The speculation in the parent post is woefully uninformed. Apple does not own the file format. AAC is a consortium-built, industry-standard audio format. Apple does not even own the DRM. It is licensed from FairPlay. See Apple's AAC page to get a clue.
It's a PDF v1.4 document. You need Acrobat 5 or higher (or the equivalent) to view it properly. It looks black because the transparent images are not supported in PDF v1.3 and earlier. It could be considered a flaw that Acrobat 4 does not recognize that it's a newer PDF than the application knows how to render.
The author probably built the chart in Illustrator, which outputs its PDF documents as v1.4 by default.
MacOS X makes it trivial to build a small, encrypted disk image. Make up a strong password for that image, store passwords in -rw------- text files on that image and you're set. As long as you unmount the disk image after each use, it's pretty easy and modestly safe. Using a technique like this, I make up a semi-random password for *every* computer, website, maillist, etc that I access. The three or four most sensitive passwords (GPG passphrase, etc) don't go in there, though. Those stay only in my head.
A nice alternative is Secret! for PalmOS which, similarly, encrypts a simple text file.
I saw this in the 2003 Wisconsin Film Festival. The writer/director, Greg Pak, was present for a Q&A afterward. The stories are superficially about robots. By that I mean it's not hard sci-fi, but primarily about people in a sci-fi context. The characters are interesting and much more significant than the plot.
I enjoyed the film. The middle two stories are the best, I think. If you have the opportunity to see it at a film fest where Pak may be present, I recommend that. He is an interesting speaker.
Hubble is operated and funded by NASA, but all science planning and data analysis is done by Space Telescope Science Institute on the Johns Hopkins University campus.
Several people have commented that the money may be better spent on a space telescope. Here's why that may not be true:
Advantages of space:
* Extremely low light pollution and air absorption. This means you can see very dim things that may not be ever visible from the ground.
Advantages of ground:
* Initial cost is about 100-1000 times cheaper for same-sized primary
* Repairs and routine maintenance are possible without a $250 million shuttle launch
* Newer technology is possible, since it's less risky. Hubble uses a lot of electronics from the early 1980s.
Since light-collecting power goes as the square of the diameter, a 100-meter telescope has 1600 times the light collecting ability of Hubble. So, if the celestial objects of interest are not background-limited, you can get the same quality image in 1 minute that would take Hubble a whole day to acquire.
1 gram is about 6 x 10^23 atoms (mostly hydrogen) 1 star is about 2 x 10^33 grams (mostly sun-like) 1 galaxy is about 10^10 stars 1 universe is about 10^10 galaxies
So the number of atoms in the universe is about 10^77 which is about 2^256, so you're off by a factor of about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
Most of the universe is hydrogen, which has 3 quarks. So that wouldn't change your answer by very much.
It's not an issue for me. I find I just do an occasional eye flicker to the secondary monitor and work mostly on the primary monitor.
I use two identical 17" Sony E200 monitors at 1280x1024, side by side with about a 10 degree angle between them. Left is Mail, Mozilla, iTunes, and Dock. Right is Menubar, Terminal, and iChat and any other apps. I spend almost all my time looking at Right, with an occasional glance at Mail on Left. Left is AGP Radeon, Right is PCI Radeon.
A few ideas that helped me:
Use identical monitors
Any difference between the two (size, resolution, color) is grating
Speed up your mouse settings (MouseZoom prefpanel on Mac)
Moving horizontally across 2560 pixels takes times
Choose one to be your primary and do all focused work there
Put low-attention apps (mail, browser) on the other
Choose a dark colored desktop unless you want a tan
Sit back in your chair when reading mail and surfing
Lean in when coding
Turn off animated GIFs!!!!!!
Otherwise the corner-of-the-eye flicker will kill concentration
A few problems (likely all Mac specific):
VNC server can only see Right (the primary monitor)
Booting with one monitor off may forget window placement
Windows are only allowed to be as wide as the width of one monitor.
Grr.
"USB-required" is just a mnemonic. What it really means is they're only supporting machines released after some date, which happens to coincide with when they made USB a standard feature. Saying "only computers with built-in USB" makes it really easy to check if your machine will support Panther.
I suspect it's because Panther drops support for certain older Apple motherboards, namely the ones from just before Apple added USB as a standard feature.
* Always on connection - no dialup time or busy signals * Doesn't tie up the line / don't need a second line * Lower latency than modem (for some)
and the increased bandwidth has benefits beyond just download times:
* SSH connection still responsive while downloading * Multiple simultaneous downloads practical, since single
downloads no longer saturate the connection * Can stream music from my computer at work * One connection can feasibly serve multiple computers
My $35/month 256k DSL is only about 5x faster than my old modem. For big downloads (e.g. Mozilla nightlies), I still have to wait for a fair while, but staying online with DSL doesn't tie up the phone, so it's not an inconvenience.
Not sure how a firewall helps with DOS and DDOS attacks however. something floods your pipe, and its flooded, no matter how clever your firewall is. Try reading the article:)
Maybe You should read the HEADLINE!:-) This is a low-bandwidth DOS which exploits a TCP stack weakness to prevent outgoing packets. It does not flood the pipe.
I think I fully understand your point, but I don't agree with you. If he is a whitehat, then his intentions are indeed good. He may be trying not to break anything. But my point was, what if he's an incompetent whitehat? I don't think we should trust some shmoe worm writer to fix our security holes for us.
Marginally related anecdote: in 1991 or 1992, a couple of guys I met at Cornell release a Mac virus into the wild. The virus had no destructive payload -- it was just an experiment that would propagate. But the idiots only tested it on one version of MacOS (v7, IIRC). The virus fried other MacOS versions, killing many many machines. Granted, these were certainly not whitehats, but the destructive aftermath of their toy was unintentional.
What if W32/Nachi worked great on WinXP but accidentally wiped harddrives on Win2K? Nobody would be praising the "whitehat" in that case. And who pays for the bandwidth for W32/Nachi's brute force search for wide-open boxes?
In my analogy, it's like millions of whitehats going to every house and trying the doors over and over again to see if they're unlocked. And, yes, he IS nailing things. The worm dowloads and installs new software. That's likely a non-reversable process (unless you wipe the machine and start over, or have intricate logs to know what the file system looked like before the attack).
I don't think I used the slippery slope fallacy in my argument. I did apply reasoning that the possible worst case consequences do not justify the likely benefits. I would be genuinely grateful if you pointed out where I may have used a fallacy.
But I did remember. In my analogy, it was the drug dealers. However, it's not clear from the alert message that the anti-blaster virus only attacks infected machines. My interpretation was that it looks for any machine with port 135 open and tries to patch the RPC hole.
The ends do not justify the means. Worms are bad, and vigilantism rarely achieves long-lasting good. (Case in point: What good did Bernhard Goetz achieve by his shootings?)
If you support the actions by the author of this worm to rid the computers of the illegal blaster worm, then I claim you cannot deny RIAA the ability to raid the same computers to rid them of illegal music downloads. They're both examples of non-authority actions to rid computers of a perceived wrong.
So, if you leave the door to your house unlocked, you're giving me permission to enter and nail plywood sheets over the doorway? Cool. It's for your own good, after all. Better that I render your house impregnable than a drug dealer gets in a sets up shop. Oh by the way, I'm not a carpenter, so if I accidentally break up a couple windows in the process, you won't mind, right?
If this worm is supposed to be Robin Hood, then picture Sherwood Forest overrun by about 30 million tights-clad archers running about, grabbing every person in sight, shaking them vigorously to see if they are rich, and cutting purses if jingling is detected.
Let's just hope that jingle-detection algorithm is perfect, and the purse-cutting knife is sharp and true. Otherwise Sherwood is going to have a lot of pissed-off, penniless eunuchs.
Vigilantism is a dangerous game. Innocent victims do get hurt. This worm is a very bad idea.
"The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it"
My interpretation is that if you routinely need to change pieces of GCC to change your code, then the GCC source *is* your source and the GPL requires you to release it.
This is a great story. It's nice to hear about successes! But I have to ask, how much time (==money) did you have to invest to win that battle? The rest of us thank you for that investment, but I'm guessing it was larger than most of us are willing to invest individually.
I agree that monolithic apps cause problems (I gave up on Mozilla mail for example), but the particular example of IM and email consolidation is appealing to me.
I like to document conversations, so I keep and file a lot of email. The IM discussions are often lost from the conceptual thread, unless I manually digest them into an email. If IM transcripts showed up with my email, it would be easier to keep a uniform record of workflow.
A more interesting solution to me would be that iChat or the like would email the IM transcript at the end of the conversation, instead of being integrated into the mail client.
Slashdot Mirror
On the contrary, real scientists quite frequently admit when they don't understand something. Perhaps you were thinking of politicians?
The speculation in the parent post is woefully uninformed. Apple does not own the file format. AAC is a consortium-built, industry-standard audio format. Apple does not even own the DRM. It is licensed from FairPlay. See Apple's AAC page to get a clue.
It's a PDF v1.4 document. You need Acrobat 5 or higher (or the equivalent) to view it properly. It looks black because the transparent images are not supported in PDF v1.3 and earlier. It could be considered a flaw that Acrobat 4 does not recognize that it's a newer PDF than the application knows how to render.
The author probably built the chart in Illustrator, which outputs its PDF documents as v1.4 by default.
MacOS X makes it trivial to build a small, encrypted disk image. Make up a strong password for that image, store passwords in -rw------- text files on that image and you're set. As long as you unmount the disk image after each use, it's pretty easy and modestly safe. Using a technique like this, I make up a semi-random password for *every* computer, website, maillist, etc that I access. The three or four most sensitive passwords (GPG passphrase, etc) don't go in there, though. Those stay only in my head.
A nice alternative is Secret! for PalmOS which, similarly, encrypts a simple text file.
I saw this in the 2003 Wisconsin Film Festival. The writer/director, Greg Pak, was present for a Q&A afterward. The stories are superficially about robots. By that I mean it's not hard sci-fi, but primarily about people in a sci-fi context. The characters are interesting and much more significant than the plot.
I enjoyed the film. The middle two stories are the best, I think. If you have the opportunity to see it at a film fest where Pak may be present, I recommend that. He is an interesting speaker.
Hubble is operated and funded by NASA, but all science planning and data analysis is done by Space Telescope Science Institute on the Johns Hopkins University campus.
The key is funding.
Several people have commented that the money may be better spent on a space telescope. Here's why that may not be true:
Advantages of space:
* Extremely low light pollution and air absorption. This means you can see very dim things that may not be ever visible from the ground.
Advantages of ground:
* Initial cost is about 100-1000 times cheaper for same-sized primary
* Repairs and routine maintenance are possible without a $250 million shuttle launch
* Newer technology is possible, since it's less risky. Hubble uses a lot of electronics from the early 1980s.
Hubble cost $1.5 billion initially plus $0.25 billion per year (http://hubble.nasa.gov/faq.html) for a 2.5-meter telescope.
Since light-collecting power goes as the square of the diameter, a 100-meter telescope has 1600 times the light collecting ability of Hubble. So, if the celestial objects of interest are not background-limited, you can get the same quality image in 1 minute that would take Hubble a whole day to acquire.
Here's some math for ya:
, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
1 gram is about 6 x 10^23 atoms (mostly hydrogen)
1 star is about 2 x 10^33 grams (mostly sun-like)
1 galaxy is about 10^10 stars
1 universe is about 10^10 galaxies
So the number of atoms in the universe is about 10^77 which is about 2^256, so you're off by a factor of about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
Most of the universe is hydrogen, which has 3 quarks. So that wouldn't change your answer by very much.
Hmm, maybe it's because I have two vid cards. Does your machine have both monitors plugged into the same card?
I use two identical 17" Sony E200 monitors at 1280x1024, side by side with about a 10 degree angle between them. Left is Mail, Mozilla, iTunes, and Dock. Right is Menubar, Terminal, and iChat and any other apps. I spend almost all my time looking at Right, with an occasional glance at Mail on Left. Left is AGP Radeon, Right is PCI Radeon.
A few ideas that helped me:
Any difference between the two (size, resolution, color) is grating
Moving horizontally across 2560 pixels takes times
A few problems (likely all Mac specific):
Grr.
"USB-required" is just a mnemonic. What it really means is they're only supporting machines released after some date, which happens to coincide with when they made USB a standard feature. Saying "only computers with built-in USB" makes it really easy to check if your machine will support Panther.
I suspect it's because Panther drops support for certain older Apple motherboards, namely the ones from just before Apple added USB as a standard feature.
Publish a few Perl modules to CPAN.org. That's guaranteed to get you 30-40 spam messages per day. It worked for me, unfortunately.
May I recommend Frazz to all Calvin & Hobbes fans? In my opinion, it has similar humor, wisdom and cuteness. It's my current favorite.
It's not just content that justifies broadband:
* Always on connection - no dialup time or busy signals
* Doesn't tie up the line / don't need a second line
* Lower latency than modem (for some)
and the increased bandwidth has benefits beyond just download times:
* SSH connection still responsive while downloading
* Multiple simultaneous downloads practical, since single
downloads no longer saturate the connection
* Can stream music from my computer at work
* One connection can feasibly serve multiple computers
My $35/month 256k DSL is only about 5x faster than my old modem. For big downloads (e.g. Mozilla nightlies), I still have to wait for a fair while, but staying online with DSL doesn't tie up the phone, so it's not an inconvenience.
Not sure how a firewall helps with DOS and DDOS attacks however. something floods your pipe, and its flooded, no matter how clever your firewall is. Try reading the article :)
:-) This is a low-bandwidth DOS which exploits a TCP stack weakness to prevent outgoing packets. It does not flood the pipe.
Maybe You should read the HEADLINE!
I think I fully understand your point, but I don't agree with you. If he is a whitehat, then his intentions are indeed good. He may be trying not to break anything. But my point was, what if he's an incompetent whitehat? I don't think we should trust some shmoe worm writer to fix our security holes for us.
Marginally related anecdote: in 1991 or 1992, a couple of guys I met at Cornell release a Mac virus into the wild. The virus had no destructive payload -- it was just an experiment that would propagate. But the idiots only tested it on one version of MacOS (v7, IIRC). The virus fried other MacOS versions, killing many many machines. Granted, these were certainly not whitehats, but the destructive aftermath of their toy was unintentional.
What if W32/Nachi worked great on WinXP but accidentally wiped harddrives on Win2K? Nobody would be praising the "whitehat" in that case. And who pays for the bandwidth for W32/Nachi's brute force search for wide-open boxes?
In my analogy, it's like millions of whitehats going to every house and trying the doors over and over again to see if they're unlocked. And, yes, he IS nailing things. The worm dowloads and installs new software. That's likely a non-reversable process (unless you wipe the machine and start over, or have intricate logs to know what the file system looked like before the attack).
I don't think I used the slippery slope fallacy in my argument. I did apply reasoning that the possible worst case consequences do not justify the likely benefits. I would be genuinely grateful if you pointed out where I may have used a fallacy.
Heh. I like that image. :-)
But I did remember. In my analogy, it was the drug dealers. However, it's not clear from the alert message that the anti-blaster virus only attacks infected machines. My interpretation was that it looks for any machine with port 135 open and tries to patch the RPC hole.
I know people who are pissed if you tell them that their fly is open, but it doesn't mean I shouldn't try.
This worm is doing not telling.
A better analogy: I see your fly is down, so I zip it up for you.
The ends do not justify the means. Worms are bad, and vigilantism rarely achieves long-lasting good. (Case in point: What good did Bernhard Goetz achieve by his shootings?)
If you support the actions by the author of this worm to rid the computers of the illegal blaster worm, then I claim you cannot deny RIAA the ability to raid the same computers to rid them of illegal music downloads. They're both examples of non-authority actions to rid computers of a perceived wrong.
So, if you leave the door to your house unlocked, you're giving me permission to enter and nail plywood sheets over the doorway? Cool. It's for your own good, after all. Better that I render your house impregnable than a drug dealer gets in a sets up shop. Oh by the way, I'm not a carpenter, so if I accidentally break up a couple windows in the process, you won't mind, right?
If this worm is supposed to be Robin Hood, then picture Sherwood Forest overrun by about 30 million tights-clad archers running about, grabbing every person in sight, shaking them vigorously to see if they are rich, and cutting purses if jingling is detected.
Let's just hope that jingle-detection algorithm is perfect, and the purse-cutting knife is sharp and true. Otherwise Sherwood is going to have a lot of pissed-off, penniless eunuchs.
Vigilantism is a dangerous game. Innocent victims do get hurt. This worm is a very bad idea.
My interpretation is that if you routinely need to change pieces of GCC to change your code, then the GCC source *is* your source and the GPL requires you to release it.
This is a great story. It's nice to hear about successes! But I have to ask, how much time (==money) did you have to invest to win that battle? The rest of us thank you for that investment, but I'm guessing it was larger than most of us are willing to invest individually.
Download it. In the tarball is
PDL-2.4.0/Demos/Cartography_demo.pm
I agree that monolithic apps cause problems (I gave up on Mozilla mail for example), but the particular example of IM and email consolidation is appealing to me.
I like to document conversations, so I keep and file a lot of email. The IM discussions are often lost from the conceptual thread, unless I manually digest them into an email. If IM transcripts showed up with my email, it would be easier to keep a uniform record of workflow.
A more interesting solution to me would be that iChat or the like would email the IM transcript at the end of the conversation, instead of being integrated into the mail client.