Hey, you gave me an idea! Someone should start an open-source MP3 company! When someone buys an MP3, they should share it with people! I'll call it... Gnutella!:)
Yes, I was actually talking about the danger of your hard drive blowing up (not literally...). I'm not sure that your music would "skip" if your hard drive was skipping... It'd probably crash.
I re-read my parent post and realized I wasn't too clear... The ramdisk stuff was both to prevent the box from hanging *and* to ensure that your music was nice and smooth.:)
Whoops... I re-read what I said, and I guess I wasn't all that clear.
I'm suggesting more or less what you're saying - load the next several songs into ramdisk. I also thought, however, that copying whatever the system might decide to access whenever it's running into ramdisk (assuming you have a minimalistic distro... you won't be needed Quake on your MP3 player... although maybe that's not such a bad idea... hehe), so that, should you hit a particularly bad bump which screws up the hard drive, the MP3 player won't crash.
If I actually owned CDs made in the past four years, I might just get a CD player for my car. But with Napster, Gnutella, and now kza (a Kazaa client for Linux), I've stopped buying MP3s. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this idea had a ton of benefits:
Skip-proof - RAM's pretty cheap... Take a cheap computer and throw a gig of RAM in, and set a lot of it up as a ramdisk. Go over a bump with a CD, and you'll start skipping. (A hard drive would probably be worse...) But if your next ten songs, and the apps the system's using are all in RAM, unless the RAM physically pops out, you're all set.
Tons of space - I have less than a gig of MP3s... I know some nuts who have 10+ GB, but you can get a 40 GB drive for like $100 if you shop around. Access speed isn't too important if it's just being thrown into ramdisk.
Configurable - Can your CD player do Ogg Vorbis? Play other formats? Probably not. Nor could you, say, hack up a Perl script pull the MP3s out of a MySQL database and read the song title with Festival.
Again, I haven't actually tried this, but I'd really like to...
Assuming the FBI doesn't have the time to read through every single packet from every single computer in the word... They must have filters to catch "suspicious" packets, right?
Well, here's what I wonder. What do they search for? You'd assume it's words like "bomb", "C4", "anthrax", "President", and so on.
But how many "false negatives" will this catch? Especially the word "Anthrax," with all of sudden paranoia about anthrax? I've mentioned the word three times in this post...
And didn't each and every one of the hijackers
present valid ID?
It really annoys me that practically no media agencies have picked up on this point. We can outlaw encryption, have a national ID card, require a strip search to board any form of public transportation, and have video cameras at every intersection of every little dirt road in the middle of nowhere. But none of this would have helped to prevent the World Trade Center tragedy. People don't seem to realize that all of these "anti-terrorism" laws are completely irrelevant to terrorism.
Your CMOS is something different, actually. Most computers use "DRAM", which needs to be "refreshed" often, or it'll "lose it's charge"... ROMish stuff is SRAM, which doesn't need the stupid refreshes... But it's more expensive, so a a couple gigs of SRAM is sorta out of the question.:(
DRAM is *sooo* much cheaper, and is used in the RAM of just about all computers. However, it's charges "wear out" and needs to be "refreshed" very often. As we all know, data isn't retained in memory when you lose power.
SRAM can "hold" a charge, and is thus more "permanent". I don't have specific quotes, but I know that, compared to conventional RAM, it's insanely expensive.:(
It sounds kind of akward, but I think I've got an idea.
If near real-time is a requirement, why not chain multiple phones together? This was popular back "in the day" when dial-ups were popular; why not try the same with cell phones? The poor cameraman need not carry a zillion 'normal' phones in his pocket, a bunch of transceivers could simply be put in this already large-ish box.
There is the obvious issue of power consumption, but I guess you could counter that by simply adding a bigger battery...?
Hmm... I like this idea. The only real problem would be the added overhead; someone already replied, mentioning the decreased battery life. Decoding the transmitted video at the studios, though, you can easily have a small cluster of computers for real-time decoding. If studios spend tens of thousands of dollars for a single video camera, they probably wouldn't mind the comparatively cost.
There is one problem, though. If the compression is going to introduce a delay, it could really throw a wrench in the works during live interviews.
I'm sure you probably know this, but I wanted to make a point of something you just mentioned in passing.
Ripping a CD to MP3s as a back-up, or using them instead of the normal CD, is ENTIRELY legal. They're essentially prohibiting your from doing this. Which makes me want to go buy about 10 copies of this for my friends (even though all my friends hate N`Sync...) So we can return them because they are truly defective.
And yes, this foolishness IS a waste
of university (students!) funds.
It doesn't sound that bad... Until you do the math. Assuming Drexel bought the domains "normally" ($70/2 years), not using one of the places that lets you get them for as little as $11/domain... Do the math; that's $21,000 for two years of domains, and an additional $10,500/year after that.
Yeah, it's a 'business' (sorta...); they spend money. But... $10,500/year for no real reason? That's about what it'd cost you to get a T1 run to your dorm.:)
I was writing a letter to Mr. Gregg, when I stumbled onto this idea that I thought some people might find interesting.
Remember when Napster started facing legal trouble? People wanted to get away from Napster, but liked the concept. So, what did the legal action against Napster do? It caused dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of Napster alternatives. Esentially, the RIAA, in their lawsuit, made things a million times worse for themselves.
Similarly, if the government builds a "back door" into most common encryption schemes, what's to stop my friend and I from writing our own scheme? Sure, it'd be "illegal," but so is downloading hundreds of songs that you don't own from Gnutella...
In essence, if this bill passes, all the stuff that's been mentioned will happen, in addition to something that will cause extraordinary problems for the government -- countless new encryption schemes will pop up, and the government won't be able to crack them. And don't you think that those who are trying to hide something "bad" will want to use those?
And, before you mention it, there really is no way to say "We noticed you're using encryption... Stop or you'll be shot." You see, how do they know it was an encrypted message? Couldn't it have been completely random bits that a Perl script spews out at random intervals?
Hey! I've just found a security hole in Slashdot that allows me to post comments! This is a severe risk; some people might post inappropriate comments. I have done some research, and found that thousands of people know about this exploit; many have taken to posting that they are the "first" to use the exploit in response to a given story. (To avoid detection, they call their cracking a "post", hence, they say "first post!" instead of "first exploit")
But instead, this is OpenSource. So he posts a story asking for help, so that he can fix the problem. He's not saying "Linux is perfect and it can't possible be Linux's fault that this is happening." Instead, he's acknowledging that there's a problem with Linux, or at least the way he has it set up.
I don't see what your post has to do with anything, aside from maybe being an attempt at a troll? He's soliciting advice on how to fix a problem; not trolling about how Linux is perfect.
You bring up, or mabye just cause my "unique" mind to dream up... An interest point:
Theoretically, couldn't an unencrypted message be "more" secure? It's like hiding something in the open, where no one would bother looking.
But I agree, they'd get a lot of hits. But I strongly doubt international terrorists would send e-mail in plain text saying "Hey, let's crash planes into the World Trade Center!" I'd think they'd use some form of 'codeword' or something...? So, for all we know, an e-mail saying "Wuzzzzzzup?!?!?! NMH!" could mean "Let's blow up the White House tomorrow." I doubt the FBI would be able to figure that out, unless they had inside sources who told them.
Not that I have any clue how terrorists communicate, but just a thought...
I've always hated anything that could be used to invade my privacy. I have telnet and ftp turned off, in favor of ssh/scp. (That's common sense, I suppose.) I'm working on installing PGP or GPG. My friend and I are testing an encrypted AOL IM client we wrote. Yet I have *NOTHING* to hide, short of someone intercepting an e-mail to a friend about how I'm mad at another friend, or something like that. Or maybe my ISP might notice that I've downloaded two MP3s this month. In short, I guess you could call me paranoid.
Yet, despite my paranoia, I was somehow relieved and comforted when the press announced that the NSA was reviewing tapes of cell phone calls to try to gather more clues in the WTC disaster. Sure, the government admitted to listening to your phone calls. But it's clearly for a good reason. I'm not proposing 24/7 wiretaps on your phonelines, packet sniffers on your LAN, or hidden video cameras in your house; nor am I advocating invasion of privacy. But somehow, for some unknown reason, I'm beginning to think that maybe a little bit of snooping here and there is a good thing. Kinda scary that I'm starting to appreciate some privacy invasions...
I've used rpmfind a lot, but sometimes I still have trouble. Assuming the obscure library is found on rpmfind; I often have trouble installing it. Yeah, I know make/make install and all that, but I've gotten the most annoying problems... The worst is when I do a full install of RedHat, find that a common app I don't have is missing a libary... Then I go and get the library, and try to install it, only to have *THAT* fail due to library dependencies.
I agree that it's generally fairly easy, but I was referring to the small portion of the time when I get dozens of cryptic error messages, and, in trying to fix them, end up with more. A determined person might spend hours fixing libraries, but I'm rather impatient, and would just as soon give up and use an alternative program.
Looking over what I wrote, it almost sounds like I'm saying that I hate Linux, and that it never works. That's not at all the case; Linux installs can be almost "easier" (if you know what you're doing) than some Windows installs; I'm referring to the occasions when everything possible just goes wrong.
I ran Debian for a while, and apt-get was *REAL* sweet. But then I upgraded to 2.4 without really having any idea what I was doing (the version of Debian I was using was from pre-2.4 days, and didn't work well, unless you read their HOWTO, which I only found *after* I had upgraded everything.
In short, I managed to break apt-get, and really needed a working Linux box, so I just overwrote it with RedHat... But I'm thinking of switching back; it was *real* nice until I totally killed it. (BTW: There's a Debian 'spin-off' distro that's supposed to be real easy to install, yet based on Debian, I think it's called "Progency" or something; I'm thinking I'll give that a try - as you say, the Debain install was awful.)
Another idea would be *much* easier to code, and wouldn't require anything on/.'s part. I suspect people might have already created this:
People who have a ton of bandwidth could simply write a small Perl (or whatever language... I just happen to like Perl) script to occasionally refresh/.'s page, looking for new links, following them, and mirroring a couple links deep...
I've thought about this a lot, actually, guess it's just that I have no life.;) An idea like this has one major disadvantage - if everyone and their cousin has a script running to do this, Slashdot will be driven off the web by tens of thousands of these programs...
The 'best' solution would be to have a small cache of pages on Slashdot - you could even call it "SlashCache".:) There's been a lot of discussion about the legal risks of doing this; seemingly valid arguments have been presented showing that Slashdot could find themselves in huge trouble. However, Google has been doing this for quite some time, and, to the best of my knowledge, has never had any legal problems.
According to one of the networks (I don't have any clue which at this point...), one of the stewards/stewardesses was able to call someone (IIRC, it was the airline), and told them teh exact seat number of the hijacker. Let's hope that this will help in figuring out who was responsible.
Try and place as much code into libraries as possible. Modularization is good. Use libtool religiously
Personally, I *hate* libraries. Then again, I'm running RedHat on x86 using "standard" apps.
My problem is that I *never* have whatever library the program I'm trying to install requires, and all too often, I have no idea where I might *find* the library. And I've had libaries that can't be installed due to other library dependencies... *grrr*
I guess my problem isn't with the actual use of libraries, but with their implementations. Why don't developers offer a version of their packages *with* every libary you may need? Personally, I'd be soooo much happier if I could just run a script to install all the libraries.
Of course, then you have to worry about how well that script works, and if it'll overwrite my libraries with older / non-working libraries. But you get the idea...:)
Don't these just affect IE on XP, or does XP actually act as like a 'proxy'? In other words, can you just use Netscape on XP to circumvent the problem? I'd venture to guess that you can't, because I can't see it being a big deal if it was just another 'feature' of IE.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, you gave me an idea! Someone should start an open-source MP3 company! When someone buys an MP3, they should share it with people! I'll call it... Gnutella! :)
I re-read my parent post and realized I wasn't too clear... The ramdisk stuff was both to prevent the box from hanging *and* to ensure that your music was nice and smooth. :)
I'm suggesting more or less what you're saying - load the next several songs into ramdisk. I also thought, however, that copying whatever the system might decide to access whenever it's running into ramdisk (assuming you have a minimalistic distro... you won't be needed Quake on your MP3 player... although maybe that's not such a bad idea... hehe), so that, should you hit a particularly bad bump which screws up the hard drive, the MP3 player won't crash.
If I actually owned CDs made in the past four years, I might just get a CD player for my car. But with Napster, Gnutella, and now kza (a Kazaa client for Linux), I've stopped buying MP3s. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this idea had a ton of benefits:
Skip-proof - RAM's pretty cheap... Take a cheap computer and throw a gig of RAM in, and set a lot of it up as a ramdisk. Go over a bump with a CD, and you'll start skipping. (A hard drive would probably be worse...) But if your next ten songs, and the apps the system's using are all in RAM, unless the RAM physically pops out, you're all set.
Tons of space - I have less than a gig of MP3s... I know some nuts who have 10+ GB, but you can get a 40 GB drive for like $100 if you shop around. Access speed isn't too important if it's just being thrown into ramdisk.
Configurable - Can your CD player do Ogg Vorbis? Play other formats? Probably not. Nor could you, say, hack up a Perl script pull the MP3s out of a MySQL database and read the song title with Festival.
Again, I haven't actually tried this, but I'd really like to...
Well, here's what I wonder. What do they search for? You'd assume it's words like "bomb", "C4", "anthrax", "President", and so on.
But how many "false negatives" will this catch? Especially the word "Anthrax," with all of sudden paranoia about anthrax? I've mentioned the word three times in this post...
It really annoys me that practically no media agencies have picked up on this point. We can outlaw encryption, have a national ID card, require a strip search to board any form of public transportation, and have video cameras at every intersection of every little dirt road in the middle of nowhere. But none of this would have helped to prevent the World Trade Center tragedy. People don't seem to realize that all of these "anti-terrorism" laws are completely irrelevant to terrorism.
Your CMOS is something different, actually. Most computers use "DRAM", which needs to be "refreshed" often, or it'll "lose it's charge"... ROMish stuff is SRAM, which doesn't need the stupid refreshes... But it's more expensive, so a a couple gigs of SRAM is sorta out of the question. :(
DRAM is *sooo* much cheaper, and is used in the RAM of just about all computers. However, it's charges "wear out" and needs to be "refreshed" very often. As we all know, data isn't retained in memory when you lose power.
SRAM can "hold" a charge, and is thus more "permanent". I don't have specific quotes, but I know that, compared to conventional RAM, it's insanely expensive. :(
If near real-time is a requirement, why not chain multiple phones together? This was popular back "in the day" when dial-ups were popular; why not try the same with cell phones? The poor cameraman need not carry a zillion 'normal' phones in his pocket, a bunch of transceivers could simply be put in this already large-ish box.
There is the obvious issue of power consumption, but I guess you could counter that by simply adding a bigger battery...?
There is one problem, though. If the compression is going to introduce a delay, it could really throw a wrench in the works during live interviews.
Ripping a CD to MP3s as a back-up, or using them instead of the normal CD, is ENTIRELY legal. They're essentially prohibiting your from doing this. Which makes me want to go buy about 10 copies of this for my friends (even though all my friends hate N`Sync...) So we can return them because they are truly defective.
It doesn't sound that bad... Until you do the math. Assuming Drexel bought the domains "normally" ($70/2 years), not using one of the places that lets you get them for as little as $11/domain... Do the math; that's $21,000 for two years of domains, and an additional $10,500/year after that.
Yeah, it's a 'business' (sorta...); they spend money. But... $10,500/year for no real reason? That's about what it'd cost you to get a T1 run to your dorm. :)
Remember when Napster started facing legal trouble? People wanted to get away from Napster, but liked the concept. So, what did the legal action against Napster do? It caused dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of Napster alternatives. Esentially, the RIAA, in their lawsuit, made things a million times worse for themselves.
Similarly, if the government builds a "back door" into most common encryption schemes, what's to stop my friend and I from writing our own scheme? Sure, it'd be "illegal," but so is downloading hundreds of songs that you don't own from Gnutella...
In essence, if this bill passes, all the stuff that's been mentioned will happen, in addition to something that will cause extraordinary problems for the government -- countless new encryption schemes will pop up, and the government won't be able to crack them. And don't you think that those who are trying to hide something "bad" will want to use those?
And, before you mention it, there really is no way to say "We noticed you're using encryption... Stop or you'll be shot." You see, how do they know it was an encrypted message? Couldn't it have been completely random bits that a Perl script spews out at random intervals?
Hey! I've just found a security hole in Slashdot that allows me to post comments! This is a severe risk; some people might post inappropriate comments. I have done some research, and found that thousands of people know about this exploit; many have taken to posting that they are the "first" to use the exploit in response to a given story. (To avoid detection, they call their cracking a "post", hence, they say "first post!" instead of "first exploit")
I don't see what your post has to do with anything, aside from maybe being an attempt at a troll? He's soliciting advice on how to fix a problem; not trolling about how Linux is perfect.
You bring up, or mabye just cause my "unique" mind to dream up... An interest point:
Theoretically, couldn't an unencrypted message be "more" secure? It's like hiding something in the open, where no one would bother looking.
But I agree, they'd get a lot of hits. But I strongly doubt international terrorists would send e-mail in plain text saying "Hey, let's crash planes into the World Trade Center!" I'd think they'd use some form of 'codeword' or something...? So, for all we know, an e-mail saying "Wuzzzzzzup?!?!?! NMH!" could mean "Let's blow up the White House tomorrow." I doubt the FBI would be able to figure that out, unless they had inside sources who told them.
Not that I have any clue how terrorists communicate, but just a thought...
Yet, despite my paranoia, I was somehow relieved and comforted when the press announced that the NSA was reviewing tapes of cell phone calls to try to gather more clues in the WTC disaster. Sure, the government admitted to listening to your phone calls. But it's clearly for a good reason. I'm not proposing 24/7 wiretaps on your phonelines, packet sniffers on your LAN, or hidden video cameras in your house; nor am I advocating invasion of privacy. But somehow, for some unknown reason, I'm beginning to think that maybe a little bit of snooping here and there is a good thing. Kinda scary that I'm starting to appreciate some privacy invasions...
I agree that it's generally fairly easy, but I was referring to the small portion of the time when I get dozens of cryptic error messages, and, in trying to fix them, end up with more. A determined person might spend hours fixing libraries, but I'm rather impatient, and would just as soon give up and use an alternative program.
Looking over what I wrote, it almost sounds like I'm saying that I hate Linux, and that it never works. That's not at all the case; Linux installs can be almost "easier" (if you know what you're doing) than some Windows installs; I'm referring to the occasions when everything possible just goes wrong.
I ran Debian for a while, and apt-get was *REAL* sweet. But then I upgraded to 2.4 without really having any idea what I was doing (the version of Debian I was using was from pre-2.4 days, and didn't work well, unless you read their HOWTO, which I only found *after* I had upgraded everything.
In short, I managed to break apt-get, and really needed a working Linux box, so I just overwrote it with RedHat... But I'm thinking of switching back; it was *real* nice until I totally killed it. (BTW: There's a Debian 'spin-off' distro that's supposed to be real easy to install, yet based on Debian, I think it's called "Progency" or something; I'm thinking I'll give that a try - as you say, the Debain install was awful.)
People who have a ton of bandwidth could simply write a small Perl (or whatever language... I just happen to like Perl) script to occasionally refresh /.'s page, looking for new links, following them, and mirroring a couple links deep...
I've thought about this a lot, actually, guess it's just that I have no life. ;) An idea like this has one major disadvantage - if everyone and their cousin has a script running to do this, Slashdot will be driven off the web by tens of thousands of these programs...
The 'best' solution would be to have a small cache of pages on Slashdot - you could even call it "SlashCache". :) There's been a lot of discussion about the legal risks of doing this; seemingly valid arguments have been presented showing that Slashdot could find themselves in huge trouble. However, Google has been doing this for quite some time, and, to the best of my knowledge, has never had any legal problems.
According to one of the networks (I don't have any clue which at this point...), one of the stewards/stewardesses was able to call someone (IIRC, it was the airline), and told them teh exact seat number of the hijacker. Let's hope that this will help in figuring out who was responsible.
Personally, I *hate* libraries. Then again, I'm running RedHat on x86 using "standard" apps.
My problem is that I *never* have whatever library the program I'm trying to install requires, and all too often, I have no idea where I might *find* the library. And I've had libaries that can't be installed due to other library dependencies... *grrr*
I guess my problem isn't with the actual use of libraries, but with their implementations. Why don't developers offer a version of their packages *with* every libary you may need? Personally, I'd be soooo much happier if I could just run a script to install all the libraries.
Of course, then you have to worry about how well that script works, and if it'll overwrite my libraries with older / non-working libraries. But you get the idea... :)
The first link, to iViews, is "refusing" my (normal HTTP) connection... Wonder if maybe they were nabbed, too?
Don't these just affect IE on XP, or does XP actually act as like a 'proxy'? In other words, can you just use Netscape on XP to circumvent the problem? I'd venture to guess that you can't, because I can't see it being a big deal if it was just another 'feature' of IE.
IIRC, actually, Guyana and Ghana are two separate places. But I may be entirely wrong, who knows...?