I think in fact that is what they are trying to do. I have this discussion w/ friends all the time (I was using opengl/gtk he was using java) and the speed differences were embarrassing (I was doing full real time rendering). Since you can compile gtk and get Mesa for every machine under the sun, I would ask him what the point was.. i.e. why not pull a alpha type trick and recompile native or connect to native libraries... well anyway apparantly that is what some of the java things are going to do i.e check for quicktime then connect to that natively, check for opengl and connect to that natively.. I don't use Java at all personally so I am not sure if this is true.. but thats what he claimed..
I would say it was an old school thing i.e. the generation of kidz above us are more 'rustic hackers' and the kidz our gen grew up in the tech/rave scene.. but then I visited MIT once and *everyone* looks like that (oldskool).. I kept expecting Jim Jones to appear and preach to the masses:) Its strange tho., because there really are two completely different 'stereotypes' of tech kidz.. In anycase stereotypes *are* just that.. crap.
Okay I went thru the slashdot notes and hurt my head a bit in trying to make out what the graph *really* meant:) so it seems it is saying that we expect there to be more rare species than there to be unrare species. This makes sense as rare species don't effect the others in quite the same way as a very unrare species (which would dominate resources so you would expect there to be few of them), this really is just saying that there is species-species correlation, especially w/ dominant unrare species (i.e. not really random).
Umm is that article just on crack or what? I am sure that graph (Learning curves : a fresh approach) has to be a misrepresentation of something... Notice how the "old" graph says to the left we have a small distribution of "rare" species and then (as you move to the right) it gets larger and the for some reason only known to the business kidz very unrare species they think become umm rare again:). Obviously this just isn't true, no one maps out gaussian curves like that.. I think by the assymmetry of the "new" curve that they are showing that some things are better modelled using Poisson Statistics.. thats what the "new graph" looks like anyway.. the question is what on earth are they trying to show.. what is the Y axis??
Anyway i'll put money on the fact whoever these profs are are trying to scam cash from financial wallstreet types.. (New curves new ways to predict the stock market give us money *cough*) this article was a plant.. but i'm feeling kind of cynical today:)
You know what would be really cool actually, is if along w/ moderation points we allowed people to push up/down stories that were in the queue (along w/ commentary from the people who are moderators only) This would 1) satisfy all the/. addicts who need new stories every 30-60 minutes:) , get rid of the unfeasible queue and prevent stories from being duplicated. i.e. give say 400 random (post often kidz) stories and say when 10 % of the people approve of the story it gets posted. The problem w/ the system now is that (unfortunately) is that rob and friends seem to be a bit overworked and the system is (even more unfortunately) basically taking them on as our editors.. (deciding what stories are worth posting). The critique/commentary system is what makes/., it could be cool to apply it further?
Doesn't seem to you guys that things are going the other way tho.? Maybe i've sucked down too much coffee and am feeling optimistic:) Computer prices are dropping out of control (price of a vcr), we now have a completely well designed beautiful development environment (linux and friends for kidz to learn how to code).. Net access is dropping to about $10 a month.. about the same as a water bill.. We're *really* close to people thinking its economically viable to have free net access for all as well as free machines.. That is the infrastructure, now we just have to convince the kidz that its worth their while (free pr0n d00d:)) The good side of the net has always been start up costs for creating businesses, it doesn't take old money anymore.. (i.e. no more $250k to open the restaurant get space etc etc) this will benefit minorities and the poor more than anything else.. old money is getting their money the same way as they ever were the stockmarket.. lets laugh heartily when nasdaq goes south:).
-avi (who thinks the problem is much more class than race)
Right thats what i meant.. (the workstation/server looked like a bundling difference than any core difference) but all of this means someone somewhere has MacOS X Server (since it is out or advertised?) So what I was wondering was how cool was it? i.e. are all the gnu utilities easy to port over, do we get a bash prompt? can we compile ssh,gcc?? (it should all be relatively straightforward since its unix right?) set DISPLAY=macinabox:0.0? A Mac that can run all the mac utils as well as having a decent set of programs would be a fantastic compromise.. for people who only want one machine for all things.. (word processing etc) Oh it sucks that it won't run 'carbon' tho.:(
Yea you are right, it was Max OS X Server. But that is the one w/ the unix core right? It was advertised as the first mac w/ true preemptive multitasking etc etc.. (no mention of unix tho explicitly) I gathered the server bit was just that it came w/ apache and the obligatory marketing buzzwordage:)
Hey is MacOS X out?? I got one of those crappy mac catalogs in the mail last week something like MacMall or MacWeek or something..(i'm geeky enough to scan even maccatalogs for cool crap:)) anyway they had MacOS X selling on some of their machines and available separately (for like $400 (not exactly umm a cost effective OS)). I scanned thru it looking for an availability date and found none. However, from the looks of this thread MacOS X is still vaguely hypothetical which means either that I was having a mighty fine hallucination or Jobs is personally sending me catalogs from the future...?
Re:Prediction: Microsoft on Linux!
on
Delphi for Linux
·
· Score: 1
My creepy prediction of the year is that by 2001 year they will *open source* all their development environments (MSVC etc etc) This way they will make all their money of the OS and keep a programming developers base that is moving over to emacs/gcc/gtk/qt at the same time score PR points and claim themselves as outdoing their competition (i.e. taking a lead in the opensource movement).
I only know gtk (for coding) because of the license issues at the time (when I decided to play w/ toolkits) However, I recently switched over to kde (1.1.1) mixed w/ debian (slink) and it is entirely too slick (in a good way) Its definitely the system to impress your friends in a functional kind of way. (in the complementary way that enlightenment was the one to impress your acid dropping friends:)) The best examples are if your SO is a mac addict, make her theme MacOS2 (okay unfortunately this one has been removed from themes.org but its still available), put the menubar at the top of the screen and it looks and acts like a mac to the T! Try doing that on a windows box! (Its a fantastic way of converting your skeptical gf's who make fun of you for calling latex a wordprocessor:)) It also seems that kde (and i'm sure the gnome kids are doing this as well) have realized we don't need 10zillion versions of minesweep and samegame (what on earth is that thing?:! ) and have started to put a lot of really nice utility programs.. kppp is really sweet, runs in usermode, hangs up properly runs scripts before and after.. (like setting up ddns crap) i found it much easier to set up than pon/poff (which on hanging i'd have to manually kill -9 and zap the modem on and off), kvirc is entirely too sweet w/ built in servers lists, buttons out of control, korn,kexpress are finally starting to look like newsreaders (yes I realize trn is the be all and end all of all newsreaders but!), kxicq lets you register icq (which was the first time i ever messed w/ icq) of course that was pretty much the last time:)...,kdvi is *so* much better than xdvi. But I really recommend keeping a versions of kde (and its friends) along w/ your installation just to see how it is progressing (its my default windowmanager at home now)..
Oh and kfm is simply the best! Not so much for the filemanager (which I suppose is cool too) but it really is a superfast easy to run web-browser that is utterly responsive , its not completely as functional as netscape but it gets the job done w/out waiting for the 20 seconds for netscape to pop up in that cludgy kind of way that is so annoying! Oh yea and the back button takes you to where you were on the previous page (not further up the page like netscape (or at least every version of netscape i've come across)) for slashdot threading alone its worth it:) (No menudropdown thingies tho:( ).
Seriously kde really is starting to look like a desktop that most kids think of when they think of gui apps and 'modern' computers (for better or worse)! As far as stability, I was actually having some weirdness w/ kde and 1.1 (this was a 'contrib' type debian package unofficial, not something compiled on my own).. Its definitely the one to give your nongeek friends *imho*
Can someone explain to me how on earth music/video can *ever* be protected?? Everyone keeps going on about DVD and music formats but it seems to me that w/ music I should always at the very least be able to grab the stream right before it hits the sound card (i.e. uncompressed) and then convert it back to whatever I feel like. W/ regards to video, (such as dvd) why couldn't some enterprising kid grab the video images off the vram of the video card and then (given enough ram, cpu power etc etc) just recompress the stream back into whatever format they felt like. Basically it seems to me encryption formats are good and all but at some point the thing has to turn into something vaguely usable at which point it can be snagged. What am I missing here?
A lot of it is the libraries unfortunately.. much of the fortran libraries are handoptimized since fortran is column ordered. This isn't really that big of a deal since you can just do a transpose but vaguely annoying. I do numerical crap and I use (shock,shock,horror,horror) C++. The fact is if you write decent code and are smart about it your code should pretty much be the same speed in any language.. (Fortran people dont tend to believe that but its simple enough to test, take a simple project and implement it in two languages.) Anything that really needs to be optimized can link to blas routines, so the language itself doesn't really matter) The real problem w/ c++ is that it is *really* easy to write really horrendous code, because you can hide huge routines in things like +,= etc.. but of course if you going about doing that you should be aware of what you are doing right?
Its funny you mention that. I always thought the NC vision was one of the most retarded concepts ever created:!. NC was like an unglorified Xterm! The most expensive thing to me is my bandwidth, why would I want to get rid of something as ridiculously cheap as my hard drive? I know bandwidth is getting cheaper (gigabit ether and all that) and there are administration costs that make not having a harddrive cheaper.. but as far as admincrap is concerned wouldn't it be simpler just to use rsync and a few perl scripts etc?
So what would happen if i just fft the thingy and invert it back? Filter out some of the higher frequencies (but not enough to destroy the image/sound etc..).. even w/out knowing where exactly the tags are hidden, wouldn't that mess up the original signature? Or for instance to and D->A->D conversion.. Since obviously they don't want the watermark to mess up the picture/sound looking at it in frequency space may turn up the suspicious looking tags? Am I missing something?
There must be some rules governing what sort of weapons the robots can have right? i.e. can you send a em pulse to disable the circuitry (hopefully shielding yours)? Can you attach a submachine gun and just spray in circles? Grenades? Glue guns?
-avi
Re:As a physician, I never learned to spell
on
Quack!
·
· Score: 1
I don't think this is fair.. I think the AAP should have *some* information on this if they are going to make such a sweeping generalization. After all there is an implicit understanding here when we are given a recommendation that the AAP have *studied* the matter, if they haven't where and why are they getting their information? The fact is what they are doing is appealing to our 'common sense'. There was an article on this (i believe in NYT specifically about the AAP rec.), Basically they had someone go around actually looking into where they got their number from. The author was basically given a lot of back pedaling and 'self evident' appeals. It is at best simplistic and at worst misleading to come up with a number such as 0 hours of television for children based on *nothing* and I think unfortunately will end up doing a disservice to parents who rely on such recommendations. (Or perhaps become less inclined to believe future AAP reports after reading the various scathing criticisms of this one by various scientists/doctors in the media). Btw just so you realize where I am coming from, I really think Katz is (and is generally) completely of base here parents should control their kidz behavior: I for one am probably *not* going to have a television and just stock up on a decent set of kidz books (or sit. myself near a good public library:)). I.E. it is my recommendation to myself and my kidz that there are just a ton of cooler, more fun things to do than watch teevee. However, I also believe that *some* amount of study should be done on the matter by ostensibly professional organizations like the AAP to lend recommendations some amount of credibility because as is they are setting themselves up for a print/general media equivalent of a massive flame:). You seem to be taking the stance that this is no longer necessary as politics/opinions taint much of medical data/info, which seems to me a bit fatalistic.
Does anyone know if they would have gone bankrupt on their own or did the whole "we must be able to listen in and know where you are so no play for you" govt force them to go bankrupt? It would be really embarrassing for our allegedly pro-business govt forced them to go under (especially as that law was borderline useless since the kidz will all encrypt one day anyway). You have to admit tho, sending 3zillion satellites into space is pretty ballsy:! Maybe they could sue the govt *ponder*?
Incidentally this isn't really true there is relativistic quantum mechanics... its just another term... There are tons of things that go around mucking up the werks tho:)
Err wouldn't it also depend on where he was telnetting from? I mean not to be naive but it would have been brilliant if the kidz were following him around and he happened to have telnetted in from some place unsecure?
Anyone noticed that he telnetted into the box to do the update? Did anyone snag the password?? Its not entirely surprising that people are trying to grab upstream boxes..
-avi
Re:Corel Packages :: Debian Packages and other Pro
on
Corel Linux Preview
·
· Score: 1
Yea I had some really horrible experiences with potato a while back destroying my system. (I think it was a faulty dselect or dpkg. I really like the idea of having auto-upgrading new versions of applications that are pretty much 'beta' anyway but i'm a bit wary of potato still, as I'd like a vaguely usable system:). (Reinstalling loses its entertainment value after a while). It would be cool if they separated or froze out base/net/ etc for stabilization before the rest of it so we could be assured our machines wouldn't die and rather that a random application would be unusable for a day at worst..
In anycase debian is still the coolest system and there is something to be said for paranoid stability checking.. (though I wonder if the 2.4 kernel is going to come out before they get a new version:))
-avi
Corel Packages :: Debian Packages and other Probs.
on
Corel Linux Preview
·
· Score: 1
Do you guys know which Debian dist its based on? More importantly if they are glibc2.1 or glibc2.0?
It would be *very* cool if they keep in tandem with the stable branch of Debian as it would allow us to grab corel packages instead of waiting 4 thousand years for debian stabilize.. Debian has got to be the coollest easiest to maintain system around (apt-get cron jobs are simple enough for automatic maintenance). The *only* thing i don't like about debian (and I know other people who are thinking about switching to back to rhat) is it seems that it is impossible to get new packages for it.. i.e. simple ones -non-system ones. Like for instance wmaker is on version 0.20 or something..:(:( Even more unfortunately none of the unstable branch is compatible..
I think the trick is to grab the source and.dsc files from unstable and then make your own package and install that, but didn't have much luck w/ wmaker. Of course the simplest thing is configure;make;make install but then you lose your dependencies.. It would be even cooler if something like apt-get did the compiling package making for you:)
Anyone know what the rule of thumb is? i.e. does anything like this exist?
Are you positive about this? We have a bunch of old AIX RS6K boxes as well as SP2:PWR2 series. A few years ago we converted a series of compaq 'mac clones' (at the time they were going for $3k) to ppc boxes running AIX (200 mhz ppc). Basically, w/out compiler specific flags on their compilers (xl*) (-qtune,-qarch) you can your code pretty much anywhere... (on AIX).. I believe ppc machine code is mostly a subset of the pwr series maybe a few other things thrown in for grins:)
I've been thinking about this for a while now and it strikes me this would make a really good fun project and would pretty much render any of the govt's half-assed attempts of listening in obsolete. I'm thinking something that looks like a ratshack dialer that negotiates strong encryption on pickup (providing clearvoice if negotiation doesn't work). i.e. something *really* simple to use. Well okay maybe that wouldn't work, maybe just building the specs for a phone..
But to get around encryption policy, we'll do what all the smart kidz do, separate hardware from software:)... have a serial port or something that uploads the code automatically (via windows,macs,linux etc).. the hardware kidz don't have to worry about export controls since they are just selling a glorified modem, and the software kidz can write their own drivers..
I guess this can be done in steps
1) providing strong encryption capabilities to 'net phones' would be easy to do (if this hasn't been done already) 2) work out a simple box that basically mimics the capabilities of a modem i.e. just like above but automatically.. voice->digital->encyption->analog->phoneline->anal og->decryption->voice
3)stick the code in ram use the cheapest general purpose chips available, on a cheap circuit board, provide an interface to upload the code *separately* from the hardware.. but make the use is simple enough that everyone and their mom will use it.. (i.e again it should be no more complicated than plugging it in to a serial/usb port and running a program that asks for a number between 512->8192 for length of key for example:) )
hell how cool would it be to make the thing get the code automatically by dialing up a 1800 number !
now no one will get busted for selling the hardware since by default it doesn't do anything or just sends cleartext (or clearvoice i mean:)). The software people will do what they are good at.
We *ALL* know how efficient it is for the govt to surpress software based encryption right?:) (Basically the idea is that the only thing that is slowing strong encryption down is ease of use rather than any matter of principle)
What do you guys think? Have I been smoking too much crack?
Slashdot Mirror
I think in fact that is what they are trying to do. I have this discussion w/ friends all the time (I was using opengl/gtk he was using java) and the speed differences were embarrassing (I was doing full real time rendering). Since you can compile gtk and get Mesa for every machine under the sun, I would ask him what the point was.. i.e. why not pull a alpha type trick and recompile native or connect to native libraries... well anyway apparantly that is what some of the java things are going to do i.e check for quicktime then connect to that natively, check for opengl and connect to that natively.. I don't use Java at all personally so I am not sure if this is true.. but thats what he claimed..
I would say it was an old school thing i.e. the generation of kidz above us are more 'rustic hackers' and the kidz our gen grew up in the tech/rave scene.. but then I visited MIT once and *everyone* looks like that (oldskool) .. I kept expecting Jim Jones to appear and preach to the masses :) Its strange tho., because there really are two completely different 'stereotypes' of tech kidz.. In anycase stereotypes *are* just that .. crap.
-avi
Okay I went thru the slashdot notes and hurt my head a bit in trying to make out what the graph *really* meant :) so it seems it is saying that we expect there to be more rare species than there to be unrare species. This makes sense as rare species don't effect the others in quite the same way as a very unrare species (which would dominate resources so you would expect there to be few of them), this really is just saying that there is species-species correlation, especially w/ dominant unrare species (i.e. not really random).
-avi
Umm is that article just on crack or what? I am sure that graph (Learning curves : a fresh approach) has to be a misrepresentation of something... Notice how the "old" graph says to the left we have a small distribution of "rare" species and then (as you move to the right) it gets larger and the for some reason only known to the business kidz very unrare species they think become umm rare again :). Obviously this just isn't true, no one maps out gaussian curves like that.. I think by the assymmetry of the "new" curve that they are showing that some things are better modelled using Poisson Statistics.. thats what the "new graph" looks like anyway.. the question is what on earth are they trying to show.. what is the Y axis??
:)
Anyway i'll put money on the fact whoever these profs are are trying to scam cash from financial wallstreet types.. (New curves new ways to predict the stock market give us money *cough*) this article was a plant.. but i'm feeling kind of cynical today
-avi
You know what would be really cool actually, is if along w/ moderation points we allowed people to push up/down stories that were in the queue (along w/ commentary from the people who are moderators only) This would 1) satisfy all the /. addicts who need new stories every 30-60 minutes :) , get rid of the unfeasible queue and prevent stories from being duplicated. i.e. give say 400 random (post often kidz) stories and say when 10 % of the people approve of the story it gets posted. The problem w/ the system now is that (unfortunately) is that rob and friends seem to be a bit overworked and the system is (even more unfortunately) basically taking them on as our editors.. (deciding what stories are worth posting). The critique/commentary system is what makes /., it could be cool to apply it further?
-avi
Doesn't seem to you guys that things are going the other way tho.? Maybe i've sucked down too much coffee and am feeling optimistic :) Computer prices are dropping out of control (price of a vcr), we now have a completely well designed beautiful development environment (linux and friends for kidz to learn how to code).. Net access is dropping to about $10 a month .. about the same as a water bill.. We're *really* close to people thinking its economically viable to have free net access for all as well as free machines.. That is the infrastructure, now we just have to convince the kidz that its worth their while (free pr0n d00d :)) The good side of the net has always been start up costs for creating businesses, it doesn't take old money anymore.. (i.e. no more $250k to open the restaurant get space etc etc) this will benefit minorities and the poor more than anything else.. old money is getting their money the same way as they ever were the stockmarket.. lets laugh heartily when nasdaq goes south :).
-avi
(who thinks the problem is much more class than race)
Right thats what i meant.. (the workstation/server looked like a bundling difference than any core difference) but all of this means someone somewhere has MacOS X Server (since it is out or advertised?) So what I was wondering was how cool was it? i.e. are all the gnu utilities easy to port over, do we get a bash prompt? can we compile ssh,gcc?? (it should all be relatively straightforward since its unix right?) set DISPLAY=macinabox:0.0? A Mac that can run all the mac utils as well as having a decent set of programs would be a fantastic compromise.. for people who only want one machine for all things.. (word processing etc) Oh it sucks that it won't run 'carbon' tho. :(
-avi
Yea you are right, it was Max OS X Server. But that is the one w/ the unix core right? It was advertised as the first mac w/ true preemptive multitasking etc etc.. (no mention of unix tho explicitly) I gathered the server bit was just that it came w/ apache and the obligatory marketing buzzwordage :)
Hey is MacOS X out?? I got one of those crappy mac catalogs in the mail last week something like MacMall or MacWeek or something..(i'm geeky enough to scan even maccatalogs for cool crap :)) anyway they had MacOS X selling on some of their machines and available separately (for like $400 (not exactly umm a cost effective OS)). I scanned thru it looking for an availability date and found none. However, from the looks of this thread MacOS X is still vaguely hypothetical which means either that I was having a mighty fine hallucination or Jobs is personally sending me catalogs from the future...?
My creepy prediction of the year is that by 2001 year they will *open source* all their development environments (MSVC etc etc) This way they will make all their money of the OS and keep a programming developers base that is moving over to emacs/gcc/gtk/qt at the same time score PR points and claim themselves as outdoing their competition
(i.e. taking a lead in the opensource movement).
-avi
I only know gtk (for coding) because of the license issues at the time (when I decided to play w/ toolkits) However, I recently switched over to kde (1.1.1) mixed w/ debian (slink) and it is entirely too slick (in a good way) Its definitely the system to impress your friends in a functional kind of way. (in the complementary way that enlightenment was the one to impress your acid dropping friends :)) The best examples are if your SO is a mac addict, make her theme MacOS2 (okay unfortunately this one has been removed from themes.org but its still available), put the menubar at the top of the screen and it looks and acts like a mac to the T! Try doing that on a windows box! :)) It also seems that kde (and i'm sure the gnome kids are doing this as well) have realized we don't need 10zillion versions of minesweep and samegame (what on earth is that thing? :! ) and have started to put a lot of really nice utility programs.. kppp is really sweet, runs in usermode, hangs up properly runs scripts before and after.. (like setting up ddns crap) i found it much easier to set up than pon/poff (which on hanging i'd have to manually kill -9 and zap the modem on and off), kvirc is entirely too sweet w/ built in servers lists, buttons out of control, korn,kexpress are finally starting to look like newsreaders (yes I realize trn is the be all and end all of all newsreaders but!), kxicq lets you register icq (which was the first time i ever messed w/ icq) of course that was pretty much the last time :)...,kdvi is *so* much better than xdvi. But I really recommend keeping a versions of kde (and its friends) along w/ your installation just to see how it is progressing (its my default windowmanager at home now)..
:) (No menudropdown thingies tho :( ).
(Its a fantastic way of converting your skeptical gf's who make fun of you for calling latex a wordprocessor
Oh and kfm is simply the best! Not so much for the filemanager (which I suppose is cool too) but it really is a superfast easy to run web-browser that is utterly responsive , its not completely as functional as netscape but it gets the job done w/out waiting for the 20 seconds for netscape to pop up in that cludgy kind of way that is so annoying! Oh yea and the back button takes you to where you were on the previous page (not further up the page like netscape (or at least every version of netscape i've come across)) for slashdot threading alone its worth it
Seriously kde really is starting to look like a desktop that most kids think of when they think of gui apps and 'modern' computers (for better or worse)! As far as stability, I was actually having some weirdness w/ kde and 1.1 (this was a 'contrib' type debian package unofficial, not something compiled on my own).. Its definitely the one to give your nongeek friends *imho*
-avi
Can someone explain to me how on earth music/video can *ever* be protected?? Everyone keeps going on about DVD and music formats but it seems to me that w/ music I should always at the very least be able to grab the stream right before it hits the sound card (i.e. uncompressed) and then convert it back to whatever I feel like. W/ regards to video, (such as dvd) why couldn't some enterprising kid grab the video images off the vram of the video card and then (given enough ram, cpu power etc etc) just recompress the stream back into whatever format they felt like. Basically it seems to me encryption formats are good and all but at some point the thing has to turn into something vaguely usable at which point it can be snagged. What am I missing here?
-avi
A lot of it is the libraries unfortunately.. much of the fortran libraries are handoptimized since fortran is column ordered. This isn't really that big of a deal since you can just do a transpose but vaguely annoying. I do numerical crap and I use (shock,shock,horror,horror) C++. The fact is if you write decent code and are smart about it your code should pretty much be the same speed in any language.. (Fortran people dont tend to believe that but its simple enough to test, take a simple project and implement it in two languages.) Anything that really needs to be optimized can link to blas routines, so the language itself doesn't really matter) The real problem w/ c++ is that it is *really* easy to write really horrendous code, because you can hide huge routines in things like +,= etc .. but of course if you going about doing that you should be aware of what you are doing right?
Its funny you mention that. I always thought the NC vision was one of the most retarded concepts ever created :!. NC was like an unglorified Xterm! The most expensive thing to me is my bandwidth, why would I want to get rid of something as ridiculously cheap as my hard drive?
I know bandwidth is getting cheaper (gigabit ether and all that) and there are administration costs that make not having a harddrive cheaper.. but as far as admincrap is concerned wouldn't it be simpler just to use rsync and a few perl scripts etc?
So what would happen if i just fft the thingy and invert it back? Filter out some of the higher frequencies (but not enough to destroy the image/sound etc..) .. even w/out knowing where exactly the tags are hidden, wouldn't that mess up the original signature? Or for instance to and D->A->D conversion.. Since obviously they don't want the watermark to mess up the picture/sound looking at it in frequency space may turn up the suspicious looking tags? Am I missing something?
-avi
There must be some rules governing what sort of weapons the robots can have right? i.e. can you send a em pulse to disable the circuitry (hopefully shielding yours)? Can you attach a submachine gun and just spray in circles? Grenades? Glue guns?
-avi
I don't think this is fair.. I think the AAP should have *some* information on this if they are going to make such a sweeping generalization. After all there is an implicit understanding here when we are given a recommendation that the AAP have *studied* the matter, if they haven't where and why are they getting their information? The fact is what they are doing is appealing to our 'common sense'. There was an article on this (i believe in NYT specifically about the AAP rec.), Basically they had someone go around actually looking into where they got their number from. The author was basically given a lot of back pedaling and 'self evident' appeals. It is at best simplistic and at worst misleading to come up with a number such as 0 hours of television for children based on *nothing* and I think unfortunately will end up doing a disservice to parents who rely on such recommendations. (Or perhaps become less inclined to believe future AAP reports after reading the various scathing criticisms of this one by various scientists/doctors in the media). Btw just so you realize where I am coming from, I really think Katz is (and is generally) completely of base here parents should control their kidz behavior: I for one am probably *not* going to have a television and just stock up on a decent set of kidz books (or sit. myself near a good public library :)). I.E. it is my recommendation to myself and my kidz that there are just a ton of cooler, more fun things to do than watch teevee. However, I also believe that *some* amount of study should be done on the matter by ostensibly professional organizations like the AAP to lend recommendations some amount of credibility because as is they are setting themselves up for a print/general media equivalent of a massive flame :). You seem to be taking the stance that this is no longer necessary as politics/opinions taint much of medical data/info, which seems to me a bit fatalistic.
Does anyone know if they would have gone bankrupt on their own or did the whole "we must be able to listen in and know where you are so no play for you" govt force them to go bankrupt? It would be really embarrassing for our allegedly pro-business govt forced them to go under (especially as that law was borderline useless since the kidz will all encrypt one day anyway). You have to admit tho, sending 3zillion satellites into space is pretty ballsy :! Maybe they could sue the govt *ponder*?
-avi
Incidentally this isn't really true there is relativistic quantum mechanics... its just another term... There are tons of things that go around mucking up the werks tho :)
Err wouldn't it also depend on where he was telnetting from? I mean not to be naive but it would have been brilliant if the kidz were following him around and he happened to have telnetted in from some place unsecure?
Anyone noticed that he telnetted into the box to do the update? Did anyone snag the password?? Its not entirely surprising that people are trying to grab upstream boxes ..
-avi
Yea I had some really horrible experiences with potato a while back destroying my system. (I think it was a faulty dselect or dpkg. I really like the idea of having auto-upgrading new versions of applications that are pretty much 'beta' anyway but i'm a bit wary of potato still, as I'd like a vaguely usable system :). (Reinstalling loses its entertainment value after a while). It would be cool if they separated or froze out base/net/ etc for stabilization before the rest of it so we could be assured our machines wouldn't die and rather that a random application would be unusable for a day at worst..
:))
In anycase debian is still the coolest system and there is something to be said for paranoid stability checking.. (though I wonder if the 2.4 kernel is going to come out before they get a new version
-avi
Do you guys know which Debian dist its based on? More importantly if they are glibc2.1 or
:(:( Even more unfortunately none of the unstable branch is compatible..
.dsc files from unstable and then make your own package and install that, but didn't have much luck w/ wmaker. Of course the simplest thing is configure;make;make install but then you lose your dependencies .. It would be even cooler if something like apt-get did the compiling package making for you :)
glibc2.0?
It would be *very* cool if they keep in tandem with the stable branch of Debian as it would allow us to grab corel packages instead of waiting 4 thousand years for debian stabilize.. Debian has got to be the coollest easiest to maintain system around (apt-get cron jobs are simple enough for automatic maintenance). The *only* thing i don't like about debian (and I know other people who are thinking about switching to back to rhat) is it seems that it is impossible to get new packages for it.. i.e. simple ones -non-system ones. Like for instance wmaker is on version 0.20 or something..
I think the trick is to grab the source and
Anyone know what the rule of thumb is? i.e. does anything like this exist?
Are you positive about this? We have a bunch of old AIX RS6K boxes as well as SP2:PWR2 series. A few years ago we converted a series of compaq 'mac clones' (at the time they were going for $3k) to ppc boxes running AIX (200 mhz ppc). Basically, w/out compiler specific flags on their compilers (xl*) (-qtune,-qarch) you can your code pretty much anywhere... (on AIX).. I believe ppc machine code is mostly a subset of the pwr series maybe a few other things thrown in for grins :)
-avi
I've been thinking about this for a while now and it strikes me this would make a really good fun project and would pretty much render any of the govt's half-assed attempts of listening in obsolete. I'm thinking something that looks like a ratshack dialer that negotiates strong encryption on pickup (providing clearvoice if negotiation doesn't work). i.e. something *really* simple to use. Well okay maybe that wouldn't work, maybe just building the specs for a phone..
:)... have a serial port or something that uploads the code automatically (via windows,macs,linux etc) .. the hardware kidz don't have to worry about export controls since they are just selling a glorified modem, and the software kidz can write their own drivers..
.. l og->decryption->voice
:) )
:)
But to get around encryption policy, we'll do what all the smart kidz do, separate hardware from software
I guess this can be done in steps
1) providing strong encryption capabilities to 'net phones' would be easy to do (if this hasn't been done already)
2) work out a simple box that basically mimics the capabilities of a modem i.e. just like above but automatically
voice->digital->encyption->analog->phoneline->ana
3)stick the code in ram use the cheapest general purpose chips available, on a cheap circuit board, provide an interface to upload the code *separately* from the hardware..
but make the use is simple enough that everyone and their mom will use it.. (i.e again it should be no more complicated than plugging it in to a serial/usb port and running a program that asks for a number between 512->8192 for length of key for example
hell how cool would it be to make the thing
get the code automatically by dialing up a 1800 number !
now no one will get busted for selling the hardware since by default it doesn't do anything or just sends cleartext (or clearvoice i mean:)). The software people will do what they are good at.
We *ALL* know how efficient it is for the govt to surpress software based encryption right?
(Basically the idea is that the only thing that
is slowing strong encryption down is ease of use rather than any matter of principle)
What do you guys think? Have I been smoking too much crack?