Neither Apple nor Microsoft gets a musical dime from me. I deal in MP3s exclusively, I rip my own CDs at the highest sampling rate possible, and I play them on my laptop when driving or working in the darkroom. I rip with Windows Media Player because I prefer the interface, I play on my desktop or laptop with iTunes because I like the better control and the easier interace of the play lists.
I just wish iTunes had threshholds for playback so that you could tell it to play 3-8 songs by the same band before moving on, my wife accuses me of giving her musical whiplash.
My next MP3 player will most likely be a 30gig Creative because I really don't care for the iPod wheel interface and the fact that a user can't change the battery, and I won't consider the Zune.
I had to do an OS reinstall last week and decided, what the heck. Well, IMHO, it sucks. That's perhaps the most horrible GUI interface for a program that I've ever seen. Fortunately all I use it for is doing system updates and managing my web site through Cpanel (which for some reason just doesn't like my Firefox installations).
Not that I expected it to make my a die-hard IE user, I've never cared much for IE and have been quite happy with FF and NS before it.
I also installed the latest of Firefox, Windows Media Player, and iTunes. Firefox does one thing that bothers me: putting the stupid close button on the tabs. I much prefer the method used in FF 1.5 and earlier, so I guess it's back to Ctrl-F4 for now. If I had the time, I'd consider writing an add-in that did that, but I imagine someone will. WMP is certainly a lot more attractive, but not enough to really wow me. iTunes is the least radically changed and I have no probs with it (I prefer WMP for ripping MP3s and iTunes for playing them).
it's Mahir vs Borat. I will not see the movie, not that it's likely to come to my area (we have only five screens, we miss LOTS of films). There are limits to how much stupid humor that I can handle, and that's saying a lot from someone who amongst his favorite films counts Wayne's World I & II and Robin Hood: Men In Tights.
I think I'd stress a couple of points. First, chances are that people are not interested in their information per se, they're much more interested in covertly controlling their computer. A lot of attacks today are automated -- they sit there and watch for insecure connections, open ports, etc. I was reinstalling a friend's computer with 2000 Pro that unfortunately did not have any service packs: it was pwned before I could install a firewall or update it. (had I known I was going to be reinstalling 2K, I would have copied SP4/IE 6 onto my thumb drive). We went and bought a copy of XP Pro with SP2 pre-installed: after the installation was finished and we re-installed Zone Alarm Pro, it was amusing to see all of the failed attacks bouncing off the firewall. All of the attacking IP addresses were on Qwest's consumer network (his ISP).
Second, tell them about botnets and these zombie armies being used to send out spam.
It's not entirely about them, it's also about denying additional resources in the form of their PC to bot herders.
If they're talking 2008, they're not going to release it. When was XP released? 2002? A six year old OS, and with Vista allegedly just over the horizon, they're not going to release an XP SP a year or so later, they'll probably come up with "Well, it's going to be falling into limited support next year, so there's just no point to doing it."
What I don't get is why they don't release a cumulative patch CD so that when we do a new install, we don't have to spend an hour or two downloading patches, just get 'em off a DVD. (No, my boss won't let me set up a WSUS server yet).
12 or more years ago I wrote a program in VB 3 (or 4? I don't recall) that did this. Two versions, one was a 3x4 matrix for doing a telephone pad (with * & #), one was a full keyboard. My inspiration? An episode of Max Headroom where they decipher a key sequence by "looking at the thermal signatures of the keys"; also, the fact that often-used keys (if everyone was using the same code to enter a door) will show more wear, not quite the same issue on a keyboard.
The keys shuffled after every click, it was kinda cool.
I don't think the last four, or perhaps last six, digits are encoded. The SSNs for me and my brother are off by one digit: mine is *04, he is *05. He was born in '59, me two years later. I don't know why my parents got his when they got mine.
The problem with offshoring of anything is the breaking of an economic contract with the community. If I hire you and pay you money, a lot of that money is going to be spent in our community and ultimately that money will come back to me in the form of new work. If I send your job overseas, I pay them money, that money goes into their community, my community never sees it and weakens in a very real and economic sense.
How much has the money poured into India and Bangladesh helped the average standard of living? In three words: zip, zilch, nada.
Give me outsourcing to another AMERICAN company any day (substitute your own country name as appropriate).
I bought the $2 14-day trial from Hastings last week. It expired last night. Silly me, I thought all I had to do was activate the monthly billing and I'd be back online. But NOOOO! They want me to either buy the full game or, to save me inconvenience, pay $39.99 and get it online.
Sorry, I'll buy it for $20 at Walmart when I'm in town this afternoon.
So it would. In the immortal words of Emily Letilla: "Nevermind."
Like I said, I don't do P2P, so I was unaware of that. I did some for a friend several years ago who needed some Billy Joel tracks for a school project, and her disc was DRMd. I remember searching for titles, I never thought about how the system streamed from multiple sources.
If the concern is that RIAA is matching on file hashes, why not alter the file to ensure the hash values don't match. Add a second of silence to the front or back, or speed it up or slow it down 1%? Most people wouldn't notice the diff (yes, there are plenty of people who can hear a 1% pitch change, I don't think most people could hear it in a less than perfect acoustic environment.)
The next step would be to modify the ripping software to do a random alteration during the ripping process, perhaps doing a double-rip so that the true hash is known to ensure that the altered version's hash doesn't match.
It wouldn't stop the RIAA if they actually took time to download and listen to the music, but it would slow down any form of auto-search for matching hashes.
Of course this is purely an intellectual exercise, I have no idea how the RIAA investigates someone for file sharing. The only music sharing that I do is between me and my wife, and I'm sure the RIAA would like to put a stop to that.
I am amazed at how many people aren't mentioning off-site backups. I work for a university, and the server room in one of our remote campuses caught fire. Whole thing was toasted. And the backup server/drive was sitting in its shipping box in said computer room, along with all of the backup tapes, and had been there for months.
The first network that I ran, I had five weeks of backup tapes in my desk, and on the first day of every month, I carried the previous night's backup to the warehouse and put it in a fire-proof safe. Granted, that was when you could backup entire networks to one tape. My current desktop and laptop are near mirrors of each other, the laptop is pretty much always with me when I'm not at home, plus I have DVDs in a fire-proof lockbox.
My current boss takes a DLT from the previous night home with him every night, but he also doesn't back up the entire network. Well, that's his responsibility, I'm not going to be too concerned at $6.90/hr.
You MUST HAVE off-site backups in a protected location (i.e., safe deposit box or vault) to consider yourself covered. Your site might not burn down, but I personally am not willing to take that risk.
I so wish! I do have an autographed WoS&T poster: I was a gopher/escort for Jitlov at a Phoenix convention years ago. I do have the 16mm short that was the basis for WoS&T, someone gave it to my film club when it was found on a mixed reel of 16mm shorts in the wreckage of a bar fire in Tucson.
Steganography is normally hiding a message within a file. It can be detected without too much difficulty (file doesn't compress as much, etc) even if you can't retreive the message. This system did not do this, you wouldn't even see the files since it was in the backgroud noise of the disk clutter, for want of a better term.
No, it wasn't steganography, at least in the conventional useage of the term. Basically when you installed your *nix distro, you would not partition the entire disk. This program would write your files to the uninitialized portion of the disk. Since the data was written outside of the partitioned area, it would not be seen in a casual search. Additionally, the data was encrypted in such a way as to appear no different than uninitialized drive space.
This was several years ago, but I read a paper, I believe on Slashdot, about a crypto system intended for people like human rights observers working in the field. Basically you would write up your report, call up this program, pass your report to it, and the program would write it in crypto to uninitialized blocks of the file system so that it appeared to be random noise.
The concept was that the watcher's laptop was likely to be inspected when they left the country. The inspectors wouldn't find anything since they wouldn't know how this program was started, much less the keys required to make it work.
Does anyone else remember this? I've searched Slashdot with zero success, I even emailed Bruce Schneier but he hadn't heard of this.
I love it. When I started at the police department (database geek and proud of it!), I was polygraphed. The session was started with an interview. The purpose of the interview was so that when I was connected to the machine, every question that I was asked would result in a "No" response. One question was: "We know everyone has stolen from work. It might just be a pen, or a pad of paper, or a pad of post it notes. You die and go to heaven, but before you get in, you have to write a check for everything you've ever taken from all of your employers. How much would that check be for?" I told him "Let's call it $50."
In the polygraph exam, the question asked is: "Aside from what we discussed, have you ever stolen anything from your employers?" The reply is no, because we've already discussed that over the last 13 years or so, I've stolen maybe $50 worth of supplies.
With this system, there's no baseline. So obviously what we need is each airport should have 5,000 trained polygraph examiners and you need to arrive at the airport five hours ahead of your flight. It'll be great for the unemployment situation!
I don't know if you are familiar with SQL Server, but Access uses meta-data tables to describe everything just like SQL Server. Learn how to query them, write the reports that you need to analyze the data that you want, export the reports into all the databases, and you should be able to get something reasonable.
Or export the meta-table data into a meta-meta-table and have all your information in one place. I think that's the route that I'd pursue.
Working with system tables is fun! (he says, after trying to install SQL Server 2005 Developer's Edition has screwed up two different computers)
Fairplay Games is having a pretty good sale right now, including the Super Mega-Deluxe Wood Cataan. Included are Tsuro and Castle, two games that I quite enjoy. I think they also have two versions of Ticket To Ride.
First, cooperative mode seems to have gone away. I really enjoyed a previous job where, during lunch, we'd close our office doors, hook in to a private network, and run around helping each other kill monsters. We'd sometimes deathmatch blow each other up, but I really miss cooperative play. I don't care much for deathmatch-only games. I think the last co-op game that I played was the first two Rainbow Six games.
Second, I don't care much for MMORPGs, though I do play City of Heroes/Villains (love them supers!). If I'm spending $50 on a game, I want to be able to play it on my laptop when I'm traveling, I don't want to have to be tied to a data circuit to use the game.
And I'll do a general bitch about the price of MMORPGs. I don't mind the $15/month, but I think it is ridiculous that we have to spend $50 for the game, plus the $15/month, to play the blasted thing. Yes, if you're careful you can catch sales or lower prices, I'm just stating the $50 as a general retail price.
As for me and WoW, I'm not a huge fantasy fan. I'm also not in to "crafting" games, the concept of spending a few hours online fishing just doesn't do anything, I want to log on and beat up bad guys. Thus, CoH/V is a great game for me. Now if they'd only do a Mac version... (yes, dual boot a Macintel and you're good, I have friends with older G4/G5 Macs who want to play without buying new systems).
There are four reflectors, three left by Apollo landings, one left by a Russian robotic landing. That latter seems to be the hardest to hit, it is more sensitive to temperature changes (lunar phase, light/dark) than the others.
Well, she's the main operator. She also works for the Apollo program now, and I occasionally sit on the catwalk watching for airplanes that wander into the airspace while the laser is "shining."
Slashdot Mirror
Neither Apple nor Microsoft gets a musical dime from me. I deal in MP3s exclusively, I rip my own CDs at the highest sampling rate possible, and I play them on my laptop when driving or working in the darkroom. I rip with Windows Media Player because I prefer the interface, I play on my desktop or laptop with iTunes because I like the better control and the easier interace of the play lists.
I just wish iTunes had threshholds for playback so that you could tell it to play 3-8 songs by the same band before moving on, my wife accuses me of giving her musical whiplash.
My next MP3 player will most likely be a 30gig Creative because I really don't care for the iPod wheel interface and the fact that a user can't change the battery, and I won't consider the Zune.
I had to do an OS reinstall last week and decided, what the heck. Well, IMHO, it sucks. That's perhaps the most horrible GUI interface for a program that I've ever seen. Fortunately all I use it for is doing system updates and managing my web site through Cpanel (which for some reason just doesn't like my Firefox installations).
Not that I expected it to make my a die-hard IE user, I've never cared much for IE and have been quite happy with FF and NS before it.
I also installed the latest of Firefox, Windows Media Player, and iTunes. Firefox does one thing that bothers me: putting the stupid close button on the tabs. I much prefer the method used in FF 1.5 and earlier, so I guess it's back to Ctrl-F4 for now. If I had the time, I'd consider writing an add-in that did that, but I imagine someone will. WMP is certainly a lot more attractive, but not enough to really wow me. iTunes is the least radically changed and I have no probs with it (I prefer WMP for ripping MP3s and iTunes for playing them).
it's Mahir vs Borat. I will not see the movie, not that it's likely to come to my area (we have only five screens, we miss LOTS of films). There are limits to how much stupid humor that I can handle, and that's saying a lot from someone who amongst his favorite films counts Wayne's World I & II and Robin Hood: Men In Tights.
I think I'd stress a couple of points. First, chances are that people are not interested in their information per se, they're much more interested in covertly controlling their computer. A lot of attacks today are automated -- they sit there and watch for insecure connections, open ports, etc. I was reinstalling a friend's computer with 2000 Pro that unfortunately did not have any service packs: it was pwned before I could install a firewall or update it. (had I known I was going to be reinstalling 2K, I would have copied SP4/IE 6 onto my thumb drive). We went and bought a copy of XP Pro with SP2 pre-installed: after the installation was finished and we re-installed Zone Alarm Pro, it was amusing to see all of the failed attacks bouncing off the firewall. All of the attacking IP addresses were on Qwest's consumer network (his ISP).
Second, tell them about botnets and these zombie armies being used to send out spam.
It's not entirely about them, it's also about denying additional resources in the form of their PC to bot herders.
Don't forget astronomy! They use both 24 hour time and GMT.
If they're talking 2008, they're not going to release it. When was XP released? 2002? A six year old OS, and with Vista allegedly just over the horizon, they're not going to release an XP SP a year or so later, they'll probably come up with "Well, it's going to be falling into limited support next year, so there's just no point to doing it."
What I don't get is why they don't release a cumulative patch CD so that when we do a new install, we don't have to spend an hour or two downloading patches, just get 'em off a DVD. (No, my boss won't let me set up a WSUS server yet).
12 or more years ago I wrote a program in VB 3 (or 4? I don't recall) that did this. Two versions, one was a 3x4 matrix for doing a telephone pad (with * & #), one was a full keyboard. My inspiration? An episode of Max Headroom where they decipher a key sequence by "looking at the thermal signatures of the keys"; also, the fact that often-used keys (if everyone was using the same code to enter a door) will show more wear, not quite the same issue on a keyboard.
The keys shuffled after every click, it was kinda cool.
The source code is here for the 3x4 pad and here for the 6x6 pad. Feel free to play with the code, primative as it is.
I don't think the last four, or perhaps last six, digits are encoded. The SSNs for me and my brother are off by one digit: mine is *04, he is *05. He was born in '59, me two years later. I don't know why my parents got his when they got mine.
The problem with offshoring of anything is the breaking of an economic contract with the community. If I hire you and pay you money, a lot of that money is going to be spent in our community and ultimately that money will come back to me in the form of new work. If I send your job overseas, I pay them money, that money goes into their community, my community never sees it and weakens in a very real and economic sense.
How much has the money poured into India and Bangladesh helped the average standard of living? In three words: zip, zilch, nada.
Give me outsourcing to another AMERICAN company any day (substitute your own country name as appropriate).
I bought the $2 14-day trial from Hastings last week. It expired last night. Silly me, I thought all I had to do was activate the monthly billing and I'd be back online. But NOOOO! They want me to either buy the full game or, to save me inconvenience, pay $39.99 and get it online.
Sorry, I'll buy it for $20 at Walmart when I'm in town this afternoon.
So it would. In the immortal words of Emily Letilla: "Nevermind."
Like I said, I don't do P2P, so I was unaware of that. I did some for a friend several years ago who needed some Billy Joel tracks for a school project, and her disc was DRMd. I remember searching for titles, I never thought about how the system streamed from multiple sources.
If the concern is that RIAA is matching on file hashes, why not alter the file to ensure the hash values don't match. Add a second of silence to the front or back, or speed it up or slow it down 1%? Most people wouldn't notice the diff (yes, there are plenty of people who can hear a 1% pitch change, I don't think most people could hear it in a less than perfect acoustic environment.)
The next step would be to modify the ripping software to do a random alteration during the ripping process, perhaps doing a double-rip so that the true hash is known to ensure that the altered version's hash doesn't match.
It wouldn't stop the RIAA if they actually took time to download and listen to the music, but it would slow down any form of auto-search for matching hashes.
Of course this is purely an intellectual exercise, I have no idea how the RIAA investigates someone for file sharing. The only music sharing that I do is between me and my wife, and I'm sure the RIAA would like to put a stop to that.
I am amazed at how many people aren't mentioning off-site backups. I work for a university, and the server room in one of our remote campuses caught fire. Whole thing was toasted. And the backup server/drive was sitting in its shipping box in said computer room, along with all of the backup tapes, and had been there for months.
The first network that I ran, I had five weeks of backup tapes in my desk, and on the first day of every month, I carried the previous night's backup to the warehouse and put it in a fire-proof safe. Granted, that was when you could backup entire networks to one tape. My current desktop and laptop are near mirrors of each other, the laptop is pretty much always with me when I'm not at home, plus I have DVDs in a fire-proof lockbox.
My current boss takes a DLT from the previous night home with him every night, but he also doesn't back up the entire network. Well, that's his responsibility, I'm not going to be too concerned at $6.90/hr.
You MUST HAVE off-site backups in a protected location (i.e., safe deposit box or vault) to consider yourself covered. Your site might not burn down, but I personally am not willing to take that risk.
I so wish! I do have an autographed WoS&T poster: I was a gopher/escort for Jitlov at a Phoenix convention years ago. I do have the 16mm short that was the basis for WoS&T, someone gave it to my film club when it was found on a mixed reel of 16mm shorts in the wreckage of a bar fire in Tucson.
Steganography is normally hiding a message within a file. It can be detected without too much difficulty (file doesn't compress as much, etc) even if you can't retreive the message. This system did not do this, you wouldn't even see the files since it was in the backgroud noise of the disk clutter, for want of a better term.
No, it wasn't steganography, at least in the conventional useage of the term. Basically when you installed your *nix distro, you would not partition the entire disk. This program would write your files to the uninitialized portion of the disk. Since the data was written outside of the partitioned area, it would not be seen in a casual search. Additionally, the data was encrypted in such a way as to appear no different than uninitialized drive space.
This was several years ago, but I read a paper, I believe on Slashdot, about a crypto system intended for people like human rights observers working in the field. Basically you would write up your report, call up this program, pass your report to it, and the program would write it in crypto to uninitialized blocks of the file system so that it appeared to be random noise.
The concept was that the watcher's laptop was likely to be inspected when they left the country. The inspectors wouldn't find anything since they wouldn't know how this program was started, much less the keys required to make it work.
Does anyone else remember this? I've searched Slashdot with zero success, I even emailed Bruce Schneier but he hadn't heard of this.
I love it. When I started at the police department (database geek and proud of it!), I was polygraphed. The session was started with an interview. The purpose of the interview was so that when I was connected to the machine, every question that I was asked would result in a "No" response. One question was: "We know everyone has stolen from work. It might just be a pen, or a pad of paper, or a pad of post it notes. You die and go to heaven, but before you get in, you have to write a check for everything you've ever taken from all of your employers. How much would that check be for?" I told him "Let's call it $50."
In the polygraph exam, the question asked is: "Aside from what we discussed, have you ever stolen anything from your employers?" The reply is no, because we've already discussed that over the last 13 years or so, I've stolen maybe $50 worth of supplies.
With this system, there's no baseline. So obviously what we need is each airport should have 5,000 trained polygraph examiners and you need to arrive at the airport five hours ahead of your flight. It'll be great for the unemployment situation!
I don't know if you are familiar with SQL Server, but Access uses meta-data tables to describe everything just like SQL Server. Learn how to query them, write the reports that you need to analyze the data that you want, export the reports into all the databases, and you should be able to get something reasonable.
Or export the meta-table data into a meta-meta-table and have all your information in one place. I think that's the route that I'd pursue.
Working with system tables is fun! (he says, after trying to install SQL Server 2005 Developer's Edition has screwed up two different computers)
Fairplay Games is having a pretty good sale right now, including the Super Mega-Deluxe Wood Cataan. Included are Tsuro and Castle, two games that I quite enjoy. I think they also have two versions of Ticket To Ride.
w out
http://www.fairplaygames.com/games.asp?filter=Blo
I'm sure they might be able to refit their computer rooms for less than $1billion.
First, cooperative mode seems to have gone away. I really enjoyed a previous job where, during lunch, we'd close our office doors, hook in to a private network, and run around helping each other kill monsters. We'd sometimes deathmatch blow each other up, but I really miss cooperative play. I don't care much for deathmatch-only games. I think the last co-op game that I played was the first two Rainbow Six games.
Second, I don't care much for MMORPGs, though I do play City of Heroes/Villains (love them supers!). If I'm spending $50 on a game, I want to be able to play it on my laptop when I'm traveling, I don't want to have to be tied to a data circuit to use the game.
And I'll do a general bitch about the price of MMORPGs. I don't mind the $15/month, but I think it is ridiculous that we have to spend $50 for the game, plus the $15/month, to play the blasted thing. Yes, if you're careful you can catch sales or lower prices, I'm just stating the $50 as a general retail price.
As for me and WoW, I'm not a huge fantasy fan. I'm also not in to "crafting" games, the concept of spending a few hours online fishing just doesn't do anything, I want to log on and beat up bad guys. Thus, CoH/V is a great game for me. Now if they'd only do a Mac version... (yes, dual boot a Macintel and you're good, I have friends with older G4/G5 Macs who want to play without buying new systems).
That one wasn't loaded with explosives, it crashed on the lawn.
There are four reflectors, three left by Apollo landings, one left by a Russian robotic landing. That latter seems to be the hardest to hit, it is more sensitive to temperature changes (lunar phase, light/dark) than the others.
Well, she's the main operator. She also works for the Apollo program now, and I occasionally sit on the catwalk watching for airplanes that wander into the airspace while the laser is "shining."