There are times now in traffic when I get that unimistakable urge to just pull into the oncoming lane to pass some slow moron in front of me, or to pull the guy who cut me off out of his car at the next red light and lay a beating on his ass.
I don't do it, of course, but one can dream... and I know I'm not alone, because I've seen other posts on here from people similarly afflicted.
Doesn't anyone on here ever watch TV or movies? Seems to me a wireless security camera would actually *help* anyone who might want to break into a given place-- then nobody needs to infiltrate ahead of the break-in to tap into a wired video system.
First, the bad guys could watch the feed from that wireless camera unknown to anyone for weeks to "case" the target.
Secondly, all they'd probably have to do to render that camera useless would be intercept some video of the area it watches when said area was unoccupied, change any necessary onscreen time/date stamps (which aren't even an issue if it's a cheap-ass X10 camera), and rebroadcast it with a signal strong enough to overpower the signal from the real camera.
Of course, this all becomes a non-issue if you assume that an X10 camera would never be used to secure something valuable enough to be of interest to technically-sophisticated thieves who could easily defeat the system. But this is America, and stupider things have happened.
In fact, while we are known for our nice and downright peaceful ways
Yeah, right. I saw video of you alleged "peaceniks" whaling on people, breaking windows, and throwing projectiles at riot police during those antiwar protests a few weeks ago.
~Philly
To keep this post on topic: FUCK THE MPAA. Jack Valenti, take your stinking hands off my TiVo, you damn dirty ape!
I'm waiting to see the headlines when someone purchases a few albums on iTunes and subsequently gets wiped out by one of the RIAA's anti-piracy measures.
You'll probably be waiting a while, because I highly doubt the RIAA will bother writing their nukeware for Macs-- and iTunes for Windows won't be out until late this year.:-)
I think you're confusing patents and trademarks. Trademarks MUST be defended vigorously or they can be invalidated or lost-- which is why Google pissed us all off by cease-and-desisting WordSpy for using "google" as a verb. I doubt they really wanted to do that, but because of the way the system works, they had to. To do nothing would have been to risk their trademark (and by extension, their brand).
Patents are a different breed of cat... you can sit back for years and let people infringe on your patents, then spring the legal trap on them and take them for everything they've got-- and they have nobody to blame but themselves, for not doing sufficient due-diligence to make sure there were no pre-existing patents for their product/service/whatever.
Unfortunately, the Patent Office is so fucked up nowadays that they'll award a patent for the most obvious or stupid things, to practically anyone who has the money and the will to go through the patent process.
...columnist Dave Barry has sued Robert Cringely for the unauthorized use of the sentence "I am not making this up" immediately following a statement whose content is patently unbelievable but is, in fact, true.
Getting in was a breeze a little while ago, but I'm seeing more 504s now, too.
Now that more people are downloading and installing iTunes 4 to check it out, it will probably get a little laggy, and stay that way for a few days until everyone has a look around.
As long as companies like Microsoft are around to pump money into lobbyist firms and election campaigns, we'll never see a software-reliability law that's actually beneficial to consumers.
I'm pretty much willing to settle for some sort of truth-in-software-advertising law... so when William H. Macy's voice tells us that Microsoft's server software is totally secure and reliable, it also has to tell us that Microsoft's EULA says that if this turns out not to be so, tough shit on you for believing it in the first place.
You'd have to put two next to each other so you can coordinate the movements, but such a technique would allow you to scroll around a big screen quickly and accurately after a few minutes of practice.
Great job with the photos. Dide we really need FIVE photos showing the size comparison to a mobile phone? Or THREE showing how a ThinkPad dwarfs it? Would it have killled them to show the back of this thing, so I could see the ports and answer this question: Are the actual ports built into the device, or does it have some stupid, proprietary mega-port and a funky, easily-losable-and-expensive-to-replace port replicator cable that breaks the mega-port out into FireWire, USB, etc?
Or does connecting anything to it in the field require lugging around some docking station that negates the whole point of having a dinky computer in the first place?
Services like Verizon, that use DHCP and/or PPPoE and already have a "no servers" policy? What's the criteria, here??? It will be interesting to see how AOL differentiates "residential" DSL from other types of DSL.
I use SpeakEasy DSL via Covad. This service is technically residential, because my servers are sitting in my house. But I have a legitimate domain, and static IPs on my servers. However, reverse DNS lookups return "dslwww-xxx-yyy-zzz.phl.yadayadayada," NOT my registered domain name.
I just successfully sent myself a test message from my domain mail to my AOL account, so I'm not being blocked yet. I guess I'll start sending a test message once or twice a day to make sure it still works, until AOL clarifies their policy. And if I do get blocked, there's gonna be some hell raised about it. My servers are locked down tight and laways have been. Shutting out all DSL-hosted mailservers to keep out spam is like burning your house down to keep it from being burglarized.
~Philly
In related news... Family Guy on Cartoon Network!
on
Firefly Coming to DVD
·
· Score: 1
Figures that I've been waiting for months for the DVDs of that to ship, and now that they're being released on Tuesday the show is hitting the airwaves again.
To keep this comment on-topic:
FOX would just plain make a freakin mint, if they released all of their cancelled-but-loved-by-a-fanatic-minority shows on DVD. Where the HELL is my "Parker Lewis Can't Lose" DVD set, FOX???
Every year, my accountant does my taxes, and he gets one free maintenance visit from me for his computer in exchange.
I prefer to let him handle my taxes, because he knows all the tips and tricks to minimize my payment/maximize my refund, and I don't have to dick around with forms and receipts other than throwing them all in a folder to give to him. He prefers to let me service his computer, because I know all the tips and tricks to keep it humming along, and he doesn't have to dick around with Windows/driver/application/virus definition updates and whatnot other than to make a short list of any problems he's having.
While this might have been a wise thing to do at some time in the past, it wouldn't be anywhere near 100% effective at the moment.
Don't argue with me, I'm just summarizing the report. And in their fair bit of testing (all methods and results documented in the report), no e-mail address they obfuscated by changing "user@domain.com" to "user at domain dot com" received a single spam message.
To be fair though - using a mailto link (and the original e-mail address on the page) makes it easier for people to get in touch.
The way I look at it, if someone is too lazy to type in my e-mail address into a "To" field, they must not have something very important to tell me. And having to weed through a lot of spam inconveniences me a lot more than an inability to just click on a mailto on my site inconveniences them.
The alternative - things like formail.pl and php e-mail scripts have zero-day exploits that can be abused by spammers too.
The servers for my domain run on Mac OS 9.1. The best way I've come up with for easily-accessible feedback to an e-mail address is via a form that sends the message to an undisclosed (to the submitter) account on my mailserver. (The mailserver is also set up to not accept any mail to that account except messages originating from the webserver's IP.)
I have a helper app on my server that allows me to embed AppleScript into my web pages which is executed when the page is accessed, so the e-mail is sent via AppleScript commands from a scripting addition. In testing, I'm seeing some oddities with messages sent from my scripting addition which I'm currently trying to work out with the developer-- but once that happens I'll have a pretty secure and spamproof means of convenient feedback.
Just this past Wednesday night I discovered that I left the PDF version of this report sitting on my iBook from the last time this article was posted. Before I deleted it, I actually read the entire thing. Here's pretty much all you need to know:
1. Don't give out your e-mail address any more freely than you have to.
2. For the love of God, NEVER put it in unadulterated form (i.e. user@domain.com) in a Usenet posting or in a publicly-accessible HTML page-- even in the comments or other places that it won't appear on the final, rendered web page. If you do, it WILL get picked up and you WILL get an assload of spam.
3. If you MUST provide your address on a web page or Usenet posting, slightly obfuscating it (i.e. "user at domain dot com") is, for now, 100% effective against fooling the spambots. Which frankly I find amazing, because that trick has been around for years.
I might have bought one, except they have the ADC connector, and I needed VGA to use with my KVM so I could share my LCDs between my G4 and my PC. Coughing up mucho cash for an ADC-to-VGA converter box was not something I wanted to do.
One of my clients has a couple 17" Studio Displays, though, and they are amazing looking. The picture is so sharp you almost feel like you could reach in and pluck the icons off the dock with your fingers.
Chalk up another vote for ViewSonic. At my previous job working in the IT department of a large company, all the graphic designers under my care got huge ViewSonic CRTs along with their G4s.
At my current job, I recommend ViewSonic to all my clients, not just the ones who do graphics work. I just quoted a client on a VX2000 LCD today.
And I put my money where my mouth is in January, buying a VX900 and VX500 LCDs for my G4 at home.
None of my users/clients ever had a problem with their ViewSonic displays. In fact, I only ever had to return one ViewSonic monitor-- it was still sealed in its battered shipping box when we sent it back. No need to open a box that looked like it had taken the fork of a forklift in one side, and that sounded like it was full of broken glass when moved around. Which, by the way, is why I *don't* recommend UPS to my users/clients.:-)
The SR-71 "only" flies at Mach 3, and there's one guy in it wearing a pressure suit who could bake a cake in his lap if the cooling system suddenly failed.
That anyone thinks we could build a plane that could travel 8 times faster than the SR-71, with a cabin full of people in street clothes, is laughable. Even if it was technically possible to build a plane that could fly that fast, the only people who could afford to fly on it would be anyone who has recently seen their name on the Forbes "Richest People" list.
This plane would have to be the safest ever built-- and I mean a level of safety that would make flying on a 747 seem as safe as juggling running chainsaws by comparison.
That level of safety costs money. That level of safety also costs weight-- more safety features means fewer passengers and/or lower fuel capacity. Fewer passengers means a higher per ticket cost. And let's not even talk about the costs of insuring a plane designed to carry untrained people into LEO, through re-entry, and down to a safe landing. The insurance costs would also be passed right on to the passengers. And for all that, there are still way too many things that could go catastrophically wrong and result in Passenger McNuggets raining down over the landing pattern.
We're better off throwing all the research money into teleportation-- it seems much more achievable than NASP.
As a consultant, you're being paid to apply your knowledge and expertise to help your client. You're not being paid to blow sunshine up some PHB's ass or otherwise tell him/her what they want to hear.
You should always ask questions, and ESPECIALLY if something gets your spider sense tingling and you feel like you might be the designated fall-taking chump in some situation where said PHB's might be likely to do some CYA moves.
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There are times now in traffic when I get that unimistakable urge to just pull into the oncoming lane to pass some slow moron in front of me, or to pull the guy who cut me off out of his car at the next red light and lay a beating on his ass.
I don't do it, of course, but one can dream... and I know I'm not alone, because I've seen other posts on here from people similarly afflicted.
Doesn't anyone on here ever watch TV or movies? Seems to me a wireless security camera would actually *help* anyone who might want to break into a given place-- then nobody needs to infiltrate ahead of the break-in to tap into a wired video system.
First, the bad guys could watch the feed from that wireless camera unknown to anyone for weeks to "case" the target.
Secondly, all they'd probably have to do to render that camera useless would be intercept some video of the area it watches when said area was unoccupied, change any necessary onscreen time/date stamps (which aren't even an issue if it's a cheap-ass X10 camera), and rebroadcast it with a signal strong enough to overpower the signal from the real camera.
Of course, this all becomes a non-issue if you assume that an X10 camera would never be used to secure something valuable enough to be of interest to technically-sophisticated thieves who could easily defeat the system. But this is America, and stupider things have happened.
~Philly
In fact, while we are known for our nice and downright peaceful ways
Yeah, right. I saw video of you alleged "peaceniks" whaling on people, breaking windows, and throwing projectiles at riot police during those antiwar protests a few weeks ago.
~Philly
To keep this post on topic: FUCK THE MPAA. Jack Valenti, take your stinking hands off my TiVo, you damn dirty ape!
I'm waiting to see the headlines when someone purchases a few albums on iTunes and subsequently gets wiped out by one of the RIAA's anti-piracy measures.
:-)
You'll probably be waiting a while, because I highly doubt the RIAA will bother writing their nukeware for Macs-- and iTunes for Windows won't be out until late this year.
...because since 1999 Mac users have been able to browse the web while taking a dump, thanks to AirPort! :-)
~Philly
As a system integrator/end user support person, I'll tell you exactly why 3D UIs are a bad idea:
Because this is 2003, and I STILL hear, "You mean the other mouse button does something DIFFERENT?" far too frequently.
If people can't handle a mouse with two buttons, trying to understand a 3D UI will make their brains liquefy and flow out of their ears.
~Philly
I think you're confusing patents and trademarks. Trademarks MUST be defended vigorously or they can be invalidated or lost-- which is why Google pissed us all off by cease-and-desisting WordSpy for using "google" as a verb. I doubt they really wanted to do that, but because of the way the system works, they had to. To do nothing would have been to risk their trademark (and by extension, their brand).
Patents are a different breed of cat... you can sit back for years and let people infringe on your patents, then spring the legal trap on them and take them for everything they've got-- and they have nobody to blame but themselves, for not doing sufficient due-diligence to make sure there were no pre-existing patents for their product/service/whatever.
Unfortunately, the Patent Office is so fucked up nowadays that they'll award a patent for the most obvious or stupid things, to practically anyone who has the money and the will to go through the patent process.
~Philly
...columnist Dave Barry has sued Robert Cringely for the unauthorized use of the sentence "I am not making this up" immediately following a statement whose content is patently unbelievable but is, in fact, true.
~Philly
Getting in was a breeze a little while ago, but I'm seeing more 504s now, too.
Now that more people are downloading and installing iTunes 4 to check it out, it will probably get a little laggy, and stay that way for a few days until everyone has a look around.
~Philly
As long as companies like Microsoft are around to pump money into lobbyist firms and election campaigns, we'll never see a software-reliability law that's actually beneficial to consumers.
I'm pretty much willing to settle for some sort of truth-in-software-advertising law... so when William H. Macy's voice tells us that Microsoft's server software is totally secure and reliable, it also has to tell us that Microsoft's EULA says that if this turns out not to be so, tough shit on you for believing it in the first place.
~Philly
You'd have to put two next to each other so you can coordinate the movements, but such a technique would allow you to scroll around a big screen quickly and accurately after a few minutes of practice.
/. nickname is quite fitting. :-)
You mean, like this?
Your
~Philly
Could it be any lighter on details?
Great job with the photos. Dide we really need FIVE photos showing the size comparison to a mobile phone? Or THREE showing how a ThinkPad dwarfs it? Would it have killled them to show the back of this thing, so I could see the ports and answer this question: Are the actual ports built into the device, or does it have some stupid, proprietary mega-port and a funky, easily-losable-and-expensive-to-replace port replicator cable that breaks the mega-port out into FireWire, USB, etc?
Or does connecting anything to it in the field require lugging around some docking station that negates the whole point of having a dinky computer in the first place?
~Philly
...said it best.
~Philly
...we will soon see ways to fool this check and go back to business (balance) as usual.
Yep, and then the parties interested in counting NATed machines will go buy a law criminalizing circumvention of their "AUP Enforcement Technology."
After all, only terrorists don't want anyone to know how many machines they've got connected to their cable/DSL modem, right?
~Philly
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=burglariz e
~Philly
Services like Verizon, that use DHCP and/or PPPoE and already have a "no servers" policy? What's the criteria, here??? It will be interesting to see how AOL differentiates "residential" DSL from other types of DSL.
I use SpeakEasy DSL via Covad. This service is technically residential, because my servers are sitting in my house. But I have a legitimate domain, and static IPs on my servers. However, reverse DNS lookups return "dslwww-xxx-yyy-zzz.phl.yadayadayada," NOT my registered domain name.
I just successfully sent myself a test message from my domain mail to my AOL account, so I'm not being blocked yet. I guess I'll start sending a test message once or twice a day to make sure it still works, until AOL clarifies their policy. And if I do get blocked, there's gonna be some hell raised about it. My servers are locked down tight and laways have been. Shutting out all DSL-hosted mailservers to keep out spam is like burning your house down to keep it from being burglarized.
~Philly
Figures that I've been waiting for months for the DVDs of that to ship, and now that they're being released on Tuesday the show is hitting the airwaves again.
To keep this comment on-topic:
FOX would just plain make a freakin mint, if they released all of their cancelled-but-loved-by-a-fanatic-minority shows on DVD. Where the HELL is my "Parker Lewis Can't Lose" DVD set, FOX???
Every year, my accountant does my taxes, and he gets one free maintenance visit from me for his computer in exchange.
I prefer to let him handle my taxes, because he knows all the tips and tricks to minimize my payment/maximize my refund, and I don't have to dick around with forms and receipts other than throwing them all in a folder to give to him. He prefers to let me service his computer, because I know all the tips and tricks to keep it humming along, and he doesn't have to dick around with Windows/driver/application/virus definition updates and whatnot other than to make a short list of any problems he's having.
~Philly
While this might have been a wise thing to do at some time in the past, it wouldn't be anywhere near 100% effective at the moment.
Don't argue with me, I'm just summarizing the report. And in their fair bit of testing (all methods and results documented in the report), no e-mail address they obfuscated by changing "user@domain.com" to "user at domain dot com" received a single spam message.
~Philly
To be fair though - using a mailto link (and the original e-mail address on the page) makes it easier for people to get in touch.
The way I look at it, if someone is too lazy to type in my e-mail address into a "To" field, they must not have something very important to tell me. And having to weed through a lot of spam inconveniences me a lot more than an inability to just click on a mailto on my site inconveniences them.
The alternative - things like formail.pl and php e-mail scripts have zero-day exploits that can be abused by spammers too.
The servers for my domain run on Mac OS 9.1. The best way I've come up with for easily-accessible feedback to an e-mail address is via a form that sends the message to an undisclosed (to the submitter) account on my mailserver. (The mailserver is also set up to not accept any mail to that account except messages originating from the webserver's IP.)
I have a helper app on my server that allows me to embed AppleScript into my web pages which is executed when the page is accessed, so the e-mail is sent via AppleScript commands from a scripting addition. In testing, I'm seeing some oddities with messages sent from my scripting addition which I'm currently trying to work out with the developer-- but once that happens I'll have a pretty secure and spamproof means of convenient feedback.
~Philly
Just this past Wednesday night I discovered that I left the PDF version of this report sitting on my iBook from the last time this article was posted. Before I deleted it, I actually read the entire thing. Here's pretty much all you need to know:
1. Don't give out your e-mail address any more freely than you have to.
2. For the love of God, NEVER put it in unadulterated form (i.e. user@domain.com) in a Usenet posting or in a publicly-accessible HTML page-- even in the comments or other places that it won't appear on the final, rendered web page. If you do, it WILL get picked up and you WILL get an assload of spam.
3. If you MUST provide your address on a web page or Usenet posting, slightly obfuscating it (i.e. "user at domain dot com") is, for now, 100% effective against fooling the spambots. Which frankly I find amazing, because that trick has been around for years.
~Philly
Just wanted to add that.
I might have bought one, except they have the ADC connector, and I needed VGA to use with my KVM so I could share my LCDs between my G4 and my PC. Coughing up mucho cash for an ADC-to-VGA converter box was not something I wanted to do.
One of my clients has a couple 17" Studio Displays, though, and they are amazing looking. The picture is so sharp you almost feel like you could reach in and pluck the icons off the dock with your fingers.
~Philly
Chalk up another vote for ViewSonic. At my previous job working in the IT department of a large company, all the graphic designers under my care got huge ViewSonic CRTs along with their G4s.
:-)
At my current job, I recommend ViewSonic to all my clients, not just the ones who do graphics work. I just quoted a client on a VX2000 LCD today.
And I put my money where my mouth is in January, buying a VX900 and VX500 LCDs for my G4 at home.
None of my users/clients ever had a problem with their ViewSonic displays. In fact, I only ever had to return one ViewSonic monitor-- it was still sealed in its battered shipping box when we sent it back. No need to open a box that looked like it had taken the fork of a forklift in one side, and that sounded like it was full of broken glass when moved around. Which, by the way, is why I *don't* recommend UPS to my users/clients.
~Philly
...because it's completely impractical.
The SR-71 "only" flies at Mach 3, and there's one guy in it wearing a pressure suit who could bake a cake in his lap if the cooling system suddenly failed.
That anyone thinks we could build a plane that could travel 8 times faster than the SR-71, with a cabin full of people in street clothes, is laughable. Even if it was technically possible to build a plane that could fly that fast, the only people who could afford to fly on it would be anyone who has recently seen their name on the Forbes "Richest People" list.
This plane would have to be the safest ever built-- and I mean a level of safety that would make flying on a 747 seem as safe as juggling running chainsaws by comparison.
That level of safety costs money. That level of safety also costs weight-- more safety features means fewer passengers and/or lower fuel capacity. Fewer passengers means a higher per ticket cost. And let's not even talk about the costs of insuring a plane designed to carry untrained people into LEO, through re-entry, and down to a safe landing. The insurance costs would also be passed right on to the passengers. And for all that, there are still way too many things that could go catastrophically wrong and result in Passenger McNuggets raining down over the landing pattern.
We're better off throwing all the research money into teleportation-- it seems much more achievable than NASP.
~Philly
As a consultant, you're being paid to apply your knowledge and expertise to help your client. You're not being paid to blow sunshine up some PHB's ass or otherwise tell him/her what they want to hear.
You should always ask questions, and ESPECIALLY if something gets your spider sense tingling and you feel like you might be the designated fall-taking chump in some situation where said PHB's might be likely to do some CYA moves.
~Philly