I don't see how, unless their competitors were not cautious and decided to use the code, or if a newcomer were to basically reuse the company's software to enter the same space...
Interestingly, the first posting on the weblog appears to disagree, saying "...Giving away the software of failed companies could turn every corporate failure into a disaster for everyone else."
While the software of failed companies seems at first blush like a bad idea, in actuality a lot of the code is quite good and useable. Having a huge base of code, good or not, to work from can be quite a boon; the trick is to be choosy with what you actually end up using.
So, while having the software available may be a good idea, actually using it may not be.
Actually, homeostatic systems, such as the feedback loop described above, are generally in a condition known as "sensitive dependance on initial conditions"... basically, that it is very difficult to measure the entire system precisely enough to predict long-term behaviour in any sort of way.
In addition, it's so difficult to measure the system, that even if one managed to do it, the energy and precision required to do so would ultimately result in a change of the system as you measure it; meaning that the model that you create would no longer be accurate when you were done.
Basically, in any positive-feedback system, precision on the atomic scale is necessary to predict long-term behaviour. Short-term behaviour can be predicted in a gross way, but the length of the prediction is volatile; the speed of the positive-feedback system (in this case, how long it takes a small magnetic domain to become a large magnetic domain) ultimately determines for how long your model will remain reasonably accurate. And measuring things on the atomic scale ALWAYS results in changes at the same scale; it's like taking a gymnasium full of tennis balls and bouncing basket balls around, trying to determine where the tennis balls are from the angles that the basket balls bounce at; you can get useful information that way, but the tennis balls will be bounced around in unpredictable ways while you do it.
First, let me say that I don't really believe in the evils of transgenic manipulation; I fully feel that this is a technology that has its place in the world and will be fundamental to how humanity copes with growing populations in the future.
However, the article says: The Singapore team is working toward producing fish that give off a different-colored glow depending on water temperature, which may lead to using fluorescent fish as temperature indicators.
Wow. They're going to replace a common, cheap, nondestructive technology (thermometers) with living beings. This kind of meddling strikes me as particularly naive; doing science for science's sake with no attention paid to consequences. I really don't see the benefit of this; it strikes me as particularly mad scientist and unethical. Am I out in left-field, or does anyone else agree?
We used to have a house that was heated by a wood stove... big hulking thing out in the yard. The landlord had run water pipes under the ground into a heat exchanger, with clean potable water on one side, and the water from the wood stove on the other side... maybe something like this, to prevent the green googlies?
What about the storing of the credit information? That will most likely be coming in at arbitrary times, and thus the credit storage machine will need to be connected continuously.
Look at the guidelines in the Visa CISP. They have good information about this... the bottom line is: use asynchronous encryption (store your private key elsewhere and use it once-monthly to decrypt the data as you send it), use a firewall, and patch your OS often.
I do have that problem occasionally. "Real" DJs poke a lot of fun at me when I walk in with this setup... I think once I get a rack-mount computer that'll help out a little. Plus I'm thinking of hacking the DM2 and putting it in a real case... brushed aluminum, that sort of thing.
Regardless, though... once the DJs see the kind of mixing I can do with it, they start getting real interested in it. The other thing is that I use this a lot in my studio, burn it to CD, and then do CD mixing at the club.
I use the DM2 in my DJing. First off, the DM2 software sucks. Studio Pro 4.5 is it for me. I use it mostly for remixing in the studio, though I have been known to bring it to the booth with me on occasion.
As far as the ability to use your own tracks with it, this is absolutely supported. There's a certain amount of monkeying required, but you can do it with the Studio Pro. One-shots are easy as pie. Just load in the WAV. For loops it's not quite so easy... you can do it the hard way (requires a good WAV editor, and a bit of time monkeying... e-mail me if you want details) or the easy way with a software program called Recycle.
It's made by the propellerheads (they did the Spy Hunter mix from The Matrix)... it takes WAV files and manipulates them into TRK files which contain metadata, allowing any supporting player to smoothly loop it, as well as change the tempo, pitch, and lots of other effects that would be hard without the metadata.
Blatant self-promotion: I just posted my first track on MP3.com... made entirely with the DM2. Check it out if you want to hear the capabilities.
This is probably the kind of thing you're talking about; this is definitely NOT the right size to put into a projector, but it could be adapted. The advantage of this one, being RGB as opposed to white, is that it's very easy to achieve the right color balance. The manufacturer would probably need to get a custom run of the LEDs to match the LCD wavelengths, but that wouldn't really be all that difficult... just a matter of changing the doping materials in very minor ways...
P.S. Anyone keeping credit card info in a web directory that's accessible to the outside world should really think long and hard about getting out of business on the internet.
Long and hard? Anyone keeping credit info in a web directory really shouldn't have to think that long about getting out of the internet.
As soon as someone points out to you what a colossal mistake that is, it's time to go back to McDonald's and hope they'll give you your old job back, because this whole Internet thing just ain't workin out for you no more.
I wonder if Ben realizes he has just been interviewed by Wil Wheaton?
And I wonder why Wil's other question (also rated 5, BTW) wasn't asked... thought it would've been funny.
Okay, so I'm just trying to burn some Karma.
But before you mod me down, I do want to say one thing:
Why didn't Ben go into more detail about The Tick on DVD? At least a description of why he didn't know... maybe a statement to the effect of "we haven't thought of it" or "We're negotiating that now" or something... the only thing I could find online was The Tick vs. The Common Cold, but it seemed to be an interactive rendition. There was a petition for it, but its been closed for sometime.
Maybe a quick letter to Fox (what about Sony?) on the subject by interested parties could spurn them on a little more?
I would suggest, for incapacitating the intruder, sleepy gas. Look for military surplus stores and the like, they usually sell it to militia men so they stock a few canisters.
One that is scary and will definitely set the burgler running, but may result in injury, would be to get an HV generator... like an ion gun. These don't pass a lot of current, so unless you have a heart condition, you're safe. Connect it to door frames (and thus knobs), windows frames, etc. Just a thought. I did it a few years ago when my ex-roommate had a key and I hadn't been able to get the locks changed yet, and it stopped the slow and steady disappearance of small random items that I had noticed...
I asked pretty much the same thing of Microsoft when they first announced.NET (which is closely tied to SOAP) For anyone who's curious, I asked a couple people, so I don't really remember WHO I talked to, but I do know that Scott Gu was one of the people.
Their response?
Developers are tired of being hampered by netadmins, trying to open up unsecure ports just so that DCOM will work. Basically, SOAP is a way to do it where you don't have to open up esoteric and undocumented ports and protocols...
As far as security goes... it's up to the implementors. SOAP does have one advantage over some other forms of RPC, in that it has a few built in forms of authentication and is explicit as opposed to implicit. That means you can't just randomly activate bits of code just because you can log onto a server.
Another advantage of SOAP is that a decent XML coder can write his own parser for the protocol, so you don't have to use the vendor's, and you can customize your parser to only pass safe requests.
Of course, some of the MS people indicated that they felt I should use the MS parser at this point. I haven't seen anything bad with it, but I wouldn't have any qualms about writing my own if the business needs dictated it...
Actually, it's possible to design fuel cells to use ANY heavy-hydrogen long-chain molecule. Some fuel cells only consume hydrogen; but with a platinum coating on the proton exchange barrier, a fuel cell can potentially use any hydrocarbon. Ethanol is TARGETED by some of them, because it's cheap to make from corn byproducts (husks and whatnot)
This means that you can also use propane and gasoline, BTW, as long as they're clean enough. Surprisingly, methanol (aka windsheild wiper fluid) produces more energy than gasoline when used in a fuel cell...
I like the potential of long-term battery life, say for remote scientific expeditions and the like.
Another thought is that fuel cells can be made to work in reverse. Heisenberg's theroem comes to mind; it goes basically that any electronic device can be reversed, such that it's inputs become it's outputs and visa-versa. An example is microphones and speakers. The two are interchangeable, except speakers have been optimized in physical design to emit sound and microphones to collect sound. Heisenberg's thereom has been disproved... it doesn't apply to semiconductor technology.
But, it does work for fuel cells... see this page for an example of someone doing it. So, you don't need to buy methanol. You can generate it electrically. In this sense, it would be similar to a sealed lead-acid battery. The material it works on is liquid and degrades through use, but as long as the system is sealed (and thus no transfer of fluids with the outside world goes on), it's rechargeable.
Actually, according to current theory, neutrinos pass through normal matter without interacting with it (much)... that's why you need such a big and delicate detector to find them at all; they are practically inert as far as normal matter is concerned.
So, I don't know why this statement was made, except to say that the neutrino's rate of interaction with matter is one of the more hotly debated questions in science right now. Its rate of interaction and its mass are two variables that play an important role in all of cosmology (for details, lookup Mach's theory, Ober's Sky, Missing Mass, and the Omega constant, sometimes referred to as the Hubble constant)
One way to fix the brightness problem is to print a capacitor parallel to the diode... not hard, when you consider that you'll already have to print on both sides anyways (otherwise the horizontal and vertical lines will short out)
Then, all you have to do is give enough juice that the cap gets a nice good charge while it can.
If you're using a Windows server and you have a small operation where edits are done on your server, as opposed to in a seperate development environment, then it isn't as easy as that.
_vti_bin is used by frontpage when it connects to the web server to edit. So is admin.dll.
Scripts is used by Interdev; a lot of the code that the design time controls and scriplets depend on is in there
_mem_bin is Site Server 3.0's membership files. If you've written your own login / error handling code for this, then you should DEFINITELY block access to it. Problem is, you can't just delete the folder; even when you write your own code, it still needs access to this folder.
Problem is, there are times when you need more than that. But SYN packets out on 80 is probably a bad idea, too.
The important part is to carefully decide what kinds of communications you'll allow in and out... regardless of port. For instance, you may want to be able to FTP out, but not in.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see how, unless their competitors were not cautious and decided to use the code, or if a newcomer were to basically reuse the company's software to enter the same space...
Can you elaborate, please?
I think the correct wording is (bold words mine):
Interestingly, the first posting on the weblog appears to disagree, saying "...Giving away the software of failed companies could turn every corporate failure into a disaster for everyone else."
While the software of failed companies seems at first blush like a bad idea, in actuality a lot of the code is quite good and useable. Having a huge base of code, good or not, to work from can be quite a boon; the trick is to be choosy with what you actually end up using.
So, while having the software available may be a good idea, actually using it may not be.
Good point! I didn't even think of it that way. Thanks for replying!!!!
Actually, homeostatic systems, such as the feedback loop described above, are generally in a condition known as "sensitive dependance on initial conditions"... basically, that it is very difficult to measure the entire system precisely enough to predict long-term behaviour in any sort of way.
In addition, it's so difficult to measure the system, that even if one managed to do it, the energy and precision required to do so would ultimately result in a change of the system as you measure it; meaning that the model that you create would no longer be accurate when you were done.
Basically, in any positive-feedback system, precision on the atomic scale is necessary to predict long-term behaviour. Short-term behaviour can be predicted in a gross way, but the length of the prediction is volatile; the speed of the positive-feedback system (in this case, how long it takes a small magnetic domain to become a large magnetic domain) ultimately determines for how long your model will remain reasonably accurate. And measuring things on the atomic scale ALWAYS results in changes at the same scale; it's like taking a gymnasium full of tennis balls and bouncing basket balls around, trying to determine where the tennis balls are from the angles that the basket balls bounce at; you can get useful information that way, but the tennis balls will be bounced around in unpredictable ways while you do it.
First, let me say that I don't really believe in the evils of transgenic manipulation; I fully feel that this is a technology that has its place in the world and will be fundamental to how humanity copes with growing populations in the future.
However, the article says: The Singapore team is working toward producing fish that give off a different-colored glow depending on water temperature, which may lead to using fluorescent fish as temperature indicators.
Wow. They're going to replace a common, cheap, nondestructive technology (thermometers) with living beings. This kind of meddling strikes me as particularly naive; doing science for science's sake with no attention paid to consequences. I really don't see the benefit of this; it strikes me as particularly mad scientist and unethical. Am I out in left-field, or does anyone else agree?
We used to have a house that was heated by a wood stove... big hulking thing out in the yard. The landlord had run water pipes under the ground into a heat exchanger, with clean potable water on one side, and the water from the wood stove on the other side... maybe something like this, to prevent the green googlies?
What's this about stop using a computer?
I must admit, I don't understand.
What about the storing of the credit information? That will most likely be coming in at arbitrary times, and thus the credit storage machine will need to be connected continuously.
Look at the guidelines in the Visa CISP. They have good information about this... the bottom line is: use asynchronous encryption (store your private key elsewhere and use it once-monthly to decrypt the data as you send it), use a firewall, and patch your OS often.
I do have that problem occasionally. "Real" DJs poke a lot of fun at me when I walk in with this setup... I think once I get a rack-mount computer that'll help out a little. Plus I'm thinking of hacking the DM2 and putting it in a real case... brushed aluminum, that sort of thing.
Regardless, though... once the DJs see the kind of mixing I can do with it, they start getting real interested in it. The other thing is that I use this a lot in my studio, burn it to CD, and then do CD mixing at the club.
Hi!
I use the DM2 in my DJing. First off, the DM2 software sucks. Studio Pro 4.5 is it for me. I use it mostly for remixing in the studio, though I have been known to bring it to the booth with me on occasion.
As far as the ability to use your own tracks with it, this is absolutely supported. There's a certain amount of monkeying required, but you can do it with the Studio Pro. One-shots are easy as pie. Just load in the WAV. For loops it's not quite so easy... you can do it the hard way (requires a good WAV editor, and a bit of time monkeying... e-mail me if you want details) or the easy way with a software program called Recycle.
It's made by the propellerheads (they did the Spy Hunter mix from The Matrix)... it takes WAV files and manipulates them into TRK files which contain metadata, allowing any supporting player to smoothly loop it, as well as change the tempo, pitch, and lots of other effects that would be hard without the metadata.
Blatant self-promotion: I just posted my first track on MP3.com... made entirely with the DM2. Check it out if you want to hear the capabilities.
This is probably the kind of thing you're talking about; this is definitely NOT the right size to put into a projector, but it could be adapted. The advantage of this one, being RGB as opposed to white, is that it's very easy to achieve the right color balance. The manufacturer would probably need to get a custom run of the LEDs to match the LCD wavelengths, but that wouldn't really be all that difficult... just a matter of changing the doping materials in very minor ways...
Actually, I think I saw a blurb on wilwheaton.net mentioning that he was talking with them about being in it...
P.S. Anyone keeping credit card info in a web directory that's accessible to the outside world should really think long and hard about getting out of business on the internet.
Long and hard? Anyone keeping credit info in a web directory really shouldn't have to think that long about getting out of the internet.
As soon as someone points out to you what a colossal mistake that is, it's time to go back to McDonald's and hope they'll give you your old job back, because this whole Internet thing just ain't workin out for you no more.
I wonder if Ben realizes he has just been interviewed by Wil Wheaton?
And I wonder why Wil's other question (also rated 5, BTW) wasn't asked... thought it would've been funny.
Okay, so I'm just trying to burn some Karma.
But before you mod me down, I do want to say one thing:
Why didn't Ben go into more detail about The Tick on DVD? At least a description of why he didn't know... maybe a statement to the effect of "we haven't thought of it" or "We're negotiating that now" or something... the only thing I could find online was The Tick vs. The Common Cold, but it seemed to be an interactive rendition. There was a petition for it, but its been closed for sometime.
Maybe a quick letter to Fox (what about Sony?) on the subject by interested parties could spurn them on a little more?
What MS meant by out of licenses is that they have not yet printed the materials, box, or licenses for this licensing arrangement.
By sold out, they mean that a surprisingly large number of people have actually asked for it.
I would suggest, for incapacitating the intruder, sleepy gas. Look for military surplus stores and the like, they usually sell it to militia men so they stock a few canisters.
One that is scary and will definitely set the burgler running, but may result in injury, would be to get an HV generator... like an ion gun. These don't pass a lot of current, so unless you have a heart condition, you're safe. Connect it to door frames (and thus knobs), windows frames, etc. Just a thought. I did it a few years ago when my ex-roommate had a key and I hadn't been able to get the locks changed yet, and it stopped the slow and steady disappearance of small random items that I had noticed...
I asked pretty much the same thing of Microsoft when they first announced .NET (which is closely tied to SOAP) For anyone who's curious, I asked a couple people, so I don't really remember WHO I talked to, but I do know that Scott Gu was one of the people.
Their response?
Developers are tired of being hampered by netadmins, trying to open up unsecure ports just so that DCOM will work. Basically, SOAP is a way to do it where you don't have to open up esoteric and undocumented ports and protocols...
As far as security goes... it's up to the implementors. SOAP does have one advantage over some other forms of RPC, in that it has a few built in forms of authentication and is explicit as opposed to implicit. That means you can't just randomly activate bits of code just because you can log onto a server.
Another advantage of SOAP is that a decent XML coder can write his own parser for the protocol, so you don't have to use the vendor's, and you can customize your parser to only pass safe requests.
Of course, some of the MS people indicated that they felt I should use the MS parser at this point. I haven't seen anything bad with it, but I wouldn't have any qualms about writing my own if the business needs dictated it...
Actually, check out this link
Rechargeable (via DC current) fuel cell. Cool. Probably horribly inefficient, but you trade that for huge battery life.
Actually, it's possible to design fuel cells to use ANY heavy-hydrogen long-chain molecule. Some fuel cells only consume hydrogen; but with a platinum coating on the proton exchange barrier, a fuel cell can potentially use any hydrocarbon. Ethanol is TARGETED by some of them, because it's cheap to make from corn byproducts (husks and whatnot)
This means that you can also use propane and gasoline, BTW, as long as they're clean enough. Surprisingly, methanol (aka windsheild wiper fluid) produces more energy than gasoline when used in a fuel cell...
I like the potential of long-term battery life, say for remote scientific expeditions and the like.
Another thought is that fuel cells can be made to work in reverse. Heisenberg's theroem comes to mind; it goes basically that any electronic device can be reversed, such that it's inputs become it's outputs and visa-versa. An example is microphones and speakers. The two are interchangeable, except speakers have been optimized in physical design to emit sound and microphones to collect sound. Heisenberg's thereom has been disproved... it doesn't apply to semiconductor technology.
But, it does work for fuel cells... see this page for an example of someone doing it. So, you don't need to buy methanol. You can generate it electrically. In this sense, it would be similar to a sealed lead-acid battery. The material it works on is liquid and degrades through use, but as long as the system is sealed (and thus no transfer of fluids with the outside world goes on), it's rechargeable.
Actually, according to current theory, neutrinos pass through normal matter without interacting with it (much)... that's why you need such a big and delicate detector to find them at all; they are practically inert as far as normal matter is concerned.
So, I don't know why this statement was made, except to say that the neutrino's rate of interaction with matter is one of the more hotly debated questions in science right now. Its rate of interaction and its mass are two variables that play an important role in all of cosmology (for details, lookup Mach's theory, Ober's Sky, Missing Mass, and the Omega constant, sometimes referred to as the Hubble constant)
One way to fix the brightness problem is to print a capacitor parallel to the diode... not hard, when you consider that you'll already have to print on both sides anyways (otherwise the horizontal and vertical lines will short out)
Then, all you have to do is give enough juice that the cap gets a nice good charge while it can.
Damn wil, you really want to be in a movie with Bruce? I never saw you as a big Bruce Campbell fan...
How about it Bruce? Are you a Wil Wheaton fan???
If you're using a Windows server and you have a small operation where edits are done on your server, as opposed to in a seperate development environment, then it isn't as easy as that.
_vti_bin is used by frontpage when it connects to the web server to edit. So is admin.dll.
Scripts is used by Interdev; a lot of the code that the design time controls and scriplets depend on is in there
_mem_bin is Site Server 3.0's membership files. If you've written your own login / error handling code for this, then you should DEFINITELY block access to it. Problem is, you can't just delete the folder; even when you write your own code, it still needs access to this folder.
Argh. Don't you love Windows?
Problem is, there are times when you need more than that. But SYN packets out on 80 is probably a bad idea, too.
The important part is to carefully decide what kinds of communications you'll allow in and out... regardless of port. For instance, you may want to be able to FTP out, but not in.