The only real problem with this is that it costs money to get a patent; on the order of USD 2,000. So while it might be amusing and provocative, it's also expensive -- since you have to spend the money and then you wait a few years (like 2 to 4) before you find out if the patent will be granted or if it was just money squandered. That's an awfully expensive way of making what is, after all, a pretty obvious point that even the USPTO agrees with.
I do appreciate people mirroring slashdotted sites, but we really ought to pay attention to the author's copyright. Ignoring the copyright notice on the page is a lot like ignoring the GPL notice at the top of a source file.
Gag. Oracle is the answer...for a lazy database programmer. It is possible to make MS SQLServer respond snappily under this kind of traffic; Oracle is an expensive and non-interoperable path. If you're going to go with a commercial DB product, I'd suggest either Sybase or Informix. Sybase has even worked around the stupid way ext2fs caches disk writes, and their Linux database guarantees transactions get written.
Now, a colocated site with replicated databases, that will improve your performance. And it's a hell of a lot more scalable (and cheaper) than Oracle.
I want way more detail on the "printing" process. Man. That looks really cool. I think it'd be awesome to be able to take an arbitrary 3-D model and "print" it as a fully-detailed plastic model.
The place where he's addressing the DDOS attacks is at the end of the article. He's not actually stopping the attacks, he's just allowing the victim to analyze the flooding packets and find out where they're coming from. I guess that by analyzing the traffic more quickly (encoding route information in the TCP header) the good guys should be able to black hole the bad guys sooner, thus shutting down the attack.
5. We tried to deal with the Amazon thing, but you can't stop them from ordering for a resaler. Once something has entered the ISBN system, anyone can order it. However, at this time, we're only selling it through Amazon. [bold added] There you have it: "we tried not to sell through Amazon but since we couldn't prevent them from ordering the book, we're only going to be selling through them". What an utter load of crap!Go ahead and mark this as flamebait, but if this attitude on the part of/. doesn't piss you off, you must be dead.
Excuse me? A rocket is simply a motor that generates thrust by hurling mass out the back. You can, too, steer a rocket: just point the exhaust nozzle in a different direction. A missile, on the other hand, is an object that is flying (has been hurled) through space (air, usually, but not necessarily) -- for instance, a spitwad is a missile (ballistic), as is a dart (ballistic), as is a Sidewinder (rocket powered). Some of these things are steerable and some of them aren't, but the words "rocket" and "missile" are not the appropriate ones to use to identify that distinction.
I read the article/paper and found it to be very well-written. Not only do Jansson and Skala present tools for cracking CyberPatrol's weak encryption, but they explain why the encryption is weak. They also take us on their journey as they reverse-engineer the file formats and the encryption algorithm. That part alone makes this paper a valuable educational resource.
Had the submitter actually read the story, the lead-in might have been a little different. The tool became a theft tool as soon as they used it to steal as opposed to securing their own machines.
Anyone can have a copy of l0phtcrack; when they use it to commit a crime, though, then they'll get nailed for it.
You may want to take a look at setting up a Junkbuster proxy server on your web browsing machine. There are proxies for *nix and Win32. I've set 'em up on my FreeBSD box, my NT box, and my Win98 box, then configured my web browsers to use the appropriate proxy. It's sweet!
Yes. I remember seeing this as a kid and thinking that it sucked. In addition to the lame performing and incomprehensible action, you also got every Wookie with a name ending in "ie". Chewbacca gets shortened to "Chewie" as a nickname -- but his mother, siblings, cousins, what-have-you, they just have "...ie" names. Period. The writing was just as inspired as the acting. Truly, a great example of how awful television could be.
Hmmm, a diesel motorcycle. Yes, it has possibilities. It's a pity that the only U.S. importer is in Maryland, but now I have an excuse to take my K1200 on a cross-country trip. Gotta check out the Enfields! And hey, at Rs. 60,000 (USD 1,415 according to the Bloomberg currency calculator) it's a damn sight cheaper than the Ural. This is a great suggestion indeed!
I can't agree enough about the necessity of backups. Redundancy is great (crucial, for when you want to colocate or start doing real load balancing) but it doesn't address the situation of a terrorist bomb, the FBI, an earthquake, a tornado, a hurricane, etc. of wiping out your whole site. With offsite backups, you can reinstall your data on some new machines and be up and running again.
I don't know what you'd have to do to make a site "surfable" for a cell phone, but I've got some information about what you've got to do for Palm VII enabling. Basically, you build a kind of.WAD file for your whole website -- graphics, forms, page layout, the whole deal -- and then you get the user to install that on his Palm device. Then, when he hits your site you only send dynamic data. The reason you do this is that people who subscribe to the Palm VII service are severely limited for bandwidth, getting something like 50kb/month in their basic package and being billed for bandwidth usage above that.
So, that's not so much the part that will make the web a better place for blind people. If anything, it'll make it worse, since companies will then be encouraged to come up with special-purpose websites and interfaces (and the Palm version, incidentally, won't be accessible to non-Palm devices -- or meaningful) and those interfaces will probably be more graphics-heavy rather than less. Think about it: screen real-estate is at a real premium on these palmtop devices, and as a UI designer you're going to want to take advantage of it as much as possible. Using mini-icons instead of long text labels is one way of optimizing your site.
That having been said, I have to say that I think not using ALT tags is just damn wrongheaded. Every do-it-for-you HTML editor I've encountered supports them and ususally dumps the name of the image file into the ALT tag by default. It takes extra work not to have them. I say sue the bastards for not being lazy enough.
Of course, what they ought to do, if they're so worked up about it, is write their own dang filter and put it on their FreeBSD servers. I'm not quite ready to hold my breath for that, though.
I was there today and the vendor area was TINY! There were some cool things to see -- a dinky little rack-mount chassis that looks just perfect for a web server farm, for instance -- but the best part was definitely the sessions and talking with other FreeBSD users in realtime.
If you meant you switched to MS Visual C++ and DAO, well, fine, but say so. (Even if the thought of switching to DAO to get away from buggy databases is rather amusing to me.)
Okay, fair point: we switched away from Delphi (Object Pascal) and BDE over to MS Visual C++ and NOT DAO but straight access of ODBC. I agree entirely with your parenthetical astonishment: the only thing more dismaying to me than the prospect of a buggy BDE ported to Linux is that of Microsoft porting their MFC crap to Linux.
That said, I'm now curious. When did Borprise get around to patching the BDE? We were using Delphi 18 months ago and a do-nothing ISAPI DLL written in Delphi and using BDE to talk to our database would require a server reboot (!) after a few thousand requests. The same do-nothing DLL written in C++ and talking to ODBC and then the database server ran for tens of thousands more requests. (The limiting factor is now the memory leaks in IIS.) If there's a better version of the BDE out than what was being distributed in '97, then that's great news.
Well, this would require them to port the BDE to Linux as well, and I definitely think that is a Bad Idea. Delphi has a great set of tools for building applications, but the BDE is buggy as hell (at least, for Windows NT). It's the main reason my company switched over to C++. I'd hate to see a bunch of new "production quality" code being written for such a flawed database intermediary.
History has been taking place all along...we're just normally too busy doing our jobs to pay attention. I'm sure there are lots of slashdotters who remember the good ol' days of ARPAnet, when posting a message to netnews just meant that other people interested in the same thing would read your message and respond. Nowadays, your message will be sucked up into search engines and possibly read by thousands of people who were looking for something completely different...as well as by email address suckers that'll get your address onto a few hundred different spam lists. A wider audience indeed!
The point I'm making, I guess, is that we've already seen dramatic evolution and growth in electronic communications, and not all of it has gone in directions the builders imagined or desired. People have been dreaming about 2-way broadband communications since long before Dick Tracy, and we'll just keep trying until we get it. Whether it'll be what's described in this article or not (I bet not) will be decided in the future.
Stop and think about the progress you've seen -- heck, built -- in the last couple of years. Darn straight these are exciting times!
Indeed, you're correct. But don't forget that "affect" can also be used as a noun (usually done by mental "health" professionals). The whole affect vs. effect differentiation isn't done at all well by current education. Nowadays, we're happy if kids can read the street signs.
On a similar note, how many times per day do you see somebody write that something is "definate"?
Slashdot Mirror
The only real problem with this is that it costs money to get a patent; on the order of USD 2,000. So while it might be amusing and provocative, it's also expensive -- since you have to spend the money and then you wait a few years (like 2 to 4) before you find out if the patent will be granted or if it was just money squandered. That's an awfully expensive way of making what is, after all, a pretty obvious point that even the USPTO agrees with.
A character in the Harry Potter books offers the excellent advice, "Never trust anything intelligent when you can't see where it keeps its brain."
Gag. Oracle is the answer...for a lazy database programmer. It is possible to make MS SQLServer respond snappily under this kind of traffic; Oracle is an expensive and non-interoperable path. If you're going to go with a commercial DB product, I'd suggest either Sybase or Informix. Sybase has even worked around the stupid way ext2fs caches disk writes, and their Linux database guarantees transactions get written.
Now, a colocated site with replicated databases, that will improve your performance. And it's a hell of a lot more scalable (and cheaper) than Oracle.
I want way more detail on the "printing" process. Man. That looks really cool. I think it'd be awesome to be able to take an arbitrary 3-D model and "print" it as a fully-detailed plastic model.
The place where he's addressing the DDOS attacks is at the end of the article. He's not actually stopping the attacks, he's just allowing the victim to analyze the flooding packets and find out where they're coming from. I guess that by analyzing the traffic more quickly (encoding route information in the TCP header) the good guys should be able to black hole the bad guys sooner, thus shutting down the attack.
5. We tried to deal with the Amazon thing, but you can't stop them from ordering for a resaler. Once something has entered the ISBN system, anyone can order it. However, at this time, we're only selling it through Amazon. [bold added] There you have it: "we tried not to sell through Amazon but since we couldn't prevent them from ordering the book, we're only going to be selling through them". What an utter load of crap!Go ahead and mark this as flamebait, but if this attitude on the part of /. doesn't piss you off, you must be dead.
(rockets can't be steered, missiles can)
Excuse me? A rocket is simply a motor that generates thrust by hurling mass out the back. You can, too, steer a rocket: just point the exhaust nozzle in a different direction. A missile, on the other hand, is an object that is flying (has been hurled) through space (air, usually, but not necessarily) -- for instance, a spitwad is a missile (ballistic), as is a dart (ballistic), as is a Sidewinder (rocket powered). Some of these things are steerable and some of them aren't, but the words "rocket" and "missile" are not the appropriate ones to use to identify that distinction.
I read the article/paper and found it to be very well-written. Not only do Jansson and Skala present tools for cracking CyberPatrol's weak encryption, but they explain why the encryption is weak. They also take us on their journey as they reverse-engineer the file formats and the encryption algorithm. That part alone makes this paper a valuable educational resource.
Had the submitter actually read the story, the lead-in might have been a little different. The tool became a theft tool as soon as they used it to steal as opposed to securing their own machines.
Anyone can have a copy of l0phtcrack; when they use it to commit a crime, though, then they'll get nailed for it.
Does someone have a mirror up? I tried going to the link but it's not responding. (already!)
You may want to take a look at setting up a Junkbuster proxy server on your web browsing machine. There are proxies for *nix and Win32. I've set 'em up on my FreeBSD box, my NT box, and my Win98 box, then configured my web browsers to use the appropriate proxy. It's sweet!
Yes. I remember seeing this as a kid and thinking that it sucked. In addition to the lame performing and incomprehensible action, you also got every Wookie with a name ending in "ie". Chewbacca gets shortened to "Chewie" as a nickname -- but his mother, siblings, cousins, what-have-you, they just have "...ie" names. Period. The writing was just as inspired as the acting. Truly, a great example of how awful television could be.
Hmmm, a diesel motorcycle. Yes, it has possibilities. It's a pity that the only U.S. importer is in Maryland, but now I have an excuse to take my K1200 on a cross-country trip. Gotta check out the Enfields! And hey, at Rs. 60,000 (USD 1,415 according to the Bloomberg currency calculator) it's a damn sight cheaper than the Ural. This is a great suggestion indeed!
I can't agree enough about the necessity of backups. Redundancy is great (crucial, for when you want to colocate or start doing real load balancing) but it doesn't address the situation of a terrorist bomb, the FBI, an earthquake, a tornado, a hurricane, etc. of wiping out your whole site. With offsite backups, you can reinstall your data on some new machines and be up and running again.
I don't know what you'd have to do to make a site "surfable" for a cell phone, but I've got some information about what you've got to do for Palm VII enabling. Basically, you build a kind of .WAD file for your whole website -- graphics, forms, page layout, the whole deal -- and then you get the user to install that on his Palm device. Then, when he hits your site you only send dynamic data. The reason you do this is that people who subscribe to the Palm VII service are severely limited for bandwidth, getting something like 50kb/month in their basic package and being billed for bandwidth usage above that.
So, that's not so much the part that will make the web a better place for blind people. If anything, it'll make it worse, since companies will then be encouraged to come up with special-purpose websites and interfaces (and the Palm version, incidentally, won't be accessible to non-Palm devices -- or meaningful) and those interfaces will probably be more graphics-heavy rather than less. Think about it: screen real-estate is at a real premium on these palmtop devices, and as a UI designer you're going to want to take advantage of it as much as possible. Using mini-icons instead of long text labels is one way of optimizing your site.
That having been said, I have to say that I think not using ALT tags is just damn wrongheaded. Every do-it-for-you HTML editor I've encountered supports them and ususally dumps the name of the image file into the ALT tag by default. It takes extra work not to have them. I say sue the bastards for not being lazy enough.
Of course, what they ought to do, if they're so worked up about it, is write their own dang filter and put it on their FreeBSD servers. I'm not quite ready to hold my breath for that, though.
I was there today and the vendor area was TINY! There were some cool things to see -- a dinky little rack-mount chassis that looks just perfect for a web server farm, for instance -- but the best part was definitely the sessions and talking with other FreeBSD users in realtime.
If you meant you switched to MS Visual C++ and DAO, well, fine, but say so. (Even if the thought of switching to DAO to get away from buggy databases is rather amusing to me.)
Okay, fair point: we switched away from Delphi (Object Pascal) and BDE over to MS Visual C++ and NOT DAO but straight access of ODBC. I agree entirely with your parenthetical astonishment: the only thing more dismaying to me than the prospect of a buggy BDE ported to Linux is that of Microsoft porting their MFC crap to Linux.
That said, I'm now curious. When did Borprise get around to patching the BDE? We were using Delphi 18 months ago and a do-nothing ISAPI DLL written in Delphi and using BDE to talk to our database would require a server reboot (!) after a few thousand requests. The same do-nothing DLL written in C++ and talking to ODBC and then the database server ran for tens of thousands more requests. (The limiting factor is now the memory leaks in IIS.) If there's a better version of the BDE out than what was being distributed in '97, then that's great news.
Well, this would require them to port the BDE to Linux as well, and I definitely think that is a Bad Idea. Delphi has a great set of tools for building applications, but the BDE is buggy as hell (at least, for Windows NT). It's the main reason my company switched over to C++. I'd hate to see a bunch of new "production quality" code being written for such a flawed database intermediary.
History has been taking place all along...we're just normally too busy doing our jobs to pay attention. I'm sure there are lots of slashdotters who remember the good ol' days of ARPAnet, when posting a message to netnews just meant that other people interested in the same thing would read your message and respond. Nowadays, your message will be sucked up into search engines and possibly read by thousands of people who were looking for something completely different...as well as by email address suckers that'll get your address onto a few hundred different spam lists. A wider audience indeed!
The point I'm making, I guess, is that we've already seen dramatic evolution and growth in electronic communications, and not all of it has gone in directions the builders imagined or desired. People have been dreaming about 2-way broadband communications since long before Dick Tracy, and we'll just keep trying until we get it. Whether it'll be what's described in this article or not (I bet not) will be decided in the future.
Stop and think about the progress you've seen -- heck, built -- in the last couple of years. Darn straight these are exciting times!
I didn't see a date in the article, but isn't Comdex coming up?
Indeed, you're correct. But don't forget that "affect" can also be used as a noun (usually done by mental "health" professionals). The whole affect vs. effect differentiation isn't done at all well by current education. Nowadays, we're happy if kids can read the street signs.
On a similar note, how many times per day do you see somebody write that something is "definate"?
Got: Yoda, Ozzle, Luke, Darth Vader, and Chewbacca.
I guess that means my personality isn't so clumsy or random as a blaster?