I've been working on a slightly more ambitious (but still a ways off!) similar project, see http://jonathanclark.com. Initially I tried using a wiimote, but found it has a extremely limited coverage area and accuracy. If you move a few feet out of a sweet spot it will stop working, also the wiimote has a lot of noise in it's samples so you end up having to smooth the samples - but this introduces a lot of latency which destroys the illusion. On the low-cost end, the TrackIR system works a lot better (faster, more accurate samples). I have a demo using TrackIR posted here:
TrackIR also has a limited area it can work with, so now I've moved to using OptiTrack which gets pricer but can cover fairly large areas (at least a small room). One other issue I found is that flat video doesn't look entirely convincing because motion parallax should occur within a frame - for example, when you move left to right, the bridge and the water behind it should move at different speeds. To help address this, I'm currently trying to create a depth-map per video frame and convert that depth map into a mesh which the video is mapped onto. To start, I'm drawing the depth map by hand (should be ok if objects don't move much), but I'd like to create it automatically by filming from multiple angles and using feature point extraction to estimate the depth for every frame automatically.
I flew from Munich to San Francisco last Tuesday and our plane offered Internet Service (lufthansa). They charge $8 for 30 minutes, and $30 for unlimited. You have to use the initial 30 minutes all at once, you can't break it up. I used it for about 40 minutes for a cost of ~$15. A bit pricy, but who else is going to offer service up there? I was able to close a deal and process an order that I might not have otherwise so it paid for itself.
The transfer rates and ping times were comparable somewhere between low-end DSL and a modem - plenty gast for surfing, email, and downloads - but not for gaming. It uses a wireless router on the plane to talk to laptops. I had 3 thoughts on this. #1 the network traffic is unencrypted unless you use SSL or VPN, so planes would make a good place for network sniffing. #2 The authorization system only allows access to boeing's site before you pay - but it allows DNS to go through, so you could write a driver that communicates with the outside world through DNS queries and get free service. #3 It would be hard to stop passengers from getting together and share internet connections wirelessly. Don't know if any of this would happen, but watch out if the prices go to high. Oh you can also access Lufthansa and MSN search before you pay, so it give you a chance to see what it's like.
The service is run by Boeing - they showed a video of a directional antenna that tracks a satellite.
I thought it was pretty cool overall, but I regret that I no longer have a place I can "get away from it all".
Each of these places allows you to add a program that will run everytime your computer boots or you login as a specific user.
Re:What do...
on
Real's Reality
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
See my.sig for a product I work on called Thinstall - You can pacakge all of your files and registry keys into a single EXE which runs without extracting anything and without modifying the system registry. It simulates a virtual filesystem and registry for your application, so the files appear to be on the hard drive already.
Contacting the President should be a process simple enough that anyone in the USA, even those with limited technical, communication, and cognitive abilities could perform.
Such as snail mail, phone, or fax? I think most Americans are more famaliar with these systems compared with email or web.
I'd rather not have my tax dollars going towards paying the salaries of a team of people who are needed to sort through the millions of auto-generated email campains - many who don't even come from US citizens.
You should try rentacoder.com, you can do exactly this - post a programming job you want done with a maximum bid and then let people fit over how cheap they will do it.
This site seems especially popular with 3rd world skilled programmers who are willing to do quite a bit of work for very little money. I know several Asian (British meaning) programmers who would are quite happy with $8/hr - and they are fairly experienced. I've heard this site is putting many US programming consultants out of work because they can't compete with those rates.
On one hand this is bad news for us US programmers - but on the other hand it present an avenue where we can find work here and resell it. I'm thinking about posting some large projects there for things I'd like to do if I had the time - but don't.
A slightly different idea for using VMs to enhance security....
Over the last few years, I've been developing a "thin" virtual machine that runs in user-mode. The purpose of this is to allow software to be deployed in a pre-installed state, rather than having to install a bunch of file, make registry changes, etc - just distribute a single EXE that can run directly from CDROM or a download link.
Besides simplfying the installation process and prevent conflicts with other packages (DLL Hell, etc). This method of software distribution also helps protect intellectual property - for example if you use the Macromedia Flash ActiveX component - not only can your application create object instances without having to register it in the system registry - but the macromedia code automatically goes through the virtual machine to read compress/encrypted files included in the archive.
The virtual machine only takes up about 100k on disk and 500-1MB in RAM and runs on top of any version of Windows (no linux, sorry) without drivers or reboots.
DLLs are useful these days primarly for their ability to allow 3rd party developers to distribute libraries in a language independent form. For example, there are large numbers of VB and C++ programmers for Windows. But there is no easy way to create libraries that work for both languages, except for DLLs and COM. So you will find almost all 3rd party libraries are shipped out as DLLs these days (unless it's language specific).
I've been working on a system to permits the best of both worlds by do a late-link of the DLL in a language independent way.
This is impossible unless there were a major change and all software developers conformed to it. But we are stuck with Windows 95 on steroids. Windows XP addresses the problem to a small extent by providing a "side-by-side" DLL loading system.
There is no way for the OS to know which DLLs an application might use - since DLLs are "Dynamically" loaded. The application may only load the DLL in rare cases, or maybe the application is run for the first time 1 year after it's installed.
To further complicate the problem, software vendors themselves cannot be 100% sure that no other application are going to use DLLs they installed - so to be safe they leave them behind on uninstall. So you are stuck with growing system32 directory. The only way to garbage collect is to refresh the entire machine.
I have been working on a virtual machine techology that allows applications to run in a semi-isolated environment (DLLs, files, and registry keys are not shared with the system). So they have zero impact on other applications and other application installs cannot cause them to fail. Also uninstall becomes a simple "del program.exe".
I've been working on this problem. I created an application that creates a compressed virtual filesystem containing the EXE, DLLs, and datafiles that can be deployed in a "pre-installed" state. When the application runs, a virtual machine technology similar to WINE is used to allow the application to load DLLs directly from the archive rather than go to the operating system. Unlike VMWare/WINE, however, the virtual filesystem is transparently merged with the real filesystem so the application can access files from ether place with no source changes. Also 90% of Windows API calls do not need to be replaced so there a very few compatability problems. The next version will have support for a merged virtual registry as well, so you can deploy ActiveX/COM controls without having to register them or even write to the system registry at all.
I'm trying to reproduce a bug right now that does not occur in VMWare. This bug relates to thread creation/destruction, and it's very timing dependent. Because of VMWare's slow task switching mecanism, the bug never occurs when running on VMWare - but always occurs on a normal machine.
Google is a huge personal privacy threat
on
Should you Fear Google?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
If you think it's bad to read your old newsgroup post from 10-20 years ago, think about the search terms you've typed in over the same period of time. And that is information you never thought would be made public.
It's very simple to correlate search request to a person. Most people will search for their own email, name, phone number, address, etc. to find out what's available on the net. If there is a persistent cookie, then all your search request can be tied together. And blocking cookies may not help if you have a static dedicated IP. Google saves every little bit of information they can,.. forever...
There is no time limit for them to destroy this data.
There is no way you can write them and ask them to delete your records.
There is no way to ensure your information won't be leaked by an employee or seized by court order.
I suspect the big google/china ban thing a while back is because the chinese government didn't want google have access to so much information about all of their citizens, including government officials - especially since the US appears to be half-way in bed with google now. Basically it amounts to spying. The terms of the deal with china weren't disclosed for allowing google back online there - but I bet it had something to do with this issue.
With features like google-bar with pagerank google has access not to every search you've made, but also every page you visit! Even without google-bar, many browsers have a bug that returns the last page visited as the referal when you hit the home button or favorites link. Since google is highly likely to be used this way rather than typing in google.com - they will also correlate this information.
I've used google since their early beta days - but now I'm beginning to think they are on the path to evil weither they intend it or not. The fact they are a private company makes them even scarier - no public disclosures of how they are using their data. And with something like 80% of all searches going through google, they have collected a lot of data. Be afraid, be very afraid.
Yes, but it's quit easy to detect you are running under VMWare if you want. Simply query any device name and it will have the string vmware in it. Some programs do this and refuse to run on VMWare. Sucks for me because I sometimes use VMWare to test various OS releases.
Many.NET developers out there are happy with the functionality of the current crop of obfuscators, and many use such programs to "encrypt" their commercial apps.
And many.NET Developers are not happy with obfuscation. Obfuscators cannot encrypt symbols that interface with the.NET Framework, and these are usually the most damning. A good programmer can trace through obfuscated symbol names with a debugger, adding a few comments here and there and a few minutes later beat most copy protection systems built into.NET code. When your program has to access registry entries, files, user input, etc. there is no way to hide this with an obfuscator.
There are further problems with obfuscation; your program losses large abilities with the reflection API, serialization may break, and encrypted crash stack-frames make it hard to glen useful info from a testing department.
I have a different protection system available: http://thinstall.com/dotnet which does not exhibit any of this short-commings. However this solution prevents the resulting EXE from running on Mono.
Yes, ildasm and there are 2 other commercial disassemblers that provide extremely readable source code. Really a huge problem with.net and one of the reasons there are so many obfuscators available. But even with an obfuscator its easy to disassemble and reassemble.net assemblies - so changing things like registered serial number code makes most other cracks look like hard work. Basically.NET programs are "open source" weither they want to be or not.
I make a product that turns.NET byte code into a Windows EXE so it can't be disassembled any more. This precludes running the resulting program on Linux (except in Wine), but adds some other interesting features.
Yes, but I think most of this time this does not provide any useful information because almost all big sites are now dynamically generated and don't have a last-modified date. Even if the web designer figured out how to code one, often the page may have dynamic elements that change every refresh - such as date, time, username, banner ad, hit counter, and so on.
So, have a partial diff would be effecient because there is almost never 100% change from one page or refresh to another.
A bit like using the rsync algorithm to minimize bandwidth while obtaining full data set on one side. And it could still allow progressive loading (not all in one shot type thing).
Another possible way to speed up transfer is by using upstream traffic as well as downstream traffic. Normally when you download a web page, the server assumes the client knows nothing about the content, but as other post mention the difference between two pages or updates of the same site will likely be much smaller than a complete resend. So the client can use it's upstream bandwidth to start transmitting data it already has for that site (or partial data hashes), while the server transmits new data. This would require a change to the web servers or use of a proxy server, but in general I could see this dramatically improving download speeds for sites that have a lot of common XML/CSS/menus etc.
I think 90% of page traffic occurs on the top few websites through regular visitors, so in most cases the client will already have some data available.
Why do I have the feeling that a lot of these negative comments are made by a competing company? Most of the dates are Jan 4. It would be interesting to see Amazon's IP logs for all the post. I know this wouldn't be the first case of posting fake reviews (both positive and negative). No doubt many of the comments are real, it's a legit issue - but I think it's been overhyped by competition. My guess is it's someone from TaxCut.
Look at this review:
------------------ Christopher R Chirdon from Pittsburgh, PA USA I was reading reviews here when I really checked into the online activation stuff. But someone was concerned if you could import your 2001 "filename.tax" file from TurboTax 2001 into TaxCut 2002 and the answer is YES! I bought TaxCut because I want to prepare on my personal computer and then take it to work to print on my laser printer, but I don't want to have to buy 2 licenses. Also, it's just SUCH a hassle. The funny thing is, I don't think taxCut uses ANY type of authentication. I put the CD in and it never asked me for a serial or anything, just a box that said "Is this a legal copy? Y/N". In a nutshell, if you are concerned about buying TaxCut 2002 and importing your TurboTax 2001 goo, don't be. It went right in for me, and the program seems to be every bit as good as TurboTax. It doesn't have that annoying "da dum dum, da dum da" musical intro that always bothered me either...;)
First off, I know very little about the xbox boot process - however I know the amount of data it is able to calculate a hash for signature verification is fairly limited in size. Obviously it can't read the entire CD and use that as a hash or the user would wait forever. So it seems the best approach is to use the executable image from some already signed game/app and cause that to load your payload - by replacing data it reads with something that allows you to take control. Games are not designed to handle corrupted data so this shouldn't be that hard. The ideal game candidate would do as little as possible before allowing you to take control.
MS cannot verify signatures mid-game because the process is to slow so further reads from the CD go unchecked.
One possibility MS could employ to thwart this is by checking the signature of a few random block of CD data at startup. Most of the time it wouldn't catch you, but that 1% would be enough to discourage people from using this method.
I also built a single-EXE version of cygwin that has many of the utilities that fits on a floppy. It doesn't require any installation, or rely on external DLLs, and always stays as a single EXE file (nothing extract to disk). So it's a nice little file to have sitting around.
It's not so much surprising what's in there, as what is not. There is not one foriegn language website in the top 100. Does this reflect a bias in the page-rank algorithm towards english pages? Or does this reflect the fact that there is hardly any inter-linking between different language sites so none of the english "page rank" carries over to these other sites.
I like to read books on the subway, but I don't like to carry a bunch of stuff with me - especially if I'm going out for social reasons.
PDAs are took bulky, but so are books. I also don't want to worry about a PDA being stolen, lost, or broken while in my jacket. My solution?
Buy books and rip the binding off. I can usually estimate pretty well how many pages I'm going to read. Just rip a chunk off at a time, the glue binding keeps them all attached.
When you finish pages, just throw them away. Sounds wasteful, but people throw away a lot more for in newspapers everyday. If you really wanted to you could get an scanner with a page feed mecanism and immoratilze the book - but I never read a book twice.
It's supper compact, weighs nothing, you don't have to worry about theft, loss, breakage, rain, etc - and you don't stand out as a geek. You can easily read with one hand - with books often you need two hands to open it up. or a pda sometimes needs two hands as well. On a crowed tube, you have to stand and need an arm to hold on. And your choice of what to read is not limited.
I think overall it's more cost effective than a PDA as well - even if you are using free ebooks.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been working on a slightly more ambitious (but still a ways off!) similar project, see http://jonathanclark.com. Initially I tried using a wiimote, but found it has a extremely limited coverage area and accuracy. If you move a few feet out of a sweet spot it will stop working, also the wiimote has a lot of noise in it's samples so you end up having to smooth the samples - but this introduces a lot of latency which destroys the illusion. On the low-cost end, the TrackIR system works a lot better (faster, more accurate samples). I have a demo using TrackIR posted here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzKTJM5T0us&feature=player_embedded
TrackIR also has a limited area it can work with, so now I've moved to using OptiTrack which gets pricer but can cover fairly large areas (at least a small room).
One other issue I found is that flat video doesn't look entirely convincing because motion parallax should occur within a frame - for example, when you move left to right, the bridge and the water behind it should move at different speeds. To help address this, I'm currently trying to create a depth-map per video frame and convert that depth map into a mesh which the video is mapped onto. To start, I'm drawing the depth map by hand (should be ok if objects don't move much), but I'd like to create it automatically by filming from multiple angles and using feature point extraction to estimate the depth for every frame automatically.
Yes - it's true.
I flew from Munich to San Francisco last Tuesday and our plane offered Internet Service (lufthansa). They charge $8 for 30 minutes, and $30 for unlimited. You have to use the initial 30 minutes all at once, you can't break it up. I used it for about 40 minutes for a cost of ~$15. A bit pricy, but who else is going to offer service up there? I was able to close a deal and process an order that I might not have otherwise so it paid for itself.
The transfer rates and ping times were comparable somewhere between low-end DSL and a modem - plenty gast for surfing, email, and downloads - but not for gaming. It uses a wireless router on the plane to talk to laptops. I had 3 thoughts on this. #1 the network traffic is unencrypted unless you use SSL or VPN, so planes would make a good place for network sniffing. #2 The authorization system only allows access to boeing's site before you pay - but it allows DNS to go through, so you could write a driver that communicates with the outside world through DNS queries and get free service. #3 It would be hard to stop passengers from getting together and share internet connections wirelessly. Don't know if any of this would happen, but watch out if the prices go to high. Oh you can also access Lufthansa and MSN search before you pay, so it give you a chance to see what it's like.
The service is run by Boeing - they showed a video of a directional antenna that tracks a satellite.
I thought it was pretty cool overall, but I regret that I no longer have a place I can "get away from it all".
There are actually 6 places you should to look:
u rr entversion\runs oft\windows\curr entversion\runoncec rosoft\windows\curre ntversion\runf t\windows\curre ntversion\runonce
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\microsoft\windows\c
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\micro
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\mi
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\microso
C:\Documents and Settings\MYUSERNAME\Start Menu\Programs\Startup
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Startup
Each of these places allows you to add a program that will run everytime your computer boots or you login as a specific user.
See my .sig for a product I work on called Thinstall - You can pacakge all of your files and registry keys into a single EXE which runs without extracting anything and without modifying the system registry. It simulates a virtual filesystem and registry for your application, so the files appear to be on the hard drive already.
Contacting the President should be a process simple enough that anyone in the USA, even those with limited technical, communication, and cognitive abilities could perform.
Such as snail mail, phone, or fax? I think most Americans are more famaliar with these systems compared with email or web.
I'd rather not have my tax dollars going towards paying the salaries of a team of people who are needed to sort through the millions of auto-generated email campains - many who don't even come from US citizens.
You should try rentacoder.com, you can do exactly this - post a programming job you want done with a maximum bid and then let people fit over how cheap they will do it.
This site seems especially popular with 3rd world skilled programmers who are willing to do quite a bit of work for very little money. I know several Asian (British meaning) programmers who would are quite happy with $8/hr - and they are fairly experienced. I've heard this site is putting many US programming consultants out of work because they can't compete with those rates.
On one hand this is bad news for us US programmers - but on the other hand it present an avenue where we can find work here and resell it. I'm thinking about posting some large projects there for things I'd like to do if I had the time - but don't.
Jonathan
A slightly different idea for using VMs to enhance security....
Over the last few years, I've been developing a "thin" virtual machine that runs in user-mode. The purpose of this is to allow software to be deployed in a pre-installed state, rather than having to install a bunch of file, make registry changes, etc - just distribute a single EXE that can run directly from CDROM or a download link.
Besides simplfying the installation process and prevent conflicts with other packages (DLL Hell, etc). This method of software distribution also helps protect intellectual property - for example if you use the Macromedia Flash ActiveX component - not only can your application create object instances without having to register it in the system registry - but the macromedia code automatically goes through the virtual machine to read compress/encrypted files included in the archive.
The virtual machine only takes up about 100k on disk and 500-1MB in RAM and runs on top of any version of Windows (no linux, sorry) without drivers or reboots.
Check it out:
http://thinstall.com/help
Jonathan Clark
DLLs are useful these days primarly for their ability to allow 3rd party developers to distribute libraries in a language independent form. For example, there are large numbers of VB and C++ programmers for Windows. But there is no easy way to create libraries that work for both languages, except for DLLs and COM. So you will find almost all 3rd party libraries are shipped out as DLLs these days (unless it's language specific).
I've been working on a system to permits the best of both worlds by do a late-link of the DLL in a language independent way.
Jonathan
This is impossible unless there were a major change and all software developers conformed to it. But we are stuck with Windows 95 on steroids. Windows XP addresses the problem to a small extent by providing a "side-by-side" DLL loading system.
There is no way for the OS to know which DLLs an application might use - since DLLs are "Dynamically" loaded. The application may only load the DLL in rare cases, or maybe the application is run for the first time 1 year after it's installed.
To further complicate the problem, software vendors themselves cannot be 100% sure that no other application are going to use DLLs they installed - so to be safe they leave them behind on uninstall. So you are stuck with growing system32 directory. The only way to garbage collect is to refresh the entire machine.
I have been working on a virtual machine techology that allows applications to run in a semi-isolated environment (DLLs, files, and registry keys are not shared with the system). So they have zero impact on other applications and other application installs cannot cause them to fail. Also uninstall becomes a simple "del program.exe".
I've been working on this problem. I created an application that creates a compressed virtual filesystem containing the EXE, DLLs, and datafiles that can be deployed in a "pre-installed" state. When the application runs, a virtual machine technology similar to WINE is used to allow the application to load DLLs directly from the archive rather than go to the operating system. Unlike VMWare/WINE, however, the virtual filesystem is transparently merged with the real filesystem so the application can access files from ether place with no source changes. Also 90% of Windows API calls do not need to be replaced so there a very few compatability problems. The next version will have support for a merged virtual registry as well, so you can deploy ActiveX/COM controls without having to register them or even write to the system registry at all.
Check it out:
http://thinstall.com
I'm trying to reproduce a bug right now that does not occur in VMWare. This bug relates to thread creation/destruction, and it's very timing dependent. Because of VMWare's slow task switching mecanism, the bug never occurs when running on VMWare - but always occurs on a normal machine.
If you think it's bad to read your old newsgroup post from 10-20 years ago, think about the search terms you've typed in over the same period of time. And that is information you never thought would be made public.
It's very simple to correlate search request to a person. Most people will search for their own email, name, phone number, address, etc. to find out what's available on the net. If there is a persistent cookie, then all your search request can be tied together. And blocking cookies may not help if you have a static dedicated IP. Google saves every little bit of information they can,.. forever...
There is no time limit for them to destroy this data.
There is no way you can write them and ask them to delete your records.
There is no way to ensure your information won't be leaked by an employee or seized by court order.
I suspect the big google/china ban thing a while back is because the chinese government didn't want google have access to so much information about all of their citizens, including government officials - especially since the US appears to be half-way in bed with google now. Basically it amounts to spying. The terms of the deal with china weren't disclosed for allowing google back online there - but I bet it had something to do with this issue.
With features like google-bar with pagerank google has access not to every search you've made, but also every page you visit! Even without google-bar, many browsers have a bug that returns the last page visited as the referal when you hit the home button or favorites link. Since google is highly likely to be used this way rather than typing in google.com - they will also correlate this information.
I've used google since their early beta days - but now I'm beginning to think they are on the path to evil weither they intend it or not. The fact they are a private company makes them even scarier - no public disclosures of how they are using their data. And with something like 80% of all searches going through google, they have collected a lot of data. Be afraid, be very afraid.
Pretty hard, you can't fake the cpu clock counter and run at near-realtime speed. It is an easy way to detect if you are running under emulation.
Yes, but it's quit easy to detect you are running under VMWare if you want. Simply query any device name and it will have the string vmware in it. Some programs do this and refuse to run on VMWare. Sucks for me because I sometimes use VMWare to test various OS releases.
Many .NET developers out there are happy with the functionality of the current crop of obfuscators, and many use such programs to "encrypt" their commercial apps.
.NET Developers are not happy with obfuscation. Obfuscators cannot encrypt symbols that interface with the .NET Framework, and these are usually the most damning. A good programmer can trace through obfuscated symbol names with a debugger, adding a few comments here and there and a few minutes later beat most copy protection systems built into .NET code. When your program has to access registry entries, files, user input, etc. there is no way to hide this with an obfuscator.
And many
There are further problems with obfuscation; your program losses large abilities with the reflection API, serialization may break, and encrypted crash stack-frames make it hard to glen useful info from a testing department.
I have a different protection system available:
http://thinstall.com/dotnet
which does not exhibit any of this short-commings. However this solution prevents the resulting EXE from running on Mono.
Yes, ildasm and there are 2 other commercial disassemblers that provide extremely readable source code. Really a huge problem with .net and one of the reasons there are so many obfuscators available. But even with an obfuscator its easy to disassemble and reassemble .net assemblies - so changing things like registered serial number code makes most other cracks look like hard work. Basically .NET programs are "open source" weither they want to be or not.
.NET byte code into a Windows EXE so it can't be disassembled any more. This precludes running the resulting program on Linux (except in Wine), but adds some other interesting features.
I make a product that turns
http://thinstall.com/dotnet
Yes, but I think most of this time this does not provide any useful information because almost all big sites are now dynamically generated and don't have a last-modified date. Even if the web designer figured out how to code one, often the page may have dynamic elements that change every refresh - such as date, time, username, banner ad, hit counter, and so on.
So, have a partial diff would be effecient because there is almost never 100% change from one page or refresh to another.
A bit like using the rsync algorithm to minimize bandwidth while obtaining full data set on one side. And it could still allow progressive loading (not all in one shot type thing).
Another possible way to speed up transfer is by using upstream traffic as well as downstream traffic. Normally when you download a web page, the server assumes the client knows nothing about the content, but as other post mention the difference between two pages or updates of the same site will likely be much smaller than a complete resend. So the client can use it's upstream bandwidth to start transmitting data it already has for that site (or partial data hashes), while the server transmits new data. This would require a change to the web servers or use of a proxy server, but in general I could see this dramatically improving download speeds for sites that have a lot of common XML/CSS/menus etc.
I think 90% of page traffic occurs on the top few websites through regular visitors, so in most cases the client will already have some data available.
Now I remember why I love slashdot. The overwhelming love and support. ahhh... Just makes me feel good inside.
Why do I have the feeling that a lot of these negative comments are made by a competing company? Most of the dates are Jan 4. It would be interesting to see Amazon's IP logs for all the post. I know this wouldn't be the first case of posting fake reviews (both positive and negative). No doubt many of the comments are real, it's a legit issue - but I think it's been overhyped by competition. My guess is it's someone from TaxCut.
;)
Look at this review:
------------------
Christopher R Chirdon from Pittsburgh, PA USA
I was reading reviews here when I really checked into the online activation stuff. But someone was concerned if you could import your 2001 "filename.tax" file from TurboTax 2001 into TaxCut 2002 and the answer is YES! I bought TaxCut because I want to prepare on my personal computer and then take it to work to print on my laser printer, but I don't want to have to buy 2 licenses. Also, it's just SUCH a hassle. The funny thing is, I don't think taxCut uses ANY type of authentication. I put the CD in and it never asked me for a serial or anything, just a box that said "Is this a legal copy? Y/N".
In a nutshell, if you are concerned about buying TaxCut 2002 and importing your TurboTax 2001 goo, don't be. It went right in for me, and the program seems to be every bit as good as TurboTax. It doesn't have that annoying "da dum dum, da dum da" musical intro that always bothered me either...
First off, I know very little about the xbox boot process - however I know the amount of data it is able to calculate a hash for signature verification is fairly limited in size. Obviously it can't read the entire CD and use that as a hash or the user would wait forever. So it seems the best approach is to use the executable image from some already signed game/app and cause that to load your payload - by replacing data it reads with something that allows you to take control. Games are not designed to handle corrupted data so this shouldn't be that hard. The ideal game candidate would do as little as possible before allowing you to take control.
MS cannot verify signatures mid-game because the process is to slow so further reads from the CD go unchecked.
One possibility MS could employ to thwart this is by checking the signature of a few random block of CD data at startup. Most of the time it wouldn't catch you, but that 1% would be enough to discourage people from using this method.
I also built a single-EXE version of cygwin that has many of the utilities that fits on a floppy. It doesn't require any installation, or rely on external DLLs, and always stays as a single EXE file (nothing extract to disk). So it's a nice little file to have sitting around.
. html
http://thinstall.com/docs/index.php?sp=unix_tools
It's not so much surprising what's in there, as what is not. There is not one foriegn language website in the top 100. Does this reflect a bias in the page-rank algorithm towards english pages? Or does this reflect the fact that there is hardly any inter-linking between different language sites so none of the english "page rank" carries over to these other sites.
Another iteresting google search trick. Search for "http" and you will get a list of the top page-ranked sites on the internet.
It's an interesting unbasied "who's who" list with a few surprises.
I like to read books on the subway, but I don't like to carry a bunch of stuff with me - especially if I'm going out for social reasons.
PDAs are took bulky, but so are books. I also don't want to worry about a PDA being stolen, lost, or broken while in my jacket. My solution?
Buy books and rip the binding off. I can usually estimate pretty well how many pages I'm going to read. Just rip a chunk off at a time, the glue binding keeps them all attached.
When you finish pages, just throw them away. Sounds wasteful, but people throw away a lot more for in newspapers everyday. If you really wanted to you could get an scanner with a page feed mecanism and immoratilze the book - but I never read a book twice.
It's supper compact, weighs nothing, you don't have to worry about theft, loss, breakage, rain, etc - and you don't stand out as a geek. You can easily read with one hand - with books often you need two hands to open it up. or a pda sometimes needs two hands as well. On a crowed tube, you have to stand and need an arm to hold on. And your choice of what to read is not limited.
I think overall it's more cost effective than a PDA as well - even if you are using free ebooks.