ticalc.org features on slashdot?
on
Happy Pi Day!
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Contratulation to ticalc for getting one of their (often considered completely useless) features posted as a slashdot article! That's the first time I've seen one of those, and I've been following both sites for a pretty long time. ticalc.org is finally getting some recognition. For what? I'm not sure; the article was in the humor category.
Anyway, why hasn't anyone posted with how many digits of pi they have memorized (like they have all over the ticalc page)? I must admit I can only do 31 from memory, which is a lot for most poeple, but not very much at all compared to some freaks. 231 was the most claimed so far on the ticalc.org page, 45 the most I've seen in person, and I believe the world record is over 40,000. Yes, that's 40,000.
(There's no point in me posting the actual digits because there's no proof that I memorized them. The claim is just as valid as the digits, on a web forum.)
LOL! I've had the idea on a few occasions to take up the cause of good grammar and style on slashdot, but I always figured it would take too much time and effort. This is the first time I've seen one of your posts. How long have you been doing this? Is there just one of you, or do you have friends? If not, I'd be willing to set up a real slashdot account for the Grammar Man, with a public password, that any grammar-minded person could post under. What do you think of the idea?
Since this is the first and only intelligent post on this thread, I'll respond to it, even though it's quite a bit OT.
Being the libetarian type of person I am, I certainly agree with the notion that weapon possesion ensures liberty and democracy. I also agree that handguns or rifles or whatever people like to own won't make much difference in that type of fight.
However, I think referring to it as a fallacious argument is overreacting a little. First, even if the total gun ownership in the nation won't make a dent in the armament controlled by the military, that doesn't mean we should end right there and just take them away. Every little bit will help, if it comes down to it. Second, I highly doubt the military would resort to using biological weapons on US citizens. They don't even do that in places liike Libya or North Korea (that we know about, at least), so to think that they would use bio. weapons, or nuclear weapons, on its own citizens is inconceivable. Guns, therefore, could make a little difference, but I admit, not as much as in 1780.
There has been some kind of precedent from way back when that some weapons are just too dangerous for the public to own. Chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons certainly, and I would probably agree with that one. Also, any kind of large explosives ar either banned or highly controlled. Claiming that we would need bombs in the event we have to revolt against a civilized government might be a valid argument for large explosive ownership, until you realize that the potential for abuse is simply too large, from a utilitarian point of view, to allow. In other words, so many more people would die if random people could own huge explosives, that it's probably worth lessening the chances the citizens would win such a revolt. The question is how far you want to extend that argument. Nuclear bombs, biological weapons, of course. But will you extend it all the way down to automatic or semi-automatic weapons, or even handguns, and say that it's worth saving those lives, even though it lowers the chances that the people win their future revolt by x%? It's a question of balancing the two interests, and it's not one that can be answered easily and consistently. But next time you think about gun control and liberty, remember it's a continuium all the way from the H-bomb to firecrackers. How many lives do we want to save and how much do we want to risk the triumph of a totalitarian state?
[[ If this sounds disjointed and unorganized, it's because I wrote it down as I though of it, and I just had a few drinks. Thanks for reading. ]]
The only way I could see to do it (from a technological point of view) would be to monitor the source ports for outgoing connections. Win9x starts numbering ports at some low number, possibly 1024 (I haven't done that much research). Most NAT software remaps those ports to somewhere above 60000. If they start watching your port numbers, they can tell when you're not using plain old win9x. Of course, this would also detect those subversive alternative operating systems, like linux. Then again, based on some of the horror stores I've heard about cable ISP's, I would not be surprised if they suspended a linux users account for suspected NAT use, even if he wasn't using it:)
I have a cable modem and a local network, with three user nodes. This new modem would be great for a simple shared connection, but what if I want more? I want an IMAP mail server so that I can get saved mail from any of the three computers. I want an http server to use netscape roaming access, so I can get my bookmarks and preferences anywhere. I want a samba server to keep documents centralized and make backups easy. I want port forwarding to make servers on internal nodes visible.
All those features make home network much easier for the users (just ask my parents:) ), but you can't do any of that with this simple modem. You need a server. Load linux on it, enable ip masquerading, named, and then configure to taste. I admit that most people wouldn't be able to set up all these features. My setup is not for everyone. I just don't want people to think this is the ultimate tool for a home network. Also, I'm predicting that people are going to want far more bandwidth than HomePNA can ever provide. I mean 100BaseT, for decent quality video between two points. If you do it yourself, with NICs, cat5, and a switch (yes, a switch. they're amazingly cheap these days, so buy one.), you'll have much more room for expansion in the future.
In case you're wondering, my server is a $100 compaq from onsale.com. It's running RH6.1. No keyboard, mouse, or monitor. I get mail for all four family members with fetchmail, and serve it with imapd. It's a nice combination, and very easy to set up. All three clients run netscape mail under various windows versions. Roaming access for netscape is possible with some creative tweaks to apache. It's a _very_ nice feature. Use it. Other services: sendmail (for fetchmail and mailman mailing lists), apache, ssh, samba, ftp. If you're smart, you'll run a dhcp server too.
> With Windows, an evil pirate cannot recompile the kernel to snoop on a process, defeat anti-debugging measures or redirect output to a file
Of course you can because Windows' security (9x, not necessarily NT) sucks incredibly. You can easily write a vxd and have it loaded dynamically by ANY PROCESS and ANY USER which will have COMPLETE CONTROL of the computer, even assigning itself realtime priority if it wants. (I think they call it Ring 0 status in the windows world.) If you don't want to go that route, just load the offending application as a debug process and there you go: instant access to all of its memory!
And since windows 9x is the most popular desktop os, the products which we want to hack will have to be released for it. Wasn't there a program released a while back that intercepted the audio being played by liquid audio and saved it as a wav? Don't worry about getting information out of windows. In most cases, it'll be easier than under linux.
It is true, though, that an open-source version of liquid audio can never be released. However, a binary-only version for linux would be just as, or more, secure than the same thing running on windows.
Try Daggerfall, and the other games in that series (not Battlespire, that's different). I haven't played them, but I've read a bit about them, and they're supposed to be extremely free in what you can do. Info at: http://www.bethsoft.com/games/daggerfall.html Or just plain www.bethsoft.com
[[[ I posted this on another article a few days ago, but it applies here too. ]]]
Last thursday at the LinuxWorldExpo, I bought one of those DVD shirts, you know, the ones with DVD CSS crossed out on the front and the acutal code on the back... copyleft sells them.
Anyway, today, I wore it to school and to the meeting of our political debate club. A bunch of people asked about it and I briefly explained the issue. Many thought the shirt was funny, but all of them roughly understood the issue. Of course, you can't wear it every day, but buy one and wear it as much as you can; explain to random people who ask about it what the issue is. Spread awareness in general. I found that most people, even people who are into technology and computers, don't know about this particular issue. So teach them. Wear the shirt!
Yesterday at the LinuxWorldExpo, I bought one of those DVD shirts, you know, the ones with DVD CSS crossed out on the front and the acutal code on the back... copyleft sells them.
Anyway, today, I wore it to school and to the meeting of our political debate club. A bunch of people asked about it and I briefly explained the issue. Many thought the shirt was funny, but all of them roughly understood the issue. Of course, you can't wear it every day, but buy one and wear it as much as you can; explain to random people who ask about it what the issue is. Spread awareness in general. I found that most people, even people who are into technology and computers, don't know about this particular issue. So teach them. Wear the shirt!
> XOR the two encrypted messages, you'll get the key back
No, the key will XOR out and you'll get two messages XOR'd with each other. It will look pretty much meaningless, but there are some statistical methods you can use to recreate one or both of the messages, which will let you get the key. It's definitely a huge weakness of the OTP, but it's not as easy to get the key as you indicate.
Um... DES has been around for a very long time (decades), and it's still uncrackable by most casual cryptographers. Triple DES is still strong against most anyone, except the NSA and some other governments. Any maybe a few major international corporations. Good cryptography is made to last decades, if it wasn't, no one would use it. Saying that it's good if it lasts 5 years without being broken is like saying a computer is good if it can go five minutes without crashing.
While we're all having fun with the newest member of the series, don't forget to pay homage to what I consider one of the best games of all time: King's Bounty. It was the first HOM&M before it was called HOM&M. I believe it came out around 1991, +/- 1. You can pick up a cracked copy at http://underdogs.gamingdepot.com/ It's for dos, but it'll probably run under dosemu. I haven't tried, though.
This was also the first game I tried "hacking", albeit in very limited ways. Mainly, I messed around with the saved game files in a hex editor. I was young then... don't laugh at me:)
You probably won't ever read this.. but what the hell:
Napster transfers files peer to peer, so you just have to do a netstat while you're transfering, and you get the ip of the person distributing illegal stuff. You can then use a reverse lookup to get his isp, and mail their abuse address. There you go... shut down. It's the same as running an FTP server on a stealth port (a high port number), which you should do anyway if you're doing illegal stuff with FTP. Also, with the ip, those losers can pound all they want. The extra step for netstat isn't that difficult.
If you find napster buggy and the servers crappy (as I also do), you might want to try CuteMX. The software is much nicer and it has a lot of nice features (virtual fs, multithreaded downloads, and more). The servers are good also. The only problem is it's in closed beta, meaning you can't download it from their site (same ppl as cuteftp). However, it's pretty easy to get if you look hard enough. Try ftpsearch.lycos.com, and ask people on IRC. I can also send it to you if you want.
It's nice and neat that people can now set up their own napster servers so that it'll be easier to evade the RIAA and other assorted annoyances, but consider for a minute why anyone needs this proprietary protocol for something as simple as file sharing? What ever happened to FTP, a classic file-transfer protocol that has withstood the test of time? (I can't help the cliches... sorry.) An FTP server (there are free ones available for every OS) is much more flexable than running a napster client and picking one directory. FTP servers support virtual file systems, so you can have files on more than one physical computer appear under one FS (as I do) and both private and anonymous accounts, so you can control who gets access to what. It can also do things like ratios, which I find annoying, but some people like.
So what does napster do that FTP doesn't? First, chat. That's simple, just use IRC. Done. Second, searching. OK, there are already FTP search engines, and some might have open source. Let's all just pick one (or many) and let it index our FTP sites. How about audiogalaxy.com, mp3.lycos.com, oth.net? There we go: searching. Napster can search on bitrate... ok, that's not too hard to bulid into the ftp search engine. Instant messaging? That's probably the worst napster feature, as it adds one to an already too-long list of IM programs. What's wrong with ICQ, AIM, Jabber, etc? Even IRC can kinda emulate instant messaging.
So we already have programs with open protocols and open source that can do everything napster can, and do it better in every case. Why would we use this closed and inherently limited protocol for anything at all? Honestly, the only two reasons I can think of are these: it forces everyone to not have ratios for downloading, and it's easier to set up than an FTP server. The first isn't a big deal and can be handled by a community decision. The second is more of a problem, but someone can just make an FTP server that's simple to set up (only need to specify one directry) and it'll even contact the FTP spider and everything. It can't be that hard.
It's always nice to see some quality original humor here on slashdot. My only suggestion would be to put in the names of the characters speaking the lines. Then again, maybe it's just best how it is...
It's called Habitat for Humanity, and I know a friend who did it last summer, he said it was one of the best experiences of his life. I strongly suggest that all geeks try volunteering for them some time. I'm certainly considering it.
Re:What's the difference between this and radio?
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MP3.com's Beam-It
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I've read that some of the restrictions include not playing more than a certain number of songs from one artist in a certain amount of time, and not playing more than a certain number of songs from the same album in a certain amount of time. That would pretty much eliminate the kind of request radio the original poster wanted. However, try http://www.launch.com for an interesting implementation of the same concept.
Bah. That attitude is not shown by any evidence anywhere. True, he plans to devote a lot of time and money to philanthropy, but he's not trying to "cash in." You see, he honestly believes that he is doing the world a favor by pushing his software on everyone and everything. He thinks that Microsoft will lead the world into a uptopian age of information and communication for everyone. We know that he's been going about that the wrong way, but you know how people with a vision are. And he certainly has one; it's what's been keeping Microsoft constantly "innovating" (once in a while, they _do_ come up with something slightly new) and pushing its software into every crevice of the modern world. He wants to help us all. He doesn't care about the money; do you really think you can tell the difference between $50 billion and $200 billion? The exact amount of money he has doesn't mean anything, he'll still manage to break every philanthropic record with what he has now (or even 5 years ago). He's in it for his vision, for helping humanity. He would never try to "escape" as the object of this reply put it. We can see that he's a bit misguided (ok, a lot), but it's his vision.
(Oh no! A post that's slightly pro-MS? Quick! Moderate!)
I just have to include a link: www.douglasadams.com/dna/pedants.html It's funny. Read it. Unfortunately, I can't resolve the domain right now for some reason. Hope you have better luck.
I just have to include a link: www.douglasadams.com/dna/pedants.html It's funny. Read it. Unfortunately, I can't resolve the domain right now for some reason. Hope you have better luck.
Very true, I skipped a bit over the platform issue because it wasn't entirely relevant to my argument and I would have been a bit boring. But I'll explain further now. The ultimate "platform" for life is the physical universe, but that doesn't really mean much because digital electronic comptuers also operate in the physical world. Just as computers have structures bulit in the physicsl world, biology must also. When I said the cytoplasm was the platform, I was going for the concept of cytoplasm as "all the stuff in the cell that is responsible for the transcription, translation, and ultimate expression of DNA". The proteins responsible for this stuff are suprisingly constant in most organism. In fact, the largest difference between these support structures occurs between the prokaryotes (bacteria) and eukaryotes (everything else). Since we're talking about bacteria, the simplest way to do "execute" this "program" would be to synthesize the genome, then get bacteria to take it in (there are techniques for this) and discard all of its old DNA (perhaps a bit harder). Then we would have a bacterium with RNA transcriptase, ribosomes, folding chaperones, etc., everything that we need to get this new DNA expressed as proteins. Let's say the new plan for a ribosome was slightly different than the old one (that's already present in the cell). You would probably observe, as the bacteria went through its life processes, that the old ribosomes would gradually decrease in number and the new ones increase, until the bacterium would be almost entirely created according to the new plans. These new plans would, of couse, have to specify how to create all of the infrastructure themselves.
Come to think of it, that right there is probably the spot this analogy crashes hardest: no digital comptuer program must contain the instructions for its hardware, operating system, and compiler, all in one. Yet DNA contains all those things, and one placed in an environment that will interpret it (any old bacterium will do), it will eventually produce the life form that it codes for.
You are right when you say "The 'platform' controls the 'code' much more than in a computer." The DNA must simultaneously contain the instructions for the platform and the code that runs on it. It IS the platform, as much as it is the code.
I've seen a few people mention this, so I thought I'd clear it up.
The person who invented PCR is Kary Mullis. He's written a book, _Dancing Naked in the Mind Field_, in which he talks about a whole bunch of stuff, mostly related to science. Interestingly, he writes about how the people he worked for at the time when he invented it (Cetus) took the rights for the reaction away from him and compensated him with significantly less that he thought he deserved (and probably did deserve).
He also writes about hallucinogenic (sp?) drugs, poisonous spiders, current trends in pseudoscience, and a whole array of intersting topics. I'd reccomend this book to anyone who's ever read about science or had any thoughs on the subject. Yes, that means you. It's a great "mind opener."
I wold envision debugging as something like what many microbiologists already do: set up large plates with lots of tiny wells where bacteria can grow. Each well has a slightly different bacterium in it. This way, lots of different strains can be analyzed in parallel. To take it a little further, since we are speaking of the physical world as a computer, and the physical world is inherently parallel, it would be quite a error not to take advantage of this built in feature.
Yes, of course, mutation would be have to be taken into account. The best way would be to study how nature has found a way around the problem: error correcting copying enzymes, "junk DNA" (some studies show it might no be as useless as once thought), large volume of offspring, etc. Or we could harness mutation (as the agent of natural selection) as an optimizer for our "code". Thje time spans involved there might be prohibitory, though.
Slashdot Mirror
> She does attend a U.S. school
It's Schreiber High School in Port Washington, NY
Contratulation to ticalc for getting one of their (often considered completely useless) features posted as a slashdot article! That's the first time I've seen one of those, and I've been following both sites for a pretty long time. ticalc.org is finally getting some recognition. For what? I'm not sure; the article was in the humor category.
Anyway, why hasn't anyone posted with how many digits of pi they have memorized (like they have all over the ticalc page)? I must admit I can only do 31 from memory, which is a lot for most poeple, but not very much at all compared to some freaks. 231 was the most claimed so far on the ticalc.org page, 45 the most I've seen in person, and I believe the world record is over 40,000. Yes, that's 40,000.
(There's no point in me posting the actual digits because there's no proof that I memorized them. The claim is just as valid as the digits, on a web forum.)
LOL! I've had the idea on a few occasions to take up the cause of good grammar and style on slashdot, but I always figured it would take too much time and effort. This is the first time I've seen one of your posts. How long have you been doing this? Is there just one of you, or do you have friends? If not, I'd be willing to set up a real slashdot account for the Grammar Man, with a public password, that any grammar-minded person could post under. What do you think of the idea?
Since this is the first and only intelligent post on this thread, I'll respond to it, even though it's quite a bit OT.
Being the libetarian type of person I am, I certainly agree with the notion that weapon possesion ensures liberty and democracy. I also agree that handguns or rifles or whatever people like to own won't make much difference in that type of fight.
However, I think referring to it as a fallacious argument is overreacting a little. First, even if the total gun ownership in the nation won't make a dent in the armament controlled by the military, that doesn't mean we should end right there and just take them away. Every little bit will help, if it comes down to it. Second, I highly doubt the military would resort to using biological weapons on US citizens. They don't even do that in places liike Libya or North Korea (that we know about, at least), so to think that they would use bio. weapons, or nuclear weapons, on its own citizens is inconceivable. Guns, therefore, could make a little difference, but I admit, not as much as in 1780.
There has been some kind of precedent from way back when that some weapons are just too dangerous for the public to own. Chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons certainly, and I would probably agree with that one. Also, any kind of large explosives ar either banned or highly controlled. Claiming that we would need bombs in the event we have to revolt against a civilized government might be a valid argument for large explosive ownership, until you realize that the potential for abuse is simply too large, from a utilitarian point of view, to allow. In other words, so many more people would die if random people could own huge explosives, that it's probably worth lessening the chances the citizens would win such a revolt. The question is how far you want to extend that argument. Nuclear bombs, biological weapons, of course. But will you extend it all the way down to automatic or semi-automatic weapons, or even handguns, and say that it's worth saving those lives, even though it lowers the chances that the people win their future revolt by x%? It's a question of balancing the two interests, and it's not one that can be answered easily and consistently. But next time you think about gun control and liberty, remember it's a continuium all the way from the H-bomb to firecrackers. How many lives do we want to save and how much do we want to risk the triumph of a totalitarian state?
[[ If this sounds disjointed and unorganized, it's because I wrote it down as I though of it, and I just had a few drinks. Thanks for reading. ]]
The only way I could see to do it (from a technological point of view) would be to monitor the source ports for outgoing connections. Win9x starts numbering ports at some low number, possibly 1024 (I haven't done that much research). Most NAT software remaps those ports to somewhere above 60000. If they start watching your port numbers, they can tell when you're not using plain old win9x. Of course, this would also detect those subversive alternative operating systems, like linux. Then again, based on some of the horror stores I've heard about cable ISP's, I would not be surprised if they suspended a linux users account for suspected NAT use, even if he wasn't using it :)
I have a cable modem and a local network, with three user nodes. This new modem would be great for a simple shared connection, but what if I want more? I want an IMAP mail server so that I can get saved mail from any of the three computers. I want an http server to use netscape roaming access, so I can get my bookmarks and preferences anywhere. I want a samba server to keep documents centralized and make backups easy. I want port forwarding to make servers on internal nodes visible.
:) ), but you can't do any of that with this simple modem. You need a server. Load linux on it, enable ip masquerading, named, and then configure to taste. I admit that most people wouldn't be able to set up all these features. My setup is not for everyone. I just don't want people to think this is the ultimate tool for a home network. Also, I'm predicting that people are going to want far more bandwidth than HomePNA can ever provide. I mean 100BaseT, for decent quality video between two points. If you do it yourself, with NICs, cat5, and a switch (yes, a switch. they're amazingly cheap these days, so buy one.), you'll have much more room for expansion in the future.
All those features make home network much easier for the users (just ask my parents
In case you're wondering, my server is a $100 compaq from onsale.com. It's running RH6.1. No keyboard, mouse, or monitor. I get mail for all four family members with fetchmail, and serve it with imapd. It's a nice combination, and very easy to set up. All three clients run netscape mail under various windows versions. Roaming access for netscape is possible with some creative tweaks to apache. It's a _very_ nice feature. Use it. Other services: sendmail (for fetchmail and mailman mailing lists), apache, ssh, samba, ftp. If you're smart, you'll run a dhcp server too.
> With Windows, an evil pirate cannot recompile the kernel to snoop on a process, defeat anti-debugging measures or redirect output to a file
Of course you can because Windows' security (9x, not necessarily NT) sucks incredibly. You can easily write a vxd and have it loaded dynamically by ANY PROCESS and ANY USER which will have COMPLETE CONTROL of the computer, even assigning itself realtime priority if it wants. (I think they call it Ring 0 status in the windows world.) If you don't want to go that route, just load the offending application as a debug process and there you go: instant access to all of its memory!
And since windows 9x is the most popular desktop os, the products which we want to hack will have to be released for it. Wasn't there a program released a while back that intercepted the audio being played by liquid audio and saved it as a wav? Don't worry about getting information out of windows. In most cases, it'll be easier than under linux.
It is true, though, that an open-source version of liquid audio can never be released. However, a binary-only version for linux would be just as, or more, secure than the same thing running on windows.
Try Daggerfall, and the other games in that series (not Battlespire, that's different). I haven't played them, but I've read a bit about them, and they're supposed to be extremely free in what you can do.
Info at:
http://www.bethsoft.com/games/daggerfall.html
Or just plain www.bethsoft.com
[[[ I posted this on another article a few days ago, but it applies here too. ]]]
Last thursday at the LinuxWorldExpo, I bought one of those DVD shirts, you know, the ones with DVD CSS crossed out on the front and the acutal code on the back... copyleft sells them.
Anyway, today, I wore it to school and to the meeting of our political debate club. A bunch of people asked about it and I briefly explained the issue. Many thought the shirt was funny, but all of them roughly understood the issue. Of course, you can't wear it every day, but buy one and wear it as much as you can; explain to random people who ask about it what the issue is. Spread awareness in general. I found that most people, even people who are into technology and computers, don't know about this particular issue. So teach them. Wear the shirt!
Yesterday at the LinuxWorldExpo, I bought one of those DVD shirts, you know, the ones with DVD CSS crossed out on the front and the acutal code on the back... copyleft sells them.
Anyway, today, I wore it to school and to the meeting of our political debate club. A bunch of people asked about it and I briefly explained the issue. Many thought the shirt was funny, but all of them roughly understood the issue. Of course, you can't wear it every day, but buy one and wear it as much as you can; explain to random people who ask about it what the issue is. Spread awareness in general. I found that most people, even people who are into technology and computers, don't know about this particular issue. So teach them. Wear the shirt!
> XOR the two encrypted messages, you'll get the key back
No, the key will XOR out and you'll get two messages XOR'd with each other. It will look pretty much meaningless, but there are some statistical methods you can use to recreate one or both of the messages, which will let you get the key. It's definitely a huge weakness of the OTP, but it's not as easy to get the key as you indicate.
Um... DES has been around for a very long time (decades), and it's still uncrackable by most casual cryptographers. Triple DES is still strong against most anyone, except the NSA and some other governments. Any maybe a few major international corporations. Good cryptography is made to last decades, if it wasn't, no one would use it. Saying that it's good if it lasts 5 years without being broken is like saying a computer is good if it can go five minutes without crashing.
While we're all having fun with the newest member of the series, don't forget to pay homage to what I consider one of the best games of all time: King's Bounty. It was the first HOM&M before it was called HOM&M. I believe it came out around 1991, +/- 1. You can pick up a cracked copy at
:)
http://underdogs.gamingdepot.com/
It's for dos, but it'll probably run under dosemu. I haven't tried, though.
This was also the first game I tried "hacking", albeit in very limited ways. Mainly, I messed around with the saved game files in a hex editor. I was young then... don't laugh at me
You probably won't ever read this.. but what the hell:
Napster transfers files peer to peer, so you just have to do a netstat while you're transfering, and you get the ip of the person distributing illegal stuff. You can then use a reverse lookup to get his isp, and mail their abuse address. There you go... shut down. It's the same as running an FTP server on a stealth port (a high port number), which you should do anyway if you're doing illegal stuff with FTP. Also, with the ip, those losers can pound all they want. The extra step for netstat isn't that difficult.
If you find napster buggy and the servers crappy (as I also do), you might want to try CuteMX. The software is much nicer and it has a lot of nice features (virtual fs, multithreaded downloads, and more). The servers are good also. The only problem is it's in closed beta, meaning you can't download it from their site (same ppl as cuteftp). However, it's pretty easy to get if you look hard enough. Try ftpsearch.lycos.com, and ask people on IRC. I can also send it to you if you want.
It's nice and neat that people can now set up their own napster servers so that it'll be easier to evade the RIAA and other assorted annoyances, but consider for a minute why anyone needs this proprietary protocol for something as simple as file sharing? What ever happened to FTP, a classic file-transfer protocol that has withstood the test of time? (I can't help the cliches... sorry.) An FTP server (there are free ones available for every OS) is much more flexable than running a napster client and picking one directory. FTP servers support virtual file systems, so you can have files on more than one physical computer appear under one FS (as I do) and both private and anonymous accounts, so you can control who gets access to what. It can also do things like ratios, which I find annoying, but some people like.
So what does napster do that FTP doesn't? First, chat. That's simple, just use IRC. Done. Second, searching. OK, there are already FTP search engines, and some might have open source. Let's all just pick one (or many) and let it index our FTP sites. How about audiogalaxy.com, mp3.lycos.com, oth.net? There we go: searching. Napster can search on bitrate... ok, that's not too hard to bulid into the ftp search engine. Instant messaging? That's probably the worst napster feature, as it adds one to an already too-long list of IM programs. What's wrong with ICQ, AIM, Jabber, etc? Even IRC can kinda emulate instant messaging.
So we already have programs with open protocols and open source that can do everything napster can, and do it better in every case. Why would we use this closed and inherently limited protocol for anything at all? Honestly, the only two reasons I can think of are these: it forces everyone to not have ratios for downloading, and it's easier to set up than an FTP server. The first isn't a big deal and can be handled by a community decision. The second is more of a problem, but someone can just make an FTP server that's simple to set up (only need to specify one directry) and it'll even contact the FTP spider and everything. It can't be that hard.
/nt/
It's always nice to see some quality original humor here on slashdot. My only suggestion would be to put in the names of the characters speaking the lines. Then again, maybe it's just best how it is...
It's called Habitat for Humanity, and I know a friend who did it last summer, he said it was one of the best experiences of his life. I strongly suggest that all geeks try volunteering for them some time. I'm certainly considering it.
I've read that some of the restrictions include not playing more than a certain number of songs from one artist in a certain amount of time, and not playing more than a certain number of songs from the same album in a certain amount of time. That would pretty much eliminate the kind of request radio the original poster wanted. However, try http://www.launch.com for an interesting implementation of the same concept.
Bah. That attitude is not shown by any evidence anywhere. True, he plans to devote a lot of time and money to philanthropy, but he's not trying to "cash in." You see, he honestly believes that he is doing the world a favor by pushing his software on everyone and everything. He thinks that Microsoft will lead the world into a uptopian age of information and communication for everyone. We know that he's been going about that the wrong way, but you know how people with a vision are. And he certainly has one; it's what's been keeping Microsoft constantly "innovating" (once in a while, they _do_ come up with something slightly new) and pushing its software into every crevice of the modern world. He wants to help us all. He doesn't care about the money; do you really think you can tell the difference between $50 billion and $200 billion? The exact amount of money he has doesn't mean anything, he'll still manage to break every philanthropic record with what he has now (or even 5 years ago). He's in it for his vision, for helping humanity. He would never try to "escape" as the object of this reply put it. We can see that he's a bit misguided (ok, a lot), but it's his vision.
(Oh no! A post that's slightly pro-MS? Quick! Moderate!)
I just have to include a link:
www.douglasadams.com/dna/pedants.html
It's funny. Read it.
Unfortunately, I can't resolve the domain right now for some reason. Hope you have better luck.
I just have to include a link:
www.douglasadams.com/dna/pedants.html
It's funny. Read it.
Unfortunately, I can't resolve the domain right now for some reason. Hope you have better luck.
Very true, I skipped a bit over the platform issue because it wasn't entirely relevant to my argument and I would have been a bit boring. But I'll explain further now.
The ultimate "platform" for life is the physical universe, but that doesn't really mean much because digital electronic comptuers also operate in the physical world. Just as computers have structures bulit in the physicsl world, biology must also.
When I said the cytoplasm was the platform, I was going for the concept of cytoplasm as "all the stuff in the cell that is responsible for the transcription, translation, and ultimate expression of DNA". The proteins responsible for this stuff are suprisingly constant in most organism. In fact, the largest difference between these support structures occurs between the prokaryotes (bacteria) and eukaryotes (everything else). Since we're talking about bacteria, the simplest way to do "execute" this "program" would be to synthesize the genome, then get bacteria to take it in (there are techniques for this) and discard all of its old DNA (perhaps a bit harder). Then we would have a bacterium with RNA transcriptase, ribosomes, folding chaperones, etc., everything that we need to get this new DNA expressed as proteins. Let's say the new plan for a ribosome was slightly different than the old one (that's already present in the cell). You would probably observe, as the bacteria went through its life processes, that the old ribosomes would gradually decrease in number and the new ones increase, until the bacterium would be almost entirely created according to the new plans. These new plans would, of couse, have to specify how to create all of the infrastructure themselves.
Come to think of it, that right there is probably the spot this analogy crashes hardest: no digital comptuer program must contain the instructions for its hardware, operating system, and compiler, all in one. Yet DNA contains all those things, and one placed in an environment that will interpret it (any old bacterium will do), it will eventually produce the life form that it codes for.
You are right when you say "The 'platform' controls the 'code' much more than in a computer." The DNA must simultaneously contain the instructions for the platform and the code that runs on it. It IS the platform, as much as it is the code.
I've seen a few people mention this, so I thought I'd clear it up.
The person who invented PCR is Kary Mullis. He's written a book, _Dancing Naked in the Mind Field_, in which he talks about a whole bunch of stuff, mostly related to science. Interestingly, he writes about how the people he worked for at the time when he invented it (Cetus) took the rights for the reaction away from him and compensated him with significantly less that he thought he deserved (and probably did deserve).
He also writes about hallucinogenic (sp?) drugs, poisonous spiders, current trends in pseudoscience, and a whole array of intersting topics. I'd reccomend this book to anyone who's ever read about science or had any thoughs on the subject. Yes, that means you. It's a great "mind opener."
Well, no analogy is perfect :)
I wold envision debugging as something like what many microbiologists already do: set up large plates with lots of tiny wells where bacteria can grow. Each well has a slightly different bacterium in it. This way, lots of different strains can be analyzed in parallel. To take it a little further, since we are speaking of the physical world as a computer, and the physical world is inherently parallel, it would be quite a error not to take advantage of this built in feature.
Yes, of course, mutation would be have to be taken into account. The best way would be to study how nature has found a way around the problem: error correcting copying enzymes, "junk DNA" (some studies show it might no be as useless as once thought), large volume of offspring, etc. Or we could harness mutation (as the agent of natural selection) as an optimizer for our "code". Thje time spans involved there might be prohibitory, though.