Micro$oft doesn't use the account to shutdown auctions. They pay some poor monkey to spend all day searching on the word Micro$oft, and auto-generating infringment e-mails to e-bay. They do this under the guise of fighting piracy. Microsoft's legal staff could bury E-bay if they so chose, therefore e-bay cancels these auctions without investigation.
Jamie, I like your stuff, but you're obviously haven't worked much with the innards of proprietary software.
To get my first Windows application running was painful, but to figure out why it was blowing up after a couple hours of use was a nightmare. I formulated dozens of theories as to what could be the problem, and disproved many of them. Finally at one point I inadvertantly changed the order in which I allocated my memory blocks, and the problem magically vanished. This, and hundreds of bugs like it are daily worked around and forgotten by programmers who have given up wasting their time with the no-solution solutions from Microsoft. Bugs like these are found, squashed and shared in Open Source products.
If you code the innards, there is just no comparison, nor is their any counting the number of bugs much more disruptive than the PGP bug you've mentioned, that will never be isolated and fixed in proprietary code, because there's no money in it.
According to this list I was a late starter. I started with my Vic20 in BASIC at age 11 and was programming in Assembly at 12.
As you know programming requires a drive to surmount bugs, bad documents and to endure frustrating hours of non-working code to find the simple stupid mistake that bound the whole thing up. In the many self-taught people I've talked to the drive to persue this daemon comes from the need to perfect something...
If you haven't yet, introduce them to computer programs that are in their immediate reach, Infocom games, PacMan style graphics games, screen savers, sensor reaction robotics, and X10 control programs (to name a few). When one of these things lights their bulb, then pick the language. One of the more important things you will teach them with this approach is that there is no "right" language, this is a great lesson.
The beauty of everything above (except X10, which is just cool) is that these programs blossom in complexity.
PacMan starts off simple and cool, while you are designing the sprites, and tallying the score. When you want to make the ghosts smart enough to corner the PacSter it's suddenly real programming.
Text Adventures start off as the two word only, Verb + Noun parsers, but once this victory is achieved one thirsts to interpret "Smash Jack with Hammer While Turning Crank", correctly. And to design a universe to suit this complexity.
Screen Savers are the ultimate in flexible creativity. They can start with a bouncing ball, which will lead to an exploding ball, and adding gravity effects to make the peices fall and bounce properly, thence to fireworks, shading, animation, ray tracing, then to hard stuff.
Robotics programs can be the simplest in the world, from simple reactions to sensors, to teaching a robot arm to spread peanut butter on bread, then imbueing a rover with a map of the house.
All of these projects can start in BASIC or Parallax Basic, but can flower into Assembly, C, LISP, wherever their dreams take it.
Well spoken. It seems ironic that Meyer goes on at length to point out the unsubstantiated views of "leaders of the free software movement" with his own unsubstantiated views.
This is a shame as he touches on a crucial issue of free software, that is that it must compliment and support commercial efforts from now until the time when humans free themselves from all monetary exchange.
Among the more laughable views was his simplistic summary of US firearms policies, "...a minority of gun nuts... supported by an all-powerful lobby, the National Rifle Association, has managed to terrorize Congress into maintaining loose gun laws with no equivalent in the civilized world."
Are the Swiss no longer considered civilized? Meyer makes reference to their militia, but seems to ignore that they have probably the best armed population on the planet, among the lowest crime rates, and a decently stable economy.
If I have to write an article regarding the in appropriate nature of espousing ones values regarding firearms in a software forum, I hope that I have the good taste not to espouse my own.
There are two mechanisms to which the posters on this topic seem quite oblivious, probably due to the fact that they still have hair on the topmost portions of their skulls. Must be nice.
The first mechanism, is how to block content. Granted iCraveTV did so in an idiotic fashion, but it doesn't have to be done that way. In fact, restricting content to Canada would be quite easy for the following reasons.
Almost all Internet traffic between the U.S. and Canada goes out via terrestrial links. These links cross a 100-foot section of land at the Canadian boarder that is owned by the government. This land must be leased from the government and is subject to their limitations, controls and restrictions. It is an ideal point for censorship.
It is admittedly difficult to discern the geographical location of a randomly generated Internet address. It is quite easy, however, to check a list of all B.C.Tel and CanTel internet ranges and see if you have a match.
It is quite easy to encrypt a video data stream. It is also easy to implant rolling tags that look like random data, but in fact have a pattern that border-planted filtration devices can pickup. It is also quite easy to set up a Windows-Only client to interact with this system.
It's a snap to tell the Canadian border routers not pass any packets from the iCrave site directly to the U.S. or to allow a U.S. site to so much as ping the iCrave site.
These measures alone would stop every full time Windows user (with few exceptions) from accessing iCrave (95% of the populace?).
A hacker trying to pull this off would at the very least need a box in Canada to reencrypt the data coming from iCrave. He/she could then pass that data down to his own intranet which would use a masquerading firewall to conceal his own internal (pseudo-Canadian) IP addresses. (do.01% of the populace have these skills?).
This would buy him/her one stream to each of his Windows boxes (ugh). If he wanted to rebroadcast this stream he/she would have to decrypt the actual video data, probably by hacking the Windows code. (.0001%?) Perhaps our hacker goes that extra ugly painful step, and voila, the mechanism is broken, and the streams fly about the net. Weeeee!
Sadly, the victory will be short lived, because unlike the Satellite Video industry or the DVD folks, iCrave's software can be replaced on the fly. To people with the bandwidth for streaming video, extra couple seconds downloading this week's encryption plug-in would go unnoticed.
Lastly, if someone were redirecting video streams to the public in this fashion it would be a straightforward exercise to leave extra data in the streams that could be recovered at the remote end and used to narrow down the list of feeds used. It could be done as a binary-chop fairly quickly where half of the streaming servers would use sig1 and half sig2. As soon as the remote sense device fed back which stream it was on, half of the old sig1 group would get sig2 etc. etc. In 32 times your feedback delay you will have the exact address of the stream in question. Of course you won't tell anyone. You'll simply monitor it and others like it for months while you arrange for search warrants.
Essentially, this hacker's first sign of detection will be when jack-booted thugs kick down his door and throw him in the cell next to Kevin Mitnick.
The other mechanism to understand is that this is precisely the process by which our freedoms disappear. Once the security company hired by iCrave to secure Canada has done it's job it will be hired by their government to prevent any unwanted content from entering Canada. The unfair barring of non-pornographic material by CyberWatch and NetNanny was due to the impracticality of distinguishing one site from another. This will happen on a country wide scale when CanaNanny is born.
Registration of mean-looking rifles, in California, was touted as precaution to keep them out of the hands of psychos. Once the names and addresses of the owners were safely on file, the confiscation began.
At the outset it was specifically forbidden for Social Security Numbers to become a national ID number. In the interest of catching "Dead-Beat Dads" laws were enacted that allowed states to tie them to your driver's license and registration. All of your assets can now be tracked and seized upon the discovery of a single seed of cannabis found on any property linked to your ID, and it's already happened to some.
The machine of socialism is quite simple, and has been running in this repetitious fashion for a long time. I don't use cannabis or own a firearm, or watch any television but StarTrek and A&E.
It is not my liberties they are curtailing, today, but it won't be long.
I have helped several electronic startups get there products going. The fact that the Dyson product doesn't look like a prototype is evidence of a great deal of risk and effort, and I cannot help but admire someone with the determination to see it through.
I also agree that for the standard Geek-Lair, it's not yet a useful tool, but these things have to startup and improve. Next year's model will be smarter and more adept. The first version of Linux was not generally useful either. Just damned cool.
Ignorance has been such a hurdle to our efforts to gift the world a better OS. It would be such irony if the Music industry thought they'd solved their control issues and started delivering music electronically, only to find that it "somehow" made it's way to MP3 format the day it was released. Shhh! Nobody should tell them how easy it would be to replace the Windoze sound api dll with one that pumped the data back out to a.wav file.
If you must have this, please allow me to highly recommend that you punch slightly larger holes in your walls (wife will persue only slightly more vigorously), and insert standard drivers. The advantage of having the vibrating surface not touch the wall, vibrate the air and thus the wall will reduce the gain, but give you the general idea. What I'm certain you'll find is that at 40hz and down it's just peachy. If I had to have this, I'd choose a new style of wall paper and replace the drywall between two studs with heavy mylar or some resilient plastic. Then the transducers might be just peachy, and the wife would get new wall paper in return for her patience.
artpopp@gte.net
--Windows NT and the Brontosaurus, what do they have in common?
I've seen those. I'm afraid I'm fixated on the PCMCIA idea though. For instance one could hook a 2.5" HD to the IDE connector and use the PCMCIA hold a 100Mb/s ethercard, and thus load one's MP3s at 3 songs a second.
Oh, what dreams may come.
Just missed the mark, but it could be fixed.
on
Mini Board PC
·
· Score: 1
It is one impressively dense connector farm. Its 512k Flash just won't run enough of Linux to give us a solid state car computer though.
One can buy an Alton M598 MB with K62-300 for about $150 and get 4 channel Sound. Then one can add the PCMCIA adapter. It's just a question of whether you computer is dash mounted or trunk mounted, $700 for the dash mount option makes it a bit less than fun.
"Value" aside, if it had a PCMCIA slot, I might add it to my toys-to-acquire list. Would anyone else?
Slashdot Mirror
Micro$oft doesn't use the account to shutdown auctions. They pay some poor monkey to spend all day searching on the word Micro$oft, and auto-generating infringment e-mails to e-bay. They do this under the guise of fighting piracy. Microsoft's legal staff could bury E-bay if they so chose, therefore e-bay cancels these auctions without investigation.
To get my first Windows application running was painful, but to figure out why it was blowing up after a couple hours of use was a nightmare. I formulated dozens of theories as to what could be the problem, and disproved many of them. Finally at one point I inadvertantly changed the order in which I allocated my memory blocks, and the problem magically vanished. This, and hundreds of bugs like it are daily worked around and forgotten by programmers who have given up wasting their time with the no-solution solutions from Microsoft. Bugs like these are found, squashed and shared in Open Source products.
If you code the innards, there is just no comparison, nor is their any counting the number of bugs much more disruptive than the PGP bug you've mentioned, that will never be isolated and fixed in proprietary code, because there's no money in it.
As you know programming requires a drive to surmount bugs, bad documents and to endure frustrating hours of non-working code to find the simple stupid mistake that bound the whole thing up. In the many self-taught people I've talked to the drive to persue this daemon comes from the need to perfect something...
If you haven't yet, introduce them to computer programs that are in their immediate reach, Infocom games, PacMan style graphics games, screen savers, sensor reaction robotics, and X10 control programs (to name a few). When one of these things lights their bulb, then pick the language. One of the more important things you will teach them with this approach is that there is no "right" language, this is a great lesson.
The beauty of everything above (except X10, which is just cool) is that these programs blossom in complexity.
PacMan starts off simple and cool, while you are designing the sprites, and tallying the score. When you want to make the ghosts smart enough to corner the PacSter it's suddenly real programming.
Text Adventures start off as the two word only, Verb + Noun parsers, but once this victory is achieved one thirsts to interpret "Smash Jack with Hammer While Turning Crank", correctly. And to design a universe to suit this complexity.
Screen Savers are the ultimate in flexible creativity. They can start with a bouncing ball, which will lead to an exploding ball, and adding gravity effects to make the peices fall and bounce properly, thence to fireworks, shading, animation, ray tracing, then to hard stuff.
Robotics programs can be the simplest in the world, from simple reactions to sensors, to teaching a robot arm to spread peanut butter on bread, then imbueing a rover with a map of the house.
All of these projects can start in BASIC or Parallax Basic, but can flower into Assembly, C, LISP, wherever their dreams take it.
Simon,
... supported by an all-powerful lobby, the National Rifle Association, has managed to terrorize Congress into maintaining loose gun laws with no equivalent in the civilized world."
Well spoken. It seems ironic that Meyer goes on at length to point out the unsubstantiated views of "leaders of the free software movement" with his own unsubstantiated views.
This is a shame as he touches on a crucial issue of free software, that is that it must compliment and support commercial efforts from now until the time when humans free themselves from all monetary exchange.
Among the more laughable views was his simplistic summary of US firearms policies, "...a minority of gun nuts
Are the Swiss no longer considered civilized? Meyer makes reference to their militia, but seems to ignore that they have probably the best armed population on the planet, among the lowest crime rates, and a decently stable economy.
If I have to write an article regarding the in appropriate nature of espousing ones values regarding firearms in a software forum, I hope that I have the good taste not to espouse my own.
There are two mechanisms to which the posters on this topic seem quite oblivious, probably due to the fact that they still have hair on the topmost portions of their skulls. Must be nice.
The first mechanism, is how to block content. Granted iCraveTV did so in an idiotic fashion, but it doesn't have to be done that way. In fact, restricting content to Canada would be quite easy for the following reasons.
Almost all Internet traffic between the U.S. and Canada goes out via terrestrial links. These links cross a 100-foot section of land at the Canadian boarder that is owned by the government. This land must be leased from the government and is subject to their limitations, controls and restrictions. It is an ideal point for censorship.
It is admittedly difficult to discern the geographical location of a randomly generated Internet address. It is quite easy, however, to check a list of all B.C.Tel and CanTel internet ranges and see if you have a match.
It is quite easy to encrypt a video data stream. It is also easy to implant rolling tags that look like random data, but in fact have a pattern that border-planted filtration devices can pickup. It is also quite easy to set up a Windows-Only client to interact with this system.
It's a snap to tell the Canadian border routers not pass any packets from the iCrave site directly to the U.S. or to allow a U.S. site to so much as ping the iCrave site.
These measures alone would stop every full time Windows user (with few exceptions) from accessing iCrave (95% of the populace?).
A hacker trying to pull this off would at the very least need a box in Canada to reencrypt the data coming from iCrave. He/she could then pass that data down to his own intranet which would use a masquerading firewall to conceal his own internal (pseudo-Canadian) IP addresses. (do
This would buy him/her one stream to each of his Windows boxes (ugh). If he wanted to rebroadcast this stream he/she would have to decrypt the actual video data, probably by hacking the Windows code. (.0001%?) Perhaps our hacker goes that extra ugly painful step, and voila, the mechanism is broken, and the streams fly about the net. Weeeee!
Sadly, the victory will be short lived, because unlike the Satellite Video industry or the DVD folks, iCrave's software can be replaced on the fly. To people with the bandwidth for streaming video, extra couple seconds downloading this week's encryption plug-in would go unnoticed.
Lastly, if someone were redirecting video streams to the public in this fashion it would be a straightforward exercise to leave extra data in the streams that could be recovered at the remote end and used to narrow down the list of feeds used. It could be done as a binary-chop fairly quickly where half of the streaming servers would use sig1 and half sig2. As soon as the remote sense device fed back which stream it was on, half of the old sig1 group would get sig2 etc. etc. In 32 times your feedback delay you will have the exact address of the stream in question. Of course you won't tell anyone. You'll simply monitor it and others like it for months while you arrange for search warrants.
Essentially, this hacker's first sign of detection will be when jack-booted thugs kick down his door and throw him in the cell next to Kevin Mitnick.
The other mechanism to understand is that this is precisely the process by which our freedoms disappear. Once the security company hired by iCrave to secure Canada has done it's job it will be hired by their government to prevent any unwanted content from entering Canada. The unfair barring of non-pornographic material by CyberWatch and NetNanny was due to the impracticality of distinguishing one site from another. This will happen on a country wide scale when CanaNanny is born.
Registration of mean-looking rifles, in California, was touted as precaution to keep them out of the hands of psychos. Once the names and addresses of the owners were safely on file, the confiscation began.
At the outset it was specifically forbidden for Social Security Numbers to become a national ID number. In the interest of catching "Dead-Beat Dads" laws were enacted that allowed states to tie them to your driver's license and registration. All of your assets can now be tracked and seized upon the discovery of a single seed of cannabis found on any property linked to your ID, and it's already happened to some.
The machine of socialism is quite simple, and has been running in this repetitious fashion for a long time. I don't use cannabis or own a firearm, or watch any television but StarTrek and A&E.
It is not my liberties they are curtailing, today, but it won't be long.
I have helped several electronic startups get there products going. The fact that the Dyson product doesn't look like a prototype is evidence of a great deal of risk and effort, and I cannot help but admire someone with the determination to see it through.
I also agree that for the standard Geek-Lair, it's not yet a useful tool, but these things have to startup and improve. Next year's model will be smarter and more adept. The first version of Linux was not generally useful either. Just damned cool.
That was the funniest thing I'd read this week.
Note: There isn't even a HOWTO for setting up Linux for Korean folk. The Portuguese would have a much better chance at this claim...
Where are the 1.44 MegaPixels?
.96M. Sounds pretty fishy.
1200x1200 resolution would be 1.44M. Even if there were two seperate panels of 800x600 for 3D games it would only be
I didn't think anything that was to happen this
morning was going to get a smile back on my face, this sure did.
AI is like a gun in that it can be handled safely; unlike a gun, idiots don't recognize that it is one.
Ignorance has been such a hurdle to our efforts to gift the world a better OS. It would be such irony if the Music industry thought they'd solved their control issues and started delivering music electronically, only to find that it "somehow" made it's way to MP3 format the day it was released. Shhh! Nobody should tell them how easy it would be to replace the Windoze sound api dll with one that pumped the data back out to a .wav file.
If you must have this, please allow me to highly recommend that you punch slightly larger holes in your walls (wife will persue only slightly more vigorously), and insert standard drivers. The advantage of having the vibrating surface not touch the wall, vibrate the air and thus the wall will reduce the gain, but give you the general idea. What I'm certain you'll find is that at 40hz and down it's just peachy. If I had to have this, I'd choose a new style of wall paper and replace the drywall between two studs with heavy mylar or some resilient plastic. Then the transducers might be just peachy, and the wife would get new wall paper in return for her patience.
artpopp@gte.net
--Windows NT and the Brontosaurus, what do they have in common?
I've seen those. I'm afraid I'm fixated on the PCMCIA idea though. For instance one could hook a 2.5" HD to the IDE connector and use the PCMCIA hold a 100Mb/s ethercard, and thus load one's MP3s at 3 songs a second.
Oh, what dreams may come.
One can buy an Alton M598 MB with K62-300 for about $150 and get 4 channel Sound. Then one can add the PCMCIA adapter. It's just a question of whether you computer is dash mounted or trunk mounted, $700 for the dash mount option makes it a bit less than fun.
"Value" aside, if it had a PCMCIA slot, I might add it to my toys-to-acquire list. Would anyone else?