To be fair, the "10W wasted as heat" claim comes straight from the mouth of the company pushing this thing, and I'm not sure I buy it. Looking at their website, it does kinda read like somebody locked a dozen marketing and MBA types in a room with unlimited whiskey, cocaine and a copy of Dreamweaver.
Yeah, I hope that was just newspeople oversimplification. Most likely they mean he used a resistor as a load to measure the power output (which technically would convert the alternating charge - a currentless electron accumulation that by definition is doing no "work" - to an alternating current at a voltage that can be expressed in terms of power (watts)).
In after the millions of nerdrage arguments about the finer points of file locking semantics that will inevitably follow (and have), I have an even more modest wish. Forget operating on the locked files for now: when I try to copy/move/delete a directory of 10,000 files, of which 3 are locked, will this new Windows file manager go ahead and copy/move/delete the other 9,997 instead of freezing for half a minute and then bombing out of the process on the first failure?
(As much *fun* as it is to clean out the Windows temp directory via manual binary search to find the actually deletable ones...)
Look up "supercookie" and "evercookie". Clever people have found ways to store and retrieve cookie-equivalent data (e.g. unique tracking IDs) that survive deleting all cookies and cache, and can in certain cases survive formatting the hard drive (by hiding data in content cached by certain ISPs transparent proxies). Of course, if you miss even one of the 7 places the site hid the data, the other 6 are immediately restored from it next time you visit.
I propose a movement to start calling the male end a jack, and the female end a jill. Confusion solved! (In a generation or so when it catches on, of course...)
Someone should alert Zimbabwe. They could save a bundle not having to reprint all the bills each week, just update the dollar value on them each time the bank turns them over. Take that, hyperinflation!
SSL has numerous applications and needs that it serves. What we really need is a graduated system of "validity" which allows for things that don't need the "uber-valid" level of certs to operate.
This. As an 'ordinary user' that doesn't have to deal with the end of obtaining and maintaining paid-for certificates, my biggest annoyance with the current SSL implementation is what happens when the trends of common-ssl-misconfigurations and encrypt-everything-for-the-hell-of-it collide. This is partly the fault of certain browser makers (*cough*Firefox), but I'm sure you've come across the situation where you had to click past half a dozen warnings, and (maybe) permanently accept a known-bad cert, just to read some random guy's blog or innocous mailing list, since the owner for whatever reason decided to SSL read-only content that anyone can freely access. Given the many ISPs currently playing mid-pipe rewriting tricks a la Phorm, this is not a bad idea in theory, but when these not-important certs have a problem, as they often do, browsers treat Joe's Blog and a bank identically. An in-between solution for non-ecommerce content (DNSSEC if it ever becomes common) will be great.
You could use a realtime (RTAI) kernel and still have a 'normal' Linux box. This is the approach EMC2 uses to run CNC systems (down to individual motor step pulses from a parallel port) realtime from a standard Ubuntu distribution.
Just c/c++ actually, unless you're patching the optional Arduino IDE itself, which is written in Java.:-)
(Technically, you can skip all the Arduino-isms entirely and program the board in assembler using the avr-gcc + avrdude included with the IDE, but there aren't tutorials for this on their site.)
Also, the username(s) used by the uploader were "MrFuddlesticks" (not fiddlesticks) and "whothehellispenny". It looks like the rest of the videos have already been deleted (couldn't find any kind of search feature on xtranormal).
To be fair, RONJA was delivering these 10MBps/1.4km links on Radio Shack grade LEDs at least a decade ago, and has "cheap and readily available bog-standard parts" as one of its design goals (last I looked, admittedly a while ago, they were using parts like the LM339 comparator literally scavenged from old floppy disk drives), not the latest and greatest single-source NDA'ed part.
(That said, I'd be very interested in actual technical details about the analog frontend that lets 'em pull off 800MB/s using commodity LEDs and photodiodes. The biggest challenge in RONJA is a PIN photodiode, even with tricks, is limited in speed by its parasitic capacitance, and this scales with sensor area (light gathering capability). So I agree that pulling these rates from an unfocused source is actually somewhat interesting, even if TFA is written for 4-year-olds.)
How does the Zediva case substantially differ from Cartoon Network vs. Cablevision, in which a very similar "hosted DVR" scheme was ruled lawful on all counts? (i.e. automated copies and multiple "buffer contents" copies noninfringing, transmission to the renting user not public performance)?
It's an interesting case and ruling to say the least. A recent case against a cable company with a very similar scheme (a remotely-hosted DVR) ruled soundly in the cable company's favor, finding that "buffer copies" and a transient bitstream did not constitute copyright infringement, and that replaying (including time-shifting) the content directly to the original user did not constitute public performance. OTOH, the article cited a case where a hotel streaming a movie *from the same building* (presumably using a very long, analog cable not unlike the one leading from a VCR in the same room) *was* a public performance. An extreme amount of quibbling in the former case centered on "who" would "press the button" to make the copies (e.g. whether the DVR copy was transcoded and saved separately per user upon demand or transcoded once and cached singly. Ironically, it turned out having potentially many copies was what made it noninfringing.) I'm very curious to see what the difference is that makes the Cablevision scheme legal and the Zediva one not.
All that being said, this particular guy has very little to complain about. He posted a picture of a naked 10 year old girl posed suggestively with the title Virgin Killers printed on it. The picture was already declared to be child porn in several countries, and the guy specifically stated that he wanted to see just how close he could get to child pornography without actually crossing the line. It is ridiculous for him to complain that someone else draws their line at a slightly different shade of gray.
Except that the ban was a result of an automated porn-detector algorithm, not a live human. After the fact (and resulting media flap, which seems to be the preferred/only method of getting a live human at Google to look into a banbot issue), a live human at Google looked into it and reinstated his account.
It wasn't mentioned in the article, but I'm curious whether this is a custom-for-Apple microcontroller/firmware, or one of the several off-the-shelf battery authentication ICs currently on the market. Firmware on a battery is not entirely suprising - charge management, capacity counting, authentication and various safety checks can be cheaply integrated that way, and a little serial bootloader onboard for emergency bugfixes is a "why-not" feature. In the case of authentication, some manufacturers are now using cryptographic hashes (one such chip has hardware SHA-1 built in) to function similarly to the lockout chips on Lexmark ink cartridges. The gadget can refuse to operate from aftermarket / "unauthorized" batteries, ensuring (depending who's telling it) user safety or vendor lock-in / planned obsolescence. Viable hacks for these give some promise that some lazy vendors' battery packs can be replaced usefully beyond the manufacturer's designated product lifespan:-)
Good points overall, but I have to nitpick about the idea of the Earth's magnetic field wiping hard drives over time. Have a look at coercive field strength for typical ferromagnetic materials used in hard drives (or audiotape for that matter)... weak (below the coercive threshold) magnetic fields like that of the Earth won't demagnetize the media. Heck, the hard drive itself has extremely strong neodymium magnets to move the heads; these park less than 1cm from the platters harmlessly:-)
As for your audiotapes, extended proximity to some AC-powered device (linear amp transformer in a home stereo?) is the more likely cause of failure.
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair, the "10W wasted as heat" claim comes straight from the mouth of the company pushing this thing, and I'm not sure I buy it. Looking at their website, it does kinda read like somebody locked a dozen marketing and MBA types in a room with unlimited whiskey, cocaine and a copy of Dreamweaver.
Yeah, I hope that was just newspeople oversimplification. Most likely they mean he used a resistor as a load to measure the power output (which technically would convert the alternating charge - a currentless electron accumulation that by definition is doing no "work" - to an alternating current at a voltage that can be expressed in terms of power (watts)).
In after the millions of nerdrage arguments about the finer points of file locking semantics that will inevitably follow (and have), I have an even more modest wish. Forget operating on the locked files for now: when I try to copy/move/delete a directory of 10,000 files, of which 3 are locked, will this new Windows file manager go ahead and copy/move/delete the other 9,997 instead of freezing for half a minute and then bombing out of the process on the first failure?
(As much *fun* as it is to clean out the Windows temp directory via manual binary search to find the actually deletable ones...)
That's because all the rich craftsmen can afford better tools. /ducks
Look up "supercookie" and "evercookie". Clever people have found ways to store and retrieve cookie-equivalent data (e.g. unique tracking IDs) that survive deleting all cookies and cache, and can in certain cases survive formatting the hard drive (by hiding data in content cached by certain ISPs transparent proxies). Of course, if you miss even one of the 7 places the site hid the data, the other 6 are immediately restored from it next time you visit.
A "jack" is a female fitting.
I propose a movement to start calling the male end a jack, and the female end a jill. Confusion solved! (In a generation or so when it catches on, of course...)
NCC-1701-D?
(i.e, Life support: When you just can't afford to turn it off and then on again.)
Someone should alert Zimbabwe. They could save a bundle not having to reprint all the bills each week, just update the dollar value on them each time the bank turns them over. Take that, hyperinflation!
SSL has numerous applications and needs that it serves. What we really need is a graduated system of "validity" which allows for things that don't need the "uber-valid" level of certs to operate.
This. As an 'ordinary user' that doesn't have to deal with the end of obtaining and maintaining paid-for certificates, my biggest annoyance with the current SSL implementation is what happens when the trends of common-ssl-misconfigurations and encrypt-everything-for-the-hell-of-it collide. This is partly the fault of certain browser makers (*cough*Firefox), but I'm sure you've come across the situation where you had to click past half a dozen warnings, and (maybe) permanently accept a known-bad cert, just to read some random guy's blog or innocous mailing list, since the owner for whatever reason decided to SSL read-only content that anyone can freely access. Given the many ISPs currently playing mid-pipe rewriting tricks a la Phorm, this is not a bad idea in theory, but when these not-important certs have a problem, as they often do, browsers treat Joe's Blog and a bank identically. An in-between solution for non-ecommerce content (DNSSEC if it ever becomes common) will be great.
You could use a realtime (RTAI) kernel and still have a 'normal' Linux box. This is the approach EMC2 uses to run CNC systems (down to individual motor step pulses from a parallel port) realtime from a standard Ubuntu distribution.
Just c/c++ actually, unless you're patching the optional Arduino IDE itself, which is written in Java. :-)
(Technically, you can skip all the Arduino-isms entirely and program the board in assembler using the avr-gcc + avrdude included with the IDE, but there aren't tutorials for this on their site.)
http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/11622514/score-parody-3
http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/11599075/score-parody-part-deux
Also, the username(s) used by the uploader were "MrFuddlesticks" (not fiddlesticks) and "whothehellispenny". It looks like the rest of the videos have already been deleted (couldn't find any kind of search feature on xtranormal).
To be fair, RONJA was delivering these 10MBps/1.4km links on Radio Shack grade LEDs at least a decade ago, and has "cheap and readily available bog-standard parts" as one of its design goals (last I looked, admittedly a while ago, they were using parts like the LM339 comparator literally scavenged from old floppy disk drives), not the latest and greatest single-source NDA'ed part.
(That said, I'd be very interested in actual technical details about the analog frontend that lets 'em pull off 800MB/s using commodity LEDs and photodiodes. The biggest challenge in RONJA is a PIN photodiode, even with tricks, is limited in speed by its parasitic capacitance, and this scales with sensor area (light gathering capability). So I agree that pulling these rates from an unfocused source is actually somewhat interesting, even if TFA is written for 4-year-olds.)
How does the Zediva case substantially differ from Cartoon Network vs. Cablevision, in which a very similar "hosted DVR" scheme was ruled lawful on all counts? (i.e. automated copies and multiple "buffer contents" copies noninfringing, transmission to the renting user not public performance)?
It's an interesting case and ruling to say the least. A recent case against a cable company with a very similar scheme (a remotely-hosted DVR) ruled soundly in the cable company's favor, finding that "buffer copies" and a transient bitstream did not constitute copyright infringement, and that replaying (including time-shifting) the content directly to the original user did not constitute public performance. OTOH, the article cited a case where a hotel streaming a movie *from the same building* (presumably using a very long, analog cable not unlike the one leading from a VCR in the same room) *was* a public performance. An extreme amount of quibbling in the former case centered on "who" would "press the button" to make the copies (e.g. whether the DVR copy was transcoded and saved separately per user upon demand or transcoded once and cached singly. Ironically, it turned out having potentially many copies was what made it noninfringing.) I'm very curious to see what the difference is that makes the Cablevision scheme legal and the Zediva one not.
All that being said, this particular guy has very little to complain about. He posted a picture of a naked 10 year old girl posed suggestively with the title Virgin Killers printed on it. The picture was already declared to be child porn in several countries, and the guy specifically stated that he wanted to see just how close he could get to child pornography without actually crossing the line. It is ridiculous for him to complain that someone else draws their line at a slightly different shade of gray.
Except that the ban was a result of an automated porn-detector algorithm, not a live human. After the fact (and resulting media flap, which seems to be the preferred/only method of getting a live human at Google to look into a banbot issue), a live human at Google looked into it and reinstated his account.
...you lead a pretty sad freaking life. I use the Internet pretty much all day long and...
Well played.
Man, these copyright extension acts are really getting out of hand.
Kidding aside - so much for letting opencv spend a night or two on it.
It wasn't mentioned in the article, but I'm curious whether this is a custom-for-Apple microcontroller/firmware, or one of the several off-the-shelf battery authentication ICs currently on the market. Firmware on a battery is not entirely suprising - charge management, capacity counting, authentication and various safety checks can be cheaply integrated that way, and a little serial bootloader onboard for emergency bugfixes is a "why-not" feature. In the case of authentication, some manufacturers are now using cryptographic hashes (one such chip has hardware SHA-1 built in) to function similarly to the lockout chips on Lexmark ink cartridges. The gadget can refuse to operate from aftermarket / "unauthorized" batteries, ensuring (depending who's telling it) user safety or vendor lock-in / planned obsolescence. Viable hacks for these give some promise that some lazy vendors' battery packs can be replaced usefully beyond the manufacturer's designated product lifespan :-)
Good points overall, but I have to nitpick about the idea of the Earth's magnetic field wiping hard drives over time. Have a look at coercive field strength for typical ferromagnetic materials used in hard drives (or audiotape for that matter)... weak (below the coercive threshold) magnetic fields like that of the Earth won't demagnetize the media. Heck, the hard drive itself has extremely strong neodymium magnets to move the heads; these park less than 1cm from the platters harmlessly :-)
As for your audiotapes, extended proximity to some AC-powered device (linear amp transformer in a home stereo?) is the more likely cause of failure.
How does this license compare to the recent (similarly-named) OSHW license? Do these groups know about each other?
Moss: You had a job?
Roy: Girl on fifth.
Moss: Did you and her, hit it off?
Roy: Define, hit it off.
Moss: Did she continue talking to you once you'd fixed her computer?
Roy: No. And while I was working on it, she rested a cup on my back.
Moss: No
Roy: Yup.
Moss: Unbelievable.
Roy: They have no respect for us up there. No respect whatsoever. We're all just drudgeons to them.
Moss: Yes. If there were such a thing as a drudgeon, that is what we would be to them.
By what? No, not 'my butt'. Delete-that. Delete-that. Delete-that...
...or they could use 'geek', as it is a generic term.
Isn't that a bit like saying "they didn't just call themselves prostitutes, but used the term in conjunction with sex"?