I've noticed a few places (the US Post Office, for one) that way in big letters they won't accept cards that say "See ID".
If you think about how easy it is to forge an ID, this is even LESS secure. If I got ahold of your physical card, I could then easily get an ID made with *MY* pic, and my version of your signature.
The clerk would accept YOUR card from me, look at this fake ID, and see the sig I just dropped on the paper receipt matches the one on the fake ID perfectly.
I understand your logic, but why do you care so much? I usually get more upset when some clerk wants to check my signature for a low-value (= $250) purchase.
*I* am not liable for fraudulent charges if my card is stolen. I don't care if the merchant checks my sig or not, it's all the same to me.
You seem to be basing your point on the idea that I'm standing idly by and bitching. All I'm saying is that I think this particular "hack" is a little bit trivial to be called a "hack". As someone else pointed out, it might be better to apply "kludge" to this one.
FTR, I've done a number of hardware and software "hacks" myself. Had I wanted to accomplish a set of cordless headphones, *I* would have done it by way of an RF transmitter/receiver pair so that the Shuffle is still accessable and controllable. The reason I didn't do it is because the whole resultant product is not really something I have a use for.
If you're going to post something on the Internet, then you can/should expect that not ALL your feedback is going to be smoke-up-your-ass-sunshine.
BTW, I don't think an all black canvas is "art" either, but that is an entirely different argument.
I'm familiar with alt.hack as well. But I'd like the think that we have progressed a little. I know there are 1000 bits that can be taped, glued, and/or soldered together to make other interesting bits, but that doesn't mean they are noteworthy.
We either need a new word that is like hack++ to differentiate the real interesting hacks from the lame ones, or we need a word that would be more like --hack for the entry-level hacks.
How exactly do old-ass headphones give you "street cred".
Not to mention this whole "hack" is so non-Apple. There is no "style" to it, and it's cumbersome. Not to mention that the Shuffle in one of the ear cups probably affects the sound quality a bit.
I'm also a little tired of the "hack" moniker being thrown around so readily. Soldering a couple of wires together is not a "hack" in most cases, it's just... well... soldering.
Take the shuffle apart, integrate its electronics into the headphones, and port the controls and I/O to the outside, keeping the same layout so that the headphones have a "hint of shuffle" to them (maybe even paint the headphones a nice eggshell white). THAT would be closer to a hack, IMO.
15 or so years ago Dvorak had some insightful articles, even if they didn't always come 100% true. Nowadays he's another has-been from a past era trying to pimp his FUD and general tech conspiracy theories. IMO, if you steadily bet AGAINST Dvorak you'll come out ahead over the long run.
In the days of 10Mhz 286's I used to really enjoy John's columns. Now, I don't know if I've just gotten smarter, or he's gotten dumber (heh), but I can't remember the last time he didn't seem like a technology lunatic to me.
Yet another pointless case-mod story. And it's not even that well executed. The stupid clear window will get all scratched and fugly looking if it actually does any real travel, and those knobs, ports, etc on the end are sure to be broken in short order.
A decent laptop plus smallish Etherhub or two is more useful (consider that a laptop has an LCD screen and can run of it's own batterY), probably 1/2 the cost, and 2x more portable.
These fools actually thing someone is going to PAY them to duplicate this horrid experiment?
Interestingly enough, I saw the prototype for that Polara range about 3 years ago. The story line then was that they would have a whole line of kitchen appliances that communicated over a bluetooth like network. There was going to be a co-marketed deal with Kraft and other food companies to have these "meal" concepts and the UPC codes would be recognized by the appliances. The idea was that you stick the various components of dinner in the appliances (range(s), microwave, convection oven, etc) and you tell it when you want dinner to be ready, then they all work together to get the portions done at the same time (ie: the range might signal the micro when the meat is almost done to start nuking some sort of vegetable side dish).
No, but I might wander in and turn his TV upside down or something. That would depend on my mood, peeing on the carpet would be mean (albeit humorous). Fucking with his AP isn't mean, and is intended to provide a doze of clue-x-four (which admittedly doesn't seem to be working).
Why do these still make it to/.? I feel bad for the person who submitted the story, and bad for the editor that posted it.
Yes, there is just no end to the amount of hollow objects that can hold a modern small form-factor PC system board.
It's no longer considerd creative to wedge a system board into some makeshift case. Hopefully this will be realized before we have to see every possible iteration.
Thanks for saving me the trouble of posting essentially the same message.
A PC is just not a work of art, sorry. The best boxen are the ones that are silently, cooly, tucked out of the way somewhere.
Why does it sometimes seem that an entire generation has just discovered a 30 year old piece of technology (LEDs) and now feels compelled to put them EVERYWHERE remote'y near a DC power source?
I saw some RAM advertised yesterday that had 16 LEDs on the top that went around in a chase pattern, and it also had (as they termed it) "blue ground effects lighting".
My home AP is named "FuckOff". It's secured (to the extent that an AP *can* be secured) well enough.
My neighbor INSISTS on leaving his WRT54G unsecured. I change it whenever I'm bored (I've also connected to the LAN, and then to one of his shared printers and printed out some "interesting" photos). I'll name his AP stuff like "pimpwifi" "secureme" "hellomike", etc. Nothing too interesting really.
And you'd be in the restraunt business for about 2 days.
Power costs, on average, 12 cents per KwH. The cost of someone plugging in a laptop to charge for an hour is far less than the cost of the paper cup the coffee they bought was served in.
Your talk about using a filtered/protected extention lead is also silly. Most devices these days have power supplys that can work happily on anything from 90-260VAC. They take in AC, and output DC, and thus have a degree of filtering built in already. Furthermore laptop power bricks and such are pretty much desgined to be used in all sorts of environments. I'd worry more about the contaminantes in the water they used to make my Latte than I would worry about a bit of noise or ripple on the AC.
I believe that John Kerry's political campaign was an experiment to see just how much Americans would tolerate in terms of an ill-prepped candidate as a dry run for Hillary's '08 presidential bid.
32M is still a relatively small number compared to the overall American population (~300M).
I find most blogs so bland and boring that I don't see the reward in trying to separate the wheat from the chaff in them. Sure, some are funny, or informed, or insightful, but SO many are just pointless ramblings mixed in with malformed thoughts and opinions.
Blogs are one of those things that I am absolutely shocked have gotten so much attention.
Ucentric has also been quietly trudging away in this space from the old DEC headquarters in Maynard, MA. (http://www.ucentric.com)
They did trials of their product with Comcast and AT&T (before it was bought by Comcast), and now have a rollout with Voom (the also-ran HD sat company).
It's a good, stable, platform, but never seems to get any press (or customers). Linux based (Debian) with some fancy bits globbed on.
The real sweet spot is in their thin clients and distribution technologies. Imagine having ALL of your PVR's content available simultaneously from every TV (or PC) in the house, from a client a little bigger than a pack of smokes. And, you don't need to run a bunch of Cat5 to get the signal to the other TV's, an old piece of coax will do just fine.
Exit polls from this election are about as useful as a rnadom number generator to provide the results. So many people were inclined to either withold their info, provide misleading answers, or oherwise skew the results that they are meaningless.
IMO grasping at the "exit poll" straw is clinging to an antiquated methodology that is no longer relevant. This election was VERY heated, and I think that people are just getting tired of getting raped of their personal information.
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Ah, I see.
Thanks for explaining that.
Curious.
Why? Is this just a novelty thing, or is their a perceived layer of additional security provided by doing this?
I've noticed a few places (the US Post Office, for one) that way in big letters they won't accept cards that say "See ID".
If you think about how easy it is to forge an ID, this is even LESS secure. If I got ahold of your physical card, I could then easily get an ID made with *MY* pic, and my version of your signature.
The clerk would accept YOUR card from me, look at this fake ID, and see the sig I just dropped on the paper receipt matches the one on the fake ID perfectly.
I understand your logic, but why do you care so much? I usually get more upset when some clerk wants to check my signature for a low-value (= $250) purchase.
*I* am not liable for fraudulent charges if my card is stolen. I don't care if the merchant checks my sig or not, it's all the same to me.
You seem to be basing your point on the idea that I'm standing idly by and bitching. All I'm saying is that I think this particular "hack" is a little bit trivial to be called a "hack". As someone else pointed out, it might be better to apply "kludge" to this one.
FTR, I've done a number of hardware and software "hacks" myself. Had I wanted to accomplish a set of cordless headphones, *I* would have done it by way of an RF transmitter/receiver pair so that the Shuffle is still accessable and controllable. The reason I didn't do it is because the whole resultant product is not really something I have a use for.
If you're going to post something on the Internet, then you can/should expect that not ALL your feedback is going to be smoke-up-your-ass-sunshine.
BTW, I don't think an all black canvas is "art" either, but that is an entirely different argument.
You're right, this is more of a "neat stuff" than a "hack".
I'm familiar with alt.hack as well. But I'd like the think that we have progressed a little. I know there are 1000 bits that can be taped, glued, and/or soldered together to make other interesting bits, but that doesn't mean they are noteworthy.
We either need a new word that is like hack++ to differentiate the real interesting hacks from the lame ones, or we need a word that would be more like --hack for the entry-level hacks.
How exactly do old-ass headphones give you "street cred".
Not to mention this whole "hack" is so non-Apple. There is no "style" to it, and it's cumbersome. Not to mention that the Shuffle in one of the ear cups probably affects the sound quality a bit.
I'm also a little tired of the "hack" moniker being thrown around so readily. Soldering a couple of wires together is not a "hack" in most cases, it's just... well... soldering.
Take the shuffle apart, integrate its electronics into the headphones, and port the controls and I/O to the outside, keeping the same layout so that the headphones have a "hint of shuffle" to them (maybe even paint the headphones a nice eggshell white). THAT would be closer to a hack, IMO.
Uhhh... maybe you should try doing the math to figure it out?
Dvorak must be buying crack by the bushel these days. He's off in left field waving his arms going "Look at me! Look at me!".
I wish they would just retire that poor old fool before he embarrasses himself even more.
15 or so years ago Dvorak had some insightful articles, even if they didn't always come 100% true. Nowadays he's another has-been from a past era trying to pimp his FUD and general tech conspiracy theories. IMO, if you steadily bet AGAINST Dvorak you'll come out ahead over the long run.
In the days of 10Mhz 286's I used to really enjoy John's columns. Now, I don't know if I've just gotten smarter, or he's gotten dumber (heh), but I can't remember the last time he didn't seem like a technology lunatic to me.
Yet another pointless case-mod story. And it's not even that well executed. The stupid clear window will get all scratched and fugly looking if it actually does any real travel, and those knobs, ports, etc on the end are sure to be broken in short order.
A decent laptop plus smallish Etherhub or two is more useful (consider that a laptop has an LCD screen and can run of it's own batterY), probably 1/2 the cost, and 2x more portable.
These fools actually thing someone is going to PAY them to duplicate this horrid experiment?
Heh. No.
Invensys was pushing RFID tags about 4-5 years ago for food products as part of their smart kitchen appliances...
Interestingly enough, I saw the prototype for that Polara range about 3 years ago. The story line then was that they would have a whole line of kitchen appliances that communicated over a bluetooth like network. There was going to be a co-marketed deal with Kraft and other food companies to have these "meal" concepts and the UPC codes would be recognized by the appliances. The idea was that you stick the various components of dinner in the appliances (range(s), microwave, convection oven, etc) and you tell it when you want dinner to be ready, then they all work together to get the portions done at the same time (ie: the range might signal the micro when the meat is almost done to start nuking some sort of vegetable side dish).
So, this story is all about how people took some hardware and stuck it in a case that wasn't originally intended to hold that hardware?
Oh, gee. What an original concept.
You get Internet service for $60/year? Is it IP over Avian Carrier?
No, but I might wander in and turn his TV upside down or something. That would depend on my mood, peeing on the carpet would be mean (albeit humorous). Fucking with his AP isn't mean, and is intended to provide a doze of clue-x-four (which admittedly doesn't seem to be working).
Why do these still make it to /.? I feel bad for the person who submitted the story, and bad for the editor that posted it.
Yes, there is just no end to the amount of hollow objects that can hold a modern small form-factor PC system board.
It's no longer considerd creative to wedge a system board into some makeshift case. Hopefully this will be realized before we have to see every possible iteration.
Thanks for saving me the trouble of posting essentially the same message.
A PC is just not a work of art, sorry. The best boxen are the ones that are silently, cooly, tucked out of the way somewhere.
Why does it sometimes seem that an entire generation has just discovered a 30 year old piece of technology (LEDs) and now feels compelled to put them EVERYWHERE remote'y near a DC power source?
I saw some RAM advertised yesterday that had 16 LEDs on the top that went around in a chase pattern, and it also had (as they termed it) "blue ground effects lighting".
My home AP is named "FuckOff". It's secured (to the extent that an AP *can* be secured) well enough.
My neighbor INSISTS on leaving his WRT54G unsecured. I change it whenever I'm bored (I've also connected to the LAN, and then to one of his shared printers and printed out some "interesting" photos). I'll name his AP stuff like "pimpwifi" "secureme" "hellomike", etc. Nothing too interesting really.
And you'd be in the restraunt business for about 2 days.
Power costs, on average, 12 cents per KwH. The cost of someone plugging in a laptop to charge for an hour is far less than the cost of the paper cup the coffee they bought was served in.
Your talk about using a filtered/protected extention lead is also silly. Most devices these days have power supplys that can work happily on anything from 90-260VAC. They take in AC, and output DC, and thus have a degree of filtering built in already. Furthermore laptop power bricks and such are pretty much desgined to be used in all sorts of environments. I'd worry more about the contaminantes in the water they used to make my Latte than I would worry about a bit of noise or ripple on the AC.
I believe that John Kerry's political campaign was an experiment to see just how much Americans would tolerate in terms of an ill-prepped candidate as a dry run for Hillary's '08 presidential bid.
32M is still a relatively small number compared to the overall American population (~300M).
I find most blogs so bland and boring that I don't see the reward in trying to separate the wheat from the chaff in them. Sure, some are funny, or informed, or insightful, but SO many are just pointless ramblings mixed in with malformed thoughts and opinions.
Blogs are one of those things that I am absolutely shocked have gotten so much attention.
Ucentric has also been quietly trudging away in this space from the old DEC headquarters in Maynard, MA. (http://www.ucentric.com)
They did trials of their product with Comcast and AT&T (before it was bought by Comcast), and now have a rollout with Voom (the also-ran HD sat company).
It's a good, stable, platform, but never seems to get any press (or customers). Linux based (Debian) with some fancy bits globbed on.
The real sweet spot is in their thin clients and distribution technologies. Imagine having ALL of your PVR's content available simultaneously from every TV (or PC) in the house, from a client a little bigger than a pack of smokes. And, you don't need to run a bunch of Cat5 to get the signal to the other TV's, an old piece of coax will do just fine.
Exit polls from this election are about as useful as a rnadom number generator to provide the results. So many people were inclined to either withold their info, provide misleading answers, or oherwise skew the results that they are meaningless.
IMO grasping at the "exit poll" straw is clinging to an antiquated methodology that is no longer relevant. This election was VERY heated, and I think that people are just getting tired of getting raped of their personal information.