Phil Zimmermann's PGP already put crypto in the hands of the masses. It was a little cumbersome to use, even back in the '90s, but it's there. Anybody who wants good crypto, even on their phone, can probably find it and set it up. That group especially includes what I will call dedicated professional terrorists. FBI tapping into vanilla off-the-shelf iPhones will not catch them. This bill is about the common tech carried by the common man.
... for the Commodore PET. http://pettil.tumblr.com/ But now my code is better than it was in 1979, and by now I have used dozens of other languages and operating systems. Am I "expert"? No. I take the approach of learning the minimum I need to accomplish the mission (usually delivering maintainable code) plus whatever else I become curious about along the way.
What usually works best is to combine a new project with a new set of tools, so I'm learning the new tool while trying to finish the project. I describe the approach as "You are here and you want to get there." or "Lewis and Clark" approach. If you started with Perl, learning Ruby. Consider learning something old school, like Forth. Install Linux on your desktop. Force yourself to live in it by deleting Windows first. In short, become uncomfortable. The best learning occurs in that space.
'its ability to be safely used in all weather conditions, and the fact that its connections are never live unless commanded by the car during charging.'
I had a similar thing happen with Apple's iTunes a few years ago. One of my kids downloaded a couple hundred dollars worth of stuff using my debit card. Since I didn't (still don't) own an iPod and run Linux on the desktop (no iTunes client) there was no way it was me. I was pretty sure it was an inside job, but there was no phone number to contact Apple. The child vehemently denied any involvement. After going back and forth a few times with iTunes' web support people, they told me it was fraud and I should involve the local police department, ending the matter where they were concerned.
I went back on their site, but instead of reporting it as a fraud issue, I took the "I forgot my username and password" route. I entered my credit card info and they gave up the goods, handing over the kid's email account. The iTunes were also discovered on the kid's iPod, as well as receipts in the yahoo mail folder. Busted.
from the link: "using 30-year-old or older machines." from the fine article: "First released in 1981; discontinued in 1994 using 30-year-old or older machines."
I recently (three weekends ago) fired up my Commodore PET 2001 (a *genuine* pre-1980 computer) and have been writing a Forth for it. It's really a lot of fun, and I'm finding that 30 years experience in various high-level languages has improved my "6502 assembler golf" game a lot. It's very incomplete, but the inner interpreter mostly works. Feel free to throw down on it here
But this article links to thespywhobilledme.com which in turn has a link to Amazon where you can buy the thriller "Outsourced" which (coincidence or correlation? you decide) will be released TOMORROW! So it might just be a shameless plug. Maybe RJ Hillhouse (if that's her *real* name) discovered Taco's password (which probably isn't 'password') and posted the story on Slashdot's front page herself (if indeed she's really a woman). To recap:
1) write spy novel 2) get published 3) get slashdotted 4) click click click 5) profit!
Last time I checked, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves was in Grimm's Fairy Tales, a compilation of European folk stories that existed long before Walt Disney or copyright/trademark laws. As the dad of three, it bugs me more than a little when Disney Inc attempts to own childhood fantasy and retroactively copyright/trademark/turn-into-disney-IP all kinds of things that were part of the childhood psyche-scape long before Uncle Walt was even born.
"...sacrificing yourself to the complete reinstalls..." ???? I am afraid you are mistaken.
SUSE Linux has an "upgrade" mode in the YAST installer, which retains all your old configuration information and/etc tree
Re:Great introduction to Linux
on
Knoppix Hacks
·
· Score: 1
I've got a 5th grader and an 8th grader living in my house, and after seeing pr0n splashed all over the screen back when it was booted to Windows for the last time, and reinstalling Windows to remove virii and trojans and browser hijackers for the last time, I installed Linux (SuSE 9.1, no dual boot). They like the games, the Open Office is fine for their school projects, and my 5th grader is happily learning how to code HTML. Life is good.
I remember reading (somewhere, once) that Kildall had embedded "signature bytes" in the CP/M binaries that inexplicably showed up in Tim Patterson's QDOS 1.0. (basically an 8088 port of CP/M) What does the slashdot cabal say to veracity of this rumor?
I'm 40. Back in the day, I worked at the Tyson's Corner ComputerLand store, where they sold the Osborne I. It had a Z-80, it ran CP/M -- the precursor to what could have been DOS if only Kildall hadn't been out flying his airplane the on the day IBM knocked on his door. The bundled software with an Osborne I included PacMan, adapted for the 16x64 text display, and I played that on the floor demo a lot.
Looking back now, it seems to me that the Osborne books were the logical O'Reilly Associates of that era. I was particularly fond of "Introduction to Microprocessors" and their various assembly language introductions. My copies were majorly dogeared. The only one I hung onto was my 6502 Assembly Language Programming by Lance Leventhal.
About ten years ago, some friends of mine gave me an Osborne I, which they picked up for $7 at a garage sale in Colorado Springs. I turned it on a few years ago and it still worked... was thinking of Ebaying it but I think I might just hang on to it now. Osborne will be remembered by me mostly for the Osborne I and those great books he published.
Every now and then I fill my available disk with several big huge files, the only purpose of which is to soak up all of the available disk. Then I PGP -W the enormous tempfiles into oblivion, effectively cleaning out the leftover data fragments in the should-be-empty sectors.
http://vwx.com has the story of how its vw.net domain was legally acquired by the Volkswagen corporation via the inconvenient-for-the-little-guys policies of Network Solutions and our fine court system.
I don't have a lot of problems with the PDF format per se, but the Acrobat Reader is sorely lacking. For starters, the keyboard controls are counterintuitive. Try hitting page up or page down to move through a document. I do it every time, then smack myself on the forehead and say "wups, shoulda used control-3 instead!" Now click the "Makes the visible width of the current page fit inside the window" button (I kid you not, that's the tool tip) and press the keystroke combination that advances one screen at a time, not one page at a time. That's right, there is no such keystroke combination. The icons don't make a lot of sense, to me anyway. Just check out the ones which have tool tips of "Displays only the page," "Displays both bookmarks and the page," and "Displays both thumbnails and the page" on the left side of the toolbar. Try dragging the mouse over some text in the viewer to select it for pasting to your word processor or notepad. Notice how you can only select entire words? Finally, why does the readme file delivered with my version (3.01 for Windoze) come in WRITE format and not PDF?
First of all, it's "services," not "servises." And "bat" should have been "bad." Editor!
Moving to the substance of the matter, here we see big media news coverage of Yet Another Big Media Merger. Does it occur to anyone besides me that:
1) CNN's coverage of a competitor's mega-merger might be um... somewhat biased?
2) Leaving the details of this one particular mega-deal aside, it's kind of strange that such an enormous concentration of media power has been placed into the hands of so few people in an alleged Democratic Republic?
In other words, would it really make a difference if we give all the control to a single corporation over all the media (cable TV, broadcast TV, radio, broadband, dialup, newspapers) vs. splitting it up into a cartel of a dozen or so companies? If an advertiser will eagerly pay millions of dollars for a single 30-second spot during the Super Bowl(tm), it could only be for one reason -- because it works. One of the reasons I avoid watching TV is that I believe the same holds true for the other 99.9996527778% of the year. This is taking place in an era where, in theory, just about *anyone* can garner a worldwide audience for their idea, if it is good enough, using readily available, affordable equipment. Why then are so few people (RIAA, MPAA, Disney/Go/ABC, MS/NBC/GE, etc...) in control of the intellectual marketplace?
I'm a busy guy. I've been reading this site for a few years now, and I usually set my filtering at "2" and pick through just the stories that interest me, to rein in the total amount of time I spend slashdotting. While I'm often tempted to post a comment, I've only done it a couple of times. Maybe it's fear of flame, maybe it's laziness, maybe it's just because after reading *all* the other comments to avoid replicating ideas I become so confused that I forget what triggered my original impulse to post my own comment in the first place. So my slashdot karma is usually zero.
While I appreciate that participation is rewarded in the form of moderator points, that system has a few drawbacks. My proposal is to let users select from among more than one moderation model (the one Rob gives us) on the slashdot preferences page. The preferred model for me would let every user (even lurkers like me) give a 1 (hated it), 2 (ehh, default, unrated), or 3 (loved it) rating to every comment they read, should they feel the impetus to click on the thumbs up or thumbs down button that appears below the comment. Comments could be sorted by the total accumulated points. This would permit other views, such as "top 10 hottest comments", as well as making us lurkers feel more welcome. Well?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. Reagan, a Republican was still president in 1991. Oh wait...
Phil Zimmermann's PGP already put crypto in the hands of the masses. It was a little cumbersome to use, even back in the '90s, but it's there. Anybody who wants good crypto, even on their phone, can probably find it and set it up. That group especially includes what I will call dedicated professional terrorists. FBI tapping into vanilla off-the-shelf iPhones will not catch them. This bill is about the common tech carried by the common man.
... for the Commodore PET. http://pettil.tumblr.com/ But now my code is better than it was in 1979, and by now I have used dozens of other languages and operating systems. Am I "expert"? No. I take the approach of learning the minimum I need to accomplish the mission (usually delivering maintainable code) plus whatever else I become curious about along the way. What usually works best is to combine a new project with a new set of tools, so I'm learning the new tool while trying to finish the project. I describe the approach as "You are here and you want to get there." or "Lewis and Clark" approach. If you started with Perl, learning Ruby. Consider learning something old school, like Forth. Install Linux on your desktop. Force yourself to live in it by deleting Windows first. In short, become uncomfortable. The best learning occurs in that space.
'its ability to be safely used in all weather conditions, and the fact that its connections are never live unless commanded by the car during charging.'
I had a similar thing happen with Apple's iTunes a few years ago. One of my kids downloaded a couple hundred dollars worth of stuff using my debit card. Since I didn't (still don't) own an iPod and run Linux on the desktop (no iTunes client) there was no way it was me. I was pretty sure it was an inside job, but there was no phone number to contact Apple. The child vehemently denied any involvement. After going back and forth a few times with iTunes' web support people, they told me it was fraud and I should involve the local police department, ending the matter where they were concerned. I went back on their site, but instead of reporting it as a fraud issue, I took the "I forgot my username and password" route. I entered my credit card info and they gave up the goods, handing over the kid's email account. The iTunes were also discovered on the kid's iPod, as well as receipts in the yahoo mail folder. Busted.
from the link: "using 30-year-old or older machines."
from the fine article: "First released in 1981; discontinued in 1994 using 30-year-old or older machines."
I recently (three weekends ago) fired up my Commodore PET 2001 (a *genuine* pre-1980 computer) and have been writing a Forth for it. It's really a lot of fun, and I'm finding that 30 years experience in various high-level languages has improved my "6502 assembler golf" game a lot. It's very incomplete, but the inner interpreter mostly works. Feel free to throw down on it here
Charlie
Maybe this is a conspiracy theory, maybe not...
But this article links to thespywhobilledme.com which in turn has a link to Amazon where you can buy the thriller "Outsourced" which (coincidence or correlation? you decide) will be released TOMORROW! So it might just be a shameless plug. Maybe RJ Hillhouse (if that's her *real* name) discovered Taco's password (which probably isn't 'password') and posted the story on Slashdot's front page herself (if indeed she's really a woman). To recap:
1) write spy novel
2) get published
3) get slashdotted
4) click click click
5) profit!
I'm probably the only guy left in the world who still plays this game a lot, but I really like it and it kills time like no other game can
Last time I checked, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves was in Grimm's Fairy Tales, a compilation of European folk stories that existed long before Walt Disney or copyright/trademark laws. As the dad of three, it bugs me more than a little when Disney Inc attempts to own childhood fantasy and retroactively copyright/trademark/turn-into-disney-IP all kinds of things that were part of the childhood psyche-scape long before Uncle Walt was even born.
"...sacrificing yourself to the complete reinstalls ..." ???? I am afraid you are mistaken.
/etc tree
SUSE Linux has an "upgrade" mode in the YAST installer, which retains all your old configuration information and
I've got a 5th grader and an 8th grader living in my house, and after seeing pr0n splashed all over the screen back when it was booted to Windows for the last time, and reinstalling Windows to remove virii and trojans and browser hijackers for the last time, I installed Linux (SuSE 9.1, no dual boot). They like the games, the Open Office is fine for their school projects, and my 5th grader is happily learning how to code HTML. Life is good.
I remember reading (somewhere, once) that Kildall had embedded "signature bytes" in the CP/M binaries that inexplicably showed up in Tim Patterson's QDOS 1.0. (basically an 8088 port of CP/M) What does the slashdot cabal say to veracity of this rumor?
I'm 40. Back in the day, I worked at the Tyson's Corner ComputerLand store, where they sold the Osborne I. It had a Z-80, it ran CP/M -- the precursor to what could have been DOS if only Kildall hadn't been out flying his airplane the on the day IBM knocked on his door. The bundled software with an Osborne I included PacMan, adapted for the 16x64 text display, and I played that on the floor demo a lot.
Looking back now, it seems to me that the Osborne books were the logical O'Reilly Associates of that era. I was particularly fond of "Introduction to Microprocessors" and their various assembly language introductions. My copies were majorly dogeared. The only one I hung onto was my 6502 Assembly Language Programming by Lance Leventhal.
About ten years ago, some friends of mine gave me an Osborne I, which they picked up for $7 at a garage sale in Colorado Springs. I turned it on a few years ago and it still worked... was thinking of Ebaying it but I think I might just hang on to it now. Osborne will be remembered by me mostly for the Osborne I and those great books he published.
There's always "pgp -w"
Every now and then I fill my available disk with several big huge files, the only purpose of which is to soak up all of the available disk. Then I PGP -W the enormous tempfiles into oblivion, effectively cleaning out the leftover data fragments in the should-be-empty sectors.
leereyno wrote:
> Neither of them is likely to know the difference between Linux and Charlie Brown's piano playing friend with a similar name.
Do you mean Schroeder?
Isn't the second syllable of copyright, "pee"? uh... I think you meant the third syllable.
http://vwx.com has the story of how its vw.net domain was legally acquired by the Volkswagen corporation via the inconvenient-for-the-little-guys policies of Network Solutions and our fine court system.
I don't have a lot of problems with the PDF format per se, but the Acrobat Reader is sorely lacking. For starters, the keyboard controls are counterintuitive. Try hitting page up or page down to move through a document. I do it every time, then smack myself on the forehead and say "wups, shoulda used control-3 instead!" Now click the "Makes the visible width of the current page fit inside the window" button (I kid you not, that's the tool tip) and press the keystroke combination that advances one screen at a time, not one page at a time. That's right, there is no such keystroke combination. The icons don't make a lot of sense, to me anyway. Just check out the ones which have tool tips of "Displays only the page," "Displays both bookmarks and the page," and "Displays both thumbnails and the page" on the left side of the toolbar. Try dragging the mouse over some text in the viewer to select it for pasting to your word processor or notepad. Notice how you can only select entire words? Finally, why does the readme file delivered with my version (3.01 for Windoze) come in WRITE format and not PDF?
First of all, it's "services," not "servises." And "bat" should have been "bad." Editor!
Moving to the substance of the matter, here we see big media news coverage of Yet Another Big Media Merger. Does it occur to anyone besides me that:
1) CNN's coverage of a competitor's mega-merger might be um... somewhat biased?
2) Leaving the details of this one particular mega-deal aside, it's kind of strange that such an enormous concentration of media power has been placed into the hands of so few people in an alleged Democratic Republic?
In other words, would it really make a difference if we give all the control to a single corporation over all the media (cable TV, broadcast TV, radio, broadband, dialup, newspapers) vs. splitting it up into a cartel of a dozen or so companies? If an advertiser will eagerly pay millions of dollars for a single 30-second spot during the Super Bowl(tm), it could only be for one reason -- because it works. One of the reasons I avoid watching TV is that I believe the same holds true for the other 99.9996527778% of the year. This is taking place in an era where, in theory, just about *anyone* can garner a worldwide audience for their idea, if it is good enough, using readily available, affordable equipment. Why then are so few people (RIAA, MPAA, Disney/Go/ABC, MS/NBC/GE, etc...) in control of the intellectual marketplace?
I'm a busy guy. I've been reading this site for a few years now, and I usually set my filtering at "2" and pick through just the stories that interest me, to rein in the total amount of time I spend slashdotting. While I'm often tempted to post a comment, I've only done it a couple of times. Maybe it's fear of flame, maybe it's laziness, maybe it's just because after reading *all* the other comments to avoid replicating ideas I become so confused that I forget what triggered my original impulse to post my own comment in the first place. So my slashdot karma is usually zero.
While I appreciate that participation is rewarded in the form of moderator points, that system has a few drawbacks. My proposal is to let users select from among more than one moderation model (the one Rob gives us) on the slashdot preferences page. The preferred model for me would let every user (even lurkers like me) give a 1 (hated it), 2 (ehh, default, unrated), or 3 (loved it) rating to every comment they read, should they feel the impetus to click on the thumbs up or thumbs down button that appears below the comment. Comments could be sorted by the total accumulated points. This would permit other views, such as "top 10 hottest comments", as well as making us lurkers feel more welcome. Well?