Have you ever bid on a government project in Puerto Rico? We did once. The RFP was so full of irregularities that inidicated the process was corrupt that we complained and the whole thing got shut down. It was clear that the winner of the process had been selected before the search began and they were local and weren't qualified to do the work. This sort of thing happens all over, but the most blatant case I ever saw was in PR.
The small airport at which the system is operating has never identified a wanted criminal. The system at the sherrif's office is much more useful and is used during booking during which matches occur every day.
Re:Can I have an infinite budget to write the code
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Java Faster Than C++?
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· Score: 1
You never used PowerPlant? That was sweet.
Re:Can I have an infinite budget to write the code
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Java Faster Than C++?
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· Score: 1
I used the Visual Age for Java layout tools. I actually don't think that they generated bad code at all. In fact it was pretty good code. I haven't used the WASD layout tool as much so I don't know about its generated code. In any case the layout tool is great for something that doesn't need to be flexible and doesn't need to resize or work at different resolutions. Otherwise you have to do layouts by hand. The basic layouts are easy to understand but look like crap. To produce a really professional looking layout takes a lot of effort and tweaking with Swing. I wish it was easier.
What's going to make or break this handheld battle...is battery life, though. Sony made the Betamax...tapes weren't long enough to record baseball games on TV, though.
This reminds me of the story of how the size of the audio CD was established. Originally it was going to be an hour. Then someone noticed that Beetohven's 8th symphony wouldn't fit it it was only an hour long. Apparently this symphony is a big deal during new years celebrations in Japan. So they made the disc big enough to fit the symphony.
Oddly this decision will have reverbrations long after it is relevant. DVDs and Blu-Ray discs are the same physical size as CDs, and I am sure that it will be a standard size for optical media into the future. Sort of like the story of how the width of a donkey's butt lead to the size of the solid rocket boosters for the space shuttle.
How does "weapons grade research" differ from ordinary research? I understand that weapons grade plutonium is a different sort of plutonium, but what is it that enhances "weapons grade research"? How can I enrich my everyday research to make it weapons grade? Does "weapons grade research" have to involve weapons? Weapons grade plutonium doesn't.
I think that if you read my comment carefully I implied that the polygamy issue is a slippery slope that will arise from the same-sex marriage debate. I then said that the legalization of polygamy would open its own can of worms separate from the same-sex marriage debate, especially for the LDS church.
I understand that in certain Muslim cultures in Africa, new converts to the Mormon church who were polygamists before joining the church are permitted to keep multiple wives, although they avoid the hot potatoe of sanctioning new plural marriages there even though it is legal, and I am sure they would force them to seperate if it ever became politically sensitive again.
Could you provide a reference please? My understanding is that African polygamists are not allowed to become members of the church. Oddly, I also understand that the Community of Christ (formerly the RLDS Church) which has historically been against polygamy allows African polygamists to join their church. So basically the historical situation has been reversed in Africa.
It also seems that part of the reason for opposing same-sex marriage is that this would lead to the legalization of polygamy, which would open a can of worms in the eyes of some people.
Some tools are safer than others though. I can't imagine why you would choose ASM as an example, given that it is the most dangerous of all. C and C++ can be not much better if you use them ignorantly. Also note that buggy code and insecure code are two different things.
I agree that DirecTV has a problem. They giving the same key to millions of people, which they have to do since they don't have constant two-way communication.
I also agree that keys can be extracted from a smart card. Newer cards have protections against many of the extraction methods. The idea is to make the cost of extraction more than the value of what you are protecting. Occasionally there will be a breakthrough that drops the cost of extraction significantly at which point you need to decide if you are going to send out new cards.
This system doesn't suffer from the drawbacks that DirecTV has though. Delivering content over the internet they can have two-way communication with the smart card, so each card can have its own key and you can verify that there aren't duplicate cards being used. If a key is leaked then you revoke that key and contact the single customer that has that key. If you design the system correctly then the break of a single card, or even a large number of cards isn't a break of the entire system.
Re:Can I have an infinite budget to write the code
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Java Faster Than C++?
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· Score: 1
It seems that I have been asked to chime in.
First off, let me say that I like Java a lot and use it more than any other language. I have done some pretty massive swing projects. For instance I wrote the editor that is used to create the documents that describe how to assemble space shuttle motors.
I have also used Qt, but not as extensively. I have found Qt to be easy to learn, well documented, and logical. Swing is not easy to learn, is reasonable well documented, and is usually but not always logical.
Throwing together a GUI in a visual editor is very easy in Swing. I haven't done this in Qt. However, the visual editing tools that I have used simple place your components statically, with a set location and size using a null layout. If you resize nothing happens. In order to get good resizing behaviour you have to use the Box and BoxLayout objects. Not only are these poorly documented, but the concepts are poorly named. What is a Box? What does glue do? Not what you would expect from the name. Creating a layout that behaves properly by hand is a painstaking process. If you screw on thing up you'll get bad behaviour that is hard to debug since Swing components tend to behave inconsistently on resize, ie you start at one size, change to a second size, and go back to the original size and your components are laid out differently now.
I have fond memories of using Power Plant to effortlessly lay out GUIs that could resize and looked nice back in the day. I don't know why Sun hasn't gotten something that works well for Swing.
Doing layouts by hand in Qt is much easier. The concepts of the layout tool are easy to grasp and work correctly without lots of tweaking.
I could go into a whole page of complaints about the Swing text package and the abomination that is the document tree, but I will save that for another day. Suffice it to say that it is poorly documented, badly designed, and gives you complexity without functionality. Of course adding that functionality yourself is impossible because of the way that useful methods are private or package private so you can't call them in order to do things yourself. The option would be to edit the source, which would mean that you could never upgrade your Java. Ugh!
This might be funny, but it isn't informative.
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Java Faster Than C++?
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· Score: 1
I'll explain the joke for the moderators: He is incurring the overhead of launching the JVM, which is significant. In fact, all this tests is that invocation overhead and nothing else.
If your keys aren't in hardware such as a smart card then you aren't secure, you are just making people jump through hoops.
Even if your keys are in hardware you aren't secure since someone could just grab the stream after it is decrypted. So you probably need to decide what it is that you want to protect against and what it is that you aren't going to worry about stopping.
You're probably going to hate college/university if you've hated school up to this point.
Maybe, maybe not. If he is a smart as he thinks he is (unlikely but possible) and just hasn't been challenged yet then he should go to the best univeristy he can get in to and there will be plenty of people/courses to challenge him and he'll enjoy the intellectual and social stimulation. There is a big difference between being a big fish in a small pond (high school) and being an average fish in a large pond. This might appeal to him.
If he isn't as smart as he thinks he is then he will quickly find this out at any large public institution.
In either case he is going to find out quickly that being "bright" will only get you so far.
I had friends in high school who were smart, creative, and rejected the system. They figured that they were smarted than their teachers once they got to college, which might have been true, but they got nowhere fast. I know other people that weren't as smart, but worked hard and didn't have an over-inflated opinion of themselves. They are doctors now. Moral of the story? Hard work can be more important than being exceptionally bright.
The cost of making the antenna is the largest factor in the price of the simplest RFID tags. The industry is pretty close to the elusive 5 cent tag, which has been the holy grail for some time. It is improved technology (as opposed to expiring patents) that has lead to the reduction in cost over time.
Were the patent still in force he could charge less than a penny per tag and he would still get rich (there will be billions and billions of tags) and the cost wouldn't be prohibitive.
If he insisted on a high fee, such as a dollar per tag that would certainly slow the adoption of the technology, but why would he do that?
In the end the market would have dictated the price and it would be low in order to allow adoption of the technology and maximize his profit. In that case, what you are saying would not be any more applicable than it is today.
Radio-powered smart cards have been here for years. I have several sitting on my desk. Check out ISO 14443. This might make them more efficient though, which could reduce cost which is always nice.
There are RFID chips out there that can do a challenge-response. I have no idea what they are using for these. If all they are doing is responding then you are correct, it is easy to spoof.
If (and this is a big if) they use a secure protocol then you would need all sorts of keys in order to be able to spoof a plate. You would then need to grab the number of a valid plate to spoof. Of course if you had the correct keys then reading a plate should be easy, but getting those keys could be mighty difficult. Let me know when you have it figured out. Here's a hint: the ones in the plate aren't the ones you need.
Not broadcasting is the easiest option, just grab a rock and go to work.
In any case this reminds me of an episode of Knight Rider in which KITT causes his license plate to spin, revealing a false plate. From the looks of it there were three different plates.
Beyound that, what a great way to get your users to create your 2.0 product for you, which might be a full-featured, hackable PVR? What does a HDTiVo go for? $999? They could take their product and eventually make a consumer box thanks to the efforts of their users. A two-man outfit competing with the big boys.:)
Notice that it ships with Xine. If they went the Windows route could integrate with WMP for free? Would you get the PVR functionality that way? Or would they have to pay to use somebody's Windows only software?
By using Linux they can leverage the free software that is out there to create a complete product (with software) while focusing on what they do best, which is build hardware.
Castle Wolfenstein and Doom were both done using raytracing, though it was 2-D raytracing. They didn't use fancy lighting or complex models either, so maybe it they don't count.
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How did you get that /. user id? Was it planned? Did you time it just right or was it luck?
Have you ever bid on a government project in Puerto Rico? We did once. The RFP was so full of irregularities that inidicated the process was corrupt that we complained and the whole thing got shut down. It was clear that the winner of the process had been selected before the search began and they were local and weren't qualified to do the work. This sort of thing happens all over, but the most blatant case I ever saw was in PR.
The small airport at which the system is operating has never identified a wanted criminal. The system at the sherrif's office is much more useful and is used during booking during which matches occur every day.
You never used PowerPlant? That was sweet.
I used the Visual Age for Java layout tools. I actually don't think that they generated bad code at all. In fact it was pretty good code. I haven't used the WASD layout tool as much so I don't know about its generated code. In any case the layout tool is great for something that doesn't need to be flexible and doesn't need to resize or work at different resolutions. Otherwise you have to do layouts by hand. The basic layouts are easy to understand but look like crap. To produce a really professional looking layout takes a lot of effort and tweaking with Swing. I wish it was easier.
This reminds me of the story of how the size of the audio CD was established. Originally it was going to be an hour. Then someone noticed that Beetohven's 8th symphony wouldn't fit it it was only an hour long. Apparently this symphony is a big deal during new years celebrations in Japan. So they made the disc big enough to fit the symphony.
Oddly this decision will have reverbrations long after it is relevant. DVDs and Blu-Ray discs are the same physical size as CDs, and I am sure that it will be a standard size for optical media into the future. Sort of like the story of how the width of a donkey's butt lead to the size of the solid rocket boosters for the space shuttle.
How does "weapons grade research" differ from ordinary research? I understand that weapons grade plutonium is a different sort of plutonium, but what is it that enhances "weapons grade research"? How can I enrich my everyday research to make it weapons grade? Does "weapons grade research" have to involve weapons? Weapons grade plutonium doesn't.
Could you provide a reference please? My understanding is that African polygamists are not allowed to become members of the church. Oddly, I also understand that the Community of Christ (formerly the RLDS Church) which has historically been against polygamy allows African polygamists to join their church. So basically the historical situation has been reversed in Africa.
It also seems that part of the reason for opposing same-sex marriage is that this would lead to the legalization of polygamy, which would open a can of worms in the eyes of some people.
Some tools are safer than others though. I can't imagine why you would choose ASM as an example, given that it is the most dangerous of all. C and C++ can be not much better if you use them ignorantly. Also note that buggy code and insecure code are two different things.
I also agree that keys can be extracted from a smart card. Newer cards have protections against many of the extraction methods. The idea is to make the cost of extraction more than the value of what you are protecting. Occasionally there will be a breakthrough that drops the cost of extraction significantly at which point you need to decide if you are going to send out new cards.
This system doesn't suffer from the drawbacks that DirecTV has though. Delivering content over the internet they can have two-way communication with the smart card, so each card can have its own key and you can verify that there aren't duplicate cards being used. If a key is leaked then you revoke that key and contact the single customer that has that key. If you design the system correctly then the break of a single card, or even a large number of cards isn't a break of the entire system.
First off, let me say that I like Java a lot and use it more than any other language. I have done some pretty massive swing projects. For instance I wrote the editor that is used to create the documents that describe how to assemble space shuttle motors.
I have also used Qt, but not as extensively. I have found Qt to be easy to learn, well documented, and logical. Swing is not easy to learn, is reasonable well documented, and is usually but not always logical.
Throwing together a GUI in a visual editor is very easy in Swing. I haven't done this in Qt. However, the visual editing tools that I have used simple place your components statically, with a set location and size using a null layout. If you resize nothing happens. In order to get good resizing behaviour you have to use the Box and BoxLayout objects. Not only are these poorly documented, but the concepts are poorly named. What is a Box? What does glue do? Not what you would expect from the name. Creating a layout that behaves properly by hand is a painstaking process. If you screw on thing up you'll get bad behaviour that is hard to debug since Swing components tend to behave inconsistently on resize, ie you start at one size, change to a second size, and go back to the original size and your components are laid out differently now.
I have fond memories of using Power Plant to effortlessly lay out GUIs that could resize and looked nice back in the day. I don't know why Sun hasn't gotten something that works well for Swing.
Doing layouts by hand in Qt is much easier. The concepts of the layout tool are easy to grasp and work correctly without lots of tweaking.
I could go into a whole page of complaints about the Swing text package and the abomination that is the document tree, but I will save that for another day. Suffice it to say that it is poorly documented, badly designed, and gives you complexity without functionality. Of course adding that functionality yourself is impossible because of the way that useful methods are private or package private so you can't call them in order to do things yourself. The option would be to edit the source, which would mean that you could never upgrade your Java. Ugh!
I'll explain the joke for the moderators: He is incurring the overhead of launching the JVM, which is significant. In fact, all this tests is that invocation overhead and nothing else.
I saw a similar demo with NeXTStep on a 300MHz PII. That was pretty slick.
Even if your keys are in hardware you aren't secure since someone could just grab the stream after it is decrypted. So you probably need to decide what it is that you want to protect against and what it is that you aren't going to worry about stopping.
Maybe, maybe not. If he is a smart as he thinks he is (unlikely but possible) and just hasn't been challenged yet then he should go to the best univeristy he can get in to and there will be plenty of people/courses to challenge him and he'll enjoy the intellectual and social stimulation. There is a big difference between being a big fish in a small pond (high school) and being an average fish in a large pond. This might appeal to him.
If he isn't as smart as he thinks he is then he will quickly find this out at any large public institution.
In either case he is going to find out quickly that being "bright" will only get you so far.
I had friends in high school who were smart, creative, and rejected the system. They figured that they were smarted than their teachers once they got to college, which might have been true, but they got nowhere fast. I know other people that weren't as smart, but worked hard and didn't have an over-inflated opinion of themselves. They are doctors now. Moral of the story? Hard work can be more important than being exceptionally bright.
Were the patent still in force he could charge less than a penny per tag and he would still get rich (there will be billions and billions of tags) and the cost wouldn't be prohibitive.
If he insisted on a high fee, such as a dollar per tag that would certainly slow the adoption of the technology, but why would he do that?
In the end the market would have dictated the price and it would be low in order to allow adoption of the technology and maximize his profit. In that case, what you are saying would not be any more applicable than it is today.
This does bring up an interesting question, what is the best language to write a text adventure in? Lisp? Perl? ML?
Aren't the Infocom games written in their own language for a virtual machine?
Radio-powered smart cards have been here for years. I have several sitting on my desk. Check out ISO 14443. This might make them more efficient though, which could reduce cost which is always nice.
There are RFID chips out there that can do a challenge-response. I have no idea what they are using for these. If all they are doing is responding then you are correct, it is easy to spoof.
Not broadcasting is the easiest option, just grab a rock and go to work.
In any case this reminds me of an episode of Knight Rider in which KITT causes his license plate to spin, revealing a false plate. From the looks of it there were three different plates.
Beyound that, what a great way to get your users to create your 2.0 product for you, which might be a full-featured, hackable PVR? What does a HDTiVo go for? $999? They could take their product and eventually make a consumer box thanks to the efforts of their users. A two-man outfit competing with the big boys. :)
By using Linux they can leverage the free software that is out there to create a complete product (with software) while focusing on what they do best, which is build hardware.
I stand corrected! You are right.
Castle Wolfenstein and Doom were both done using raytracing, though it was 2-D raytracing. They didn't use fancy lighting or complex models either, so maybe it they don't count.