With any of several HDTV tuner cards (HiPix, AccessDTV, and MyHD, to name three) you can do timeshifting and in some cases editing of HD material. For example, I record "Alias" in HD every week and archive it to DVD-R. It's a much more versatile option than a simple HDTV set-top tuner box. All of those cards will output either composite or RGB to feed into an HDTV set. If you subscribe to DISH Network and you have the right kind of satellite receiver, you can feed HD HBO into one of those tuner cards for timeshifting as well.
Yes, those costs are passed on to us. But on the other hand, if a bank instituted fraud reduction measures, it wouldn't have to reduce its charges and interest rates by the same amount as its savings, so fraud reduction should still be a profitable activity.
I used to work on the billing system for a company that took credit card payments, and I have to say the security in the system is just laughable. I have no sympathy whatsoever for the banks losing billions a year to fraud; there are so many simple ways to plug the system's gaping holes that I think it borders on criminal negligence they haven't done so yet. A few examples off the top of my head -- with the caveat that this was all true a few years ago and may be less so today. All of what I'll describe here is pretty rampant already, so I don't think I'm revealing any state secrets.
Address/ZIP code verification (AVS) is fine and dandy. But for the major US credit cards (Visa, MC) it only works with US addresses! So if you have a Visa card with a Canadian or British billing address, address verification is a no-op. It didn't take our fraudulent customers long to figure that one out.
And even if you want to use a US ZIP code, all you need to know is the card prefix for a small regional bank (the first 4 digits of a Visa card are a bank ID) that only serves a few ZIP codes, and you can get a pretty good hit rate with random card generation.
Depending on the issuing bank, you can often use any expiration date you want as long as it's in the future. We used to have an option to automatically bump the expiration date forward by a year when the expiration date on a monthly-billed account went by, and most of the time it worked without any errors even in cases where we knew the bank had issued a new card with a two-year expiration time.
Here are a few things I'd like to see in the credit card infrastructure.
More strict address verification. Standardize the format of street addresses such that the actual address can be verified on mail-order or online sales, rather than just the ZIP code. Some banks do already support street address verification, but it's not universal and it's pretty unreliable since there are so many different ways to format addresses and they don't always match what's in the bank database. (#10 101 1st St., 101-10 First St., 101 1st Street Suite 10, etc.)
Require a photo on every credit card, a la Citibank. That plus better AVS makes physical credit card theft a lot less worthwhile.
Smart account closures. Right now when an event like the one in the article happens, 2.2 million people have to scramble to clean up the mess of recurring payments suddenly failing through no fault of their own. The letter from the bank is followed a couple days later by a nastygram from the cable company or whatever. The infrastructure should be able to shut down a card for new transactions while allowing familiar ones to go through, where "familiar" means a vendor that's charged to the card more than N times over a period of at least M months where the amount of the new charge is within X percent of the previous charges. This one might not appear to benefit the banks at first glance, but it does: when there's a big theft of card numbers, it will cut down on the number of irate customer phone calls they have to field from people whose utilities just got shut off.
Single-use card numbers. I should be able to call a phone robot or hit a web site, enter my card number, and get back a virtual card number that's good for either a limited amount of time (American Express offers that) or, better still, that's only good for the first vendor who uses it. That way I'd give a different card number for each monthly payment (cable bill, Netflix subscription, etc.) and if the number was stolen, I'd only have to give a new number to that one vendor and the bank's exposure to fraudulent transactions would be negligible.
PINs. Again, this is more helpful for physical card theft than online theft since the PINs would be in the online databases right alongside the card numbers, but it's an obvious thing that'd make it next to useless to grab someone's wallet intending to use their cards.
Some of these things would be a major overhaul. Some of them wouldn't. But any of them has to be doable for a lot less money than the credit industry claims it loses to fraud every year. I cannot comprehend why they don't do some of these things.
Translation: Folks, your time is less valuable than the cost of tax preparation software. Spend a few hours to save yourself a couple bucks.
Err, no thanks. It's worth $30 to me to save several hours of sifting through stacks of paper, re-checking my calculations and making sure I've copied the correct numbers from form A to form B.
Not too useful to some people, but I'd love it -- I live about an equal distance from two different highways I can take to my office, and traffic radio only warns me if there's a major accident on one of them, not when one of them is running a little slower than the other. I'd check a system like this every day. (And I already check my PC before going to work, to see if there's any urgent E-mail that needs taking care of before I hit the road.)
Speaking as someone who's at this very moment waiting for an installer to arrive at his house to put up solar panels... I can say that in some parts of the world you feel the need for power a lot more during the day/summer. Solar power is a great match if you're in a place where air conditioners are a must-have.
The local electric utility is my storage battery -- my house will feed them power during the day while I'm at work and I'll get it back from them at night.
But it is tiring, staring at a flickering glaring screen for hours, my eyes get dry, and I strain and get tired picking out fuzzy objects when I try to focus at distance.
If you can see your screen flickering (assuming you're using a CRT) you really owe it to yourself to try a higher refresh rate. I get horrible eyestrain when I have to use a 60Hz monitor for any length of time, but set the same monitor to 75Hz or higher and I can use it for hours with no ill effects.
Also make sure the brightness and contrast aren't set too high; excessive contrast can cause "blooming" (where the bright areas bleed into the dark ones) which makes text a lot more work to read.
Obviously the above shouldn't be taken to mean that some people just don't like reading from screens, even perfectly-calibrated ones, but a well-set-up screen is a lot more pleasant to look at than a bad one.
And don't get me started on how loud most computers are, not exactly ideal reading conditions...
I stand corrected. My assertion was based on the fact that, well, it works:
unsigned int a = 1, b = 2;
int c = a - b;
That consistently results in c == -1, at least on every C compiler I've used for the last 20-odd years. But if that behavior isn't actually part of the standard, then I guess we'd need to define some standard macros for unsigned time_t math to produce correct results portably.
No, the type of time_t - time_t must be signed. That doesn't imply that time_t must be signed. For example, (unsigned int) - (unsigned int) is int, not unsigned int.
And anyway, "if (time_t > time_t)" works fine with unsigned values.
First of all, it's a Y2038 problem rather than a Y2106 problem because time_t is signed in many places. Simply switching to an unsigned time_t (who uses time_t to represent pre-1970 values?) will buy us an extra 68 years with minimal application grief, but the underlying problem will still be there.
It boggles my mind that Sun, for example, went to the trouble of building a whole host of interfaces and a porting process for 64-bit file offsets (see the lf64 and lfcompile64 manpages on Solaris) and yet they didn't bother to increase the size of time_t at the same time. If everyone is going to be recompiling their apps anyway, why not fix it all in one go?
On the application side, it should be noted that this isn't a problem for code written in Java, whose equivalent of time_t is already 64-bit (in milliseconds, granted, but that only eats about 10 of the extra 32 bits.) Obviously the Java VM won't be able to make up for the underlying OS not supporting large time values, but at least the applications won't have to change.
First one to start whining about Java's year-584544016 problem gets whacked with a wet noodle.
Try EMusic -- it's not all of the record companies' out-of-print material, but there's a heck of a lot of great classic stuff there and the price can't be beat ($10/month for unlimited downloads, no DRM crap). In my opinion it's the best online music service nobody's heard of. It's no good if you want the latest top-10 hits, but I wouldn't want most of that stuff even if they were giving it away free.
Maybe it's not technically SMS, but I use Sprint's text message service to forward some of my E-mail to my phone. I find that I get lots of duplicates -- I'll often get two, sometimes three or four, copies of the same message.
I don't think I've ever had it completely drop a message. Sometimes there's a long delay (several hours) but that's rare; usually if I'm sitting at my desk I hear my phone beep before my mailreader has noticed that a new message has arrived.
It doesn't look like Sprint charges me extra for the duplicates, so it doesn't bother me too terribly much, though I'd prefer it if my phone would just suppress the dupes altogether rather than showing them with "Duplicate!" warnings.
Depends on what site you're running. If you read your traffic report and say to yourself, "Wow, 10000 hits yesterday! A new record!" then no. If you say to yourself, "Uh oh, only 7500000 hits yesterday, must have been a big network outage somewhere," then yes.
There's a reason some sites have multiple racks of dedicated web servers, and any technology that lets them serve more users in less physical space is going to be a win if the cost isn't prohibitive.
I bought one for my mom and she adores it -- so much so that I'm not sure it'll actually save her any time for the next couple months, because she enjoys standing there watching it do its thing!
It's not a particularly powerful vacuum cleaner, and it has trouble with throw-rugs with tassels and such. It can also get itself wedged in between chair legs if they're just the right distance apart. But those are minor nits that I think my mom will notice happening once, adjust for, then never worry about again.
It'll be swell when version 2.0 comes out and can go recharge itself as needed. Now if only they made a robot to do my laundry and ironing...
Baloney, if you keep your skill set current and grow over time. When I graduated from college, I didn't have years of Oracle development and administration experience, several large system architectures to my name, Solaris kernel development experience, firsthand knowledge of the common pitfalls of J2EE development, real-time network application development skills, experience leading a team of junior engineers, or the ability to gather requirements from customers without a manager looking over my shoulder. Now I have all of that and a lot more.
On the other hand, I've seen other engineers stuck in one place for years, mostly because they're content to keep doing the same thing every day, never taking any initiative to push themselves further along. It's not just about embracing the techno-fad of the day, it's about the certainty that no matter what you're doing, you're not as good at it as you could be, and it's up to you to improve.
If you're not a better engineer now than you were a year ago, someone else will have your job eventually. If you are, and you can say that every year, then you'll have people offering you jobs out of the blue even in today's economy.
I agree in theory, but in practice, indie labels tend to be heavily slanted toward just a few specific genres. If you like classical music or big-band jazz, for example, you'll have to look long and hard to find much among the vast forests of agitated electric guitars that dominate the indie landscape. (Not that I have anything against agitated electric guitars, when I'm in the mood for them, but I like other stuff too.)
My perception after spending countless hours surfing around looking for new music is that if your musical tastes run mostly toward dissonant and/or ultra-cynical rock, non-Western music, folk singing, or techno, there are a bunch of indie labels right up your alley. If you like anything else, forget it.
Of course, I'd like nothing more than to get a bunch of replies with links proving how wrong I am!
If that's what you want, a hacked 3Com Audrey is a lot cheaper. Color LCD with touchscreen, networked, even runs a UNIX-ish OS. I have a bunch of them scattered around my house; they're great. They're about $100 these days.
Ahh, good, so if as a consumer I want to read a protected document on my Palm instead of my PC, all I have to do is go back to college, get an advanced math degree, bring myself up to speed on the state of the art in encryption, learn how to program on both platforms, figure out the encoding the document uses, write an app to crack it, and I'm all set.
Right, best be getting to it, then.
Good thing the law protects me from buying the end result from someone else instead of going through the process myself -- without doubt, a law that promotes that sort of self-sufficient, can-do spirit is just the sort of thing that made this country great.
If no one sends spam, then no one will filter spam.
I'm not sure about that. I agree that people will probably stop doing much work on new spam filtering techniques, but once a mail client ships with spam filtering built-in (and especially if it's turned on by default) it seems unlikely to me that the developers will ever take that feature out even if spam volume drops dramatically. A lot of spam filtering can be done with little or no user intervention, so aside from the CPU time and the disk space there's no real downside to the user. Assuming it's a well-behaved spam filter with few false positives, not hard to find these days.
I'm not saying spam volume will ever reach zero, but if it goes back to where it was five years ago (and most of it continues to be caught by filters) I imagine most of us would find that sufficiently tolerable.
I disagree that client-side filtering isn't a long-term solution, though it's not a direct one. Sure, there are superstar spammers who're making money hand over fist at it, but they're the minority. Everything I've read about spammer business models indicates that by and large it's not all that profitable a business. If client-side filtering becomes really widespread, it'll drive down response rates to the point where even the small marginal cost of spamming another ten thousand people is greater than the expected payoff. When that situation is commonplace, garden-variety spammers will have no incentive to keep doing their thing.
Which isn't to say I approve of the bandwidth waste in the meantime, but short of passing tough anti-spam laws (which I'm all for) I doubt there's much direct action that can be taken to cut off the supply of spam. Gotta dry up the demand instead.
The implicit assumption here is that OSS is driving toward mainstream use, and can be judged a failure or a success based on how widespread it is. Which I think is dead wrong. In the commercial world, if you sell a billion copies of your software, you've succeeded since your goal is to get money from as many customers as possible. The motivation of a typical OSS project is completely different: to solve a particular problem. Popularity is nice for ego gratification, but it really isn't a goal of very many OSS projects.
As someone who's written several free applications that "compete" with commercial apps, I can say with authority that I'm not interested in bringing down the commercial vendors. In each case I saw a problem that wasn't being addressed the way I wanted, solved it for myself, and if anyone else wants to use my solution, they're welcome to it. If they want to use one of the commercial alternatives, they're welcome to that too. Makes no difference to me. The question, "How can I make my package so attractive that other people will choose it instead of the competition?" has nothing to do with why I develop open-source software.
Some might say, "Well, yeah, and that's the problem with open source. You'll never appeal to a mass audience that way." Which to me is like walking up to a lion tamer and telling him he's never going to grow any oranges holding the chair like that. A statement which is both perfectly true and utterly beside the point.
Unless it's made illegal, I'll keep writing software and keep releasing the source code no matter what the rest of the world thinks of the concept of free software. I'm not doing it for them.
Slashdot Mirror
With any of several HDTV tuner cards (HiPix, AccessDTV, and MyHD, to name three) you can do timeshifting and in some cases editing of HD material. For example, I record "Alias" in HD every week and archive it to DVD-R. It's a much more versatile option than a simple HDTV set-top tuner box. All of those cards will output either composite or RGB to feed into an HDTV set. If you subscribe to DISH Network and you have the right kind of satellite receiver, you can feed HD HBO into one of those tuner cards for timeshifting as well.
What's up with the whole ".com.com" thing, anyway? Why do so many sites link to stories using news.com.com URLs rather than just news.com?
Yes, those costs are passed on to us. But on the other hand, if a bank instituted fraud reduction measures, it wouldn't have to reduce its charges and interest rates by the same amount as its savings, so fraud reduction should still be a profitable activity.
Here are a few things I'd like to see in the credit card infrastructure.
Some of these things would be a major overhaul. Some of them wouldn't. But any of them has to be doable for a lot less money than the credit industry claims it loses to fraud every year. I cannot comprehend why they don't do some of these things.
Err, no thanks. It's worth $30 to me to save several hours of sifting through stacks of paper, re-checking my calculations and making sure I've copied the correct numbers from form A to form B.
Yeah, if you're one of the lawyers arguing the case.
Not too useful to some people, but I'd love it -- I live about an equal distance from two different highways I can take to my office, and traffic radio only warns me if there's a major accident on one of them, not when one of them is running a little slower than the other. I'd check a system like this every day. (And I already check my PC before going to work, to see if there's any urgent E-mail that needs taking care of before I hit the road.)
The local electric utility is my storage battery -- my house will feed them power during the day while I'm at work and I'll get it back from them at night.
It's never just been about the science.
If you can see your screen flickering (assuming you're using a CRT) you really owe it to yourself to try a higher refresh rate. I get horrible eyestrain when I have to use a 60Hz monitor for any length of time, but set the same monitor to 75Hz or higher and I can use it for hours with no ill effects.
Also make sure the brightness and contrast aren't set too high; excessive contrast can cause "blooming" (where the bright areas bleed into the dark ones) which makes text a lot more work to read.
Obviously the above shouldn't be taken to mean that some people just don't like reading from screens, even perfectly-calibrated ones, but a well-set-up screen is a lot more pleasant to look at than a bad one.
And don't get me started on how loud most computers are, not exactly ideal reading conditions...
unsigned int a = 1, b = 2;
int c = a - b;
That consistently results in c == -1, at least on every C compiler I've used for the last 20-odd years. But if that behavior isn't actually part of the standard, then I guess we'd need to define some standard macros for unsigned time_t math to produce correct results portably.
And anyway, "if (time_t > time_t)" works fine with unsigned values.
It boggles my mind that Sun, for example, went to the trouble of building a whole host of interfaces and a porting process for 64-bit file offsets (see the lf64 and lfcompile64 manpages on Solaris) and yet they didn't bother to increase the size of time_t at the same time. If everyone is going to be recompiling their apps anyway, why not fix it all in one go?
On the application side, it should be noted that this isn't a problem for code written in Java, whose equivalent of time_t is already 64-bit (in milliseconds, granted, but that only eats about 10 of the extra 32 bits.) Obviously the Java VM won't be able to make up for the underlying OS not supporting large time values, but at least the applications won't have to change.
First one to start whining about Java's year-584544016 problem gets whacked with a wet noodle.
Try EMusic -- it's not all of the record companies' out-of-print material, but there's a heck of a lot of great classic stuff there and the price can't be beat ($10/month for unlimited downloads, no DRM crap). In my opinion it's the best online music service nobody's heard of. It's no good if you want the latest top-10 hits, but I wouldn't want most of that stuff even if they were giving it away free.
I don't think I've ever had it completely drop a message. Sometimes there's a long delay (several hours) but that's rare; usually if I'm sitting at my desk I hear my phone beep before my mailreader has noticed that a new message has arrived.
It doesn't look like Sprint charges me extra for the duplicates, so it doesn't bother me too terribly much, though I'd prefer it if my phone would just suppress the dupes altogether rather than showing them with "Duplicate!" warnings.
There's a reason some sites have multiple racks of dedicated web servers, and any technology that lets them serve more users in less physical space is going to be a win if the cost isn't prohibitive.
It's not a particularly powerful vacuum cleaner, and it has trouble with throw-rugs with tassels and such. It can also get itself wedged in between chair legs if they're just the right distance apart. But those are minor nits that I think my mom will notice happening once, adjust for, then never worry about again.
It'll be swell when version 2.0 comes out and can go recharge itself as needed. Now if only they made a robot to do my laundry and ironing...
On the other hand, I've seen other engineers stuck in one place for years, mostly because they're content to keep doing the same thing every day, never taking any initiative to push themselves further along. It's not just about embracing the techno-fad of the day, it's about the certainty that no matter what you're doing, you're not as good at it as you could be, and it's up to you to improve.
If you're not a better engineer now than you were a year ago, someone else will have your job eventually. If you are, and you can say that every year, then you'll have people offering you jobs out of the blue even in today's economy.
My perception after spending countless hours surfing around looking for new music is that if your musical tastes run mostly toward dissonant and/or ultra-cynical rock, non-Western music, folk singing, or techno, there are a bunch of indie labels right up your alley. If you like anything else, forget it.
Of course, I'd like nothing more than to get a bunch of replies with links proving how wrong I am!
If that's what you want, a hacked 3Com Audrey is a lot cheaper. Color LCD with touchscreen, networked, even runs a UNIX-ish OS. I have a bunch of them scattered around my house; they're great. They're about $100 these days.
You've found it what? Helpful? Annoying? Entertaining? Useless? Indispensible? Unreliable?
Right, best be getting to it, then.
Good thing the law protects me from buying the end result from someone else instead of going through the process myself -- without doubt, a law that promotes that sort of self-sufficient, can-do spirit is just the sort of thing that made this country great.
I'm not sure about that. I agree that people will probably stop doing much work on new spam filtering techniques, but once a mail client ships with spam filtering built-in (and especially if it's turned on by default) it seems unlikely to me that the developers will ever take that feature out even if spam volume drops dramatically. A lot of spam filtering can be done with little or no user intervention, so aside from the CPU time and the disk space there's no real downside to the user. Assuming it's a well-behaved spam filter with few false positives, not hard to find these days.
I'm not saying spam volume will ever reach zero, but if it goes back to where it was five years ago (and most of it continues to be caught by filters) I imagine most of us would find that sufficiently tolerable.
Which isn't to say I approve of the bandwidth waste in the meantime, but short of passing tough anti-spam laws (which I'm all for) I doubt there's much direct action that can be taken to cut off the supply of spam. Gotta dry up the demand instead.
As someone who's written several free applications that "compete" with commercial apps, I can say with authority that I'm not interested in bringing down the commercial vendors. In each case I saw a problem that wasn't being addressed the way I wanted, solved it for myself, and if anyone else wants to use my solution, they're welcome to it. If they want to use one of the commercial alternatives, they're welcome to that too. Makes no difference to me. The question, "How can I make my package so attractive that other people will choose it instead of the competition?" has nothing to do with why I develop open-source software.
Some might say, "Well, yeah, and that's the problem with open source. You'll never appeal to a mass audience that way." Which to me is like walking up to a lion tamer and telling him he's never going to grow any oranges holding the chair like that. A statement which is both perfectly true and utterly beside the point.
Unless it's made illegal, I'll keep writing software and keep releasing the source code no matter what the rest of the world thinks of the concept of free software. I'm not doing it for them.