Re:Prettier outside, same junk inside
on
Concept PC 2001
·
· Score: 2
There's another problem with those easily upgradeable, modular systems: they are also very easily *downgraded* by thieves. This is especially worrysome in large office environments, where it is often quite easy to walk in and out with a bag full'o'drives and company secrets. I've heard about quite a number of these incidents when I worked for one of the bigger companies in The Netherlands.
Marvin was around after the destruction of Planet Earth to tell us all about it...
Robots generally don't like to speak without the assistance of a brain. They usually just play dead.
Marvin was a robot
Marvin spoke
by (6), Marvin had a brain, if only an electronic one.
by (7), Planet Earth could not be Marvin's brain.
By (1-8), it all falls down and the question still remains...
A christmas story, and how PayPal ruined it
on
The PayPal Phenomenon
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Well, there we were. All set and ready to buy a whole bunch of Webplayers from the defunct Virgin Connect operation. The deal with the supplier was struck by a volunteer, and funds were transferred into his PayPal account. More than $10.000,- in total, as there were several hundred machines ordered by more than 300 people.
Then PayPal decided that there was something bad about this transaction, and froze the account. Mind you, they froze it for our volunteer, but they did not freeze the incoming stream of funds which now piled up on his account.
PayPal sat on this money for three months, all the while collecting interest on it. The volunteer had complied to all of PayPal's requests, but they just kept on repeating them.
Eventually, more or less at the end of the 'allowable' freeze period, they released the funds and our transaction with the supplier (Boundless Technologies) could go through.
It is quite clear that PayPal did not have fraud in mind when they froze the account. What they did have in mind was the illegal collection of three months worth of interest on OUR funds, not one cent of which has been given back to the group.
In essence, while PayPal might provide a useful service, the company behind it is not to be trusted with your funds. Once bitten, twice shy, PayPal is not on the shortlist anymore...
They might be prisoners, but as long as they are not convicted they're only *suspected* of commiting a crime. That's what they employ those lawyers for in the first place, to defend them in a court of law. Now of course, lawyers being what they often are (for sale), it will be interesting for the prosecution to know what is discussed between the lawyers and their clients.
But what now if the person in jail is really not guilty of any crime you and I would label as such, and is just 'guilty' of opposing (someone in) government, or someone who has power over said government? Would you label such a prisoner a 'criminal'? And would you want the government to have these means to convict said person? Remember, if you want to beat a dog, you'll always be able to find a stick somewhere...
Uh... If those files the user shares are 'important' to collegues/friends/whoever, why would they only want to share them while logged in? Also, in many workplaces workstations are shared between many people, or used by many people ('flexible office' and such...), so the mere fact that the user is not logged in on a certain machine does not mean she does not want/need to share those files.
The filesharing functionality in itself can be handy, but the place to implement this is not in a desktop applet. A controller for the 'server', sure, put that in an applet. But the server itself is better implemented as a small, self-contained daemon. This makes it much easier to audit it for security problems, and actually fix those problems.
It is not the functionality (sharing files) which I dispute, but the place where it is to be implemented (in a desktop applet, as far as I can tell from the TODO-list). From a security standpoint it does not seem to be the best place to implement this functionality. KDE is huge, and has - as far as I know - not been subject of a rigorous check for the usual security-related problems (buffer overflows, etc). This webserver applet would use the KDE framework to serve files to the outside, so it would have to sit there listening on some TCP port. Now what if (and that's probably not an 'if' at all...) there's some exploitable problem in one of the libraries? And this applet is installed on all those KDE desktops which are popping up everywhere thanks to the huge success of free software and the downfall of the evil empire and such?
We'd have the same problems as 'they' have today.
Oh, and for those of you who think I'm disparaging KDE, that's not the case. Replace 'KDE' with 'GNOME' or 'CDE' or 'XFCE' or whichever big(gish) desktop environment you care to name, the same would hold true.
* kpf - web server applet, designed for sharing files
That does not sound like a wise thing to do, implementing webserver functionality into a desktop applet. That's what we've got daemons for, right? Small, self-contained, functional and modular. With the added bonus that the webserver keeps on running when the user logs out.
If you really want to share some files on your box through the desktop, there's lots of P2P apps/'platforms' out there which make this possible. Jabber comes to mind, or JXTA, or... even a 'personal Apache controller applet' for all I care.
But a webserver *in* the applet... Nein Danke...
XPI ('Zippy') is mozilla lingo for 'Cross Platform Installer' or something like that. XPI files are to mozilla what deb files are to Debian, or RPM's to RedHat. They are actually jar files (you know, Java Archives, which in turn are really zip-files with a twist) with an install script and a description of the contents of the archive in RDF format. More on this can be found on the mozilla website
The best decision is to play along, accumulate enough money and power until you can make the decisions, and then pray that you yourself haven't totally sold out your principles in the name of the golden cash cow.
No, the best decision is to learn to play yourself. Music, I mean. Or go to places where music is played, live, in front of an audience. There's loads of bars, clubs, festivals and such out there waiting to be explored. Out there, out of the grasp of those 'management types'.
Learn to play yourself. Don't criticise the media, become the media (free after Jello Biafra).
Start a band maybe?
Just don't play along with those bozo's in their suits who think they can control your world. They'll only succeed if you let them. Don't let them in.
From UBS AG's (AKA UBS SA, AKA UBS Warburg) disclaimer:
E-mail transmission cannot be guaranteed to be secure or error-free as information could be intercepted, corrupted, lost, destroyed, arrive late or incomplete, or contain viruses. The sender therefore does not accept liability for any errors or omissions in the contents of this message which arise as a result of e-mail transmission.
So wrong, so wrong... How can information contain viruses? It cannot. It is the carrier which contains those viruses, and only certain specific carriers at that. If they really cared about not sending out those viruses, they would use a carrier which does not allow executable content. Like, say... ASCII text.
Of course, they're in the financial sector, so they're probably shackled and tied to the upgrade vortex from Redmond. Bummer, I say.
No, the first drives with this technology are already on the market. In fact, I have two of them sitting next to eachother in the waterproof, ruggedized,solar-powered Webplayer I'm building. They're IBM Travelstar 20GB 2.5"/9.5mm drives. Nice, quiet, and reasonably fast, but at a mere 4200 RPM they're not what I'd call 'extremely fast'. The magic is used to put 20GB in a small package (there's also a 30GB version, but that one was more than double the price of the 20GB).
My puny P166 gateway does something not quite unlike this, and more... Not hyperfast of course, but the technology to make content/context-based routing decisions is in the Linux kernel in the form of Class Based Queueing (CBQ). There's also the firewall based classifier, which enables you to 'mark' packets with iptables and use those marks for routing decisions. Look for this stuff under the 'advanced router' option.
Evolution is not just a biological principle...
on
Digital TV Approaches
·
· Score: 2
Hmmm... A feeling creeps upon me, that evolution as described by Charles Darwin to be the engine of creation, also rules over human endeavour...
The Romans were happily feeding Christians to the lions, and Thracians to eachother in the arena, but a time came when they longed for other entertainment. Even feeding a whole flock of Christians to a horde of hungry lions could not rouse them anymore, so the habit died out - as did many Romans.
In medieval times, it was considered fun sport to gallop your horse on a collision course with a wooden pole in hand, hoping to unseat your opponent before he did this to you (sorry girls, this was a mens only sport). This was fun while it lasted, but eventually people longed for other pastimes. As is written down for all to read in books of history.
Now fast-forward a couple of centuries, to.. say the 23d. In whatever is used to record knowledge by that time, will people 'read' about the funny habits of their 20th century ancestors, who gawked at electronic lightshows (kinda like the puppet-on-a-string theathers from the 17th century...)? It seemed to be fun while it lasted, but eventually the puppeteers became greedy, and the populace looked elsewhere for entertainment. They seem to have considered throwing the media-moguls before the lions as a fun alternative, but this plan was abandonded for lack of suitably starved lions. Besides, they were a protected species back then, and you could get arrested for mistreating one. So they eventually invented lochian ultra-cricket, and set out to find the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything.
Please back up for a second, and look at what you just wrote.
Connect it to the subject you wrote about: laws which we're supposed to know and uphold.
Now look at your comparison between a law text and a Stephen King novel.
Comparing disparate things does not an argument make. The law is simply the written code which citizens of a 'civilized' country are supposed to follow. Since they're supposed to know the law, they should be able to get hold of the law texts when needed. While the same law may entitle writers to remuneration for their work, it is simply inexcusable to keep those affected by the law from reading the rules they're supposed to follow.
The mere fact that you need to use lawyer-speak to defend the practice of charging for access to the law text indicates that the current implementation of 'law and order' has veered far and wide from the original purpose. Law, and everything related to it, is simply a profit center. It shouldn't be, but it is.
Law texts should be freely available for anyone, and the Internet is one of the ways this can be achieved. End of argument.
Hm, have you seen the URL's for those goto.com referrals? They all contain a $sessionid$ which starts with IHOAXD... Probably a coincidence, but right on the mark...
I'd even go as far to state that a claim of infringement on a patent related to something you might 'accidentally stumble upon' probably says more about the patent itself. Maybe the patent is too broad, or it covers something which is 'obvious and/or trivial to someone skilled in the art'?
You go camping with your friends and some of them bring a guitar. Night comes, and you decide to make fire and sing some stuff. Suddenly a pair of RIAA agents appear from nowhere and sue all of you for copyright violation.
Sorry, that trick has been tried already. ASCAP went after the American Camping Association - which represents (amongst other) some Girlscouts camps - for royalties on the songs the girls tend to sing around their campfires. This whole mess eventually was concluded by the Girlscouts asking for and getting exemption because they're a non-profit organization.
Yeah- this is one of those "Why didn't I think of that?" things- but I have yet to hear of a web cache or proxy that uses md5sums instead of last-modified headers- are there any out there? And if so, wouldn't that count as the all-important prior art?
And with very good reason: to get that MD5 (or RIPEM-160 or whatever) hash you have to download the whole page. And if you have to download the whole page to check whether it has changed or not, what's the point of having a cacheing proxy in the first place? The HTTP HEAD request only gets the HEADer (which includes the last-modified header), which takes up much less bandwidth...
So maybe this will make a few radio stations get rid of the DJ's alltogether. I'd rather listen to commercials than some of their blathering. If I'm tuned into a 'music' station, I expect to at least occasionally hear MUSIC during the hours between 6am and 10am.
In the Netherlands, we already have a bunch of these stations. They're nothing more than an electronic jukebox connected to a transmitter, serving music and advertisements. The formula seems to work, seeing they've been around for several years now.
A lawyer friend of mine believes...<deletia>...they are leaving themselves open to lawsuits for content composed and transmitted by users.
Pray tell me, what is good about this? Isn't there already enough ligitation as it is? And isn't that due in part to lawyers stretching and bending words in such a way that ANY policy or document can be grounds for ligitation? Thereby keeping themselves (the lawyers) in business and society in a constant state of paranoia?
I believe that the law was never intended to become a 'profit center'. It was intended to solve disputes which could not be solved otherwise. Nowadays it seems to be the other way around... Like technology which provides answers in search of questions...
"But HyperCard might be in danger of going the way of the dinosaur. With the launch of Mac OS X, unless HyperCard is 'carbonized,' it could be the beginning of the end."
Hm, funny that. For the dinosaurs it was the opposite way around: they were carbonized after their demise or so they say. Cars and buses run on exploding dinosaurs, right?
It is. I have two iOpeners set up this way, connected to a rather ancient (P166) server sitting under the stairs. Works like a charm. In a few weeks, some WebPlayers will arrive, also to be connected in this fashion. I set up the machines so they can run with and without a network connection (with reduced functionality in the latter case, using the available flash-disk storage and a small-sized GNU/Linux installation). For browsing, mail, music, video and other general applications this setup works and keeps on working. And, especially nice, you can just turn the thing off once you're done with it since there's no RW-mounted local storage when using the network-boot option.
...the ruggedized Webplayer I'm designing for a canoe trip down the Yukon river this summer. The plan is to take a solar-powered Webplayer with me, connected to which is a USB camera and a microphone. The camera will be fitted to a headband, it will see what I see. The mike will be somewhere where it hears what I say. I'll use this gear to make a report of this two-month trip from Whitehorse (Canada) to Emmonak (somewhere near the Bering sea). Pity there is no affordable, reliable wireless datacom coverage yet, or I would be able to beam this data right to my website... Hm, reminds me of the 'gargoyles' from Snow Crash...
Slashdot Mirror
There's another problem with those easily upgradeable, modular systems: they are also very easily *downgraded* by thieves. This is especially worrysome in large office environments, where it is often quite easy to walk in and out with a bag full'o'drives and company secrets. I've heard about quite a number of these incidents when I worked for one of the bigger companies in The Netherlands.
Well, there we were. All set and ready to buy a whole bunch of Webplayers from the defunct Virgin Connect operation. The deal with the supplier was struck by a volunteer, and funds were transferred into his PayPal account. More than $10.000,- in total, as there were several hundred machines ordered by more than 300 people.
Then PayPal decided that there was something bad about this transaction, and froze the account. Mind you, they froze it for our volunteer, but they did not freeze the incoming stream of funds which now piled up on his account.
PayPal sat on this money for three months, all the while collecting interest on it. The volunteer had complied to all of PayPal's requests, but they just kept on repeating them.
Eventually, more or less at the end of the 'allowable' freeze period, they released the funds and our transaction with the supplier (Boundless Technologies) could go through.
It is quite clear that PayPal did not have fraud in mind when they froze the account. What they did have in mind was the illegal collection of three months worth of interest on OUR funds, not one cent of which has been given back to the group.
In essence, while PayPal might provide a useful service, the company behind it is not to be trusted with your funds. Once bitten, twice shy, PayPal is not on the shortlist anymore...
Scuse me...
They might be prisoners, but as long as they are not convicted they're only *suspected* of commiting a crime. That's what they employ those lawyers for in the first place, to defend them in a court of law. Now of course, lawyers being what they often are (for sale), it will be interesting for the prosecution to know what is discussed between the lawyers and their clients.
But what now if the person in jail is really not guilty of any crime you and I would label as such, and is just 'guilty' of opposing (someone in) government, or someone who has power over said government? Would you label such a prisoner a 'criminal'? And would you want the government to have these means to convict said person? Remember, if you want to beat a dog, you'll always be able to find a stick somewhere...
Uh... If those files the user shares are 'important' to collegues/friends/whoever, why would they only want to share them while logged in? Also, in many workplaces workstations are shared between many people, or used by many people ('flexible office' and such...), so the mere fact that the user is not logged in on a certain machine does not mean she does not want/need to share those files.
The filesharing functionality in itself can be handy, but the place to implement this is not in a desktop applet. A controller for the 'server', sure, put that in an applet. But the server itself is better implemented as a small, self-contained daemon. This makes it much easier to audit it for security problems, and actually fix those problems.
It is not the functionality (sharing files) which I dispute, but the place where it is to be implemented (in a desktop applet, as far as I can tell from the TODO-list). From a security standpoint it does not seem to be the best place to implement this functionality. KDE is huge, and has - as far as I know - not been subject of a rigorous check for the usual security-related problems (buffer overflows, etc). This webserver applet would use the KDE framework to serve files to the outside, so it would have to sit there listening on some TCP port. Now what if (and that's probably not an 'if' at all...) there's some exploitable problem in one of the libraries? And this applet is installed on all those KDE desktops which are popping up everywhere thanks to the huge success of free software and the downfall of the evil empire and such?
We'd have the same problems as 'they' have today.
Oh, and for those of you who think I'm disparaging KDE, that's not the case. Replace 'KDE' with 'GNOME' or 'CDE' or 'XFCE' or whichever big(gish) desktop environment you care to name, the same would hold true.
Uh-Oh,
From the planned feature list:
* kpf - web server applet, designed for sharing files
That does not sound like a wise thing to do, implementing webserver functionality into a desktop applet. That's what we've got daemons for, right? Small, self-contained, functional and modular. With the added bonus that the webserver keeps on running when the user logs out.
If you really want to share some files on your box through the desktop, there's lots of P2P apps/'platforms' out there which make this possible. Jabber comes to mind, or JXTA, or... even a 'personal Apache controller applet' for all I care.
But a webserver *in* the applet... Nein Danke...
Did you turn the gestures on? You have to press the 'on' button on the left side of the toolbar...
XPI ('Zippy') is mozilla lingo for 'Cross Platform Installer' or something like that. XPI files are to mozilla what deb files are to Debian, or RPM's to RedHat. They are actually jar files (you know, Java Archives, which in turn are really zip-files with a twist) with an install script and a description of the contents of the archive in RDF format. More on this can be found on the mozilla website
No, the best decision is to learn to play yourself. Music, I mean. Or go to places where music is played, live, in front of an audience. There's loads of bars, clubs, festivals and such out there waiting to be explored. Out there, out of the grasp of those 'management types'.
Learn to play yourself. Don't criticise the media, become the media (free after Jello Biafra).
Start a band maybe?
Just don't play along with those bozo's in their suits who think they can control your world. They'll only succeed if you let them. Don't let them in.
From UBS AG's (AKA UBS SA, AKA UBS Warburg) disclaimer:
So wrong, so wrong... How can information contain viruses? It cannot. It is the carrier which contains those viruses, and only certain specific carriers at that. If they really cared about not sending out those viruses, they would use a carrier which does not allow executable content. Like, say... ASCII text.
Of course, they're in the financial sector, so they're probably shackled and tied to the upgrade vortex from Redmond. Bummer, I say.
No, the first drives with this technology are already on the market. In fact, I have two of them sitting next to eachother in the waterproof, ruggedized,solar-powered Webplayer I'm building. They're IBM Travelstar 20GB 2.5"/9.5mm drives. Nice, quiet, and reasonably fast, but at a mere 4200 RPM they're not what I'd call 'extremely fast'. The magic is used to put 20GB in a small package (there's also a 30GB version, but that one was more than double the price of the 20GB).
My puny P166 gateway does something not quite unlike this, and more... Not hyperfast of course, but the technology to make content/context-based routing decisions is in the Linux kernel in the form of Class Based Queueing (CBQ). There's also the firewall based classifier, which enables you to 'mark' packets with iptables and use those marks for routing decisions. Look for this stuff under the 'advanced router' option.
Hmmm... A feeling creeps upon me, that evolution as described by Charles Darwin to be the engine of creation, also rules over human endeavour...
The Romans were happily feeding Christians to the lions, and Thracians to eachother in the arena, but a time came when they longed for other entertainment. Even feeding a whole flock of Christians to a horde of hungry lions could not rouse them anymore, so the habit died out - as did many Romans.
In medieval times, it was considered fun sport to gallop your horse on a collision course with a wooden pole in hand, hoping to unseat your opponent before he did this to you (sorry girls, this was a mens only sport). This was fun while it lasted, but eventually people longed for other pastimes. As is written down for all to read in books of history.
Now fast-forward a couple of centuries, to.. say the 23d. In whatever is used to record knowledge by that time, will people 'read' about the funny habits of their 20th century ancestors, who gawked at electronic lightshows (kinda like the puppet-on-a-string theathers from the 17th century...)? It seemed to be fun while it lasted, but eventually the puppeteers became greedy, and the populace looked elsewhere for entertainment. They seem to have considered throwing the media-moguls before the lions as a fun alternative, but this plan was abandonded for lack of suitably starved lions. Besides, they were a protected species back then, and you could get arrested for mistreating one. So they eventually invented lochian ultra-cricket, and set out to find the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything.
Balderdash!
Please back up for a second, and look at what you just wrote.
Connect it to the subject you wrote about: laws which we're supposed to know and uphold.
Now look at your comparison between a law text and a Stephen King novel.
Comparing disparate things does not an argument make. The law is simply the written code which citizens of a 'civilized' country are supposed to follow. Since they're supposed to know the law, they should be able to get hold of the law texts when needed. While the same law may entitle writers to remuneration for their work, it is simply inexcusable to keep those affected by the law from reading the rules they're supposed to follow.
The mere fact that you need to use lawyer-speak to defend the practice of charging for access to the law text indicates that the current implementation of 'law and order' has veered far and wide from the original purpose. Law, and everything related to it, is simply a profit center. It shouldn't be, but it is.
Law texts should be freely available for anyone, and the Internet is one of the ways this can be achieved. End of argument.
Hm, have you seen the URL's for those goto.com referrals? They all contain a $sessionid$ which starts with IHOAXD... Probably a coincidence, but right on the mark...
I'd even go as far to state that a claim of infringement on a patent related to something you might 'accidentally stumble upon' probably says more about the patent itself. Maybe the patent is too broad, or it covers something which is 'obvious and/or trivial to someone skilled in the art'?
Sorry, that trick has been tried already. ASCAP went after the American Camping Association - which represents (amongst other) some Girlscouts camps - for royalties on the songs the girls tend to sing around their campfires. This whole mess eventually was concluded by the Girlscouts asking for and getting exemption because they're a non-profit organization.
Read it from the horse's (ASCAP's) mouth here:
http://www.ascap.com/playback/1996/october/girlsco uts.html
A bit of Googling around the web will yield more results.
And with very good reason: to get that MD5 (or RIPEM-160 or whatever) hash you have to download the whole page. And if you have to download the whole page to check whether it has changed or not, what's the point of having a cacheing proxy in the first place? The HTTP HEAD request only gets the HEADer (which includes the last-modified header), which takes up much less bandwidth...
In the Netherlands, we already have a bunch of these stations. They're nothing more than an electronic jukebox connected to a transmitter, serving music and advertisements. The formula seems to work, seeing they've been around for several years now.
A quote from Henry Ford:
If this were true in Ford's time, it'll certainly be true now with the increased efficiency of internal combustion engines...
Pray tell me, what is good about this? Isn't there already enough ligitation as it is? And isn't that due in part to lawyers stretching and bending words in such a way that ANY policy or document can be grounds for ligitation? Thereby keeping themselves (the lawyers) in business and society in a constant state of paranoia?
I believe that the law was never intended to become a 'profit center'. It was intended to solve disputes which could not be solved otherwise. Nowadays it seems to be the other way around... Like technology which provides answers in search of questions...
Hm, funny that. For the dinosaurs it was the opposite way around: they were carbonized after their demise or so they say. Cars and buses run on exploding dinosaurs, right?
It is. I have two iOpeners set up this way, connected to a rather ancient (P166) server sitting under the stairs. Works like a charm. In a few weeks, some WebPlayers will arrive, also to be connected in this fashion. I set up the machines so they can run with and without a network connection (with reduced functionality in the latter case, using the available flash-disk storage and a small-sized GNU/Linux installation). For browsing, mail, music, video and other general applications this setup works and keeps on working. And, especially nice, you can just turn the thing off once you're done with it since there's no RW-mounted local storage when using the network-boot option.
...the ruggedized Webplayer I'm designing for a canoe trip down the Yukon river this summer. The plan is to take a solar-powered Webplayer with me, connected to which is a USB camera and a microphone. The camera will be fitted to a headband, it will see what I see. The mike will be somewhere where it hears what I say. I'll use this gear to make a report of this two-month trip from Whitehorse (Canada) to Emmonak (somewhere near the Bering sea). Pity there is no affordable, reliable wireless datacom coverage yet, or I would be able to beam this data right to my website... Hm, reminds me of the 'gargoyles' from Snow Crash...