On the other hand, some might say stories like this are a damn good reason not to subscribe. I read the National Enquirer in the line at the supermarket, but I don't buy it.
Did you read it? "Since real one-time pads' numbers are by definition random and known in advance to both sender and receiver, though, the company seems to be playing fast-and-loose with their terms." This isn't a "National Enquirer" story, it's an "Alerting you to a lying company" story.
Yeah, Here is a good article on accessing the hidden folder on an iPod, and here is a (os 9) app to do it for you. I don't know about Windows, but i'd assume you'd just have to be able to access a HFS+ firewire drive (which is basically what the iPod is). (Keep in mind though, i don't have an iPod, so i don't have any first-hand knowledge of any of this).
That's NOT to say that you can't use it as a hard drive. You CAN copy stuff to and from it, in hard drive mode, but if you copied mp3's to it in hard drive mode, then you can't listen to them, and if you can listen to the music, then it's not in hard drive mode.
You can actually copy mp3s off it in music mode. It's music is simply stored in an invisible folder named "Music". Easily copied via the command line (or whatever). It's just a little more work then the automatic upstream synchronization.
"43. CNN 2, Fox News 2: Reporting live from Afghanistan, Geraldo Rivera implies that he's packing heat. "We refuse to be crime victims," Rivera says. "We're not the victim types. If they're going to get us, it's going to be in a gunfight."
"Words you never want to hear: 'Garaldo's got a gun!'"
The author may bag on AI, and it it bad now, but it's the only hope for workable search engines in the future.
He doesn't exactly bag on AI, he just says we should let computers do what they're good at (Repetitive counting and sifting through masses of information) and let humans do what they're good at (Making judgments on how good or useful a web site is).
2) What is this absolute crapola about how bytes are more reliable than allegedly "fragile" books? Does this tubesteak realize that there are 500 year old books that are completely legible, while 15-year-old electronic data is unreadable? Yeesh. The only bright spot is that this guy's ravings are in electronic form, so future generations won't have to worry about them.
Yeah, 500 year old books are readable, if they're kept in vacuum sealed boxes and not touched by human hands. I have copies of books that are falling apart after a couple of years. And if you had read the whole article, you would have read him say "CDs, magnetic tape, flash, and platters all fall apart pretty quickly -- but that's OK, because bytes are not only comparatively tiny... but they get tinier every year." Yeah, CDs only last about 15 years, but in 10 years you'll be able to fit your 1000 CD library on 1 SuperduperCD. You can easily make exact copies of bytes, but I'd like to see you make those copies given the 1,000,000 books those 1000 CDs can hold.
"Macs are the computers that really made a difference, just look at DOS, it's not even a GUI. Too bad Apple's gonna die any day now."
"Macs are the computers that really made a difference, just look at Windows 3.1, what a blatant rip off of the Mac OS. Too bad Apple's gonna die any day now."
"Macs are the computers that really made a difference, just look at Windows 95, what a rip off of the Mac OS. Too bad Apple's gonna die any day now."
"Macs are the computers that really made a difference, just look at Windows XP, huge rip off of Macs. Too bad Apple's gonna die any day now."
Ok, I don't know if this is a clever troll, or if you're just staggeringly ignorant, but I'll say it again DOWNLOADING MUSIC IS NOT FUCKING THEFT. I'm sorry to swear, but I feel that it's very important to put this bad metaphor (bordering on Newspeak[?]) to death. If you steal something, the person you steal it from no longer has it. A better analogy would be:
First of all, you leave you're couch sitting out on your front porch. I see your couch and I like it, so I go home and build myself an exact copy. You can't get mad at me about theft, because you still have your couch. And you can't get mad at me for invading you privacy, because you left your couch out for everyone walking by to see (which is analogous to having your music on TV, and the radio, and in movies)
It makes sense to disallow b.net clone servers even if those developers personally aren't infringing on any of Blizzard's copyrights
It may make sense, but it's not very LEGAL (or moral for that matter). It's quite possible b.net clones are bad for Blizzard bottom line, but that doesn't make them illegal. If I do something legal that hurts a company, it's the company's problem (In an ideal, non corporate-owned world anyway).
When you put down your email address on a catalog or credit card form, the email you start receiving (technically opt-in) will probably be sent using this product.
No, no, no! Not bothering to opt-out does not count as opting in! To say otherwise is pure Doublespeak[?].
Sure you can download it for free, but what you don't find out until you download 400 MB. and go through their slow-ass website, is that they want a friggen credit-card number to let you play. "30-day free trial (cancel anytime before trial expires and you won't be billed)" Yeah, right.
Yes, it's absolutely the first book about the OS. Partly because "the OS" is Finux (which is a fictional Linux alike (which he used so he could do what he wanted with it and not worry about people saying 'You fool, thats v. 2.57 of FOO, it can't do multiconfigubar' (or some such))).
An Interview with Benjamin Herrenschmidt, PPC/Kernel Hacker.
by Michael Coyle
In the early days of PPC/Linux, it was extremely difficult to boot into the alternative OS. It required a three-finger keyboard command to boot into Open Firmware and then typing several lines of cryptic text.
Fortunately, thanks to work the of Benjamin Herrenschmidt and his free BootX Control panel, booting Linux in Old World Macs became much easier. It opened Linux to a large number of average Mac users. Today, several years later, BootX has been replaced by yaboot and Ben has moved on to become a major contributor to the PowerPC branch of the Linux kernel. Running Linux on a Powerbook or iBook with support for power management and accelerated graphics wouldn't be possible his efforts.
Born in Selestat, France twenty-nine years ago, Ben had his first computer at 8 years old (a ZX81) and by the age of 13 he was enrolled in his first "Technology Class". You wouldn't call him the "Teachers Pet", more likely a "Teachers Pest" since the instructor soon asked young Benjamin run the course for him.
His first exposure to the MacOS came when he ran a Mac emulator on Atari ST and Amiga computers. By college, Ben traded his Amiga computer for his first Mac. At that time, he had no interest in Linux, but enjoyed writing for the lower level bits and bytes. He adds,
"Unlike many other Linux hackers, Unix is a late discovery for me. After I sold my Amiga, I had the chance to have access to a Mac and started learning MacOS programming. I started doing that professionally after spending a couple of years having fun and drinking beer at the university. I quickly became interested specifically in device drivers and other kind of low level programming, and that's probably what led me to Linux."
Benjamin installed MkLinux on his Wallstreet PowerBook, but there was no Sleep support at that time. He contacted the maintainer of the PPC branch of the Linux kernel, Paul Mackerras, and asked permission to use his Linux/PPC PMU (Power Management) source code as the basis for an MkLinux version. Ben never finished the MkLinux version, but this introduction to Paul and PPC/Linux led to his switch from MkLinux to the PPC/Linux kernel where he rolled up his sleeves and dug in, fixing whatever low level drivers got in the way of enjoying Linux on his Powerbook. But what let to the development of BootX?
"At one point, I got fed up of floppy booting and used a code snipped I found on usenet that showed how to switch the CPU into supervisor mode. I used that to write BootX. That's how, slowly, I started using my knowledge of Macs and my MacOS hacking skills to work on improving Linux on Macs. But I've never been a Linux _user_, I'm still learning "newbie" tricks everyday. When it comes to userland, I believe I can't even write moderately complex shell scripts."
One advantage to being a developer on the PPC code base is how quickly your patches are accepted into the official Linux kernel. In the x86 world, there are substantially more developers trying to get their snippet of code added to the kernel, but in the PowerPC world, the pond is a lot smaller and it's easier to be a "Big Fish". While PPC is a smaller community, it's not limited solely to Apple hardware.
"The PPC tree has it's own complexities, mostly because we have to deal with a large set of very different machines and CPUs. From the PowerMacs, PRePs & CHRP, the 4xx and 8xx based embedded platforms, and even IBM pSeries and iSeries servers."
Because the source code is often available for Linux programs, the platform disparity that exists between MacOS and Windows is diminished. If a software developer compiles his project for the x86 architecture, the user of a PPC computer can simply compile the source on his own computer. Unfortunately, their are sometimes problems with the compilation. Are x86 developers reluctant to modify their code to accommodate PPC users, is Linux another OS where PowerPC users are given second class status?
"Well, except for some rare cases, I've never seen maintainers reluctant to merge in things like endian fixes. It's a bit more difficult when it comes to someone saying, "Hey, add that ugly hack that makes it work for me".
But Benjamin, do you make money writing Open Source software?
"So far, all my Linux work has been spare-time volunteer activity. I have a job in a nice small company where I mostly do MacOS software. Our company is evolving though, and we are now working on some embedded systems using Linux/PPC on IBM 405GP CPU. I do it (Linux/PPC Development) for fun and because I learned a lot of things doing it.
I quite like the concept of Free Software and am happy to put my work under the GPL umbrella. I believe at some point, computer science is like science in general, information and techniques have to be shared to benefit the most people and evolve.
I also feel these technologies have too important a position in our society, too many things depend on them, to safely leave them in the hands of an opaque monopoly. Free Software (or Open Source in this case) is a kind of guarantee that the technology you rely on can be trusted."
It seemed Apple would embrace Linux. there was even a ppclinux.apple.com website for awhile, but the site has disappeared as have most mentions of Linux from the Apple site. The boot process for MacOS X seems very similar to what happens in BootX and yaboot for Linux. Did you ever work for Apple? What is your opinion on how they view Linux?
"I did not work for Apple, but I used to (and still) know some Apple engineers. Apple use to have a "Linux technology manager", but I'm not sure I fully figured out what his role was, but he tried hard to get us hardware specifications (and mostly failed).
Apple's BootX and Linux BootX are two completely different things. yaboot is similar, but they were developed independently and share no code. There has been no collaboration here.
It's difficult to decrypt the reasons Apple does things. They didn't open source driver code for some third party hardware, but that is understandable. They might simply not have had the right to do so. Regarding drivers for Apple's own hardware, they did indeed "hide" a couple of them. What comes to my mind right now are the PMU driver (Power Management Unit) and the Firewire controllers driver (OHCI and Lynx chipsets)."
Still, by making Darwin, the core of MacOS X, more open, Apple must be helping the PPC/Linux group, even if inadvertently.
"Darwin code has been incredibly useful for some things. There is no documentation on the various Apple chipsets, so we have to "discover" them by either looking at the OF code (Open Firmware), disassembling MacOS bits, or reading Darwin drivers.
I have not used Darwin as a distro however. I do use MacOS X at work, and I quite like it. I have a machine running Linux 100% of the time, and one running MacOS (9 or X). In fact, I also run MacOS 9 in MacOnLinux on the Linux machine right now to write this email using CTM softwares excellent PowerMail"
PPC/Linux on a new Ti Powerbook
(Click for full image in a new window) It's possible Apple no longer actively supports Linux because the OS is multi-platform. In the final analysis, Apple is a hardware company. They leverage the MacOS to move CPUs. Since Linux runs on a variety of platforms, most costing less than Apple's hardware, support from Apple for Linux only increases the probability of migration to the x86 platform.
Still, it would be a mistake to think PPC/Linux lags behind the MacOS. It has always been fully multi-threaded and preemptive, features lacking in Classic MacOS, and Linux's hardware support exceeds MacOS X is some areas, PCMCIA and printing are two that come to mind.
Fortunately, the Mac/Linux community has volunteer coders, such as Ben Herrenschmidt, whose efforts keep an inexpensive and open source alternative to the MacOS available on PowerPC hardware.
What was our reaction to MS disabling access to the MSN sites? Blazing anger.
And this is different exactly how? When a Linux person does it, it's 'funny' (+1).
That is not why. The reason it because he starts the messages with ONE FRIGGEN WORD. If MS had disabled access to MSN sites by starting them with a certain word, we wouldn't be mad at them, we would accept that the program that wouldn't display them was at fault. And fix it.
The chief difference is that I don't send HTML mail out of malice, I do it because I think it adds value to the mail
So, your saying that the extra feature that outlook has is it doesn't allow the plaintext of the message to begin with "begin". Exactly how does not being able to start a message with "begin" add value?
A couple of Microsoft's security people published a book - Writing Secure Code - recently.
Also coming soon from BitterIrony press: GNU's guide to user-frendly UI.
The U.S. D.O.J.'s guide to speedy legal precedings.
And: Larry Wall's guide to maintainable code.
Don't you realize you already have a CD player that allows you to make a backup copy? Why would you pay extra to buy a new one?
Uhh... i think he means with the defective ("copy protected") cd. You can't do that on the CD player you have now (at least without some h4ckz0ring) that's the whole point.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, don't knock 'em. They saved Startrek. (Badumbbum)
Did you read it? "Since real one-time pads' numbers are by definition random and known in advance to both sender and receiver, though, the company seems to be playing fast-and-loose with their terms." This isn't a "National Enquirer" story, it's an "Alerting you to a lying company" story.
Yeah, Here is a good article on accessing the hidden folder on an iPod, and here is a (os 9) app to do it for you. I don't know about Windows, but i'd assume you'd just have to be able to access a HFS+ firewire drive (which is basically what the iPod is). (Keep in mind though, i don't have an iPod, so i don't have any first-hand knowledge of any of this).
You can actually copy mp3s off it in music mode. It's music is simply stored in an invisible folder named "Music". Easily copied via the command line (or whatever). It's just a little more work then the automatic upstream synchronization.
"Dissecting humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested, and the frog dies." -EB White
"Words you never want to hear: 'Garaldo's got a gun!'"
He doesn't exactly bag on AI, he just says we should let computers do what they're good at (Repetitive counting and sifting through masses of information) and let humans do what they're good at (Making judgments on how good or useful a web site is).
2) What is this absolute crapola about how bytes are more reliable than allegedly "fragile" books? Does this tubesteak realize that there are 500 year old books that are completely legible, while 15-year-old electronic data is unreadable? Yeesh. The only bright spot is that this guy's ravings are in electronic form, so future generations won't have to worry about them.
Yeah, 500 year old books are readable, if they're kept in vacuum sealed boxes and not touched by human hands. I have copies of books that are falling apart after a couple of years. And if you had read the whole article, you would have read him say "CDs, magnetic tape, flash, and platters all fall apart pretty quickly -- but that's OK, because bytes are not only comparatively tiny ... but they get tinier every year." Yeah, CDs only last about 15 years, but in 10 years you'll be able to fit your 1000 CD library on 1 SuperduperCD. You can easily make exact copies of bytes, but I'd like to see you make those copies given the 1,000,000 books those 1000 CDs can hold.
"Macs are the computers that really made a difference, just look at DOS, it's not even a GUI. Too bad Apple's gonna die any day now."
"Macs are the computers that really made a difference, just look at Windows 3.1, what a blatant rip off of the Mac OS. Too bad Apple's gonna die any day now."
"Macs are the computers that really made a difference, just look at Windows 95, what a rip off of the Mac OS. Too bad Apple's gonna die any day now."
"Macs are the computers that really made a difference, just look at Windows XP, huge rip off of Macs. Too bad Apple's gonna die any day now."
Starting to see a pattern forming?
What do you get when you multiply six by nine?
First of all, you leave you're couch sitting out on your front porch. I see your couch and I like it, so I go home and build myself an exact copy. You can't get mad at me about theft, because you still have your couch. And you can't get mad at me for invading you privacy, because you left your couch out for everyone walking by to see (which is analogous to having your music on TV, and the radio, and in movies)
Oh, sorry then. I misunderstood you.
It may make sense, but it's not very LEGAL (or moral for that matter). It's quite possible b.net clones are bad for Blizzard bottom line, but that doesn't make them illegal. If I do something legal that hurts a company, it's the company's problem (In an ideal, non corporate-owned world anyway).
*cough*slashdot*cough*
No, no, no! Not bothering to opt-out does not count as opting in! To say otherwise is pure Doublespeak[?].
Ironically enough, I think Macslash is Slashdotted
Sure you can download it for free, but what you don't find out until you download 400 MB. and go through their slow-ass website, is that they want a friggen credit-card number to let you play. "30-day free trial (cancel anytime before trial expires and you won't be billed)" Yeah, right.
Yes, it's absolutely the first book about the OS. Partly because "the OS" is Finux (which is a fictional Linux alike (which he used so he could do what he wanted with it and not worry about people saying 'You fool, thats v. 2.57 of FOO, it can't do multiconfigubar' (or some such))).
Sence the site seems /.ed; Here's the article:
An Interview with Benjamin Herrenschmidt, PPC/Kernel Hacker.
by Michael Coyle
In the early days of PPC/Linux, it was extremely difficult to boot into the alternative OS. It required a three-finger keyboard command to boot into Open Firmware and then typing several lines of cryptic text.
Fortunately, thanks to work the of Benjamin Herrenschmidt and his free BootX Control panel, booting Linux in Old World Macs became much easier. It opened Linux to a large number of average Mac users. Today, several years later, BootX has been replaced by yaboot and Ben has moved on to become a major contributor to the PowerPC branch of the Linux kernel. Running Linux on a Powerbook or iBook with support for power management and accelerated graphics wouldn't be possible his efforts.
Born in Selestat, France twenty-nine years ago, Ben had his first computer at 8 years old (a ZX81) and by the age of 13 he was enrolled in his first "Technology Class". You wouldn't call him the "Teachers Pet", more likely a "Teachers Pest" since the instructor soon asked young Benjamin run the course for him.
His first exposure to the MacOS came when he ran a Mac emulator on Atari ST and Amiga computers. By college, Ben traded his Amiga computer for his first Mac. At that time, he had no interest in Linux, but enjoyed writing for the lower level bits and bytes. He adds,
"Unlike many other Linux hackers, Unix is a late discovery for me. After I sold my Amiga, I had the chance to have access to a Mac and started learning MacOS programming. I started doing that professionally after spending a couple of years having fun and drinking beer at the university. I quickly became interested specifically in device drivers and other kind of low level programming, and that's probably what led me to Linux."
Benjamin installed MkLinux on his Wallstreet PowerBook, but there was no Sleep support at that time. He contacted the maintainer of the PPC branch of the Linux kernel, Paul Mackerras, and asked permission to use his Linux/PPC PMU (Power Management) source code as the basis for an MkLinux version. Ben never finished the MkLinux version, but this introduction to Paul and PPC/Linux led to his switch from MkLinux to the PPC/Linux kernel where he rolled up his sleeves and dug in, fixing whatever low level drivers got in the way of enjoying Linux on his Powerbook. But what let to the development of BootX?
"At one point, I got fed up of floppy booting and used a code snipped I found on usenet that showed how to switch the CPU into supervisor mode. I used that to write BootX. That's how, slowly, I started using my knowledge of Macs and my MacOS hacking skills to work on improving Linux on Macs. But I've never been a Linux _user_, I'm still learning "newbie" tricks everyday. When it comes to userland, I believe I can't even write moderately complex shell scripts."
One advantage to being a developer on the PPC code base is how quickly your patches are accepted into the official Linux kernel. In the x86 world, there are substantially more developers trying to get their snippet of code added to the kernel, but in the PowerPC world, the pond is a lot smaller and it's easier to be a "Big Fish". While PPC is a smaller community, it's not limited solely to Apple hardware.
"The PPC tree has it's own complexities, mostly because we have to deal with a large set of very different machines and CPUs. From the PowerMacs, PRePs & CHRP, the 4xx and 8xx based embedded platforms, and even IBM pSeries and iSeries servers."
Because the source code is often available for Linux programs, the platform disparity that exists between MacOS and Windows is diminished. If a software developer compiles his project for the x86 architecture, the user of a PPC computer can simply compile the source on his own computer. Unfortunately, their are sometimes problems with the compilation. Are x86 developers reluctant to modify their code to accommodate PPC users, is Linux another OS where PowerPC users are given second class status?
"Well, except for some rare cases, I've never seen maintainers reluctant to merge in things like endian fixes. It's a bit more difficult when it comes to someone saying, "Hey, add that ugly hack that makes it work for me".
But Benjamin, do you make money writing Open Source software?
"So far, all my Linux work has been spare-time volunteer activity. I have a job in a nice small company where I mostly do MacOS software. Our company is evolving though, and we are now working on some embedded systems using Linux/PPC on IBM 405GP CPU. I do it (Linux/PPC Development) for fun and because I learned a lot of things doing it.
I quite like the concept of Free Software and am happy to put my work under the GPL umbrella. I believe at some point, computer science is like science in general, information and techniques have to be shared to benefit the most people and evolve.
I also feel these technologies have too important a position in our society, too many things depend on them, to safely leave them in the hands of an opaque monopoly. Free Software (or Open Source in this case) is a kind of guarantee that the technology you rely on can be trusted."
It seemed Apple would embrace Linux. there was even a ppclinux.apple.com website for awhile, but the site has disappeared as have most mentions of Linux from the Apple site. The boot process for MacOS X seems very similar to what happens in BootX and yaboot for Linux. Did you ever work for Apple? What is your opinion on how they view Linux?
"I did not work for Apple, but I used to (and still) know some Apple engineers. Apple use to have a "Linux technology manager", but I'm not sure I fully figured out what his role was, but he tried hard to get us hardware specifications (and mostly failed).
Apple's BootX and Linux BootX are two completely different things. yaboot is similar, but they were developed independently and share no code. There has been no collaboration here.
It's difficult to decrypt the reasons Apple does things. They didn't open source driver code for some third party hardware, but that is understandable. They might simply not have had the right to do so. Regarding drivers for Apple's own hardware, they did indeed "hide" a couple of them. What comes to my mind right now are the PMU driver (Power Management Unit) and the Firewire controllers driver (OHCI and Lynx chipsets)."
Still, by making Darwin, the core of MacOS X, more open, Apple must be helping the PPC/Linux group, even if inadvertently.
"Darwin code has been incredibly useful for some things. There is no documentation on the various Apple chipsets, so we have to "discover" them by either looking at the OF code (Open Firmware), disassembling MacOS bits, or reading Darwin drivers.
I have not used Darwin as a distro however. I do use MacOS X at work, and I quite like it. I have a machine running Linux 100% of the time, and one running MacOS (9 or X). In fact, I also run MacOS 9 in MacOnLinux on the Linux machine right now to write this email using CTM softwares excellent PowerMail"
PPC/Linux on a new Ti Powerbook
(Click for full image in a new window) It's possible Apple no longer actively supports Linux because the OS is multi-platform. In the final analysis, Apple is a hardware company. They leverage the MacOS to move CPUs. Since Linux runs on a variety of platforms, most costing less than Apple's hardware, support from Apple for Linux only increases the probability of migration to the x86 platform.
Still, it would be a mistake to think PPC/Linux lags behind the MacOS. It has always been fully multi-threaded and preemptive, features lacking in Classic MacOS, and Linux's hardware support exceeds MacOS X is some areas, PCMCIA and printing are two that come to mind.
Fortunately, the Mac/Linux community has volunteer coders, such as Ben Herrenschmidt, whose efforts keep an inexpensive and open source alternative to the MacOS available on PowerPC hardware.
Blazing anger.
And this is different exactly how?
When a Linux person does it, it's 'funny' (+1).
That is not why. The reason it because he starts the messages with ONE FRIGGEN WORD. If MS had disabled access to MSN sites by starting them with a certain word, we wouldn't be mad at them, we would accept that the program that wouldn't display them was at fault. And fix it.
For the last friggen time: It's doesn't block Windows users. It blocks Outlook users. And yes, there are people with Windows who don't use Outlook.
So, your saying that the extra feature that outlook has is it doesn't allow the plaintext of the message to begin with "begin". Exactly how does not being able to start a message with "begin" add value?
Yeah, stop that damn pesky enforcing of laws designed to prevent car accidents. You might be late for something for god sakes!
Also coming soon from BitterIrony press:
GNU's guide to user-frendly UI.
The U.S. D.O.J.'s guide to speedy legal precedings.
And:
Larry Wall's guide to maintainable code.
Uhh... i think he means with the defective ("copy protected") cd. You can't do that on the CD player you have now (at least without some h4ckz0ring) that's the whole point.
This is really offtopic but: In my heart of hearts he will always be Johnny Johnson (Jimmy James' rival in NewsRadio)