> The really funny thing is, IT spending is > expected to rise AGAIN this year, after all of > the (some wasted) dollars spent on the 'Y2K > Bug' (it wasn't a bug, it was a feature!).
Of course it is. All of the companies that spent their time on Y2K now have to go back and do a year's worth of implementing new stuff that they had to put off.
Where I work, we have had a moratorium since 4Q, so we weren't allowed to make any changes to the network that would affect anything. In the meantime, projects have been piling up. We've got *tons* of new work to do.
Y2K == job security, at least for another year or two.:)
Are there any online examples of this technique? I don't have a camera, but I'd love to see what this looks like...:)
Reminds me of some fun you can have with a microphone and a simple wav recorder/editor. You sample yourself saying something ("pistachio" is a good one), then reverse it. Then sample yourself trying to say it like you hear it reversed. Fun ensues.
And...I really hate to say it, but I doubt the DVD consortium would care about the buying habits of a reasonably small segment of the DVD-buying population. I mean, there's a lot more people out there than just the collection of open-source advocates who don't have home-theater systems.
That's true, but the way I see it, the Open Source community tends to be the die-hard geeks who are early adopters. I suspect that it is often *us* who make or break a product in it's early stages.
DVD is at the critical point where it's starting to make it into homes of the non-techno-elite. The last thing they want is the situation where geek A tells all of his non-geek friends not to buy DVDs.
It's not necessarily a matter of *buying* old ones... at work we've got a TON of old D classes sitting around doing nothing that I would love to put linux on to play with:)
> In light of these concerns it astounds me > that bosses in some companies use ICQ to > talk to their employees on the job. ICQ > may be a fun toy but do you really want > to bet your company's next product (or > for that matter your company) on it?
Of course, Mirabilis's whole point was to sell servers to companies that want to have instant messaging in the office. The original idea was to have your *own* ICQ server at work.
> 1. Packaging a finger daemon with the > chat client, so that people can use > finger to see who's logged on,...
if security is a concern, finger is probably not the best way to do this, as it is one of the first things a lot of administrators turn off...
But you're right, it would be good to see a nice, open, and *secure* instant message protocol. I think the Jabber project seems to be on the right track.
> There are no directories on the server side, > it's all served off of one script. Yet, to the > user, it appears as a hierarchical directory > structure, complete with.html files.
That may be great for search engine indexing, but how maintainable is the code that serves that? Unless you have everything organized in a database, it's got to be a real pain in the butt to maintain one big monolithic CGI.
Don't forget, since the book says "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus" -- the real reason it crashed in the first place is because it wouldn't ask for directions.:)
Now I don't feel so bad about going ahead with my plan to sue the makers of Apache, wu-ftpd, and anyone else I can think of for making servers to distribute illegal software!
I usually think of a simple to remember password, and mess with it a bit (bu11Y4u, whatever), or come up with something more random if the account is important, then scramble it by typing it in dvorak on a qwerty keyboard, then doing the translation...
ie (bu11Y4u = nf11T4f, etc.)
it becomes fairly unreadable, but I suppose if you had a dictionary cracker that did dvorak conversion, it would be easier to crack, but hey, that's what backups are for...
> My benchmark for the day when Linux is regarded > as having won the OS war against Microsoft is > when a majority of major games are produced for > Linux first.
I think the trick will be either...
a) winelib getting good enough that they will *develop* games on Linux and then compile for windows too
b) clanlib/ptc/ggi/etc. being good enough and portable enough for everyone to start writing to cross-platform gaming libraries in the first place.
To me, it would seem that it would be to the advantage of game developers to *write* to these APIs in the first place. I mean really, most game companies have their own routines for everything, and they all duplicate routines other companies make. Why not put it all in one lib and work on making better games instead of rebuilding the infrastructure for each new title?
Instead of going through the hell of debugging and fixing things over and over again, donate the game-independent code to one of the cross-platform libraries.
Of course, that would require game companies to make new and interesting games to compete, instead of "we have the best whiz-bang graphics even though our game is boring!":)
> Do any of you out there even CARE? Or like I > figure, none of you understand how you get paid > (many of you are students ANYWAY!) and how lost > profits affect you.
Well, I assume the archival law still applies here (you can make a backup copy for storage). Not only that, but I know of a real-world, legitimate use for this...
My friend has a lot of DVDs, and he travels often for work, but he can't yet afford a portable DVD-playing device (be it DVD-ROM or one of those spiffy mini players). He asked me if there was something to extract them, because he has a laptop (without a DVD-ROM), and wanted to know if there was a way to convert them to VCDs so he can watch them on the road.
This has been said on Slashdot many times in other contexts, but... just because it's been cracked doesn't mean it was done maliciously. There *are* real-world, legitimate uses for this (DVD-playing for Linux? Archived VCDs?), just as there are illegitimate uses.
Granted, maybe more people will use it for Evil than will use it for Good (TM), we have yet to see.
> To me the biggest speed disadvantage Perl has to > C/C++/whatever is that it's interpreted and not > compiled, but what little people realise is that > there is a perl compiler out there
As far as I know, the way perlcc works is to compile the bytecode, and then embed the bytecode into a mini perl-interpreter. You may get a speed increase out of not byte-compiling, but that still wouldn't take care of the speed hit from forking and such.
I suspect a mod_perl solution will still be faster than perlcc...
> I think that perl sucks. I did a quick poll here > at the office and the only people that like Perl > are People that do NOT come from a 'traditional' > programming background. Typically a webmaster, > sysadmin etc... These are people that need > something quick and dirty. > > The day they'll ask me to maintain PerlCode I'm > quitting!
Then I suspect you're office is in the minority. Here at our office, Perl is the tool-du-jour. Sure, we can do everything in C/C++ that we can do in Perl, but it takes a heck of a lot longer, especially considering how many platforms we have.
Just because Perl is easily used for something quick and dirty doesn't mean that's all it's used for. Readability of perl code is *entirely* the results of the abilities of the programmer. Perl is a very forgiving language, and that means that while it's easier to write great code, it's also easier to write horrible code.
Like I had said in an earlier/. thread about Perl readability... "Perl doesn't kill code... PEOPLE kill code."
On the subject of the topic at hand, I was under the impression that a lot of the disadvantages of Perl compared to C/C++ (forking to run a CGI, time to interpret/compile the script before running) are taken care of by mod_perl (as noted in other threads). mod_perl, combined with the ability to create web applications much faster in perl would lead me to believe it's well worth it.
> But from what's been said on the PNG website, > PNG's typically compress 5%-25% better than > GIF's do. Not only that, but "PNG's compression > is fully lossless" (that's off the website While > I agree that older browsers not supporting PNG > is a problem, they do seem to be a nice graphics > format.
While PNGs are great, and may compress better, the current crop of browsers have a horrible time loading them (speed-, and feature support-wise). This becomes even more of a problem when people load something like quicktime, which I've seen hijack the PNG support in IE, which means you're not just loading an image, you're loading a plugin *and* an image.
Hopefully things like Mozilla will fix some of these problems, and who knows, maybe PNG support will improve in Netscape and IE. Unfortunately, that still doesn't take care of old browsers. Check your logs, you'd be *amazed* how many connections you'll see from Netscape 2.x/3.x and sometimes even older...
> People are voting for handsome faces more than > for wise brains etc. Elections are such a > bullshit now.
Reminds me of a passage in the Stephen Bury (aka Neal Stephenson) book, _Interface_:
"In the 1700s, politics was all about ideas. But Jefferson came up with all the good ideas. In the 1800s, it was all about character. But no one will ever have as much character as Lincoln and Lee. For much of the 1900s it was about charisma. But we no longer trust charisma because Hitler used it to kill Jews and JFK used it to get laid and send us to Vietnam." ... "So what's it about now?" Aaron said. "Scrutiny. We are in the Age of Scrutiny. A public figure must withstand the scrutiny of the media."
I liked it so much I marked up my book so I could find it again.:)
Nobody (well, at least the majority of voters) seems to care about ideas and ideals anymore. They don't look at what a candidate actually *did* previously in his political career, they just react to how he presents himself on TV. When is the last time you actually heard a candidate have a real discussion about the workings of the government, issues, and how things should change? Instead of presenting their views, they hit the hot buttons of taxes, abortion, and anything with the key word 'children', without really saying a word.
Geez, what a rant...
Anyways, as far as Echelon goes, the idea scares me (the invasion of privacy almost as much as the thought that any government agency can actually coordinate something so far-reaching without screwing it up). However, as has been said elsewhere in this article, the chances of them keeping track of even a small percentage of the 'net, given it's size, is pretty slim without the active participation of a large majority of the Internet's infrastructure. The truly evil thing is that it is even being attempted.
Admittedly, unless you encrypt your mail and such, "privacy" on the Internet is just a gentleman's agreement, considering the nature of a network. The real issue is that it's a symptom of the larger problem of a seeming decline in common decency in general, not just on the Internet. Perhapse it's just a perceived decline, but to me, the oil that keeps our social machine going is losing it's viscosity.:)
(Score: 0.5, Mostly Offtopic)
Re:Does it have network drivers this time? yes
on
QNX OS on a floppy
·
· Score: 2
Yes, they have a network version now. Worked fine with my ne2000 clone card.
> Anybody who read The Cathedral and Bazaar (most > people here, I'm assuming), know that the entire > PREMISE of the free software industry is > "release early, release often" -- which means > that free software uses the attitude described > in this article, only on steroids.
The difference is that free software (in most cases) releases early, but they don't call it a 1.0 release! The premise of "release early, release often" is a continuous alpha/beta cycle, *not* "every release is production code".
Slashdot Mirror
> The really funny thing is, IT spending is
:)
> expected to rise AGAIN this year, after all of
> the (some wasted) dollars spent on the 'Y2K
> Bug' (it wasn't a bug, it was a feature!).
Of course it is. All of the companies that spent their time on Y2K now have to go back and do a year's worth of implementing new stuff that they had to put off.
Where I work, we have had a moratorium since 4Q, so we weren't allowed to make any changes to the network that would affect anything. In the meantime, projects have been piling up. We've got *tons* of new work to do.
Y2K == job security, at least for another year or two.
Are there any online examples of this technique? I don't have a camera, but I'd love to see what this looks like... :)
Reminds me of some fun you can have with a microphone and a simple wav recorder/editor. You sample yourself saying something ("pistachio" is a good one), then reverse it. Then sample yourself trying to say it like you hear it reversed. Fun ensues.
Yeah, I can see it now:
"Open the CD-ROM bay door, BIL."
"I'm sorry, I can't do that Dave."
> The movies usually give us a GOOD idea what to
> expect in the future when technology is
> concerned.
Dear god! You mean C.H.U.D. is REAL!?
:)
Apparently whoever marked me as offtopic hasn't read it...
That's true, but the way I see it, the Open Source community tends to be the die-hard geeks who are early adopters. I suspect that it is often *us* who make or break a product in it's early stages.
DVD is at the critical point where it's starting to make it into homes of the non-techno-elite. The last thing they want is the situation where geek A tells all of his non-geek friends not to buy DVDs.
Didn't I read this in Neil Stephenson's Zodiac? :)
Here's mine: http://defiance.darktech.org/decss/
It's not necessarily a matter of *buying* old ones... at work we've got a TON of old D classes sitting around doing nothing that I would love to put linux on to play with :)
> that bosses in some companies use ICQ to
> talk to their employees on the job. ICQ
> may be a fun toy but do you really want
> to bet your company's next product (or
> for that matter your company) on it?
Of course, Mirabilis's whole point was to sell servers to companies that want to have instant messaging in the office. The original idea was to have your *own* ICQ server at work.
> 1. Packaging a finger daemon with the ...
> chat client, so that people can use
> finger to see who's logged on,
if security is a concern, finger is probably not the best way to do this, as it is one of the first things a lot of administrators turn off...
But you're right, it would be good to see a nice, open, and *secure* instant message protocol. I think the Jabber project seems to be on the right track.
> There are no directories on the server side, .html files.
> it's all served off of one script. Yet, to the
> user, it appears as a hierarchical directory
> structure, complete with
That may be great for search engine indexing, but how maintainable is the code that serves that? Unless you have everything organized in a database, it's got to be a real pain in the butt to maintain one big monolithic CGI.
Don't forget, since the book says "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus" -- the real reason it crashed in the first place is because it wouldn't ask for directions. :)
Now I don't feel so bad about going ahead with my plan to sue the makers of Apache, wu-ftpd, and anyone else I can think of for making servers to distribute illegal software!
Bah! How can any review site compare to BFatt & Lazy?!?
Yeah, but, does it run Lin... oh, wait, um... never mind.
I usually think of a simple to remember password, and mess with it a bit (bu11Y4u, whatever), or come up with something more random if the account is important, then scramble it by typing it in dvorak on a qwerty keyboard, then doing the translation...
ie (bu11Y4u = nf11T4f, etc.)
it becomes fairly unreadable, but I suppose if you had a dictionary cracker that did dvorak conversion, it would be easier to crack, but hey, that's what backups are for...
> My benchmark for the day when Linux is regarded
:)
> as having won the OS war against Microsoft is
> when a majority of major games are produced for
> Linux first.
I think the trick will be either...
a) winelib getting good enough that they will *develop* games on Linux and then compile for windows too
b) clanlib/ptc/ggi/etc. being good enough and portable enough for everyone to start writing to cross-platform gaming libraries in the first place.
To me, it would seem that it would be to the advantage of game developers to *write* to these APIs in the first place. I mean really, most game companies have their own routines for everything, and they all duplicate routines other companies make. Why not put it all in one lib and work on making better games instead of rebuilding the infrastructure for each new title?
Instead of going through the hell of debugging and fixing things over and over again, donate the game-independent code to one of the cross-platform libraries.
Of course, that would require game companies to make new and interesting games to compete, instead of "we have the best whiz-bang graphics even though our game is boring!"
-- Just my 2 cents.
> Do any of you out there even CARE? Or like I
> figure, none of you understand how you get paid
> (many of you are students ANYWAY!) and how lost
> profits affect you.
Well, I assume the archival law still applies here (you can make a backup copy for storage). Not only that, but I know of a real-world, legitimate use for this...
My friend has a lot of DVDs, and he travels often for work, but he can't yet afford a portable DVD-playing device (be it DVD-ROM or one of those spiffy mini players). He asked me if there was something to extract them, because he has a laptop (without a DVD-ROM), and wanted to know if there was a way to convert them to VCDs so he can watch them on the road.
This has been said on Slashdot many times in other contexts, but... just because it's been cracked doesn't mean it was done maliciously. There *are* real-world, legitimate uses for this (DVD-playing for Linux? Archived VCDs?), just as there are illegitimate uses.
Granted, maybe more people will use it for Evil than will use it for Good (TM), we have yet to see.
> To me the biggest speed disadvantage Perl has to
> C/C++/whatever is that it's interpreted and not
> compiled, but what little people realise is that
> there is a perl compiler out there
As far as I know, the way perlcc works is to compile the bytecode, and then embed the bytecode into a mini perl-interpreter. You may get a speed increase out of not byte-compiling, but that still wouldn't take care of the speed hit from forking and such.
I suspect a mod_perl solution will still be faster than perlcc...
> I think that perl sucks. I did a quick poll here
/. thread about Perl readability... "Perl doesn't kill code... PEOPLE kill code."
> at the office and the only people that like Perl
> are People that do NOT come from a 'traditional'
> programming background. Typically a webmaster,
> sysadmin etc... These are people that need
> something quick and dirty.
>
> The day they'll ask me to maintain PerlCode I'm
> quitting!
Then I suspect you're office is in the minority. Here at our office, Perl is the tool-du-jour. Sure, we can do everything in C/C++ that we can do in Perl, but it takes a heck of a lot longer, especially considering how many platforms we have.
Just because Perl is easily used for something quick and dirty doesn't mean that's all it's used for. Readability of perl code is *entirely* the results of the abilities of the programmer. Perl is a very forgiving language, and that means that while it's easier to write great code, it's also easier to write horrible code.
Like I had said in an earlier
On the subject of the topic at hand, I was under the impression that a lot of the disadvantages of Perl compared to C/C++ (forking to run a CGI, time to interpret/compile the script before running) are taken care of by mod_perl (as noted in other threads). mod_perl, combined with the ability to create web applications much faster in perl would lead me to believe it's well worth it.
> But from what's been said on the PNG website,
> PNG's typically compress 5%-25% better than
> GIF's do. Not only that, but "PNG's compression
> is fully lossless" (that's off the website While
> I agree that older browsers not supporting PNG
> is a problem, they do seem to be a nice graphics
> format.
While PNGs are great, and may compress better, the current crop of browsers have a horrible time loading them (speed-, and feature support-wise). This becomes even more of a problem when people load something like quicktime, which I've seen hijack the PNG support in IE, which means you're not just loading an image, you're loading a plugin *and* an image.
Hopefully things like Mozilla will fix some of these problems, and who knows, maybe PNG support will improve in Netscape and IE. Unfortunately, that still doesn't take care of old browsers. Check your logs, you'd be *amazed* how many connections you'll see from Netscape 2.x/3.x and sometimes even older...
> for wise brains etc. Elections are such a
> bullshit now.
Reminds me of a passage in the Stephen Bury (aka Neal Stephenson) book, _Interface_:
I liked it so much I marked up my book so I could find it again. :)
Nobody (well, at least the majority of voters) seems to care about ideas and ideals anymore. They don't look at what a candidate actually *did* previously in his political career, they just react to how he presents himself on TV. When is the last time you actually heard a candidate have a real discussion about the workings of the government, issues, and how things should change? Instead of presenting their views, they hit the hot buttons of taxes, abortion, and anything with the key word 'children', without really saying a word.
Geez, what a rant...
Anyways, as far as Echelon goes, the idea scares me (the invasion of privacy almost as much as the thought that any government agency can actually coordinate something so far-reaching without screwing it up). However, as has been said elsewhere in this article, the chances of them keeping track of even a small percentage of the 'net, given it's size, is pretty slim without the active participation of a large majority of the Internet's infrastructure. The truly evil thing is that it is even being attempted.
Admittedly, unless you encrypt your mail and such, "privacy" on the Internet is just a gentleman's agreement, considering the nature of a network. The real issue is that it's a symptom of the larger problem of a seeming decline in common decency in general, not just on the Internet. Perhapse it's just a perceived decline, but to me, the oil that keeps our social machine going is losing it's viscosity. :)
(Score: 0.5, Mostly Offtopic)
Yes, they have a network version now. Worked fine with my ne2000 clone card.
> Anybody who read The Cathedral and Bazaar (most
> people here, I'm assuming), know that the entire
> PREMISE of the free software industry is > "release early, release often" -- which means
> that free software uses the attitude described
> in this article, only on steroids.
The difference is that free software (in most cases) releases early, but they don't call it a 1.0 release! The premise of "release early, release often" is a continuous alpha/beta cycle, *not* "every release is production code".
Isn't that kind of like saying "several analysts said that Microsoft would use Office Documents to compete with the C programming language"?