Not so bad at all really. A better analogy, and one I can tell my daughter, would be to compare such work with an Egyptian Slave's job. You eat and work on beautiful objects but your work is secret and in the end it gets locked up in a tomb with a dead man and perhaps yourself never to be seen again by anyone you know or care about. Not very satisfying at all, especiall when you cosider that your work is paid for and props up the nasty structure that enslaves everyone you know. Nah, jerk off works better.
True enough. I've just deployed messagewall (http://www.messagewall.org) on a Gnu/Linux Debian box to provide antivirus protection to the umpteen Windows boxen sitting behind hit.
It works a treat. messagewall is free/free and uses openantivirus (http://www.openantivirus.org) virus definitions. Yet, who gets more "wins"? And would those wins be possible without lonely orphaned Linux boxen doing all the hard work and keeping the sl1ck windows XP installations safe from the big bag world?
I love OSS and do all I can to support it, from evangelising to submitting bug reports to contributing to FAQs... sometimes, however, I can't help but feel we're being used and I'm in two minds about protecting the shite windows boxes with a slick piece of software like messagewall when, without the oss world, those boxen would be exposed for slaughter.
I would think that the cafe may be able to undercut the portable satellite network equipment, expeditions would still need the equipment to cover their travel to the mountain etc but once there [c|w]ould the cafe be cheaper?
Perhaps, but if you have a major chunk of your expedition underwritten by a media outlet that *insists* on daily reports for its readers/viewers, do you think they're going to chance that the cafe is running, or carry their own gear?
Also, depending on the route the climbers are taking, Advanced Base Camp can be a *very* long hike from Base Camp.
On top of that I think that the climbers will be more interested in downloading weather data (though the tourist will be sending their emails)
Well, all expeditions are equipped with their own satellite network links these days. Check out the climbing section of mountainzone.com
http://climb.mountainzone.com/ for example. Most expeditions now also have a dedicated blogger who writes for a newspaper and a website. All this data, including satellite phone calls home (and to the sponsors) are the norm now.
The cafe will, I imagine, be for the tourists for whom base camp is the destination. It won't play a part in expeditions or expeditions planning.
erm. no. How many people can, without any impediments, gain physical access to your servers? Even if it's a 1000, that's nothing compared to the number who can gain access remotely. The first step to security is locking down remote access.
I travel quite a bit (I pass through an airport at least four times a month). The number of BSODs I see is quite extraordinary. It puzzles me, why on earth are they using Windows for those displays?
Likewise, during the height of the dotbomb one of the coach companies running between Oxford and London installed an "infotainment" machine which looped ads in Flash for the, erm, pleasure of the passangers. Fortunately, that was running NT and would BSOD 9 times out of 10.
A post above mentions the Tube and London bus stops displaying transit information... the same holds true for Milan and Madrid. It's hella useful.
Linux seems to be doing alright. It's replacing commercial OS's... if you missed the news, IBM is replacing AIX (commercial) with Linux (community). That, alone, is a pretty solid counter-example to your statement.
I'd like to hear why you think "official" support is so much better?
It seems as if mictosoft made a good move with the xbox. It seems to attract a great deal of the people that don't want to use windows. But for some reason a restricted computer by microsoft sounds good to the same people here. What's the catch here, could someone tell me?
Microsoft loses money on every unit sold (like Sony and Nintendo). They make money from selling you games (like Sony and Nintendo). When the XBox is hacked / moded to run Linux, you're not using it the way they intended (ie. you're not buying the games). What you end up with is a great piece of hardware, subsidised by Microsoft. Which is why we like it:)
Unfortunately the point of view of other countries is lets lay down and accept things the way they are until something really bad happens to make us pull our skirt back up and say "no". Australia learned that when the nightclub in Bali was bombed.
What the arse was Australia supposed to do *before* the attack? Perform a strategic surgical carpet bombing of the countries its tourists planned to visit?
So, when we're attacked, it's up to us to "do something" to "end the cycle of violence and revenge?" What "something" are we supposed to do, just let it slide, wave it off as "just one of those things we deserve?"
.No, I don't think that's the right attitude either.
I think there are other more productive solutions that should be explored before turning the middle east into glass. Don't forget, for all the irrational hatred that is being projected at the States, there's a lot of irrational hatred being projected back.
The cost of carpet bombing Iraq will be massive. The outcome? Well, briefly, the threat (if there is any) of Iraq will disappear but when it's resurrected by the children of the survivors, it will be that much more profound. If the States really do want to oust Hussein, why not, for example, carpet bomb Iraq with food and medicine with "from your Uncle Sam" propaganda attached? It would cost far, far less than dropping bombs.
Who are the Iraqi people going to support? A despot who gasses them or a friend who helps? A revolution that grows from the ground up and is nurtured into an open democracy is more likely to be long-lasting than exorcising the current regime through military might and then imposing and defending a puppet government by force.
Bombing the hell out of them will not bring a satisfactory long term solution. They will hate (if they already don't) the USA as much as they hate Hussein. The cycle of violence will continue.
Personally, I thought "I like to watch" was incredibly daring when it appeared (what, a month or two after 11/9?).
The difference here is that GNN's film attempts to be constructive and that, in my view, is an important difference. We can snigger at Bush's pea-sized brain but the fact is, he (and Blair et al) has got the sales pitch going and those against his war-mongering, do not. We can't just say, "don't destroy out civil rights, don't go to war" without offering an alternative, without offering some kind of argument.
"I like to watch" is a wonderful pisstake of the media. "Redux" is a powerful and persuasive argument against going to war.
The powerful message coming out of the film was that we (and by "we" it's clear GNN means "the west", not america alone) are in a position to do something about the dangerous cycle of violence that is threatening what we have come to know as free civilisation.
By equating Al Qaeda with Islam, and the actions of terrorists with those of muslims, many in positions of responsibility in government (specifically, the clip shows Bush and his aides, Jean Chretien, Tony Blair, et al) and especially the media are pushing the views of the public toward a mindset last seen, with catastrophic outcomes, in the crusades.
According to Bush, because "they" hate "us", we must beat them until they change their minds. Christianity == good, Islam == bad. "Either you're with us, or with the terrorists", declared Bush.
Well, this film shows that we needn't subscribe to that point of view.
Microsoft had initially hoped to donate this amount in-kind to schools, right? In other words, Microsoft had wanted to donate this amount in software and other Microsoft products. Ostensibly, the schools were to receive the benefit. The problem from the perspective on many individuals and competitors (such as Apple) was that this would allow Microsoft to extend its monopoly into a market it didn't already have a monopoly in.
I think you're confusing the cases here and the penalties. This one is the result of a class action law suit. The remedy which microsoft proposed involving giving software to schools was in the antitrust case.
Understandable that you've confused them. They are violating so many laws and being found guilty again and again it's difficult to keep track.
Both outcomes (the class action and the antitrust) are lame though 'cept for the fact that they vindicate those of us who've been ranting on about microsoft's criminal behaviour...
- Why do we still have to choose between a bunch of different desktops, ALL of which are mutually incompatible?
Out of all the duff crap in your post, this is worst. There's nothing stopping a KDE user from loading Gnome apps or vice versa, you just have to have the appropriate libraries loaded.
Are slashdotters extremely naive or something? Every company takes a look at the competition and compares it to their own product, distributing memos on whats better about the competition so that they can improve on their own products.
This isn't news. It's business.
I was about to mod you down but decided to respond instead.
Have you read the article? I suspect not. As you are clearly unaware, Microsoft bought Hotmail. At the time they bought it, Hotmail was running on FreeBSD. Much to Microsoft's shame, they couldn't port Hotmail to Windows and keep the service running. Finally, after months and months and months of effort, they did it. But it isn't done well and as this report demonstrates, their own engineers aren't happy with how it's been done.
This has nothing to do with "looking at the competition". This has everything to do with Microsoft's engineers writing up the reasons for the inadequacy of w2k for a large-scale deployment of this kind. Key phrases from the article:
- "Although Hotmail uses Microsoft software without license fees, we must consider this project as a model for real customers. Use of WLBS requires Advanced Server, but Server provides all the other features used by Hotmail. Using list prices, the cost comparison for a farm of 3500 servers is: Using WLBS (hence Advanced Server): $15M+ / Using LD and Server: $6M+"
- "A service may be hung, and rather than take the time to find and fix the problem, it is often more convenient to reboot [a Windows machine]. By contrast, UNIX administrators are conditioned to quickly identify the failing service and simply restart it; they are helped in this by the greater transparency of UNIX and the small number of interdependencies."
...and so on. You accuse the/. masses of rabidity but it is, as a point of fact, you who are knee-jerking in defence of the justified laughter and celebration of those of us who have to fight against Microsoft FUD on a daily basis. How nice to have a document to point to now and say, "look, if you don't believe me, believe microsoft. Deploying on a *nix platform is cheaper and better!"
Does anyone know if it's based on one of the Debian derivatives or have these guys actually solved the "make Debian easy to install" problem by themselves?
Linux not ready for the desktop? Have you read the article? Have you tried the cd? It's amazing what a good distro can do.
Setting up printing as is as easy as clicking through a wizard, same with changing video settings, scanners, etc, etc, etc. How the arse do you justify spreading this kind of FUD? Do you get confused because the widgets look a little differently from your win98 desktop?
In the last several months, I've given away about 20 knoppix cds directly (indirectly, by running Linux training courses for which students use Knoppix, I've given away many more). It's all down to experience. Once users get used to a slightly improved (and hence, different) way of doing things, they're all over Linux.
And Flash and RealPlayer are vital for her. I'm going to have trouble enough convincing her to live without QuickTime...
xine now does Sorenson quicktime. xine is included in Knoppix. There's a mozilla plugin in the works.
Re:Why not use old LCDs?
on
Making A Videowall
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
You could salvage LCDs from old laptops.
Not so easily done: http://www.eio.com/lcdconnect.htm as far as I can tell, you'd have to get into some pretty heavy-duty electronics and buy convertor cards to handle the different input expected by a laptop display from that which is delivered by a vga card.
All the computing sector needs is an influx of people who think they know something about computers.
These people get a government job, and start telling their contractors what to do and how to do it
This courses introduction should be "Here is what real software engineers do (insert comlex UML diagram here), and this course won't prepare you to even get there."
Nice troll.
To paraphrase, I believe it's Swift, "a little learnin' is a dangerous thing", true. However, there's "a little learnin'" and awareness raising. How many people here moan about users who can't diagnose the most basic of hardware/software related problems. It's not because they don't want to diagnose the issue it's because they've been told that their computer is a dreadully complicated beast that they can never hope to understand. So if the printer doesn't print, it must be a problem that can only be resolved by a call to tech support rather than a quick check to see if the power is on, if the cables are plugged in or if the OS is reporting an error.
This course goes further though. It doesn't teach "howtos" -- which I agree can lead to trouble, it teaches fundamentals. What is it that makes a computer tick? How does it work? How is that mouse gestures and keystrokes make things go that then appear on a monitor. This is grand stuff to know and to teach. This isn't taught on a systems-level, but on a conceptual level. Nobody is going to come out of this thinking they can become kernel hackers.
What are you anyway? A programmer? an engineer? Whatever it is that you do, do you really believe that you shouldn't know about things outside of your core competence? Aren't you ever intrigued by the workings of nature? physics? What if a physcist said to you, "hey now, don't go reading that quantum physics stuff, you're liable to think you know something about it and cause a disaster." Or if a chef freaked because they saw you fingering a cookbook?
Linux, which is even newer than Windows and is not controlled by a single commercial entity, can be expected to have even more vulnerabilities than Windows.
um, I don't get it. How does newer == "less secure" in this scenario? Sure, the older and os the more time it's had for the kinks to be worked out of it. But doesn't method have something to do with it also? Linux is developed in an open and peer-reviewed environment. It's maturing much faster than windows. There's no reason to compare the two in the way the author's done. Faulty thinking on his part.
What's also got to be factored in is the severity of the bug. A buffer-overflow that lets a cracker rm / is serious. A buffer-overflow that lets code run with the perms of the user owning the service in a chrooted directory is also serious, but much less so.
The author also babbles about the volume of security-related issues on BugTraq... I'm not the first and I won't be the last to point out the rather obvious logical flaw here. If Bugs are getting reported and being quashed then they don't pose a threat any more. If the bugs aren't reported because a certain company based in Redmond Washington won't allow them to be reported... well, it's kinda obvious from there.
That said, it is indeed encouraging to see more and more people concerned about security. I think the message is slowly being driven home.
Enable several users to get together for a meeting by using JICAL to translate their iCalendar files into their available free/busy time and post it automatically to your web server. This project enables Ximian Evolution desktop users to book meetings
So there you have it, calendering without Exchange. While not a perfect solution, it's a nice hack and can surely be developed.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. Gnokii is a fantastic tool. I use it over IR with my 6310i.
http://www.gnokii.org/
Bungi, you're such a troll.
Explain to me how the DOS cli wasn't a "copy" of the Unix cli? The trail for "originality" stretches back a long way.
And what's with the martyr like "-1 Pro Microsoft"? Stop trolling, start posting something insightful and you might get some respect.
I can't believe I've taken the troll bait... enough.
There are many, many, many ways of cheating at nethack. But why in the arse would you do it? If you want to make it easy, go into explorer mode.
Not so bad at all really. A better analogy, and one I can tell my daughter, would be to compare such work with an Egyptian Slave's job. You eat and work on beautiful objects but your work is secret and in the end it gets locked up in a tomb with a dead man and perhaps yourself never to be seen again by anyone you know or care about. Not very satisfying at all, especiall when you cosider that your work is paid for and props up the nasty structure that enslaves everyone you know. Nah, jerk off works better.
True enough. I've just deployed messagewall (http://www.messagewall.org) on a Gnu/Linux Debian box to provide antivirus protection to the umpteen Windows boxen sitting behind hit.
It works a treat. messagewall is free/free and uses openantivirus (http://www.openantivirus.org) virus definitions. Yet, who gets more "wins"? And would those wins be possible without lonely orphaned Linux boxen doing all the hard work and keeping the sl1ck windows XP installations safe from the big bag world?
I love OSS and do all I can to support it, from evangelising to submitting bug reports to contributing to FAQs... sometimes, however, I can't help but feel we're being used and I'm in two minds about protecting the shite windows boxes with a slick piece of software like messagewall when, without the oss world, those boxen would be exposed for slaughter.
I would think that the cafe may be able to undercut the portable satellite network equipment, expeditions would still need the equipment to cover their travel to the mountain etc but once there [c|w]ould the cafe be cheaper?
Perhaps, but if you have a major chunk of your expedition underwritten by a media outlet that *insists* on daily reports for its readers/viewers, do you think they're going to chance that the cafe is running, or carry their own gear?
Also, depending on the route the climbers are taking, Advanced Base Camp can be a *very* long hike from Base Camp.
On top of that I think that the climbers will be more interested in downloading weather data (though the tourist will be sending their emails)
Well, all expeditions are equipped with their own satellite network links these days. Check out the climbing section of mountainzone.com http://climb.mountainzone.com/ for example. Most expeditions now also have a dedicated blogger who writes for a newspaper and a website. All this data, including satellite phone calls home (and to the sponsors) are the norm now.
The cafe will, I imagine, be for the tourists for whom base camp is the destination. It won't play a part in expeditions or expeditions planning.
first step?????
erm. no. How many people can, without any impediments, gain physical access to your servers? Even if it's a 1000, that's nothing compared to the number who can gain access remotely. The first step to security is locking down remote access.
I travel quite a bit (I pass through an airport at least four times a month). The number of BSODs I see is quite extraordinary. It puzzles me, why on earth are they using Windows for those displays?
Likewise, during the height of the dotbomb one of the coach companies running between Oxford and London installed an "infotainment" machine which looped ads in Flash for the, erm, pleasure of the passangers. Fortunately, that was running NT and would BSOD 9 times out of 10.
A post above mentions the Tube and London bus stops displaying transit information... the same holds true for Milan and Madrid. It's hella useful.
Always? Substantiate that.
Linux seems to be doing alright. It's replacing commercial OS's... if you missed the news, IBM is replacing AIX (commercial) with Linux (community). That, alone, is a pretty solid counter-example to your statement.
I'd like to hear why you think "official" support is so much better?
It seems as if mictosoft made a good move with the xbox. It seems to attract a great deal of the people that don't want to use windows. But for some reason a restricted computer by microsoft sounds good to the same people here. What's the catch here, could someone tell me?
Microsoft loses money on every unit sold (like Sony and Nintendo). They make money from selling you games (like Sony and Nintendo). When the XBox is hacked / moded to run Linux, you're not using it the way they intended (ie. you're not buying the games). What you end up with is a great piece of hardware, subsidised by Microsoft. Which is why we like it :)
What the arse was Australia supposed to do *before* the attack? Perform a strategic surgical carpet bombing of the countries its tourists planned to visit?
.No, I don't think that's the right attitude either.
I think there are other more productive solutions that should be explored before turning the middle east into glass. Don't forget, for all the irrational hatred that is being projected at the States, there's a lot of irrational hatred being projected back.
The cost of carpet bombing Iraq will be massive. The outcome? Well, briefly, the threat (if there is any) of Iraq will disappear but when it's resurrected by the children of the survivors, it will be that much more profound. If the States really do want to oust Hussein, why not, for example, carpet bomb Iraq with food and medicine with "from your Uncle Sam" propaganda attached? It would cost far, far less than dropping bombs.
Who are the Iraqi people going to support? A despot who gasses them or a friend who helps? A revolution that grows from the ground up and is nurtured into an open democracy is more likely to be long-lasting than exorcising the current regime through military might and then imposing and defending a puppet government by force.
Bombing the hell out of them will not bring a satisfactory long term solution. They will hate (if they already don't) the USA as much as they hate Hussein. The cycle of violence will continue.
Personally, I thought "I like to watch" was incredibly daring when it appeared (what, a month or two after 11/9?).
The difference here is that GNN's film attempts to be constructive and that, in my view, is an important difference. We can snigger at Bush's pea-sized brain but the fact is, he (and Blair et al) has got the sales pitch going and those against his war-mongering, do not. We can't just say, "don't destroy out civil rights, don't go to war" without offering an alternative, without offering some kind of argument.
"I like to watch" is a wonderful pisstake of the media. "Redux" is a powerful and persuasive argument against going to war.
The powerful message coming out of the film was that we (and by "we" it's clear GNN means "the west", not america alone) are in a position to do something about the dangerous cycle of violence that is threatening what we have come to know as free civilisation.
By equating Al Qaeda with Islam, and the actions of terrorists with those of muslims, many in positions of responsibility in government (specifically, the clip shows Bush and his aides, Jean Chretien, Tony Blair, et al) and especially the media are pushing the views of the public toward a mindset last seen, with catastrophic outcomes, in the crusades.
According to Bush, because "they" hate "us", we must beat them until they change their minds. Christianity == good, Islam == bad. "Either you're with us, or with the terrorists", declared Bush.
Well, this film shows that we needn't subscribe to that point of view.
Microsoft had initially hoped to donate this amount in-kind to schools, right? In other words, Microsoft had wanted to donate this amount in software and other Microsoft products. Ostensibly, the schools were to receive the benefit. The problem from the perspective on many individuals and competitors (such as Apple) was that this would allow Microsoft to extend its monopoly into a market it didn't already have a monopoly in.
I think you're confusing the cases here and the penalties. This one is the result of a class action law suit. The remedy which microsoft proposed involving giving software to schools was in the antitrust case.
Understandable that you've confused them. They are violating so many laws and being found guilty again and again it's difficult to keep track.
Both outcomes (the class action and the antitrust) are lame though 'cept for the fact that they vindicate those of us who've been ranting on about microsoft's criminal behaviour...
- Why do we still have to choose between a bunch of different desktops, ALL of which are mutually incompatible?
Out of all the duff crap in your post, this is worst. There's nothing stopping a KDE user from loading Gnome apps or vice versa, you just have to have the appropriate libraries loaded.
Are slashdotters extremely naive or something? Every company takes a look at the competition and compares it to their own product, distributing memos on whats better about the competition so that they can improve on their own products. This isn't news. It's business.
I was about to mod you down but decided to respond instead.
Have you read the article? I suspect not. As you are clearly unaware, Microsoft bought Hotmail. At the time they bought it, Hotmail was running on FreeBSD. Much to Microsoft's shame, they couldn't port Hotmail to Windows and keep the service running. Finally, after months and months and months of effort, they did it. But it isn't done well and as this report demonstrates, their own engineers aren't happy with how it's been done.
This has nothing to do with "looking at the competition". This has everything to do with Microsoft's engineers writing up the reasons for the inadequacy of w2k for a large-scale deployment of this kind. Key phrases from the article:
...and so on. You accuse the /. masses of rabidity but it is, as a point of fact, you who are knee-jerking in defence of the justified laughter and celebration of those of us who have to fight against Microsoft FUD on a daily basis. How nice to have a document to point to now and say, "look, if you don't believe me, believe microsoft. Deploying on a *nix platform is cheaper and better!"
Does anyone know if it's based on one of the Debian derivatives or have these guys actually solved the "make Debian easy to install" problem by themselves?
What, like this: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/11/02/172924 7&mode=thread&tid=90
or some other way?
Nice troll!
Linux not ready for the desktop? Have you read the article? Have you tried the cd? It's amazing what a good distro can do.
Setting up printing as is as easy as clicking through a wizard, same with changing video settings, scanners, etc, etc, etc. How the arse do you justify spreading this kind of FUD? Do you get confused because the widgets look a little differently from your win98 desktop?
In the last several months, I've given away about 20 knoppix cds directly (indirectly, by running Linux training courses for which students use Knoppix, I've given away many more). It's all down to experience. Once users get used to a slightly improved (and hence, different) way of doing things, they're all over Linux.
And Flash and RealPlayer are vital for her. I'm going to have trouble enough convincing her to live without QuickTime...
xine now does Sorenson quicktime. xine is included in Knoppix. There's a mozilla plugin in the works.
You could salvage LCDs from old laptops.
Not so easily done: http://www.eio.com/lcdconnect.htm as far as I can tell, you'd have to get into some pretty heavy-duty electronics and buy convertor cards to handle the different input expected by a laptop display from that which is delivered by a vga card.
Can someone please tell me honestly why I should start getting into Nethack? I mean I've clicked on the icon a few times ...
LOL!
These people get a government job, and start telling their contractors what to do and how to do it
This courses introduction should be "Here is what real software engineers do (insert comlex UML diagram here), and this course won't prepare you to even get there."
Nice troll.
To paraphrase, I believe it's Swift, "a little learnin' is a dangerous thing", true. However, there's "a little learnin'" and awareness raising. How many people here moan about users who can't diagnose the most basic of hardware/software related problems. It's not because they don't want to diagnose the issue it's because they've been told that their computer is a dreadully complicated beast that they can never hope to understand. So if the printer doesn't print, it must be a problem that can only be resolved by a call to tech support rather than a quick check to see if the power is on, if the cables are plugged in or if the OS is reporting an error.
This course goes further though. It doesn't teach "howtos" -- which I agree can lead to trouble, it teaches fundamentals. What is it that makes a computer tick? How does it work? How is that mouse gestures and keystrokes make things go that then appear on a monitor. This is grand stuff to know and to teach. This isn't taught on a systems-level, but on a conceptual level. Nobody is going to come out of this thinking they can become kernel hackers.
What are you anyway? A programmer? an engineer? Whatever it is that you do, do you really believe that you shouldn't know about things outside of your core competence? Aren't you ever intrigued by the workings of nature? physics? What if a physcist said to you, "hey now, don't go reading that quantum physics stuff, you're liable to think you know something about it and cause a disaster." Or if a chef freaked because they saw you fingering a cookbook?
um, I don't get it. How does newer == "less secure" in this scenario? Sure, the older and os the more time it's had for the kinks to be worked out of it. But doesn't method have something to do with it also? Linux is developed in an open and peer-reviewed environment. It's maturing much faster than windows. There's no reason to compare the two in the way the author's done. Faulty thinking on his part.
What's also got to be factored in is the severity of the bug. A buffer-overflow that lets a cracker rm / is serious. A buffer-overflow that lets code run with the perms of the user owning the service in a chrooted directory is also serious, but much less so.
The author also babbles about the volume of security-related issues on BugTraq... I'm not the first and I won't be the last to point out the rather obvious logical flaw here. If Bugs are getting reported and being quashed then they don't pose a threat any more. If the bugs aren't reported because a certain company based in Redmond Washington won't allow them to be reported... well, it's kinda obvious from there.
That said, it is indeed encouraging to see more and more people concerned about security. I think the message is slowly being driven home.
but as has been gone over ad-infinitum on this site the calendar side is completely lacking at present.
Not quite. I just had something pop into my inbox this morning announcing this:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/jicalFrom the project summary:
So there you have it, calendering without Exchange. While not a perfect solution, it's a nice hack and can surely be developed.