This has always been my dream virus -- one that flashes the BIOS with a short program that decodes raw audio data and plays it to the PC speaker. "Your computer is hosed. Your computer is hosed. Your computer is hosed."
Maybe when clicking on viruses costs people their entire computer* they'll stop using Windows.
* You and I know that you can just replace the BIOS chip, but do Mom and Pop (or Dell)? Doubtful.
I imagine M$ donates the software so students get hooked, on it and when they get out in the real world all they know is M$ so they continue to buy M$ products and keep M$ alive.
> Let's get real here. As much as I love TeX/LaTeX, it's not widely used. When I was proceedings editor for a big technical conference
What conference? "Using Word to produce shitty documents 2005"?
Where I work -- the University of Chicago's Physical Sciences Division -- I've never seen ANYONE use Word. I don't even think most people have it installed. The professors there do all their typesetting / document production in TeX and LaTeX.
So maybe for some useless industry conference they use Word, but at top research universities, they use LaTeX. Even if your 15% is accurate, I'll bet those 15% are the papers that actually get accepted. (Not to mention that TeX provably produces better output than Word possibly could. Compare professionally typeset documents and TeX -- they share common features like ligatures, intelligent kerning, proper hyphenation, good spacing, etc, etc. Word does none of this, and CAN'T do most of that. Read Knuth's TeXbook for the details on what TeX does right.)
Uh, apt-get install tetex installs LaTeX just fine. My only beef is that my emacs macros try to execute xdvi to view the dvi file... and X isn't running (I use a native port of emacs). Is there a "carbon dvi" or something that lets me view DVIs on the mac?
(For a while I used PDFLaTeX and viewed everything in Preview.app. But that ate up memory because Preview was doing something weird like not closing the files or something. I forget, but it was bad and I only did it for a day or so.)
Trust me, I've used mplayer for years. I know what it can do. The problem is that it uses binary win32 codecs to decode things like WMV3 and some Quicktime. Not only is this completely illegal (not that I care), it also dosen't work on x86-64, ppc, sparc, arm, etc. It's convenient for x86 uses, but not so convenient for everyone else. Rather than encourage people to support proprietary, DRM-encrusted formats by allowing them to "play" them under Linux, we should instead tell content producers that we want standards-compliant video. That way, EVERYONE can play them -- not just people that happening to be running Windows on x86.
if I were a porn producer, I would just distribute my movies as H.264-encoded mov files and let the user do what he wants with it. H.264 plays under every OS now and it downloads cleanly to the iPod, so this sounds like a good solution. They're not specifically targeting the iPod (not that I see a problem here), but they're not standing in the way of people who want pr0n on their iPod. Plus it works under linux, which is more than you can say for the low-quality wmv and rm that seems to be the "industry standard" now.
I, for some reason, don't see much interest in having porn on your iPod, though. I show my iPod to people all the time, and I wouldn't want them uncovering my pr0n stash! (Plus, when do you need porn and don't have a real computer or magazine around?)
Pick "Plain Old Text" if you want to post... plain old text. You can even set this in your preferences so your comments start that way by default. And BTW, you can intermix HTML with plain old text. Just don't try and type literal <s and >s.
And with a UID of over 800,000, your opinion of Slashdot's theme is irrelevant. Slashdot has always looked like this, and most of us would like it to continue to look like this. If that's a problem, go back to one of your shiny-gui content-less blogs. k thx bye.:)
I can attest to this. The "secondary" server room at UIC is kept the same temperature, more or less, than the surrounding building. This building is completely concrete and has no windows for ventilation. One day, the building lost power because an old water main burst and flooded the steam tunnels and the basement of every building on campus (that was fun). Fortunately, the computer center had just installed an emergency backup generator, and that switched the servers over to emergency power just fine. Unfortunately, the AC was tied to the building power, and didn't work. I'm told that temperatures reached higher than 120 Fahrenheit in the server room, but the servers worked fine.
So yeah, 85 degrees for a few days isn't going to kill anything.
If you're using a mac, just copy Sentui on to your iPod. Then when you go to another computer, you can just open Sentui and copy all the music (or a few tracks) on your iPod to the host computer's iTunes library. It's brilliant for moving your music to work or giving your friends a few tracks. (Oh that's illegal. umm... not for that then. riiiight.)
> It organizes all your photos in some crazy scheme on the disk
By date? (the "2005" is not a random number... it's the year. The subfolders 01 02 03... are "months" -- and each month has "days" inside. This is the easiest way to organize things until you name the photos and add them to albums.)
> It can't recognize duplicate photos and it will stupidly re-download all your photos every time unless you delete them from the camera
I haven't had this problem. iPhoto says something like P12312312.jpg is a duplicate. Skip? [Yes, No, Yes To All]. Click Yes To All.
> However, if iPhoto had been a photo management program, it could at least have included a way to view photos. As it is, I still don't understand the point of this thing. IMO it has a very poorly designed interface.
Umm.... double click on the photos? It works for me...
You driving around in your SUV hurts me -- excess emissions means health problems from dirty air, greenhouse effect, etc. You don't have the right to hurt me.
I've heard similar stories about UIC. Mostly with the University stealing grant money (and charging grant expenses to the wrong accounts). Daniel Bernstein has one account here, and I've heard similar accounts from other professors.
Working for the state is a great way to get free money. And a great waste of taxpayer resources. (Apparently you have to give all employees a 1-year notice before you can stop paying them. That's a year of free salary unless you commit a felony. Greaaat.)
Sure, but where does the trusted key come from? The user's hard drive? You can't trust that. What if you can though? Then you have to trust libssl, loaded from the user's computer. Well you could check the checksum of the library via the net. But what if the user replaces the checksum checking code? Etc.
This generalizes to a simple fact -- you can't trust code running on a general purpose computer. You can't trust the network. You can't trust anything, because the user controls everything.
The other day, I was downloading some videos from iTMS. I remember hearing that iTunes doesn't apply the DRM until the entire file was downloaded, so I tried to figure out some way to get at the downloaded data.
My first instinct was to run iTunes in gdb. iTunes exits with error 55 when run in a debugger, though. Fine, I thought... I'll just attach gdb later. Turns out that segfaults gdb (!). Whatever... I just need the argument passed to open -- let's see what ktrace says. That gave me my answer... iTunes downloads to a folder inside its music folder called "Downloads". I figured if I hard-linked the file, iTunes would delete (or rather, decrement the inode reference count from 3 to 2) the file original file, and I'd still have the raw data in my linked file. Turns out iTunes applies the DRM in place, so that didn't work. (I had two names for the same DRM'd data.)
You don't have to stop there though. You could write kernel extensions that intercept the output of read(), write(), and mmap() calls. You could use a network filesystem that never removes any data that's written to it. You could sniff the packets. Etc. etc. etc.
You can't make a program that root can't tamper with:)
> no easy way for users to produce video content for the iPod
Umm, is "Export to iPod..." in Quicktime-enabled apps too hard? Did you know there are already several video podcasts... and the integration with iTunes means that when a new edition comes out it's automatically retrived, transferred to your iPod, and put in the "video podcasts" menu? I don't think it could be easier.
Plus, since it plays standard H.264 or MPEG4 files, you can just drag them into iTunes and play them on your iPod. NerdTV, for example, works fine this way. (And is even a slightly educational way to kill a few minutes.)
Slashdot Mirror
#CONFIG_NEW_FEATURE=n
There, no feature creep.
> There's also the matter of who's gonna foot the bill for cleaning, construction and replacing all the lost material.
Likely the insurance company.
This has always been my dream virus -- one that flashes the BIOS with a short program that decodes raw audio data and plays it to the PC speaker. "Your computer is hosed. Your computer is hosed. Your computer is hosed."
Maybe when clicking on viruses costs people their entire computer* they'll stop using Windows.
* You and I know that you can just replace the BIOS chip, but do Mom and Pop (or Dell)? Doubtful.
I imagine M$ donates the software so students get hooked, on it and when they get out in the real world all they know is M$ so they continue to buy M$ products and keep M$ alive.
> BTW, anyone have a good recovery utility for a fubar'd EXT3 drive?
Yes, fsck. It's never failed me.
> Let's get real here. As much as I love TeX/LaTeX, it's not widely used. When I was proceedings editor for a big technical conference
What conference? "Using Word to produce shitty documents 2005"?
Where I work -- the University of Chicago's Physical Sciences Division -- I've never seen ANYONE use Word. I don't even think most people have it installed. The professors there do all their typesetting / document production in TeX and LaTeX.
So maybe for some useless industry conference they use Word, but at top research universities, they use LaTeX. Even if your 15% is accurate, I'll bet those 15% are the papers that actually get accepted. (Not to mention that TeX provably produces better output than Word possibly could. Compare professionally typeset documents and TeX -- they share common features like ligatures, intelligent kerning, proper hyphenation, good spacing, etc, etc. Word does none of this, and CAN'T do most of that. Read Knuth's TeXbook for the details on what TeX does right.)
Uh, apt-get install tetex installs LaTeX just fine. My only beef is that my emacs macros try to execute xdvi to view the dvi file... and X isn't running (I use a native port of emacs). Is there a "carbon dvi" or something that lets me view DVIs on the mac?
(For a while I used PDFLaTeX and viewed everything in Preview.app. But that ate up memory because Preview was doing something weird like not closing the files or something. I forget, but it was bad and I only did it for a day or so.)
Trust me, I've used mplayer for years. I know what it can do. The problem is that it uses binary win32 codecs to decode things like WMV3 and some Quicktime. Not only is this completely illegal (not that I care), it also dosen't work on x86-64, ppc, sparc, arm, etc. It's convenient for x86 uses, but not so convenient for everyone else. Rather than encourage people to support proprietary, DRM-encrusted formats by allowing them to "play" them under Linux, we should instead tell content producers that we want standards-compliant video. That way, EVERYONE can play them -- not just people that happening to be running Windows on x86.
if I were a porn producer, I would just distribute my movies as H.264-encoded mov files and let the user do what he wants with it. H.264 plays under every OS now and it downloads cleanly to the iPod, so this sounds like a good solution. They're not specifically targeting the iPod (not that I see a problem here), but they're not standing in the way of people who want pr0n on their iPod. Plus it works under linux, which is more than you can say for the low-quality wmv and rm that seems to be the "industry standard" now.
I, for some reason, don't see much interest in having porn on your iPod, though. I show my iPod to people all the time, and I wouldn't want them uncovering my pr0n stash! (Plus, when do you need porn and don't have a real computer or magazine around?)
Pick "Plain Old Text" if you want to post ... plain old text. You can even set this in your preferences so your comments start that way by default. And BTW, you can intermix HTML with plain old text. Just don't try and type literal <s and >s.
:)
And with a UID of over 800,000, your opinion of Slashdot's theme is irrelevant. Slashdot has always looked like this, and most of us would like it to continue to look like this. If that's a problem, go back to one of your shiny-gui content-less blogs. k thx bye.
I can attest to this. The "secondary" server room at UIC is kept the same temperature, more or less, than the surrounding building. This building is completely concrete and has no windows for ventilation. One day, the building lost power because an old water main burst and flooded the steam tunnels and the basement of every building on campus (that was fun). Fortunately, the computer center had just installed an emergency backup generator, and that switched the servers over to emergency power just fine. Unfortunately, the AC was tied to the building power, and didn't work. I'm told that temperatures reached higher than 120 Fahrenheit in the server room, but the servers worked fine.
So yeah, 85 degrees for a few days isn't going to kill anything.
If you're using a mac, just copy Sentui on to your iPod. Then when you go to another computer, you can just open Sentui and copy all the music (or a few tracks) on your iPod to the host computer's iTunes library. It's brilliant for moving your music to work or giving your friends a few tracks. (Oh that's illegal. umm... not for that then. riiiight.)
The iPod is exactly the same. It does rename its music files, though, ... but they'll still play fine.
Someone should change your nick from "Overly Critical Guy" to "Overly Braindead Guy".
Maybe a dingo ate his baby.
That's it for the panel! Shut up!
3 8)
(reference: http://www.crooksandliars.com/2005/10/24.html#a55
Maybe I'm mistaken, but the wine I saw her parents drinking was non-alcoholic. By definition, they were not consuming alcohol.
The air contains an addictive drug called "oxygen". Withdrawal is almost always fatal.
How can the Morons (oh sorry) allow this heathenism to plague our children?
> It organizes all your photos in some crazy scheme on the disk
... are "months" -- and each month has "days" inside. This is the easiest way to organize things until you name the photos and add them to albums.)
By date? (the "2005" is not a random number... it's the year. The subfolders 01 02 03
> It can't recognize duplicate photos and it will stupidly re-download all your photos every time unless you delete them from the camera
I haven't had this problem. iPhoto says something like P12312312.jpg is a duplicate. Skip? [Yes, No, Yes To All]. Click Yes To All.
> However, if iPhoto had been a photo management program, it could at least have included a way to view photos. As it is, I still don't understand the point of this thing. IMO it has a very poorly designed interface.
Umm.... double click on the photos? It works for me...
You driving around in your SUV hurts me -- excess emissions means health problems from dirty air, greenhouse effect, etc. You don't have the right to hurt me.
I've heard similar stories about UIC. Mostly with the University stealing grant money (and charging grant expenses to the wrong accounts). Daniel Bernstein has one account here, and I've heard similar accounts from other professors.
Working for the state is a great way to get free money. And a great waste of taxpayer resources. (Apparently you have to give all employees a 1-year notice before you can stop paying them. That's a year of free salary unless you commit a felony. Greaaat.)
How do you figure? What does this have to do with copyright?
(And since when did criminals care about breaking the law?)
Sure, but where does the trusted key come from? The user's hard drive? You can't trust that. What if you can though? Then you have to trust libssl, loaded from the user's computer. Well you could check the checksum of the library via the net. But what if the user replaces the checksum checking code? Etc.
:)
This generalizes to a simple fact -- you can't trust code running on a general purpose computer. You can't trust the network. You can't trust anything, because the user controls everything.
The other day, I was downloading some videos from iTMS. I remember hearing that iTunes doesn't apply the DRM until the entire file was downloaded, so I tried to figure out some way to get at the downloaded data.
My first instinct was to run iTunes in gdb. iTunes exits with error 55 when run in a debugger, though. Fine, I thought... I'll just attach gdb later. Turns out that segfaults gdb (!). Whatever... I just need the argument passed to open -- let's see what ktrace says. That gave me my answer... iTunes downloads to a folder inside its music folder called "Downloads". I figured if I hard-linked the file, iTunes would delete (or rather, decrement the inode reference count from 3 to 2) the file original file, and I'd still have the raw data in my linked file. Turns out iTunes applies the DRM in place, so that didn't work. (I had two names for the same DRM'd data.)
You don't have to stop there though. You could write kernel extensions that intercept the output of read(), write(), and mmap() calls. You could use a network filesystem that never removes any data that's written to it. You could sniff the packets. Etc. etc. etc.
You can't make a program that root can't tamper with
> no easy way for users to produce video content for the iPod
Umm, is "Export to iPod..." in Quicktime-enabled apps too hard? Did you know there are already several video podcasts... and the integration with iTunes means that when a new edition comes out it's automatically retrived, transferred to your iPod, and put in the "video podcasts" menu? I don't think it could be easier.
Plus, since it plays standard H.264 or MPEG4 files, you can just drag them into iTunes and play them on your iPod. NerdTV, for example, works fine this way. (And is even a slightly educational way to kill a few minutes.)