This is my first/. posting in gosh knows when- I get fired up, see all the posts, and say, screw it. But this subject is one of my premier hot button issues.
I don't understand it. If you're confident in your product, trust in that confidence- don't use obfuscated file formats to cause interoperability problems.
The only thing I can think of that keeps this anti-customer attitude going is corporate culture. Off the top of my head, Lotus and Autodesk seem comparable, in their persistence with a worldview. Lotus, at the beginning and for quite a while, used copy protection methods. They'd not use them for a while, but pretty soon, they'd come back again. Autodesk has gone back and forth on using dongles (or at least, until 10 years ago they had- my cad days are behind me.)
Corporate cultures seem to have memes associated with them, and Microsoft's appears to be one of paranoia- regardless of the quality of their products.
I'm Microsoft certified. I even can say I like Word, minus clippit, and I even think XP has its merits. I even think, with Server 2003's installation and granularity, they might even be getting a clue.
But they make it damned hard to stick up for them, and until they open up items such as file formats to all takers, it will be useless to measure the quality of their products.
the important thing to note here is that that this ISN'T the time from an announced exploitable hole (and patch), it's the time an exploit actually takes once it starts propagating.
the time it takes for an exploit to be crafted has usually been sufficient to allow sysadmins to patch- 1 to 2 months usually.
doesn't mean it happens, obviously. and the time it takes for an exploit to be created is shrinking, too.
at this point, the clue should be received: firewalls. updates. secure systems. (and microsoft, please fix your stuff pro-actively.)
*while i do admire the desire to prove the inadequacies of wireless... *while i do recognize that this is a hacker's conference... *while i do realize that it's a good thing to do this, to prove that we should use encryption...
it's just sad. i'm old enough to remember open mail relays, not being abused, so maybe i'm just tired of the continual need to upgrade, secure, and encrypt.
wireless is cool, no two words about it. i'm sitting on my front porch, enjoying the cool air, waving to the neighbors who are out walking.
i don't use encryption on the wireless, simply because i'm not worried about somebody sniffing these unsecured packets (since i use ssh sessions for things that matter.) and because my old plaster walls don't let it go far.
but the main reason i didn't use it was because dammit, i am tired of being suspicious of everybody and everything. use secure channels, sure, but why should we have to encrypt the transport itself? i don't know why i thought wireless was going to be different than anything else.
(i'm also kinda embarrassed that i didn't think of this first. it's TERRIBLY obvious in hindsight. do also note, i'm not blaming the messengers in any way- good on you, dudes.)
end-result: time to start educating people about why it's necessary now to really worry about encrypting the transport, rather than just the communication. and one more thing that makes the net a less cool place, because some idiot out there will use it for bad purposes.
don't worry, you're living on borrowed time. that plaster's about reached the end of its lifespan, and when you have to put up sheetrock, problem solved!
but seriously... i have a similar situation, and i solved it by using my cellar to poke up cat5 and repeaters. (i've got a 65 year old house, but it's plaster *on* sheetrock- best of both worlds) my faraday cage used to drive me nuts- move 6 inches over, lose a signal. i just hid the repeaters behind furniture. *note* - i am a bachelor.
somebody needs to make a repeater/access point that fits in an electrical outlet wall-box, btw. what with schools wanting wireless everywhere, that would make it easy to do. i digress, however.
now, if you need to run cable, the trick some people do in old houses- take off the- aw dang it, words fail me. the boards around the periphery of the room, on the wall? take those off, and then raise em up about half an inch- run the cable there, and put quarter round molding in front to hide the gap and wire.
similarly, you can hide wire behind a picture rail. drilling a hole through plaster is always fin, though, as you know. (i always start a hole with, like, a 1/16th inch bit, then after i've drilled through, go back with the size i really need.)
if you try any of the verious antenna repeaters, let me know. i'd like to get a signal outside in the backyard...
and courtesy of macrumors: it's for the new imacs.
apparently, they're 4200 rpm drives- and while that's not ideally as fast as one would want, if you're squeezing for space, that's one solution...
actually, i almost posted that i was disappointed no announcement of the 60- i'd love to have one, so i could have almost all my cd collection with me at one time. i could suffer with only 5/6 of my collection at one time- or 2/3 and a very very handy 10 gigs free for backup purposes. but i wouldn't have to pick and choose about which johnny cash to put on, or which residents albums to leave off, or which set of shostakovich string quartets to have on. given the fact that they bought the 60 gig drives already, i suspect *they're* thinking of a market for something, ipod or not. but my money's on an ipod.
I've been thinking about this since the announcement this weekend. I have come up with several ideas: 1) they're still trying to figure out how to stuff it into the 20/40 new case, so they don't have to come up with yet another new dock. 2) caching/battery life is still is an issue they're tweaking. 3) the 60 will get announced as a one-more-thing at an upcoming Steve appearance, because they wanted something special ipod-related to be announced after the new imacs come out.
my money is on 1 & 3. i don't think it's a marketing thing.
what he said, plus they have ssh access, either via a client or through a web-based client, and webmail. nice size of space available, too. you can also get a price of $100 per year if you pay up front. i got my panix acct. after netcom discontinued shell access, and my only regret is not getting it sooner.
No, that's no typo.
Slashdock is a dock-based RSS grabber. Works pretty darn good, author is helpful, and is very unobtrusive (or obtrusive, if you want it to be.) Used in conjunction with Camino, it makes for highly efficient browsing.
Highly recommended.
going to infinium press image area you can find the full size images- which are basically uncropped versions that you see from one of the post links. looking at the mouse shot (and that's an interesting design- the upper case is one piece, and the buttons flex it when pressed) it's definitely photoshopped. somebody else can do all the gamma-type proof, but all it takes is to look at the glow around the cord. so they might be actual devices- but they probably don't look that purty in the real world, i betcha. regardless, we'll see in a couple of days.
I don't think they're all digital renderings- the keyboard and mouse look like it, but the case pics, especially of the flexicable, look real. I think they were extensively photoshopped, though. haven't pulled up gimp or p-shop yet to check for signs, but my gut says real but tweaked. looking at the size and style, i betcha that you could find 300dpi print res copies on infinium's site- and that would make it real easy to check.
Toutatis.
instead of sending up bruce willis to mine into it and blow it up, we need to send up obelix to make it into the world's largest menhir. don't know how he'd get it down to use as decoration for a cottage, though...
boy, i don't know if anybody could make a mmog (or rpg) out of it, but the whole time i was reading the otherworld series, i envisioned it as a game. it would probably be too expensive to make it into a stand-alone game, but not as a multiplayer game. in a similar vein would be Chalker's Well of Souls series. 1500, if memory serves, worlds to explore? i'd pay $20 a month for each of those.
dude- i posted this last year? huh? while i can be rightfully accused of repeating what i say, i can assure you that i am not doing it in an attempt to karmawhore.
that's *exactly* it. backwards-compatibility is a bitch. you can also add to this info for captioning, SAP, etc. that's been grafted onto the signal. at the same time, as pointed out earlier, the quality of the equipment has obviated the fact that the standard is kludgy- much like a faster machine overcoming (some) deficiencies in programming and sizing.
actually, the quality hasn't changed, back even further than that. since color tv was to be able to be forwards and backwards compatible with black and white, the color signal was hacked into the black and white standard. this was not the case in britain, where a new, but incompatible, standard was created, that used bandwidth more effectively, and had better color. so hdtv is the first new standard since about 1939. it's about damn time. this proves, once again, that standards are a double-edged sword. use and choose carefully...
separate drives, esp. on a separate channel or controller, will always help. but if you're dealing with xp, you can also gain some speed by NOT using ntfs on that drive. instead, use fat32- your swap file is not a file that needs full ntfs (permission or security or compression or encryption) complexity. combine that with a fixed size, from the word go, and you can get very nice speed bumps.
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This is my first /. posting in gosh knows when- I get fired up, see all the posts, and say, screw it.
But this subject is one of my premier hot button issues.
I don't understand it. If you're confident in your product, trust in that confidence- don't use obfuscated file formats to cause interoperability problems.
The only thing I can think of that keeps this anti-customer attitude going is corporate culture. Off the top of my head, Lotus and Autodesk seem comparable, in their persistence with a worldview. Lotus, at the beginning and for quite a while, used copy protection methods. They'd not use them for a while, but pretty soon, they'd come back again. Autodesk has gone back and forth on using dongles (or at least, until 10 years ago they had- my cad days are behind me.)
Corporate cultures seem to have memes associated with them, and Microsoft's appears to be one of paranoia- regardless of the quality of their products.
I'm Microsoft certified. I even can say I like Word, minus clippit, and I even think XP has its merits. I even think, with Server 2003's installation and granularity, they might even be getting a clue.
But they make it damned hard to stick up for them, and until they open up items such as file formats to all takers, it will be useless to measure the quality of their products.
Richard Stallman. Fear the Gnu!
i mean, off topic, sure, but what exactly does the department department handle? i know what all the others do.
the important thing to note here is that that this ISN'T the time from an announced exploitable hole (and patch), it's the time an exploit actually takes once it starts propagating.
the time it takes for an exploit to be crafted has usually been sufficient to allow sysadmins to patch- 1 to 2 months usually.
doesn't mean it happens, obviously. and the time it takes for an exploit to be created is shrinking, too.
at this point, the clue should be received: firewalls. updates. secure systems.
(and microsoft, please fix your stuff pro-actively.)
*while i do admire the desire to prove the inadequacies of wireless...
*while i do recognize that this is a hacker's conference...
*while i do realize that it's a good thing to do this, to prove that we should use encryption...
it's just sad. i'm old enough to remember open mail relays, not being abused, so maybe i'm just tired of the continual need to upgrade, secure, and encrypt.
wireless is cool, no two words about it. i'm sitting on my front porch, enjoying the cool air, waving to the neighbors who are out walking.
i don't use encryption on the wireless, simply because i'm not worried about somebody sniffing these unsecured packets (since i use ssh sessions for things that matter.) and because my old plaster walls don't let it go far.
but the main reason i didn't use it was because dammit, i am tired of being suspicious of everybody and everything. use secure channels, sure, but why should we have to encrypt the transport itself? i don't know why i thought wireless was going to be different than anything else.
(i'm also kinda embarrassed that i didn't think of this first. it's TERRIBLY obvious in hindsight. do also note, i'm not blaming the messengers in any way- good on you, dudes.)
end-result: time to start educating people about why it's necessary now to really worry about encrypting the transport, rather than just the communication. and one more thing that makes the net a less cool place, because some idiot out there will use it for bad purposes.
don't worry, you're living on borrowed time. that plaster's about reached the end of its lifespan, and when you have to put up sheetrock, problem solved!
but seriously...
i have a similar situation, and i solved it by using my cellar to poke up cat5 and repeaters. (i've got a 65 year old house, but it's plaster *on* sheetrock- best of both worlds) my faraday cage used to drive me nuts- move 6 inches over, lose a signal. i just hid the repeaters behind furniture. *note* - i am a bachelor.
somebody needs to make a repeater/access point that fits in an electrical outlet wall-box, btw. what with schools wanting wireless everywhere, that would make it easy to do. i digress, however.
now, if you need to run cable, the trick some people do in old houses- take off the- aw dang it, words fail me. the boards around the periphery of the room, on the wall? take those off, and then raise em up about half an inch- run the cable there, and put quarter round molding in front to hide the gap and wire.
similarly, you can hide wire behind a picture rail. drilling a hole through plaster is always fin, though, as you know. (i always start a hole with, like, a 1/16th inch bit, then after i've drilled through, go back with the size i really need.)
if you try any of the verious antenna repeaters, let me know. i'd like to get a signal outside in the backyard...
and courtesy of macrumors:
it's for the new imacs.
apparently, they're 4200 rpm drives- and while that's not ideally as fast as one would want, if you're squeezing for space, that's one solution...
actually, i almost posted that i was disappointed no announcement of the 60- i'd love to have one, so i could have almost all my cd collection with me at one time. i could suffer with only 5/6 of my collection at one time- or 2/3 and a very very handy 10 gigs free for backup purposes.
but i wouldn't have to pick and choose about which johnny cash to put on, or which residents albums to leave off, or which set of shostakovich string quartets to have on.
given the fact that they bought the 60 gig drives already, i suspect *they're* thinking of a market for something, ipod or not. but my money's on an ipod.
I've been thinking about this since the announcement this weekend. I have come up with several ideas:
1) they're still trying to figure out how to stuff it into the 20/40 new case, so they don't have to come up with yet another new dock.
2) caching/battery life is still is an issue they're tweaking.
3) the 60 will get announced as a one-more-thing at an upcoming Steve appearance, because they wanted something special ipod-related to be announced after the new imacs come out.
my money is on 1 & 3. i don't think it's a marketing thing.
what he said, plus they have ssh access, either via a client or through a web-based client, and webmail. nice size of space available, too. you can also get a price of $100 per year if you pay up front. i got my panix acct. after netcom discontinued shell access, and my only regret is not getting it sooner.
No, that's no typo. Slashdock is a dock-based RSS grabber. Works pretty darn good, author is helpful, and is very unobtrusive (or obtrusive, if you want it to be.) Used in conjunction with Camino, it makes for highly efficient browsing.
Highly recommended.
from the page:
-Sorry, no results were found containing "unix"-
going to infinium press image area you can find the full size images- which are basically uncropped versions that you see from one of the post links.
looking at the mouse shot (and that's an interesting design- the upper case is one piece, and the buttons flex it when pressed) it's definitely photoshopped. somebody else can do all the gamma-type proof, but all it takes is to look at the glow around the cord.
so they might be actual devices- but they probably don't look that purty in the real world, i betcha.
regardless, we'll see in a couple of days.
I don't think they're all digital renderings- the keyboard and mouse look like it, but the case pics, especially of the flexicable, look real. I think they were extensively photoshopped, though.
haven't pulled up gimp or p-shop yet to check for signs, but my gut says real but tweaked.
looking at the size and style, i betcha that you could find 300dpi print res copies on infinium's site- and that would make it real easy to check.
Toutatis.
instead of sending up bruce willis to mine into it and blow it up, we need to send up obelix to make it into the world's largest menhir. don't know how he'd get it down to use as decoration for a cottage, though...
whoops. absolutely correct, i meant otherland. even had an amazon link i forgot to post.
boy, i don't know if anybody could make a mmog (or rpg) out of it, but the whole time i was reading the otherworld series, i envisioned it as a game.
it would probably be too expensive to make it into a stand-alone game, but not as a multiplayer game.
in a similar vein would be Chalker's Well of Souls series. 1500, if memory serves, worlds to explore? i'd pay $20 a month for each of those.
what i wonder is if roland is paying off /. editors to get articles accepted!
just kidding. 'nother interesting post on his blog...
nope, the gist was correct.
1941 was the start date for b&w.
I was off by a few years.
actually, it's *godwin's law* anyway. or so says the jargon dictionary.
no need for cursing.
dude- i posted this last year? huh?
while i can be rightfully accused of repeating what i say, i can assure you that i am not doing it in an attempt to karmawhore.
that's why i said ~1939. i can't remember exactly when the NTSC standard first came into effect- but i'm almost certain it was pre-war.
that's *exactly* it. backwards-compatibility is a bitch. you can also add to this info for captioning, SAP, etc. that's been grafted onto the signal.
at the same time, as pointed out earlier, the quality of the equipment has obviated the fact that the standard is kludgy- much like a faster machine overcoming (some) deficiencies in programming and sizing.
actually, the quality hasn't changed, back even further than that. since color tv was to be able to be forwards and backwards compatible with black and white, the color signal was hacked into the black and white standard.
this was not the case in britain, where a new, but incompatible, standard was created, that used bandwidth more effectively, and had better color.
so hdtv is the first new standard since about 1939. it's about damn time.
this proves, once again, that standards are a double-edged sword. use and choose carefully...
separate drives, esp. on a separate channel or controller, will always help.
but if you're dealing with xp, you can also gain some speed by NOT using ntfs on that drive. instead, use fat32- your swap file is not a file that needs full ntfs (permission or security or compression or encryption) complexity.
combine that with a fixed size, from the word go, and you can get very nice speed bumps.