if this will convince Gnome and KDE to dump the bloat... or maybe get some of the lighter weight desktops like Windowmaker (and toolkits like GNUstep) some traction on teh Linux desktop.
(yes, I know GNUstep is copying NeXT, but NeXTstep on a 40 MHz 68030 was faster and more responsive than any of the leading contenders on processors 10 times as powerful)
Original story here. At least, it seems to be a bit further upstream.
Sounds like they've found another gap in the walls between security zones. THe whole IE/ActiveX security model is fundamentally flawed, and new holes are found on a regular basis, because the model depends on the HTML control guessing at the permissions to grant a potentially untrusted object based on "where it is", not on "how it got there". If you can find a location (local file, 'trusted' website, etc) that the HTML control trusts and either get your exploit code there or find an exploitable object there, the game's over.
A decade ago I looked at IE and the HTML control and banned it at work until Microsoft backed out their desktop/browser integration. I seriously believed that they would dump it within a couple of months, as soon as someone at Microsoft realized what an appalling security hole it was.
Boy, was I naive. What the hell do they care about security? Security doesn't sell software. Bill Gates said it himself... he believed there were no bugs in Windows that people would pay to get fixed. And so far he's been proven right. :(
I could honestly see the hero of "Ghost" using this trick...
I give up. That's just the "#include " and "main(int ac, char **av);" parts.
Vista isn't an "upgrade". Any given computer will run faster and more reliably with XP than Vista, so it's XP that's the upgrade.
All my bank's ATMs run Windows, and they just started pulling them all out of all the convenience stores and replacing them with something less flashy run by some independent ATM company that will probably charge me $5.00 a transaction. Why? Well it turns out that a bunch of similar machines got pwned...
Embedded Windows ... just say no.
Unless you're using Basic to be compatible with an existing Basic implementation, in which case you want to really be making an Apple ][ clone, you're much better off with something like Logo. The recent version of Basic I've used have abandoned the interactivity and robustness that made Basic fun without becoming more than a mediocre structured language. They're a better language than Dartmouth Basic, or Applesoft, they're out of the gutter and onto the sidewalk... but why shoot for the sidewalk when you can have the stars?
That too.
Why would anyone work over without compensation?
Merit raises, completion bonuses, having a salary based on accomplishing certain tasks, and if those tasks require overtime, they require overtime, and if you get them done early, you get to leave early. Yes, this really happens.
No manager or CEO would ever go out of their way to help you
Managers like that don't get rewarded by uncompensated overtime for very long.
To sell for $12.00 you a parts list under $6.00. That means using a single-chip ARM7 with on-chip ram and ROM, and the ones I'm finding have less ram than an Apple II. You're not going to fit even a 1970s UNIX implementation in that, and you'll end up with the same problem the original Mac had: the system software took up so much RAM your 128k Mac had about 12k free for working space with even the simplest apps, and to make even that possible the OS design crippled them until they replaced it with OS X.
So you're going to have to bootstrap the whole OS and development environment from scratch, and what you end up with isn't going to have any kind of upwards growth towards an open source free unix environment.
To make an ARM-based design actually useful, you're going to have to target RISC-OS, not a new OS, and I have a feeling that even RISC-OS is going to push the limits of what you can run in $6.00 worth of parts.
I can visualize an Apple-][ clone fitting in that budget, but I think ARM is pushing it.
If they can do it for $12.00 (to start with, this should go down in price over time FROM $12.00, not work down to $12.00 from $50), more power to them. But my experience with the price effect of emulating a processor on an ARM makes me distinctly dubious.
Well, strictly speaking, by definition a $12 game console is a $12 computer as well.
Well, strictly speaking, by definition a $12 digital calculator watch is a $12 computer as well.
It may be all very ho-hum for you with your GHz PC and internet connection
No, I'm comparing it with the "$12 Apple ][" that it was originally rumored to be.
all MIT has to do is come up with a NES cartridge with decent software
And its own cartridge slot and some kind of removable mass storage so you can share what you've created with it. That's what made the personal computer revolution. That's why the Apple II and Commodore 64 and Atari 800 beat the technically superior but fatally crippled TI-99/4a.
Which ended up being nothing more than a console, in the end.
I remember when slashdot was full of smart people with a liberal philosophy
I don't remember that. I remember a slashdot full of nerds... all the way down.
I haven't had guaranteed overtime pay at any salaried technical job, ever. And I'm pushing 50. The only time I've gotten overtime is on contract, or during deadline crunch and even there it's something the company does because they don't expect to meet a deadline otherwise. On the other hand, I've only once been officially asked to work more than 40 hours without overtime... and the company was working out of bankruptcy at the time.
This isn't a "$12 computer", this is a "$12 game console".
That's not even a new idea. I've seen cheap old-school console knockoffs at grocery stores for that kind of price range.
Nothing to see here. Move along.