Representative democracy and the modern business both have leaders and led, the rule-makers and the rule-followers: a disturbing amount of our economy and polity is top-down (also never meaningfully accountable) and couldn't be further from swarm theory.
The fact that humans in groups always seem to have leaders could be one of the reasons behind the common observation that, unlike ants and bees, humans in groups typically show less intelligence than we do as individuals. Anyone who has ever worked in a business or corporate or political organization knows the dumbing-down effect of the power structure. It usually doesn't matter much if a "worker" has a good idea; ideas only get implemented if they trickle up to or originate with a leader. Since we don't communicate well, the actual implementation of leaders' commands tend to be full of misunderstandings and reinterpretations, so what the group does is often a weak parody of the leader's commands, which in turn are often based on misunderstanding what the workers have been telling the leaders.
There is dispute about the actual intelligence function that maps a group's size to its effective IQ. Early guesses were that it was 1/N, but this is probably too simple. 1/log(N) is probably a more accurate function. In some groups, the function is probably much more complicated, and depends on the details of the hierarchy.
But, while studying social insects may not provide insights into the problems with our own group behavior, it may lead to useful algorithms and heuristics for robots and distributed computer systems. Unlike humans, they can be programmed to follow strict behavioral rules.
Granted, humans and mice share a lot of DNA. But rodents and primates are sufficiently distant genetically that few if any results in one family can be applied directly to the other. In particular, a lot of human adaptations happened by weakening builtin, instinctive behavior, and replacing it with learned behavior.
Maybe this result will carry over to humans, maybe not. Or, most likely, there will be something similar in humans, but the trigger will be visual or language based or something else that's related to the reasons we've ended up such a dominant species.
Since one of our important features is our tool-using ability, we may find that what triggers neuron growth in human females is a male who demonstrates that he's really good at manipulating things with his hands, IYKWIM.
I highly doubt many consumers will be randomly browsing the Dell website and say "damn, those Ubuntu machines look awesome!"...
I doubt that many consumers browsing the Dell website will even see any mention of Ubuntu or linux. I just tried, starting at www.dell.com, and doing the obvious clicks to configure and order a machine. I saw lots of mentions of "Genuine Windows Vista(TM) Home Premium" (and a few without that "Genuine";-). But neither I nor the browser's search function could find 'ubuntu' or 'linux' on any page. There are lots of menus, and maybe some of those mention ubuntu, but I didn't see it in any that I looked at.
A person who knows that they want ubuntu or linux (and is determined enough) can probably find it. But Dell doesn't seem to offer it, or even mention that it exists, in a way that "random browsing" would discover it.
So they had a Windows system with a TCP/IP connection to the Internet back in 1992? Impressive.
Actually, they probably called it "DOS" then; I don't recall "Windows" being used before 1993. But I could be wrong. In any case, TCP/IP did exist for DOS well before 1990; I remember using it (reluctantly) in projects in '86 and '88. In any case, the behavior I described has been reported over the years by a number of people. I also recall a couple of other guys who decided to replicate that report, and hooked up a DOS box loaded with that fancy new "Internet software" (only a decade after we'd all adopted in on our unix boxes;-). It didn't take them long to spot what looked like a number of different software packages "phoning home" and sending a list of all our files to some IP address that resolved to a MS machine. In one case, the software actually made the call over the modem, which sorta pissed off the people in the lab, since it was a long-distance call. The lab adopted the practice of unplugging the modems for DOS boxes when they weren't in use.
And what the fuck do you mean by a "line monitor"?
I noticed that you use the term "sniffer". Probably the same sort of thing. Back in the day, "line monitor" was a common term for the sort of gadget that you could insert in a data path and it would tell you stuff about what was happening on the line. The most common kind by far was for RS-232, due to all the notorious problems getting the damned things working right, especially if there was a modem in the path.
I had a bit of fun once with a "software line monitor" program that I wrote. Back when POSIX was being developed, the question came up about including the UUCP protocol in the standard. The POSIX committee said they couldn't do it, because UUCP was a proprietary protocol, owned by AT&T. After reading this repeatedly over many months, I posted messages to a couple of discussions that included my little program. You needed a unix box with three free serial ports. You plugged your modem into/dev/tty1. You ran my program with/dev/tty1 and dev/tty2 on the command line. You ran a crossover cable from tty2 to tty3. You configured uucp to run on tty3. The program produced a hex dump (the 3-line form that includes all the printable ASCII chars on the first line) of any traffic on the line. I suggested that any good hacker could take the resulting dump and reverse engineer the protocol. A few weeks later, AT&T published the UUCP protocol and gave the POSIX standard permission to use it. You can probably find some of this in the usenet archives if you're interested.
This program wasn't as good as a real line monitor of course; a real one could also tell you things about the signals on various pins. One useful case was when the ends of a link had different ground levels. My program couldn't do that, but it was much cheaper than a line monitor, and worked fine for studying the data on a line. I saw several cases where an Internet gateway box would have such a monitor before the modem at all times, so when the link went down, it could maybe tell you why (if you saw it before the data was overwritten in the monitor's limited memory).
Some people can use sniffers well enough to tell for certain whether a Windows machine is trying to send traffic to Microsoft or not. Other people know just enough to run a sniffer only to freak the fuck out when they see an ARP packet, or anything else they don't understand, then build a grand conspiracy theory around it. I know which group I'm in and I'm pretty damn sure I know which group you're in.
Well, I've written code that encodes and decodes ARP packets. So I hope you guessed right. Not that it really matters to either of us (or to anyone else).
As for detecting communication with a specific remote site, if your Internet connection is via any sort of unix box, this is easy. See the man page for tcpdump. There are a number of other tools that will work, too.
(I'm a bit surprised that anyone would even suggest on/. that such a thing might be difficult.)
I remember back in the early 1990s, when the first network software for Microsoft systems started coming out, I read a report from some engineers who had been using it in their lab. They noticed that their modem's lights would flicker during times that the machine was "idle". So they hooked up a line monitor, and studied the activity.
It turned out that some software inside the machine was making connections to Microsoft sites, and passing information about the contents of the disk over the line.
So MS has been doing this for 15 years or so. Even back then, they knew how to make this "service" unobtrusive. It didn't show as a running program, and it apparently didn't run when other software was using the line. It was just a quiet, hidden, background task that continuously reported on your data to its master.
Nobody who has been paying attention should find it at all surprising that, in 2007, this is still happening. If you are running Microsoft software, you should assume that, unless you know otherwise, that Microsoft has full access to everything in your machine.
[Steve said] that they have the "best Macs" in the new product pipeline ever right now, and that the stuff coming out in the next year is "off the charts."
Yeah, I'd done that some time back, out of curiosity. It is fairly common for vendors of electronic hardware to put the user manual online. Some of them even keep manuals for old, unsupported models.
Of course, I've found that the iPhone online manual isn't very useful for answering most of the questions that have been discussed here. It's your usual sort of commercial user manual, which is aimed at the novice and casual user. NTTAWWT.
I'd expect many/. denizens would go looking for online manuals. I'd expect that most of the other 99% of the "market" would be people who wouldn't think of doing such a thing. I don't think it's because they're retarded; it's more like they're sorta ignorant (and the marketing stuff they've seen hasn't taught them to look for information online;-).
You're suggesting people should RTFM for products they haven't even bought yet?
So can you get a copy of the manual without buying anything?
I don't know very many commercial products for which this is true. (And if you've misplaced your manual, you typically find that you can't get a new copy for the model you have, only for the current model.)
Yeah, we have a Garmin 3600 that's a couple of years old, and it has something called "waypoints" that are supposed to do this. The problem is that the documentation is rather sketchy, and neither my wife nor I have ever quite managed to make it work.
OTOH, last night she was looking at google maps, trying to plan a trip, and I offhandedly commented "Try dragging a point on the route." She instantly did the right thing, and it worked.
Having a capability is one thing; presenting it in a way that users can actually use it is often something very different.
Now if there were a way that we software developers could get at the innards of our GPS toys and add things like a google-style rerouting. Nah; they'd never allow that. (And the way things are going, google would probably sue us if we did it.;-)
It seems to me that maybe what we need is a nice, accessible, open-source smartphone, that can talk to any of the several bluetooth-enabled GPS receivers that are available. Then, instead of proprietary mapping packages with poor interfaces, we could program the good ideas ourselves. Some months ago, I sent a proposal to the openmoko folks that mentioned this, but I've never heard back from them. Anyone know of a feasible path to getting something like this put together and in the hands of developers?
... gives the wrong directions the the UCSC Inn. Right street, wrong end of it...
No doubt this was done intentionally, at the request of the Inn, so that when those evil Communists^WTerrorists won't be able to find the Inn when they're invading the town.
I got my first "Congratulations, you have won new iPhone" phishing message, complete with link (to http://203.121.78.200/...) to click on and give them all my personal contact info.
This is indeed an opportunity for all kinds of modern enterpreneurs.
I tried checking the "I'm willing to help" checkbox and hitting the "Submit Query" button. Bit of a bizarre, incomprehensible name there, but I figured it was what someone wanted me to do. As far as I could tell, all it did was erase that line of menus and the "Change" and "Reply" buttons just below the message. I couldn't find any way to do what I'm doing now, i.e., post a reply. I read a while, tried replying to someone's comment - and found that I couldn't.
So is there a description somewhere of how it's supposed to work? Others are obviously posting replies successfully. I am, too, since I unchecked "I'm willing to help" and hit the "Submit Query" again.
I'm using SeaMonkey 1.1.2 right now. It has NoScripts installed, but I've enabled scripts for/., so that shouldn't be causing the problems.
Some people mentioned a "floating box" with sliders. I think I saw that a few months ago, but I don't see it any more.
If you don't review your code (or for example, don't have peer review - which closed and open source often lacks.) Then no bugs at all will be discovered.
Fixed that for you.
Oh, I dunno 'bout dat. A year or so back, I got email about an open-source program that I'm responsible for, and which has a few hundred users that I know of. It was from a couple of guys in a college course about computer security. They explained a security hole (buffer overflow) and gave an example that exploited it. I fixed the problem, and sent them a nice message thanking them for their help.
If my source hadn't been available online, they wouldn't have used it as a test case in their course, and I'd have never learned about the problem (until someone exploited it, perhaps on some of the web sites that use the program). The fact that the program was open-source made it possible for total strangers to look at it, detect the problem, and tell me about it.
Granted, open-source code doesn't always result in peer review. But it does so far more open than closed source. I've worked on a lot of corporate software projects over a few decades, and I've yet to see even one "review" that turned a problem that I hadn't already discovered and solved myself. In my experience, corporate code reviews are always trivial, "Mickey-Mouse" reviews that go over the obvious ideas but never really look at the code or discover real problems. But if you put your code on the Net, you're often surprised by who takes an interest, and then shows off their expertise by telling you about problems.
In particular, it's good to know that some Comp Sci profs are encouraging their students to use available open-source code as test cases for their course work. This is a real boon to developers with the sense to take advantage of such help.
That's the kind of culture that result in believing that having a boatload of people working on something ought to produce results faster.
My favorite form of this is the question: If one woman can produce one baby in nine months, how many babies can twelve women produce in three months?
The one criticism of applying this example to the corporate culture is that it underestimates the difficulties. If pregnancy worked like corporate development departments, a group of women would take more than nine months to produce their first baby, and the larger the group, the longer it would take.
(And yes, I'm aware of why most women actually require more than nine months to produce one baby. The above is simplified for purposes of illustration. It should not be taken as a guideline for estimating the production of babies.;-)
Just, you know, because it's so evil to buy a $25 firewall for your Windows box, but it's cool to buy a whole second computer for your Linux box.
Buy??? Most linux users that I know get their second (and third and...) computer free. They come from Windows-using friends whose machines are no longer powerful enough for the current upgrades, and have to buy a new PC to get a decent response back. Their linux-using friends generously offer to carry the old one off and dispose of it properly. They do this by setting it on a shelf for use when they want a second (or third or...) machine for testing network stuff.
There are lots of 10-year-old PC around running linux just fine. I have a couple of castoffs like this that my wife had "because she needed them for work" (unlike the Mac that she likes better, but isn't used at work). They come in handy when I want to experiment with installing things that I think might crash my main machine, or at least take it offline for a few hours. Since it's running our firewall and web and email servers, I'd rather not do something that interrupts it for more than a short time. So I play around with dubious new releases on the "trash" machines. And I can use them to test for networking problems, too. It's easy enough to set up one or two machines on a temporary "outside" network, ssh in, and then shut them down to save electricity when I'm done with the task.
MS has the resources to actually generate amazingly good products and dominate on a level playing field. Unfortunately they seem to be so obsessed with winning by FUDing and spinning that they end up making crap.
It's probably more like the old observation that there are two basic ways to succeed in sales: You can spend a lot on R&D to develop a good product, or you can spend a lot on marketing to develop an image. The latter is more difficult and expensive, but if you can afford it, there's little additional profit to also spending on good R&D.
Microsoft started off by leveraging a large marketing budget from IBM. Their initial ad budget was comparable to the total operating budgets of all the other little companies that they were competing with. As a result, that first "IBM PC" became the market leader overnight, despite being technically inferior to most of the others. This situation had endured, and there's no obvious reason why Microsoft should change such a successful strategy.
But this doesn't really qualify as being "obsessed". It's more of a rational decision to continue with what obviously works well. If the majority of computer purchasers ever decide to go with what's technically the best, we can expect MS to change their strategy. But in the roughly half century that there has been a computer industry, this has never happened, so it probably won't happen any time soon.
Do a trace route sometime, and see how much of your traffic goes over one of the major telcos lines.
So how do you get that from traceroute? What I get is the names and addresses of the routers. In a traceroute that I just did (10 hops, three states), there's no recognizable telco name. It's probably because the telcos may own the wires, but at present they don't usually own most of the routers. But if you own the wires, you can easily insert an invisible bridge that "shapes" the traffic on its wires.
How do you get this information from traceroute? Or is there some other tool that will do it? I don't offhand know of any information in any IP packets that can tell you who owns the underlying physical transport layer.
Hell, you could be bounced out of state and back just to get to an ip in the next city. Not likely, but possible.
That happens in our house, in a western suburb of Boston. We have DLS service via speakeasy, and traceroute shows that packets from here to mit.edu (11 miles away by road) go via er1.nyc1.speakeasy.net and vlan51.csw1.newyork1.level3.net.
Funny thing is that the ping time (typically 20-25 ms) is about 3 times faster than the "local" service that the two cable companies (Comcast, RCN) provide. Ping times to other parts of the country are also usually faster than with our neighbors' cable service.
Now, speakeasy is known to be a well-run, professional service (whose support people are happy to hear that we're running a linux firewall;-). One of the very real worries is that the telcos will find a way to lock out the "parasites" (actual word from a local public discussion) such as speakeasy and force us to go through their monopoly service. Hereabouts, it's Verizon that owns most of the phone lines. It's quite possible that, if net neutrality is eliminated, Verizon could destroy speakeasy's business in New England by simply delaying packets to/from speakeasy addresses to the point of unusability.
(And no, I don't know what speakeasy's merger with Best Buy portends, either. Lots of people around here are sorta worried that we'll lose our only good ISP.)
At least he didn't claim everyone against him was supporting terrorists......
Maybe he didn't, but those of us paying attention ahve already seen this argument used. The "reasoning" is obvious: Allowing everyone (who pays for service) equal access to the Net clearly does allow terrorists the same access. It also allows politicians, pedophiles, librarians, garbage collectors, and left-handed people the same access.
But one of the lessons of history is that if ISPs and other comm companies are allowed to block "terrorists" (or pedophiles or politicians), they will first use it to block their own economic competitors by slowing down their packets to uselessness. The real issue here isn't whether people we don't like can be blocked.
The issue is whether single corporations set up as legal monopolies (or duopolies in some neighborhoods) can be allowed to control who can communicate and who can't. Their main concern will be with maintaining their control, not implementing the public policies used to justify giving them control.
Communication is an important right. There's reason that it was the very first thing written into the US Bill of Rights. Without the right to communicate, our other rights don't mean very much. And the recent tendency in the US for those in power to label just about anyone as a "terrorist" without any evidence at all should give us all pause.
So let's look at how humans should behave according to darwin... they should be trying to steal and kill from eachother... and we all know what that leads to. That attitude does indeed exist, but it destroys economies, and creates misery beyond belief, especially for the people that should have gotten stronger, according to darwin.
I don't think that Darwin ever suggested that.
He didn't; that was the "social Darwinists" who naïvely applied Darwin's theory in a way to justify their own rapacity. Darwin did mention the technical problem of altruism, but he really didn't deal with it (as far as I know). He left it as a problem for future researchers.
During the 20th century, altruism was one of the major problem that biologists tackled. It's pretty well understood now, and explains a lot of why social species such as humans are so successful. And they also explained the observation that in most species, especially predators, there are inhibitions against injuring members of your own species.
If you like to steal or kill others (including domestic animals), you'll just have to find your own justification. You can't use Darwin as an excuse, because he didn't give you permission. And you can't use modern biologists, either, because they'll patiently explain why your behavior is probably a dangerous mutation that should be eliminated from the gene pool, not a survival characteristic.
I can't see expending the money to buy an iPhone service contract just to test against the iPhone. If Apple provides a web page that shows me what my page looks like on the the iPhone screen, I'll use it, but I haven't heard about such a page.
I've experimented with making some of my pages work against various "smart phones", but experimenting with friends' phones has taught me that this is a hopless task. The browsers on every phone and handheld are different and idiosyncratic, and there's no way I can guess how they'll garble my stuff.
I do take pains to make my own web pages as standard-compliant as possible, and I avoid using anything very tricky. But even with this, I've seen garbling of the simplest things that I just can't learn how to handle.
Thus, two of my web sites return music notation, in the form of GIF, PNG, PS or PDF files. Users request the GIF 90% of the time, and I've seen that on most phones, GIFs are munged to fit on the screen with a range of algorithms. And most of them make most of the thin horizontal lines disappear. This makes the result utterly unreadable. Experimenting with the size and shape of the GIFs doesn't fix the problem. Even if the GIF's pixel count is smaller than the phone's screen, some munging is almost always done, and the staff lines disappear. If this were done the same on all small screens, I'd have hope, but the lines that disappear are different on different screens. This tells me that the task is hopeless.
I've also had some fun trying to get Chinese, Japanese and Arabic to display on friends' smart/dumb phones, with little success. Now, most of these were manufactured in Asia, so this is a bit baffling. But I'm in the US, where most commercial computers have all non-English stuff damaged beyond repair, even when it worked at the factory. It'll be interesting to see if the iPhone handles non-Western languages correctly, but I don't expect much.
In any case, there seems to be nothing I can find that tells me how to deal with this sort of problem. US vendors don't care (because the whole world should just use English, y'know).
So is there a way that a random web developer can find out how a page will look on the iPhone? For that matter, is there a way to do this for any handheld, phone or otherwise?
I can't personally afford a service contract for every model that's on the market.
They just want to get an iPhone and need a reason to expense it.
Funny, but also a very real possibility. Let's check in a few weeks, and see if they allow iPhones. They are nearly as proprietary as BlackBerries, so they present the same worries. For that matter, we could look at other email-capable cell phones today. If the French government allows the use of email on any computer (and a cell phones is a computer) that go through a privately-operated server, then we'll know that they were just aiming to get rid of BBs, but their security claim is bogus.
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Representative democracy and the modern business both have leaders and led, the rule-makers and the rule-followers: a disturbing amount of our economy and polity is top-down (also never meaningfully accountable) and couldn't be further from swarm theory.
The fact that humans in groups always seem to have leaders could be one of the reasons behind the common observation that, unlike ants and bees, humans in groups typically show less intelligence than we do as individuals. Anyone who has ever worked in a business or corporate or political organization knows the dumbing-down effect of the power structure. It usually doesn't matter much if a "worker" has a good idea; ideas only get implemented if they trickle up to or originate with a leader. Since we don't communicate well, the actual implementation of leaders' commands tend to be full of misunderstandings and reinterpretations, so what the group does is often a weak parody of the leader's commands, which in turn are often based on misunderstanding what the workers have been telling the leaders.
There is dispute about the actual intelligence function that maps a group's size to its effective IQ. Early guesses were that it was 1/N, but this is probably too simple. 1/log(N) is probably a more accurate function. In some groups, the function is probably much more complicated, and depends on the details of the hierarchy.
But, while studying social insects may not provide insights into the problems with our own group behavior, it may lead to useful algorithms and heuristics for robots and distributed computer systems. Unlike humans, they can be programmed to follow strict behavioral rules.
This study was done with mice.
Granted, humans and mice share a lot of DNA. But rodents and primates are sufficiently distant genetically that few if any results in one family can be applied directly to the other. In particular, a lot of human adaptations happened by weakening builtin, instinctive behavior, and replacing it with learned behavior.
Maybe this result will carry over to humans, maybe not. Or, most likely, there will be something similar in humans, but the trigger will be visual or language based or something else that's related to the reasons we've ended up such a dominant species.
Since one of our important features is our tool-using ability, we may find that what triggers neuron growth in human females is a male who demonstrates that he's really good at manipulating things with his hands, IYKWIM.
I highly doubt many consumers will be randomly browsing the Dell website and say "damn, those Ubuntu machines look awesome!"...
;-). But neither I nor the browser's search function could find 'ubuntu' or 'linux' on any page. There are lots of menus, and maybe some of those mention ubuntu, but I didn't see it in any that I looked at.
I doubt that many consumers browsing the Dell website will even see any mention of Ubuntu or linux. I just tried, starting at www.dell.com, and doing the obvious clicks to configure and order a machine. I saw lots of mentions of "Genuine Windows Vista(TM) Home Premium" (and a few without that "Genuine"
A person who knows that they want ubuntu or linux (and is determined enough) can probably find it. But Dell doesn't seem to offer it, or even mention that it exists, in a way that "random browsing" would discover it.
Dell does not provide any actual support for Ubuntu, ...
;-)
Some people would add that they don't provide any actual support for Windows, either.
the computer doesn't want any beer, no matter how much you think it does. NEVER, EVER feed your computer beer.
OTOH, when it asks for a cookie, you often find that you have to go along with the request, or the thing you tried to do just won't work quite right.
So they had a Windows system with a TCP/IP connection to the Internet back in 1992? Impressive.
;-). It didn't take them long to spot what looked like a number of different software packages "phoning home" and sending a list of all our files to some IP address that resolved to a MS machine. In one case, the software actually made the call over the modem, which sorta pissed off the people in the lab, since it was a long-distance call. The lab adopted the practice of unplugging the modems for DOS boxes when they weren't in use.
/dev/tty1. You ran my program with /dev/tty1 and dev/tty2 on the command line. You ran a crossover cable from tty2 to tty3. You configured uucp to run on tty3. The program produced a hex dump (the 3-line form that includes all the printable ASCII chars on the first line) of any traffic on the line. I suggested that any good hacker could take the resulting dump and reverse engineer the protocol. A few weeks later, AT&T published the UUCP protocol and gave the POSIX standard permission to use it. You can probably find some of this in the usenet archives if you're interested.
/. that such a thing might be difficult.)
Actually, they probably called it "DOS" then; I don't recall "Windows" being used before 1993. But I could be wrong. In any case, TCP/IP did exist for DOS well before 1990; I remember using it (reluctantly) in projects in '86 and '88. In any case, the behavior I described has been reported over the years by a number of people. I also recall a couple of other guys who decided to replicate that report, and hooked up a DOS box loaded with that fancy new "Internet software" (only a decade after we'd all adopted in on our unix boxes
And what the fuck do you mean by a "line monitor"?
I noticed that you use the term "sniffer". Probably the same sort of thing. Back in the day, "line monitor" was a common term for the sort of gadget that you could insert in a data path and it would tell you stuff about what was happening on the line. The most common kind by far was for RS-232, due to all the notorious problems getting the damned things working right, especially if there was a modem in the path.
I had a bit of fun once with a "software line monitor" program that I wrote. Back when POSIX was being developed, the question came up about including the UUCP protocol in the standard. The POSIX committee said they couldn't do it, because UUCP was a proprietary protocol, owned by AT&T. After reading this repeatedly over many months, I posted messages to a couple of discussions that included my little program. You needed a unix box with three free serial ports. You plugged your modem into
This program wasn't as good as a real line monitor of course; a real one could also tell you things about the signals on various pins. One useful case was when the ends of a link had different ground levels. My program couldn't do that, but it was much cheaper than a line monitor, and worked fine for studying the data on a line. I saw several cases where an Internet gateway box would have such a monitor before the modem at all times, so when the link went down, it could maybe tell you why (if you saw it before the data was overwritten in the monitor's limited memory).
Some people can use sniffers well enough to tell for certain whether a Windows machine is trying to send traffic to Microsoft or not. Other people know just enough to run a sniffer only to freak the fuck out when they see an ARP packet, or anything else they don't understand, then build a grand conspiracy theory around it. I know which group I'm in and I'm pretty damn sure I know which group you're in.
Well, I've written code that encodes and decodes ARP packets. So I hope you guessed right. Not that it really matters to either of us (or to anyone else).
As for detecting communication with a specific remote site, if your Internet connection is via any sort of unix box, this is easy. See the man page for tcpdump. There are a number of other tools that will work, too.
(I'm a bit surprised that anyone would even suggest on
I remember back in the early 1990s, when the first network software for Microsoft systems started coming out, I read a report from some engineers who had been using it in their lab. They noticed that their modem's lights would flicker during times that the machine was "idle". So they hooked up a line monitor, and studied the activity.
It turned out that some software inside the machine was making connections to Microsoft sites, and passing information about the contents of the disk over the line.
So MS has been doing this for 15 years or so. Even back then, they knew how to make this "service" unobtrusive. It didn't show as a running program, and it apparently didn't run when other software was using the line. It was just a quiet, hidden, background task that continuously reported on your data to its master.
Nobody who has been paying attention should find it at all surprising that, in 2007, this is still happening. If you are running Microsoft software, you should assume that, unless you know otherwise, that Microsoft has full access to everything in your machine.
[Steve said] that they have the "best Macs" in the new product pipeline ever right now, and that the stuff coming out in the next year is "off the charts."
So we should wait until next year to buy a Mac?
Yeah, I'd done that some time back, out of curiosity. It is fairly common for vendors of electronic hardware to put the user manual online. Some of them even keep manuals for old, unsupported models.
/. denizens would go looking for online manuals. I'd expect that most of the other 99% of the "market" would be people who wouldn't think of doing such a thing. I don't think it's because they're retarded; it's more like they're sorta ignorant (and the marketing stuff they've seen hasn't taught them to look for information online ;-).
Of course, I've found that the iPhone online manual isn't very useful for answering most of the questions that have been discussed here. It's your usual sort of commercial user manual, which is aimed at the novice and casual user. NTTAWWT.
I'd expect many
You're suggesting people should RTFM for products they haven't even bought yet?
So can you get a copy of the manual without buying anything?
I don't know very many commercial products for which this is true. (And if you've misplaced your manual, you typically find that you can't get a new copy for the model you have, only for the current model.)
Yeah, we have a Garmin 3600 that's a couple of years old, and it has something called "waypoints" that are supposed to do this. The problem is that the documentation is rather sketchy, and neither my wife nor I have ever quite managed to make it work.
;-)
OTOH, last night she was looking at google maps, trying to plan a trip, and I offhandedly commented "Try dragging a point on the route." She instantly did the right thing, and it worked.
Having a capability is one thing; presenting it in a way that users can actually use it is often something very different.
Now if there were a way that we software developers could get at the innards of our GPS toys and add things like a google-style rerouting. Nah; they'd never allow that. (And the way things are going, google would probably sue us if we did it.
It seems to me that maybe what we need is a nice, accessible, open-source smartphone, that can talk to any of the several bluetooth-enabled GPS receivers that are available. Then, instead of proprietary mapping packages with poor interfaces, we could program the good ideas ourselves. Some months ago, I sent a proposal to the openmoko folks that mentioned this, but I've never heard back from them. Anyone know of a feasible path to getting something like this put together and in the hands of developers?
... gives the wrong directions the the UCSC Inn. Right street, wrong end of it ...
No doubt this was done intentionally, at the request of the Inn, so that when those evil Communists^WTerrorists won't be able to find the Inn when they're invading the town.
I got my first "Congratulations, you have won new iPhone" phishing message, complete with link (to http://203.121.78.200/...) to click on and give them all my personal contact info.
This is indeed an opportunity for all kinds of modern enterpreneurs.
I tried checking the "I'm willing to help" checkbox and hitting the "Submit Query" button. Bit of a bizarre, incomprehensible name there, but I figured it was what someone wanted me to do. As far as I could tell, all it did was erase that line of menus and the "Change" and "Reply" buttons just below the message. I couldn't find any way to do what I'm doing now, i.e., post a reply. I read a while, tried replying to someone's comment - and found that I couldn't.
/., so that shouldn't be causing the problems.
So is there a description somewhere of how it's supposed to work? Others are obviously posting replies successfully. I am, too, since I unchecked "I'm willing to help" and hit the "Submit Query" again.
I'm using SeaMonkey 1.1.2 right now. It has NoScripts installed, but I've enabled scripts for
Some people mentioned a "floating box" with sliders. I think I saw that a few months ago, but I don't see it any more.
If you don't review your code (or for example, don't have peer review - which closed and open source often lacks.) Then no bugs at all will be discovered.
Fixed that for you.
Oh, I dunno 'bout dat. A year or so back, I got email about an open-source program that I'm responsible for, and which has a few hundred users that I know of. It was from a couple of guys in a college course about computer security. They explained a security hole (buffer overflow) and gave an example that exploited it. I fixed the problem, and sent them a nice message thanking them for their help.
If my source hadn't been available online, they wouldn't have used it as a test case in their course, and I'd have never learned about the problem (until someone exploited it, perhaps on some of the web sites that use the program). The fact that the program was open-source made it possible for total strangers to look at it, detect the problem, and tell me about it.
Granted, open-source code doesn't always result in peer review. But it does so far more open than closed source. I've worked on a lot of corporate software projects over a few decades, and I've yet to see even one "review" that turned a problem that I hadn't already discovered and solved myself. In my experience, corporate code reviews are always trivial, "Mickey-Mouse" reviews that go over the obvious ideas but never really look at the code or discover real problems. But if you put your code on the Net, you're often surprised by who takes an interest, and then shows off their expertise by telling you about problems.
In particular, it's good to know that some Comp Sci profs are encouraging their students to use available open-source code as test cases for their course work. This is a real boon to developers with the sense to take advantage of such help.
That's the kind of culture that result in believing that having a boatload of people working on something ought to produce results faster.
;-)
My favorite form of this is the question: If one woman can produce one baby in nine months, how many babies can twelve women produce in three months?
The one criticism of applying this example to the corporate culture is that it underestimates the difficulties. If pregnancy worked like corporate development departments, a group of women would take more than nine months to produce their first baby, and the larger the group, the longer it would take.
(And yes, I'm aware of why most women actually require more than nine months to produce one baby. The above is simplified for purposes of illustration. It should not be taken as a guideline for estimating the production of babies.
Just, you know, because it's so evil to buy a $25 firewall for your Windows box, but it's cool to buy a whole second computer for your Linux box.
...) computer free. They come from Windows-using friends whose machines are no longer powerful enough for the current upgrades, and have to buy a new PC to get a decent response back. Their linux-using friends generously offer to carry the old one off and dispose of it properly. They do this by setting it on a shelf for use when they want a second (or third or ...) machine for testing network stuff.
Buy??? Most linux users that I know get their second (and third and
There are lots of 10-year-old PC around running linux just fine. I have a couple of castoffs like this that my wife had "because she needed them for work" (unlike the Mac that she likes better, but isn't used at work). They come in handy when I want to experiment with installing things that I think might crash my main machine, or at least take it offline for a few hours. Since it's running our firewall and web and email servers, I'd rather not do something that interrupts it for more than a short time. So I play around with dubious new releases on the "trash" machines. And I can use them to test for networking problems, too. It's easy enough to set up one or two machines on a temporary "outside" network, ssh in, and then shut them down to save electricity when I'm done with the task.
MS has the resources to actually generate amazingly good products and dominate on a level playing field. Unfortunately they seem to be so obsessed with winning by FUDing and spinning that they end up making crap.
It's probably more like the old observation that there are two basic ways to succeed in sales: You can spend a lot on R&D to develop a good product, or you can spend a lot on marketing to develop an image. The latter is more difficult and expensive, but if you can afford it, there's little additional profit to also spending on good R&D.
Microsoft started off by leveraging a large marketing budget from IBM. Their initial ad budget was comparable to the total operating budgets of all the other little companies that they were competing with. As a result, that first "IBM PC" became the market leader overnight, despite being technically inferior to most of the others. This situation had endured, and there's no obvious reason why Microsoft should change such a successful strategy.
But this doesn't really qualify as being "obsessed". It's more of a rational decision to continue with what obviously works well. If the majority of computer purchasers ever decide to go with what's technically the best, we can expect MS to change their strategy. But in the roughly half century that there has been a computer industry, this has never happened, so it probably won't happen any time soon.
Do a trace route sometime, and see how much of your traffic goes over one of the major telcos lines.
So how do you get that from traceroute? What I get is the names and addresses of the routers. In a traceroute that I just did (10 hops, three states), there's no recognizable telco name. It's probably because the telcos may own the wires, but at present they don't usually own most of the routers. But if you own the wires, you can easily insert an invisible bridge that "shapes" the traffic on its wires.
How do you get this information from traceroute? Or is there some other tool that will do it? I don't offhand know of any information in any IP packets that can tell you who owns the underlying physical transport layer.
Hell, you could be bounced out of state and back just to get to an ip in the next city. Not likely, but possible.
;-). One of the very real worries is that the telcos will find a way to lock out the "parasites" (actual word from a local public discussion) such as speakeasy and force us to go through their monopoly service. Hereabouts, it's Verizon that owns most of the phone lines. It's quite possible that, if net neutrality is eliminated, Verizon could destroy speakeasy's business in New England by simply delaying packets to/from speakeasy addresses to the point of unusability.
That happens in our house, in a western suburb of Boston. We have DLS service via speakeasy, and traceroute shows that packets from here to mit.edu (11 miles away by road) go via er1.nyc1.speakeasy.net and vlan51.csw1.newyork1.level3.net.
Funny thing is that the ping time (typically 20-25 ms) is about 3 times faster than the "local" service that the two cable companies (Comcast, RCN) provide. Ping times to other parts of the country are also usually faster than with our neighbors' cable service.
Now, speakeasy is known to be a well-run, professional service (whose support people are happy to hear that we're running a linux firewall
(And no, I don't know what speakeasy's merger with Best Buy portends, either. Lots of people around here are sorta worried that we'll lose our only good ISP.)
At least he didn't claim everyone against him was supporting terrorists......
Maybe he didn't, but those of us paying attention ahve already seen this argument used. The "reasoning" is obvious: Allowing everyone (who pays for service) equal access to the Net clearly does allow terrorists the same access. It also allows politicians, pedophiles, librarians, garbage collectors, and left-handed people the same access.
But one of the lessons of history is that if ISPs and other comm companies are allowed to block "terrorists" (or pedophiles or politicians), they will first use it to block their own economic competitors by slowing down their packets to uselessness. The real issue here isn't whether people we don't like can be blocked.
The issue is whether single corporations set up as legal monopolies (or duopolies in some neighborhoods) can be allowed to control who can communicate and who can't. Their main concern will be with maintaining their control, not implementing the public policies used to justify giving them control.
Communication is an important right. There's reason that it was the very first thing written into the US Bill of Rights. Without the right to communicate, our other rights don't mean very much. And the recent tendency in the US for those in power to label just about anyone as a "terrorist" without any evidence at all should give us all pause.
So let's look at how humans should behave according to darwin ... they should be trying to steal and kill from eachother ... and we all know what that leads to. That attitude does indeed exist, but it destroys economies, and creates misery beyond belief, especially for the people that should have gotten stronger, according to darwin.
I don't think that Darwin ever suggested that.
He didn't; that was the "social Darwinists" who naïvely applied Darwin's theory in a way to justify their own rapacity. Darwin did mention the technical problem of altruism, but he really didn't deal with it (as far as I know). He left it as a problem for future researchers.
During the 20th century, altruism was one of the major problem that biologists tackled. It's pretty well understood now, and explains a lot of why social species such as humans are so successful. And they also explained the observation that in most species, especially predators, there are inhibitions against injuring members of your own species.
If you like to steal or kill others (including domestic animals), you'll just have to find your own justification. You can't use Darwin as an excuse, because he didn't give you permission. And you can't use modern biologists, either, because they'll patiently explain why your behavior is probably a dangerous mutation that should be eliminated from the gene pool, not a survival characteristic.
I can't see expending the money to buy an iPhone service contract just to test against the iPhone. If Apple provides a web page that shows me what my page looks like on the the iPhone screen, I'll use it, but I haven't heard about such a page.
I've experimented with making some of my pages work against various "smart phones", but experimenting with friends' phones has taught me that this is a hopless task. The browsers on every phone and handheld are different and idiosyncratic, and there's no way I can guess how they'll garble my stuff.
I do take pains to make my own web pages as standard-compliant as possible, and I avoid using anything very tricky. But even with this, I've seen garbling of the simplest things that I just can't learn how to handle.
Thus, two of my web sites return music notation, in the form of GIF, PNG, PS or PDF files. Users request the GIF 90% of the time, and I've seen that on most phones, GIFs are munged to fit on the screen with a range of algorithms. And most of them make most of the thin horizontal lines disappear. This makes the result utterly unreadable. Experimenting with the size and shape of the GIFs doesn't fix the problem. Even if the GIF's pixel count is smaller than the phone's screen, some munging is almost always done, and the staff lines disappear. If this were done the same on all small screens, I'd have hope, but the lines that disappear are different on different screens. This tells me that the task is hopeless.
I've also had some fun trying to get Chinese, Japanese and Arabic to display on friends' smart/dumb phones, with little success. Now, most of these were manufactured in Asia, so this is a bit baffling. But I'm in the US, where most commercial computers have all non-English stuff damaged beyond repair, even when it worked at the factory. It'll be interesting to see if the iPhone handles non-Western languages correctly, but I don't expect much.
In any case, there seems to be nothing I can find that tells me how to deal with this sort of problem. US vendors don't care (because the whole world should just use English, y'know).
So is there a way that a random web developer can find out how a page will look on the iPhone? For that matter, is there a way to do this for any handheld, phone or otherwise?
I can't personally afford a service contract for every model that's on the market.
Well, I was tempted to end with that. But I decided it would be too unsubtle, and I should leave it to the readers' imagination. Guess it worked.
They just want to get an iPhone and need a reason to expense it.
Funny, but also a very real possibility. Let's check in a few weeks, and see if they allow iPhones. They are nearly as proprietary as BlackBerries, so they present the same worries. For that matter, we could look at other email-capable cell phones today. If the French government allows the use of email on any computer (and a cell phones is a computer) that go through a privately-operated server, then we'll know that they were just aiming to get rid of BBs, but their security claim is bogus.