See also: Sheepsafe. http://github.com/nicksieger/sheepsafe... it's a simple Ruby script that automates setting up a SOCKS proxy for you on untrusted networks. I think it's only setup to work w/ OSX right now, but should be pretty simple to adapt to other unixy OSes.
It seems like public schools everywhere (up here in Maine, U.S. anyway) still use Netware for everything. I've always thought it would make sense for Novell to migrate them to a Netware/SuSE solution. The kids would win, because (hopefully) a Microsoft-free solution would be a lot cheaper for the schools, and Novell wins by keeping customers who will otherwise inevitably leave their platform as it ages.
Lobo (100% Pure Java Browser) gets... zero
on
Acid3 Test Released
·
· Score: 1
Woohoo! 0%! And the page looks like complete crap, too!
...here's another dirty little secret of the wireless industry: many phones have the ability to enable the microphone without the owner of the phone even knowing it. I only recently heard about this, and I can't vouch for how valid it is (I don't have much intimate knowledge about how cell handsets work), but even if it isn't true today, it's interesting to consider the possibility that cell phone users are carrying 'bugs' around with them 24/7...
From www.x-rates.com, on Apr 23, the Australian dollar was trading at.617299 U.S. Dollars (i.e., one AUD = US$0.62). $60m AUD times.617299 is about US$37m.
...I write billing and customer care software. We've been ready for WNP for years now. Thought I could maybe clear a couple of things up...
A lot of people are complaining about the fact that in the United States, we only give out blocks of 10,000 numbers. That simply isn't true anymore. Most people don't realize this, but last November, all non-GSM (more on U.S. GSM in a sec) U.S. Cell companies 'split' their phone numbers into two identical numbers... one called the MDN (Mobile Directory Number, or Mobile Dialable Number), and the MIN (Mobile Identification Number). The MDN is what you actually dial when you call your friend on their cell phone, and the MIN is (sort of) what the call routes on (actually, it routes on a different number called the Local Routing Number or LRN, which is associated with the MIN, but I digress...).
Anyway, when the numbers got split, it because possible to dole out phone numbers in smaller blocks... if someone needs a block of 1000 numbers and it's in the same cost center (think long distance charges) as someone else who needs 1000 numbers, they can share the same block of 10000 MDNs and use different MINs with different LRNs. This whole process is called 'Number Pooling'.
All of this also allows for WNP. So essentially, the software is already doing all of the 'hard stuff' today... we've been using two phone numbers since last November. On Nov 24th 2003, you will be able to port your MDN. Your MIN will change. So your dialable number might go from Verizon to Cingular, but your MIN will change from a Verizon MIN to a Cingular MIN. You and your friends don't notice any difference... think of your dialable number like a pointer to a MIN.
Confused? See why Verizon doesn't want to do this? I think WNP is a good thing, but I barely understand this stuff, and I helped write the damned software that's supposed to do all this... imagine training hundreds of customer care staff on how this stuff works.
GSM in the U.S. is a little less scary 'cuz it was designed from the ground-up to route on a separate number from the dialable number (they call the diable number the MSISDN... forget what it stands for off the top of my head... it's pronounced 'Mizz-din'.) GSM routes (again, sort of) on the IMSI, which is programmed into the SIM card. It's kinda sorta like combining the ESN (serial number on the phone) and the LRN from the TDMA/CDMA world into one number.
...why all the European/.ers are saying "SMS works great over here", while we North Americans are not. In Europe, SMS messages travel over the SS7 network... I think this is the network over the public switched telephone network through with the cellular switches communicate. The protocol over this network is 160 byte messages (hence the 160 character limit in SMS). In the United States and Canada, we use the internet to send SMS messages between switches.
That's my understanding anyway, I may have glossed over some important details 'cuz this is one area of the wireless world that I'm (frankly) a little bit hazy on...
I always thought this was a really interesting article about Marc Andreessen (author of the ZDNet article, founder of Netscape, now big kahuna at Loudcloud): GQ Article
Basically, it accuses him of being a fraud... none of his ideas are/were ever his own. Take it with a grain of salt (it's written by someone who's rather bitter about Marc's success), but it is an interesting read...
I was HOPING someone would ask that!!! On November 24th, a new thing called "Wireless Number Portability" was supposed ot be going into effect. Basically, it was to do exactly what you were proposing... allow you to 1.) Port your landline number to a wireless number, or 2.) port your wireless number to another wireless carrier (keeping your old number). Well... guess what? The big wireless carriers (Cingular, Verizon, et. al.) managed to "convince" the FCC that this was a bad idea AGAIN, so it got delayed AGAIN for another year (their reason: too expensive, not enough time. real reason: too dangerous... too much churn on their networks). We were supposed to be doing this years ago! It was supposed to help competition and the little guy!
Meanwhile people like me (who design wireless billing and switch provisioning software) rewrote all of our freakin' software to accomodate wireless number portability, and no one is likely ever going to use it. The consumer end up getting screwed. C'est la vie!
I'm pretty sure that the switch couldn't care less what the IMEI is ('cuz you bill on the IMSI), so the call records that come off the switch don't have that informtation. I work for a cellular billing vendor, but admittedly, the batch/switch/OSS stuff ain't my particular area of expertise (or GSM for that matter), so I could be wrong...
Many wireless airtime plans in the U.S. (where we don't do "calling party pays"... eesh... yet another case where we are "inferior" to the Europeans) have a feature where the first incoming minute is free. This is to allow for things like wrong numbers, but it can also be used against telemarketers... just hang up on them. Find out if your wireless carrier has airtime plans with this feature.
I work for a wireless billing software company. About Item (B)... the FCC is requiring cellular companies to make their numbers "portable" in the near future (more on that later). In other words, you will be able to keep your current wireless phone number, bringing it to another competing wireless provider, provided that it's in the same market.
The problem is, every time the FCC has set a deadline for this to happen, all the big wireless companies whine a lot, petition the FCC because implementing the switch/billing software/etc upgrades would be "too difficult" (i.e. costly), and the deadline gets postponed. As it stands now, it was supposed to already have happened over two years ago, and the latest deadline in late November is probably going to be pushed out another six months (if it hasn't been already). The net result is that it really sucks to be the consumer, 'cuz folks like you have to face decisions like the one you're faced with now.
Thank you Hemos. Even after all of this April Fools Nonsense, posting this link tricked me for half a second.
We used to do this where I used to work...
on
Clear Hard Drive Mods
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
...of course, I worked for a hard drive company, and we'd make the mods in a clean room, for Christ's sake!
I used to write servo firmware, and I'd get to go on recruiting tours to local colleges sometimes... we had clear-case drives at our display. We also used them to debug problems with the spinup and headload algorithms sometimes. Even when they were changed in cleanrooms, the drives usually wouldn't last very long before they'd stop working.
It's kinda interesting that half of the games you list, including the first two, weren't Atari creations at all. AFAIK, Barnstorming, River Raid, and Pitfall were all Activision games.
Well, this article is almost 12 hours old now, so I seriously doubt anyone will read this, but here it goes anyways...
What no one has mentioned in this entire discussion is that this is all being paid for, more or less, by a TRUST FUND. Basically, the interest from this fund is being used to purchase the laptops. If this great experiment proves to be a collosal failure, no big deal. Shut down the trust fund and spend the money that used to be in it on something else. I'm from Maine, and knowing this to be the case, it seems like we'd be pretty stupid not to try this out...
You know, I'm a real sucker for eye-candy, so I was really looking forward to this too... then I saw the screenshot. Holy crap, is that ugly or what? I think the reality is that it's darned hard to read text when you can see through the window. Kinda like reading pages in a book made of celluloid. It's one thing when a transparent window is overlapping your wallpaper... it's quite different to have your windows overlapping each other.
The survey also found that 77.2 percent of the developers surveyed chose Red Hat Linux as the distribution for use with a Web server or Web application server. This is more than three times the 21.8 percent who selected SuSE Linux or Mandrake. Caldera OpenLinux and FreeBSD followed, with 21.4 percent and 20.4 percent, respectively, the data showed.
Ok, so 77.2 + 21.8 + 21.4 + 20.4 = 140.8% ? I guess in the survey folks could respond with more than one choice for their distro, but I'm still surprised that there are *that* many people out there using more than one for their Web servers.
Ok, I know not to take this thing TOO seriously, but COME ON... I can think of TONS of stuff that should be on the list...
- Kings Quest? How could they not include a *single* Sierra game?
- Autoduel
- Pirates!
- RailRoad Tycoon
- Elite
I used to work for a disk drive company... I wrote servo code for their SCSI drives. Cold temperates aren't *too* big of a problem as long as you don't shut the drive off when it's below freezing (the drive generates enough heat to keep itself warm). The rate at which you heat/cool drives can be a problem, though... the rapid expansion/contraction of the disks can cause them to slip... drives have track pitches in excess of 24 thousand tracks per inch now... with tracks that narrow, slipping disks can be a big deal.
I'd be more concerned with shocking the drive. A "normal" 3.5" HDD drive is NOT designed for a laptop, and many drives don't yet park their heads on ramps when they're turned off (i.e., the heads rest on a textured region of the media when the disks are spun down). Jarring the drive too hard smacks the heads right on the media, which is usually not a Good Thing (tm).
Ok, maybe I'm being a little oversensitive here, (heck, I'm a U.S. Citizen, I shouldn't even care about this!) but the fact that the headline for this discussion topic says "Foreign" instead of "Non-U.S." says a lot, I think, about how USA-Centric things are... are we supposed to assume that Foreign always implies Foreign to the United States? I admit it, I'm whining, but c'mon... after a while, I'd think that people outside the USA would get sick of little things like this!
First of all, I'd like to just say I'm grinning wildly at 2600's response. "Oh, we can't have it hyperlinked? That's okay, we'll just make it inline text." Following the letter of the law, gotta love it.
I just visited their website. They're no longer doing this. Now, they're advising people to use Disney's search engine (to which they provide a link) to find copies instead... which is even funnier...
Hmm... I've always kinda thought that programming languages resembled mathematics more than written language. Granted, that's more true for some languages than others... C looks kinda math-like with it's syntax for functions and it's use of symbols, while SQL looks much more English-like.
One thing that might be different is where the "verbs" go. I'm pretty sure that verbs always come last in Japanese sentences. Maybe instead of
SELECT Name FROM ACCOUNTS WHERE Id=660 or
printf("Hello World!\n");
we'd have
FROM ACCOUNTS WHERE Id=660 SELECT Name or
("Hello World!\n")printf;
Slashdot Mirror
See also: Sheepsafe. http://github.com/nicksieger/sheepsafe ... it's a simple Ruby script that automates setting up a SOCKS proxy for you on untrusted networks. I think it's only setup to work w/ OSX right now, but should be pretty simple to adapt to other unixy OSes.
It seems like public schools everywhere (up here in Maine, U.S. anyway) still use Netware for everything. I've always thought it would make sense for Novell to migrate them to a Netware/SuSE solution. The kids would win, because (hopefully) a Microsoft-free solution would be a lot cheaper for the schools, and Novell wins by keeping customers who will otherwise inevitably leave their platform as it ages.
Woohoo! 0%! And the page looks like complete crap, too!
I wonder if what you experienced is exactly how it feels to be a non-English speaker using the internet on any other English-dominated site. :-/
Pssst... SQL Server was purchased from Sybase. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybase
...here's another dirty little secret of the wireless industry: many phones have the ability to enable the microphone without the owner of the phone even knowing it. I only recently heard about this, and I can't vouch for how valid it is (I don't have much intimate knowledge about how cell handsets work), but even if it isn't true today, it's interesting to consider the possibility that cell phone users are carrying 'bugs' around with them 24/7...
From www.x-rates.com, on Apr 23, the Australian dollar was trading at .617299 U.S. Dollars (i.e., one AUD = US$0.62). $60m AUD times .617299 is about US$37m.
A lot of people are complaining about the fact that in the United States, we only give out blocks of 10,000 numbers. That simply isn't true anymore. Most people don't realize this, but last November, all non-GSM (more on U.S. GSM in a sec) U.S. Cell companies 'split' their phone numbers into two identical numbers... one called the MDN (Mobile Directory Number, or Mobile Dialable Number), and the MIN (Mobile Identification Number). The MDN is what you actually dial when you call your friend on their cell phone, and the MIN is (sort of) what the call routes on (actually, it routes on a different number called the Local Routing Number or LRN, which is associated with the MIN, but I digress...).
Anyway, when the numbers got split, it because possible to dole out phone numbers in smaller blocks... if someone needs a block of 1000 numbers and it's in the same cost center (think long distance charges) as someone else who needs 1000 numbers, they can share the same block of 10000 MDNs and use different MINs with different LRNs. This whole process is called 'Number Pooling'.
All of this also allows for WNP. So essentially, the software is already doing all of the 'hard stuff' today... we've been using two phone numbers since last November. On Nov 24th 2003, you will be able to port your MDN. Your MIN will change. So your dialable number might go from Verizon to Cingular, but your MIN will change from a Verizon MIN to a Cingular MIN. You and your friends don't notice any difference... think of your dialable number like a pointer to a MIN.
Confused? See why Verizon doesn't want to do this? I think WNP is a good thing, but I barely understand this stuff, and I helped write the damned software that's supposed to do all this... imagine training hundreds of customer care staff on how this stuff works.
GSM in the U.S. is a little less scary 'cuz it was designed from the ground-up to route on a separate number from the dialable number (they call the diable number the MSISDN... forget what it stands for off the top of my head... it's pronounced 'Mizz-din'.) GSM routes (again, sort of) on the IMSI, which is programmed into the SIM card. It's kinda sorta like combining the ESN (serial number on the phone) and the LRN from the TDMA/CDMA world into one number.
That's my understanding anyway, I may have glossed over some important details 'cuz this is one area of the wireless world that I'm (frankly) a little bit hazy on...
I always thought this was a really interesting article about Marc Andreessen (author of the ZDNet article, founder of Netscape, now big kahuna at Loudcloud): GQ Article
Basically, it accuses him of being a fraud... none of his ideas are/were ever his own. Take it with a grain of salt (it's written by someone who's rather bitter about Marc's success), but it is an interesting read...
Meanwhile people like me (who design wireless billing and switch provisioning software) rewrote all of our freakin' software to accomodate wireless number portability, and no one is likely ever going to use it. The consumer end up getting screwed. C'est la vie!
I'm pretty sure that the switch couldn't care less what the IMEI is ('cuz you bill on the IMSI), so the call records that come off the switch don't have that informtation. I work for a cellular billing vendor, but admittedly, the batch/switch/OSS stuff ain't my particular area of expertise (or GSM for that matter), so I could be wrong...
Many wireless airtime plans in the U.S. (where we don't do "calling party pays"... eesh... yet another case where we are "inferior" to the Europeans) have a feature where the first incoming minute is free. This is to allow for things like wrong numbers, but it can also be used against telemarketers... just hang up on them. Find out if your wireless carrier has airtime plans with this feature.
I work for a wireless billing software company. About Item (B)... the FCC is requiring cellular companies to make their numbers "portable" in the near future (more on that later). In other words, you will be able to keep your current wireless phone number, bringing it to another competing wireless provider, provided that it's in the same market.
The problem is, every time the FCC has set a deadline for this to happen, all the big wireless companies whine a lot, petition the FCC because implementing the switch/billing software/etc upgrades would be "too difficult" (i.e. costly), and the deadline gets postponed. As it stands now, it was supposed to already have happened over two years ago, and the latest deadline in late November is probably going to be pushed out another six months (if it hasn't been already). The net result is that it really sucks to be the consumer, 'cuz folks like you have to face decisions like the one you're faced with now.
Thank you Hemos. Even after all of this April Fools Nonsense, posting this link tricked me for half a second.
I used to write servo firmware, and I'd get to go on recruiting tours to local colleges sometimes... we had clear-case drives at our display. We also used them to debug problems with the spinup and headload algorithms sometimes. Even when they were changed in cleanrooms, the drives usually wouldn't last very long before they'd stop working.
It's kinda interesting that half of the games you list, including the first two, weren't Atari creations at all. AFAIK, Barnstorming, River Raid, and Pitfall were all Activision games.
What no one has mentioned in this entire discussion is that this is all being paid for, more or less, by a TRUST FUND. Basically, the interest from this fund is being used to purchase the laptops. If this great experiment proves to be a collosal failure, no big deal. Shut down the trust fund and spend the money that used to be in it on something else. I'm from Maine, and knowing this to be the case, it seems like we'd be pretty stupid not to try this out...
You know, I'm a real sucker for eye-candy, so I was really looking forward to this too... then I saw the screenshot. Holy crap, is that ugly or what? I think the reality is that it's darned hard to read text when you can see through the window. Kinda like reading pages in a book made of celluloid. It's one thing when a transparent window is overlapping your wallpaper... it's quite different to have your windows overlapping each other.
Ok, so 77.2 + 21.8 + 21.4 + 20.4 = 140.8% ? I guess in the survey folks could respond with more than one choice for their distro, but I'm still surprised that there are *that* many people out there using more than one for their Web servers.
Ok, I know not to take this thing TOO seriously, but COME ON... I can think of TONS of stuff that should be on the list... - Kings Quest? How could they not include a *single* Sierra game? - Autoduel - Pirates! - RailRoad Tycoon - Elite
I'd be more concerned with shocking the drive. A "normal" 3.5" HDD drive is NOT designed for a laptop, and many drives don't yet park their heads on ramps when they're turned off (i.e., the heads rest on a textured region of the media when the disks are spun down). Jarring the drive too hard smacks the heads right on the media, which is usually not a Good Thing (tm).
Ok, maybe I'm being a little oversensitive here, (heck, I'm a U.S. Citizen, I shouldn't even care about this!) but the fact that the headline for this discussion topic says "Foreign" instead of "Non-U.S." says a lot, I think, about how USA-Centric things are... are we supposed to assume that Foreign always implies Foreign to the United States? I admit it, I'm whining, but c'mon... after a while, I'd think that people outside the USA would get sick of little things like this!
I just visited their website. They're no longer doing this. Now, they're advising people to use Disney's search engine (to which they provide a link) to find copies instead... which is even funnier...
Hmm... I've always kinda thought that programming languages resembled mathematics more than written language. Granted, that's more true for some languages than others... C looks kinda math-like with it's syntax for functions and it's use of symbols, while SQL looks much more English-like. One thing that might be different is where the "verbs" go. I'm pretty sure that verbs always come last in Japanese sentences. Maybe instead of SELECT Name FROM ACCOUNTS WHERE Id=660 or printf("Hello World!\n"); we'd have FROM ACCOUNTS WHERE Id=660 SELECT Name or ("Hello World!\n")printf;