Blah, blah, blah. We're not in the 1990's anymore. The term "hacker" is not a badge of honor. Rather it has entered into the lexicon as a very broad term. i.e. "He hacked into their system, therefore he's a hacker." is just as valid as "He hacked the code to do amazing and completely unmaintainable things, therefore he's a hacker!"
In short: Just give it up. It's a pointless argument.
And I hope the law throws the *#@$ing book at them! It's all very funny until someone is seriously hurt by this type of hacking. "Oh, hah, hah! I broke their toy! They've got lots of money! No biggie!" That sort of thinking is absolute bull. Scientists have to work VERY hard to secure funds for their endevours. It can take literally YEARS to secure the funding for a SINGLE project! If they've built something that costs 1 million, you can bet that they only had money enough to build ONE.
The worst part is that the scientist is doing it so that that jack*$$ who broke his system has new technologies and knowledge available to him! Yet this punk goes around trashing other people's stuff because it makes him "hip and cool", and he's "doing the scientists a favor by testing their systems". He has NO F###ING CLUE what kind of conditions this equipment has to operate under!
Take the South Pole station in the article. They only get unreliable and intermittent Internet access from retired satellites that have had their orbits moved to support the South Pole! Only a FEW HOURS A DAY! And some hacker kid vandalizes them for trying to get work done.
Some people are just plain jerks. Sure, I want to know if my financial information is safe. But why should hackers take the time to bother scientific equipment?
I can just see it now. A buoy in the ocean with millions of dollars in scientific instruments and sensors, collecting data for good of all mankind. Then some hacker finds his way in through the radio connection and manages to burn out or blow up the equipment by playing with the settings. His excuse? "See! It should have been secure! Next time you'll know better!" Way to miss the point, jack.
Thanks for the info! That's really interesting stuff! Could you answer one question for me, though? There's some argument over whether POV originally stood for "Persistence of Vision" or "Point of View". (I was always partial to the former, myself.) Did POV actually stand for the later and get morphed into the former, or are all these "Point of View" people just making this stuff up?
Re:Yes but what about the ants?
on
Solder in Space
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Believe it or not, this type of thing could be very useful to know. Sure, it's just a simple solder now, but what about other melted metals? For example, take 3D printing. Gravity tends to limit the types of shapes you can make, and the materials you can use. But what if we could 3D print steel? We could build a spaceship in record time! All we'd need are some "printer" robots and CAD software to control them!
Hell, in my day, I read the source code, and with an abacus in one hand, and a box full of crayons in the other...
Hah! I can one up you on that one, Mr. AC. When I was five, things were so bad that we had to give computer commands to a TURTLE just to get an image drawn!
Its predecessor, DKBTrace, was around for a bit before POV was born.
Ah, that's right. I'd forgotten all about that. Of course, POV-Ray was born on Compuserve, away from my prying eyes.:-(
No, Povray has not been around since before 'realistic' professional 3d packages existed. It has not blazed trails. Renderman is much older and as always been about fifty steps ahead in development.
Now hold on a moment here. I remember '94 fairly well, and I'm pretty sure that Renderman was NOT creating ray traced images. In fact, all the packages I remember from the time did more or less simple poly-fill stuff. Renderman was so cool because it made neat animations (like the jumping desk lamp) really easy to do. (Not that you could get ahold of a copy of Renderman without selling your soul.)
Now maybe I'm wrong on this, but I don't remember any true "photo-realistic" competition (besides a few other shareware ray tracers that I can't remember) until Lightwave came along and made 3DSMax get their asses in gear.
While we're on the subject, do you remember who the big ray tracing guru was back then? If I recall correctly, he was some guy with long red hair, and had a first name that was something like "Dan". I'd look it up, but at the moment I'm about 250 miles from my old ray tracing book.
Three grand?! My P120 with 16 MB was only 2 grand in '95. Sure 16 megs of memory was expensive, but I hope you at least got 10 gigs of disk for that money!:-)
but its currently totally inadiquate for professional use.
While I agree with you in principle, you have to understand that POV-Ray has been around since before "realistic" professional 3D packages existed. POV-Ray blazed the trails that all other packages have followed. Sure, it's outdated and difficult now. But back in 1994, it was the most amazing thing ever.
Depsite it's age, however, POV-Ray still makes an inexpensive solution for doing up 2D game graphics, wallpapers, title screens, splash screens, and a lot of other types of graphics.
(BTW, are they sure it's only been 10 years? I could swear that POV-Ray has been around for 11 or 12.)
To program a 1-minute full-motion 3D scene in POV-Ray? Well that depends on the complexity... how many primitives you are using, and such like. You will need to have a VERY clear idea in your head of what you want, before you even begin.
When I first started animating with POV-Ray, I found a little program that would generate include files. Basically, you'd create your POV-Ray file and enter a set of variables into the coordinate spots. These variables would be in an include file that didn't exist yet.
Then, you'd plug those variables into this little program and tell it the minimum/maximum values and the number of frames you wanted. It would then generate a DOS batch file that would use "echo" statements to create the include file every frame. Worked pretty well (if you had the disk space).:-)
These days POV-Ray just has variables that go from 0.0 to 1.0.
I NEED the great computer to win the make great work to win the contest.
Cry me a river. When I first started using POV-Ray, I had a 486 w/4MB of RAM and a puny 200 meg hard drive! The program came on three 5.12" disks, and I had no TARGA Viewer to see the output! I had to put up with grainy previews just to see what the heck I was rendering!
Bah, kids these days. 16 million colors, Three-Dee graphics cards, hundreds of megabytes of RAM, not to mention math COPROCESSORS! And you think you NEED a faster machine?! You're all a bunch of whiners, that's what you are!;-)
The iBook has a fan? Crap I've been using a 12" 1Ghz G4 iBook for 3 weeks and I haven't heard the fan kick yet.
Mine is the model just before yours, so things might be different. But yes, the iBooks have fans. I didn't know it was there until I started watching DVDs in bed. On the blanket the laptop wouldn't have a large enough cooling surface and would get hot. It's fairly loud when it turns on, but otherwise you'd swear that it doesn't have one.
AKAIK, there's no setting for this. You might consider taking it to the nearest "Genius Bar" and having them take a look at it. It's possible you've got a broken or misconfigured thermostat.
It's possible that the graphics card is putting out a lot of heat, although the battery will heat up if its power draw is increased. Does you PowerBook have a fan that kicks in when this happens?
This is actually somewhat surprising as Apple has always been careful not to burn people's laps. Dell laptops, OTOH, have been known to cause injuries from the high temperatures at which they operate. I'm guessing that's why Apple has been so careful about the temperature of their laptops.
FYI, the iBook I'm typing this on keeps cool enough not to even need the fan running. The only time the fan kicks in is when I place it on a poor surface (e.g. a blanket while watching a movie). Even then, it never gets hot enough to burn.
Perhaps this only occurs under certain power draw situations? Or perhaps it's a run of defective batteries?
I wonder if they *really* wipe the memory, or just delete/dealloc the memory. It'd be very mildly entertaining to see if you could wait a bit and find someone else's pics in the memory.
I can see it now. "This is Marge waving with her left hand. This is Marge waving with her right hand. And for the big finally, this is Marge waving with BOTH hands!!!"
Most people's pictures are terminally boring. Trust me.;-)
What I want to know is how they can sell these things at $20 a piece? LCD screens have come down in price *some*, but they can't be THAT cheap! Are these actually disposable, or is it really just a tricky recycling maneuver?
Nice try at a comparison, but not quite. You can't exactly get a "reconnaissance plan" for the Prudential Building at your local Wal-Mart. You can, however, get a Globe that will get you arrested in China, Turkey, or India.
Ah well, you live, you learn. Just be glad that you didn't screw up when the Enterprise was alone in the seas like I did! I made the blunder of saying she was the only operating carrier in the Pacific at the end of the war, when in fact it happened rather early in the war. (Thus the sign "Enterprise vs. Japan".) Once the Essex/Ticonderoga(ish) class entered service, it was all over for Japan.:-)
Indeed, that is a big screw-up, and those responsible should be sacked. However, that wasn't the type of problem referenced by the article. In the article, Microsoft is having to deal with politics based around who does or doesn't claim land today. And since it's a constantly moving target, Microsoft may find themselves in the same situation again EVEN IF THEY GET IT RIGHT!
I'm sorry, but that's just messed up. You didn't see any globe makers being thrown in jail when they failed to update their product from saying "USSR", did you?
Based on the phrase "given authority", I gather that law enforcement will investigate the situation before forcibly shutting down the site. Failing to do so could result in a counter-suit claiming that law enforcement did not do their job.
I think the core of the problem is that these are things only the government cares about (with the exception of the Muslim/Koran references). I'm thinking that the average Jinbo in China probably doesn't care if Taiwan is listed on the map or not. Same with the Indian sub-nation. This makes it very difficult to do proper market tests.
Slashdot Mirror
Blah, blah, blah. We're not in the 1990's anymore. The term "hacker" is not a badge of honor. Rather it has entered into the lexicon as a very broad term. i.e. "He hacked into their system, therefore he's a hacker." is just as valid as "He hacked the code to do amazing and completely unmaintainable things, therefore he's a hacker!"
In short: Just give it up. It's a pointless argument.
And I hope the law throws the *#@$ing book at them! It's all very funny until someone is seriously hurt by this type of hacking. "Oh, hah, hah! I broke their toy! They've got lots of money! No biggie!" That sort of thinking is absolute bull. Scientists have to work VERY hard to secure funds for their endevours. It can take literally YEARS to secure the funding for a SINGLE project! If they've built something that costs 1 million, you can bet that they only had money enough to build ONE.
The worst part is that the scientist is doing it so that that jack*$$ who broke his system has new technologies and knowledge available to him! Yet this punk goes around trashing other people's stuff because it makes him "hip and cool", and he's "doing the scientists a favor by testing their systems". He has NO F###ING CLUE what kind of conditions this equipment has to operate under!
Take the South Pole station in the article. They only get unreliable and intermittent Internet access from retired satellites that have had their orbits moved to support the South Pole! Only a FEW HOURS A DAY! And some hacker kid vandalizes them for trying to get work done.
Some people are just plain jerks. Sure, I want to know if my financial information is safe. But why should hackers take the time to bother scientific equipment?
I can just see it now. A buoy in the ocean with millions of dollars in scientific instruments and sensors, collecting data for good of all mankind. Then some hacker finds his way in through the radio connection and manages to burn out or blow up the equipment by playing with the settings. His excuse? "See! It should have been secure! Next time you'll know better!" Way to miss the point, jack.
Thanks for the info! That's really interesting stuff! Could you answer one question for me, though? There's some argument over whether POV originally stood for "Persistence of Vision" or "Point of View". (I was always partial to the former, myself.) Did POV actually stand for the later and get morphed into the former, or are all these "Point of View" people just making this stuff up?
Believe it or not, this type of thing could be very useful to know. Sure, it's just a simple solder now, but what about other melted metals? For example, take 3D printing. Gravity tends to limit the types of shapes you can make, and the materials you can use. But what if we could 3D print steel? We could build a spaceship in record time! All we'd need are some "printer" robots and CAD software to control them!
:-)
So be careful about what you rag on.
Hell, in my day, I read the source code, and with an abacus in one hand, and a box full of crayons in the other...
Hah! I can one up you on that one, Mr. AC. When I was five, things were so bad that we had to give computer commands to a TURTLE just to get an image drawn!
(for those who don't get it)
Its predecessor, DKBTrace, was around for a bit before POV was born.
:-(
Ah, that's right. I'd forgotten all about that. Of course, POV-Ray was born on Compuserve, away from my prying eyes.
No, Povray has not been around since before 'realistic' professional 3d packages existed. It has not blazed trails. Renderman is much older and as always been about fifty steps ahead in development.
Now hold on a moment here. I remember '94 fairly well, and I'm pretty sure that Renderman was NOT creating ray traced images. In fact, all the packages I remember from the time did more or less simple poly-fill stuff. Renderman was so cool because it made neat animations (like the jumping desk lamp) really easy to do. (Not that you could get ahold of a copy of Renderman without selling your soul.)
Now maybe I'm wrong on this, but I don't remember any true "photo-realistic" competition (besides a few other shareware ray tracers that I can't remember) until Lightwave came along and made 3DSMax get their asses in gear.
While we're on the subject, do you remember who the big ray tracing guru was back then? If I recall correctly, he was some guy with long red hair, and had a first name that was something like "Dan". I'd look it up, but at the moment I'm about 250 miles from my old ray tracing book.
Three grand?! My P120 with 16 MB was only 2 grand in '95. Sure 16 megs of memory was expensive, but I hope you at least got 10 gigs of disk for that money! :-)
but its currently totally inadiquate for professional use.
While I agree with you in principle, you have to understand that POV-Ray has been around since before "realistic" professional 3D packages existed. POV-Ray blazed the trails that all other packages have followed. Sure, it's outdated and difficult now. But back in 1994, it was the most amazing thing ever.
Depsite it's age, however, POV-Ray still makes an inexpensive solution for doing up 2D game graphics, wallpapers, title screens, splash screens, and a lot of other types of graphics.
(BTW, are they sure it's only been 10 years? I could swear that POV-Ray has been around for 11 or 12.)
To program a 1-minute full-motion 3D scene in POV-Ray? Well that depends on the complexity... how many primitives you are using, and such like. You will need to have a VERY clear idea in your head of what you want, before you even begin.
:-)
When I first started animating with POV-Ray, I found a little program that would generate include files. Basically, you'd create your POV-Ray file and enter a set of variables into the coordinate spots. These variables would be in an include file that didn't exist yet.
Then, you'd plug those variables into this little program and tell it the minimum/maximum values and the number of frames you wanted. It would then generate a DOS batch file that would use "echo" statements to create the include file every frame. Worked pretty well (if you had the disk space).
These days POV-Ray just has variables that go from 0.0 to 1.0.
I NEED the great computer to win the make great work to win the contest.
;-)
Cry me a river. When I first started using POV-Ray, I had a 486 w/4MB of RAM and a puny 200 meg hard drive! The program came on three 5.12" disks, and I had no TARGA Viewer to see the output! I had to put up with grainy previews just to see what the heck I was rendering!
Bah, kids these days. 16 million colors, Three-Dee graphics cards, hundreds of megabytes of RAM, not to mention math COPROCESSORS! And you think you NEED a faster machine?! You're all a bunch of whiners, that's what you are!
The iBook has a fan? Crap I've been using a 12" 1Ghz G4 iBook for 3 weeks and I haven't heard the fan kick yet.
Mine is the model just before yours, so things might be different. But yes, the iBooks have fans. I didn't know it was there until I started watching DVDs in bed. On the blanket the laptop wouldn't have a large enough cooling surface and would get hot. It's fairly loud when it turns on, but otherwise you'd swear that it doesn't have one.
two men had been arrested because they had, and I quote, "been in posession of a map and a video camera"
:-)
*chuckle* Gotta love the media.
s/misconfigured/miscalibrated/g
AKAIK, there's no setting for this. You might consider taking it to the nearest "Genius Bar" and having them take a look at it. It's possible you've got a broken or misconfigured thermostat.
It's possible that the graphics card is putting out a lot of heat, although the battery will heat up if its power draw is increased. Does you PowerBook have a fan that kicks in when this happens?
This is actually somewhat surprising as Apple has always been careful not to burn people's laps. Dell laptops, OTOH, have been known to cause injuries from the high temperatures at which they operate. I'm guessing that's why Apple has been so careful about the temperature of their laptops.
FYI, the iBook I'm typing this on keeps cool enough not to even need the fan running. The only time the fan kicks in is when I place it on a poor surface (e.g. a blanket while watching a movie). Even then, it never gets hot enough to burn.
Perhaps this only occurs under certain power draw situations? Or perhaps it's a run of defective batteries?
Doh! Good catch.
I wonder if they *really* wipe the memory, or just delete/dealloc the memory. It'd be very mildly entertaining to see if you could wait a bit and find someone else's pics in the memory.
;-)
I can see it now. "This is Marge waving with her left hand. This is Marge waving with her right hand. And for the big finally, this is Marge waving with BOTH hands!!!"
Most people's pictures are terminally boring. Trust me.
What I want to know is how they can sell these things at $20 a piece? LCD screens have come down in price *some*, but they can't be THAT cheap! Are these actually disposable, or is it really just a tricky recycling maneuver?
Nice try at a comparison, but not quite. You can't exactly get a "reconnaissance plan" for the Prudential Building at your local Wal-Mart. You can, however, get a Globe that will get you arrested in China, Turkey, or India.
Ah well, you live, you learn. Just be glad that you didn't screw up when the Enterprise was alone in the seas like I did! I made the blunder of saying she was the only operating carrier in the Pacific at the end of the war, when in fact it happened rather early in the war. (Thus the sign "Enterprise vs. Japan".) Once the Essex/Ticonderoga(ish) class entered service, it was all over for Japan. :-)
Indeed, that is a big screw-up, and those responsible should be sacked. However, that wasn't the type of problem referenced by the article. In the article, Microsoft is having to deal with politics based around who does or doesn't claim land today. And since it's a constantly moving target, Microsoft may find themselves in the same situation again EVEN IF THEY GET IT RIGHT!
I'm sorry, but that's just messed up. You didn't see any globe makers being thrown in jail when they failed to update their product from saying "USSR", did you?
Based on the phrase "given authority", I gather that law enforcement will investigate the situation before forcibly shutting down the site. Failing to do so could result in a counter-suit claiming that law enforcement did not do their job.
I think the core of the problem is that these are things only the government cares about (with the exception of the Muslim/Koran references). I'm thinking that the average Jinbo in China probably doesn't care if Taiwan is listed on the map or not. Same with the Indian sub-nation. This makes it very difficult to do proper market tests.